Electoral Engineering in the Post-Soviet

Context: the Ukrainian Case

Thomas Sedelius

Ph.D. Student in Political Science, Department of Social Sciences, Örebro University,

Sweden, Tel: +46 19 30 35 08, e-mail: thomas.sedelius@sam.oru.se

Paper to be presented at the ECPR Joint Session of Workshops, Grenoble, France, 6-11

April 2001, Workshop 2: ‘Political Transformation in Soviet Successor States: the States

of the CIS in Comparative and Theoretical Perspective’

2

Introduction

The electoral system is undoubtedly one of the most commonly cited instruments of

political engineering affecting party systems. The sub-field of electoral studies has benefited

from the fact that its main focus at votes and seats are easily operationalised and measured

and therefore comparable across a variety of cases. Among scholars within this field, there

has developed a relatively strong consensus about the significans of the electoral system for

party system development. In other words, it is claimed that the electoral system - that is, the

way in which the election is contested and votes are translated into seats - strongly influences

the number and types of parties that develop (cf. Taagepera and Shugart, 1989; Moser, 1995).

Emerging democracies adopt their initial electoral system in different ways. In the case of

the post-Soviet States, with the explosion of new parties after the Soviet breakdown in 1991,

the link between electoral law and party systems has very important implications. The types

of party systems emerging in these countries will exert an influence on the possibilities of

democratic consolidation. To a certain extent, government stability in these countries does

and will depend on the degree of fragmentation of the party system (cf. Stanclik, 1997: 1).

In this paper Ukraine will be used as a case among the former Soviet republics and the

effect of electoral rules upon the party system will be examined. Before the Ukrainian

parliamentary election in 1998, an old Soviet-era majority model was abandoned in favour of

a mixed electoral system. I will examine the effects of this reform upon the Ukrainian party

system at the national level. More precisely, I will examine the 1998 parliamentary election

from the perspective of electoral engineering. The main question is; did the new electoral

rules have the effects on the Ukrainian party system that could be expected on theoretical

grounds?

Theoretical expectations

A large amount of literature has attempted to examine the impact of alternative electoral

systems. These studies have a long tradition and strong claims to universal generalisability

regardless of, for example, socio-economic development, culture or geopolitical status.

Maurice Duverger’s Political Parties: Their Organization and Activity in the Modern World

is undoubtedly one of the most famous productions within this sub-field. The author

concludes that ‘the simple-majority single-ballot system favours the two-party system’

(Duverger, 1965:226). According to Duverger, there is (or at least was, when he wrote the

book) almost a complete correlation between the simple-majority single-ballot and the two-

party system. This argument follows from the fact that plurality systems, where ‘winner takes

3

all’, exaggerate the share of seats for the leading party, while minor parties get but meagre

dividends. Duverger accounts for the differential effects of the electoral system in terms of

‘mechanical’ and ‘psychological’ factors. The mechanical effect of plurality systems refers to

the fact that all but the two strongest parties are underrepresented because they tend to lose in

each district. The psychological factor reinforces the mechanical one in so far as the electors

realise that their votes are wasted if they give them to the third party, therefore their natural

tendency will be to transfer their votes to the ‘less evil’ of the two larger parties (Duverger,

1965:226; Norris, 1997:299f; Lijphart, 1999:165).

In this context it is also worth mentioning the importance of district magnitudes1, because

of its close connection to allocation rules (plurality systems and proportional representation

systems). Taagepera and Shugart, and others, have shown that plurality systems with low

district magnitudes (typically single-member districts, M = 1) tend to constrain the number of

parties and most often lead to two-party-systems. This follows from the same reasoning as

above, namely that plurality single member (SM)-districts penalise parties that cannot obtain a

plurality of the vote in any one district. Supporters of weak parties will, over time, avoid

‘vote-wasting’ on permanent losers and shift their support to parties more likely to gain

representation. Moreover, because of the psychological factor, leaders of weaker parties may

then be constrained from even running candidates, when they have no hope of achieving the

necessary votes. If, in a plurality system, the district magnitude is greater than 1, larger parties

will most certainly gain even more from the plurality system, because they are likely to win

all the seats, granted in the districts (cf. Duverger, 1965; Taagepera and Shugart, 1989).

Conversely, proportional representation (in short PR) and multi-member districts tend to

correlate with multi-party systems, because the votes in such systems are not ‘wasted’ to the

same extent, as in single-member plurality districts. Instead of having to win plurality contests

in small districts, minor parties in PR systems are awarded seats according to their total

proportion of votes in larger multi-member districts. Again, district magnitude is a decisive

factor in determining the proportionality of PR systems and the number of parties. Low

district magnitudes (M< 5), tend to favour larger parties at the expense of smaller ones, even

if the system is PR. An increased district magnitude results in greater proportionality and

more favourable conditions for smaller parties. Because of the district magnitude and its

1 The district magnitude denotes the number of legislative seats assigned to each electoral district. It should not

be confused with the geographical size of the districts or with the number of votes in it. The importance of

district magnitude for the number of parties and for the degree of disproportionality has often been pointed at

and is claimed to be a decisive factor (see for example Taagepera and Shugart, 1989; Lijphart, 1999; Rae, 1971).

4

implications for party system, Taagepera and Shugart argue that electoral systems should be

considered along a continuum of proportionality, rather than as a dichotomy between plurality

and PR systems (Taagepera and Shugart, 1989; Moser, 1995: 380f).

It should be noted, however, that the link between electoral systems and the number of

parties is not directly causal. Moser asserts this in the following words:

Single-member plurality systems do not create two-party systems on their own and multi-

member PR systems do not cause party proliferation. Rather, electoral systems are like

filters, which constrain and channel a country’s pre-existing configuration of political

forces. (Moser, 1995:381)

In recent years, the causal nature of Duverger’s law has been better specified and even

modified. The district magnitude, as discussed above, has been found to be a decisive factor

with a powerful constraining effect on the number of parties. Another important finding is that

the constraining effect of electoral systems is located most directly at the district level, rather

than at the national level. This fact has been used to accommodate exceptions to the

correlation between plurality and two-party systems at the national level. The exception could

be found in countries with geographically concentrated parties, represented in only some

districts. Thus, minority parties can survive by winning some districts while they still remain

third parties at the national level. Even so, the causal influence of plurality systems still

retains, but it works at the district level and not at the national level (cf. Rae, 1971).

The psychological effects of Duverger’s ‘law’ imply strategic and rational voting. Gary

Cox argues that strategic voting requires certain conditions that include actor’s motivation,

preferences, time horizons and availability of accurate information. If such conditions are not

fulfilled, plurality elections may fail to reduce the vote for minor parties. He emphasises the

necessity of (1) voters who are short-term instrumentally rational; (2) access to public

information about voter preferences and vote intentions (about which candidates are likely to

be out of the game); (3) voters who care about their first choice as well as their second (Cox,

1997:79f).

How then, are we to interpret those theoretical assumptions into the context of post-

communist states? The presence of the pre-conditions for strategic behaviour as well as the

projection of local bi-partisanship to the national level are certainly indecisive in new

democracies and especially in several post-communist states with lack of democratic

traditions. The absence of electoral experience, as well as the lack of accurate polling

5

information, may deny voters and elites the information necessary for strategical behaviour.

Moreover, the lack of well-established political parties certainly undermines the ability of

voters and elites to act strategically.

Parties are expected to serve as the primary channels and aggregators of public opinion,

while the electoral system is only a secondary mechanism influencing the number of viable

parties. In weak party systems, the absence of party identification leaves voters with no

options, other than to rely on the personal characteristics of certain candidates and patronage.

In the more unstable new democracies (several post-Soviet states are good cases in point),

parties continually enter and leave the political scene, and therefore provide no continuity

between the elections. Under such conditions, the opportunity for voters to keep lasting

preferences for one party or another is of course, minimal. For example, the Post-Soviet

Citizen Survey (PSCS) of 1997, revealed that only 27 % of Ukrainian voters could identify a

party that represented their interest. Moreover, opinion polls among Ukrainian voters have

revealed a lack of information about the programmes and agendas of the political parties (see

for example Kuzio, 1994:115). The point is, that in the context of new democracies, where the

consolidation process is not completed, it is difficult to attribute voting preferences in the

same way as in institutionalised consolidated democracies. Thus, it would probably be a

mistake to assume that institutional effects found in established democracies will be replicated

in the different social and political context of new democracies in Eastern Europe and the

former Soviet Union (Moser, 1999:364; Miller et al., 2000:461f).

The Ukrainian Electoral Law: from Majoritarian to Mixed

In the parliamentary elections of 1994, Ukraine still practised the electoral law from the

Soviet-era. The system was a single-member double-ballot model, which stipulated that a

majority in each constituency (okruh) required both a 50% vote and a 50% turnout. As a

result, almost a quarter of the 450 parliamentary seats was left vacant after the first rounds of

elections in the spring of 1994. Even though several by-elections were held, 36 seats were still

vacant in March 1998, when the new parliamentary elections were to be held. Furthermore,

the majoritarian electoral law stipulated more stringent requirements for partisan candidates

than for independents, which resulted in a parliamentary situation where non-

partisan/independent candidates received almost 50% of the seats. Nearly 6,000 candidates - a

significant majority registered as independents - ran for the 450 seats in the Verkhovna Rada

(parliament). The effect was to undermine Ukraine’s democratic parties in favour of

6

‘independents’ many of whom closely connected to the Communist Party, the Socialist Party

and the Agrarians. Thus, it was definitely those parties that benefited from the Soviet-era

majoritarian system, see table 1 (Wilson and Birch, 1999: 1039-1041; NDI, 1998).

The outcome of the 1994 parliamentary elections called for a new electoral reform and it

was in fact widespread agreement across the political spectrum on the basics of a mixed

(majoritarian-proportional) system, similar to the electoral framework applied in Russia since

1993. In September 1997 the new law was adopted, which stipulates that 225 deputies are to

be elected in single-mandate constituencies on the basis of relative majority, and the other 225

deputies according to lists of candidates from political parties or blocs of parties. The 225 list

seats are to be distributed on the basis of proportional representation according to the largest

remainder2 system in a multi-mandate nation-wide constituency. Thus, the system opted for

could be described as a combination of the two extremes along the plurality-PR continuum

(Birch, 1998:147; IFES, 1997).

In the Russian single-member system there is a turnout requirement of 25 % in each

constituency and a 5% threshold for the PR-list race. The Ukrainian law of 1997 represents a

modification of the Russian rules by abandoning the turnout requirements and setting the

threshold for PR at 4%. Another important change was the switch from ‘negative’ to

‘positive’ voting - that is from a system where voters crossed out all but one name on the lists

- to a model were voters are to mark their preferred options. However, the voters still had the

opportunity to ‘vote against all’, which is a leftover from the old system (Birch, 1998:147f;

IFES, 1997).

According to the new law individual candidates for the single-member districts can get on

to the ballot either by being nominated by a political party, which meets the signature

requirement for the party list contest, or by collecting 1,500 signatures from voters in their

own districts. The qualification criteria for parties in the multi-mandate elections is to collect

200,000 signatures, including at least 10,000 in any 14 of Ukraine’s 26 administrative districts

(oblasts), while the remaining could come from anywhere in Ukraine. The latter requirement

is intended to limit the number of regionally based parties (NDI, 1998).

The new law is certainly promising from several aspects, not least because it gives the

opportunity for parties to stand on the ballot as parties. The law also encourages political

2 The largest remainder system favours the smaller parties. After one seat is assigned for any full quota -

established by dividing votes by seats – any remaining seats are attributed to the parties with the largest residues

(Sartori, 1997:8).

7

entrepreneurs to form parties, while the relatively high threshold offers some guarantee for

party system consolidation. At the same time the law takes into account the geographical

heterogeneity of Ukrainian politics by allowing political fractions with concentrated regional

support the chance to gain seats locally without having to demonstrate national strength.

However, the adoption of the new law also had its disadvantages, which first and foremost

had to do with the pre-election environment and the shortage of time between the passage of

the law and the time of elections. This will be discussed in more details below (Birch,

2000:104).

Pre-election Environment

In the year of 1998 the Ukrainian economy had almost bottomed out. Issues such as lack of

privatisation, a chaotic tax system and overall endemic corruption were some of the huge

problems at the time being. Thus, at the time of elections the Ukrainian voters appeared to be

strongly disillusioned with the country’s economic situation. This was indeed confirmed in

nation-wide sample surveys conducted in the last weeks before the polling day, which

indicated that 66 % of respondents believed that the economic reform programme had been a

failure since 1994. Furthermore, 65 % claimed that the material state of their family had got ‘a

lot worse’ over the past four years. When the respondents were asked to list which problems

most bothered them, irregularity of payments, unemployment and political corruption were

some of the most frequent answers. It is hardly surprising that under these conditions many

voters favoured parties and candidates that they perceived as being outsiders and opposed to

the political and economic changes since 1991 (Birch, 1998:146f).

Voter cynicism and apathy represented a major challenge for all parties contesting the

elections. In February 1998, a poll by Socis Gallup and the Democratic Initiatives Foundation

announced that only 23 % of the Ukrainians believed that the outcome of the elections would

improve the country, which was nearly a 10 % drop compared to the pre-electoral period in

1994. Due to lack of confidence in the contesting candidates, almost 40 % of the Ukrainian

voters declared that they planned to stay at home on the day of elections (NDI, 1998).

Due to delays in the passage of key election laws, the election campaign of 1998 was

somewhat compressed. Although the national election law was passed in October 1997,

several pieces of the election set up were not adopted until weeks, or even months, later. The

law on local elections, for example, was adopted on January 14, i.e. less than two months

before the elections were held. According to Sarah Birch (2000), there were three major

complications connected to the electoral law and its implementation in the 1998 elections.

8

Firstly, due to the adoption of the party-list mechanism, a number of new parties were

encouraged to stand on the ballot in the hope of reaching the 4 % threshold. As a result, a total

of 40 parties contested the list vote of which 19 joined in as members of electoral blocs. Of

these, 17 had been founded after the 1994 elections, and 10 within one year before the party

list had to be presented to the electoral commission. Secondly, there was a certain lack of

voter education to explain the new election law. Thirdly, there was the uncertainty created by

the Constitutional Court’s review of the election law which begun in late January. The law

was brought twice before the Constitutional Court during the campaign, and twice found to be

unconstitutional on several counts. Even so, the Court ruled that the elections could be held as

planned, provided that certain adjustments were made. (Birch, 2000:104; NDI, 1998)

The Party Landscape and Outcome of the Elections

Several of the 30 parties that were on the final ballot for the list vote could be considered

either ‘spoiler parties’ - created in the run-up to the elections to gain votes from the more

established parties - or ‘front parties’, representing regional clans and new business interests.

Examples of spoiler parties are the Agrarian Party, which was set up as the would-be more

centre alternative to challenge the hitherto monopoly of the Peasant/Village Party in the

countryside; and the bloc called Working Ukraine, which was designed to challenge the

organisational foundations of the Communist Party in trade union and worker groups. Among

the ‘front parties’, The Greens, Hromada (‘Community’) and Razom (‘Together’) are

examples of political centre fractions, representing different clan interests in Ukrainian

politics. Even the perestroika-era opposition party on the right, Rukh, is said to have certain

links to specific business interests (Birch, 1999:278f; NDI, 1998).

Thus, the more ‘ideological based’ players in these elections only made up a dozen of the

total number of the contesting parties. Among those, the Communists and Socialist-Rural bloc

on the left, the Social and Christian Democrats in the centre, Rukh and the far right parties

such as the National Front, Fewer Words and the Ukrainian National Assembly as well as the

Russophile parties could be mentioned. When looking at the actual outcome of the elections

(table 1) it is quite clear that the spoiler tactic was rather successful. The Progressive

Socialists for example, which was set up with state support as a splinter party to gain votes

from the Socialists, overcame the threshold with 4% of the vote and the other left spoiler

parties collected more than 7%. However, the overall success of ‘spoiler’ and ‘front parties’

9

strongly contributed to an increase in the already serious problem of party system

fragmentation in Ukraine.

The predominance of economic issues and of perceived economic hardship seem to have

favoured the left in the outcome. Together, the left bloc won nearly 40% of the parliamentary

seats and thereby kept its strong position in parliament. Even the centre bloc did well and

increased their proportion of the total seats from 2% in 1994 to over 23%. The right parties

under-performed slightly, as only Rukh overcame the legal threshold. In the final part of this

paper we will return to the question of which parties actually gain and lost from the different

parts of the new electoral system.

10

Table 1. Results of the Ukrainian Parliamentary Elections 29 March 1998

List votes

(%)

List seats List seats

(%)

Single

Member

votes %

SM seats SM seats

(%)

Total seats Total seats

(%)

(1994 seats

%)

Communists (KPU) 24.7 84 37.3 14.7 38 16.9 122 27.1 (25.4)

Socialists/Peasants

(bloc)

8.6 29 12.9 4.5 5 2.2 34 7.6 (9.8)

Progressive Socialists

(PSPU)

4.1 14 6.2 1.0 2 0.9 16 3.6

Working Ukraine

(bloc)

3.1 - - 0.5 1 0.4 1 0.2

Total Left 40.5 127 56.4 20.7 46 20.4 173 38.5 (35.2)

Greens (PZU) 5.4 19 8.4 0.8 - - 19 4.2

Popular Democrats

(NDP)

5.0 17 7.6 4.2

12 5.3 29 6.4

Hromada 4.7 16 7.1 3.7 7 3.1 23 5.1

Social Democrats

United (SDPU)

4.0 14 6.2 1.9 3 1.3 17 3.8

Agrarians (APU) 3.7 - - 3.3 8 3.6 8 1.8

Reforms and Order

(PRP)

3.1 - - 1.9 3 1.3 3 0.7

Labour and Liberal

bloc (RAZOM)

1.9 - - 1.3 1 0.4 1 0.2 (1.2)

Forward Ukraine

(bloc)

1.7 - - 0.6 2 0.9 2 0.4

Christian Democrats

(KhDPU)

1.3 - - 0.8 2 0.9 2 0.4 (0.6)

Bloc of Democratic

Parties (NEP)

1.2 - - 1.2 1 0.4 1 0.2 (0.6)

Total Centre 32.0 66 29.3 19.7 39 17.2 105 23.2 (2.4)

Popular Movement

[Rukh] (NRU)

9.4 32 14.2 6.3 14 6.2 46 10.2 (5.9)

National Front (bloc) 2.7 - - 2.7 5 2.2 5 1.1 (4.4)

Fewer Words (bloc) 0.2 - - - 1 0.4 1 0.2

Total Right 12.3 32 14.2 9.0 20 8.8 52 11.5 (10.3)

Social Liberal Union

bloc (SLON)

0.9 - - 0.5 1 0.4 1 0.2

Regional Revival

(PRVU)

0.9 - - 0.9 2 0.9 2 0.4

Soyuz 0.7 - - 0.2 1 0.4 1 0.2 0.6

Total Russophile 2.5 0 0 1.6 4 1.7 4 0.8 (0.6)

Unrepresented Parties 4.4 3.0

Against all 5.2

Independents 49.2 116 51.6 116 25.8 (49.1)

Invalid 3.1

Total 100 225 100 100 225 100 450 100 100

Notes: Registered voters: 37,540,092; Voter turnout: 26,571,273 (70,8 % valid)

Sources: Joint Project of the University of Essex, IFES and ACEEO (2000); Birch, 1998

11

Analysing Mixed Electoral Systems

Mixed electoral systems offer certain opportunities for comparative electoral analysis. If

we treat a mixed electoral system as its name implies - as a mixture of two different electoral

arrangements operating side by side - we are provided with an opportunity to study the effects

of the two systems separately. Thus, with this method we can hold constant possible

intervening variables, such as socio-economic development and social cleavages. However,

the controlled comparison of the different tiers in the mixed electoral system is not without

problems. One of the main dilemmas is that we cannot expect the two systems to be totally

independent of one another. Thus, the separation into two systems for the purpose of

comparison must be understood as artificial. However, I argue that this does not render the

analysis invalid. Incentives for strategic entry and withdrawal by elites in the SM-district tier

may be weakened because the costs and pay-offs are changed, but strategic voting, should

remain quite intact. Rational voters will still have incentives to abandon small parties in the

plurality tier in favour of large parties with a greater chance of representation (cf. Moser,

1999:366f). Therefore, the PR and plurality contest will be examined separately, with the

ambition to analyse what type of system each would have produced independently. Then, in

the final part, the effect of the two systems will be discussed and a simulation of the election

results under different electoral systems will be made.

Effects of the PR System in the 1998 Ukrainian Elections

Table 2 shows the distribution of votes and seats in the PR party list contest. In column 3

the degree of disproportionality3 for each party is denoted. As earlier mentioned, a sufficiently

large number of parties contested the PR vote in hope of reaching the 4 % threshold.

Following the theoretical literature, a large number of parties in the PR list race should be

expected, but the total of 40 contesting parties certainly indicates that the party system is far

from consolidation. However, of the 21 parties gaining parliamentary representation, only 8

overcame the 4 % legal threshold, which suggests that it did have some of its constraining

effects. By using the Laasko and Taagepera effective number of parties’ index, we can

determine the number of parties produced by each electoral system. The index is

3 The level of disproportionality produced by an electoral system is the deviation between the proportion of votes

a party receives and the proportion of seats it actually gets. Later in this analysis the Gallagher index of

disproportionality will be used to measure the overall disproportionality in the Ukrainian elections.

12

Table 2. Results of the PR-list contest

List votes (%) List seats %

(No. of seats)

Deviation between % of

votes and % of seats (in

parentheses, deviation as

% of column 1

Left

Communists (KPU) 24.7 37.3 (84) +12.6 (+51.0)

Socialists/Peasants

(bloc)

8.6 12.9 (29) +4.3 (+50.0)

Progressive Socialists

(PSPU)

4.1 6.2 (14) +2.1 (+51.2)

Working Ukraine

(bloc)

3.1 0 (0) -3.1 (-100)

Centre

Greens (PZU) 5.4 8.4 (19) +3.0 (+55.1)

Popular Democrats

(NDP)

5.0 7.6 (17) +2.6 (+52.0)

Hromada 4.7 7.1 (16) +2.4 (+51.9)

Social Democrats

United (SDPU)

4.0 6.2 (14) +2.2 (+55.0)

Agrarians (APU) 3.7 0 (0) -3.7 (-100)

Reforms and Order

(PRP)

3.1 0 (0) -3.1 (-100)

Labour and Liberal

bloc (RAZOM)

1.9 0 (0) -1.9 (-100)

Forward Ukraine (bloc) 1.7 0 (0) -1.7 (-100)

Christian Democrats

(KhDPU)

1.3 0 (0) -1.3 (-100)

Bloc of Democratic

Parties (NEP)

1.2 0 (0) -1.2 (-100)

Right

Popular Movement

[Rukh] (NRU)

9.4 14.2 (32) +4.8 (+51.1)

National Front (bloc) 2.7 0 (0) -2.7 (-100)

Fewer Words (bloc) 0.2 0 (0) -0.2 (-100)

Russophile

Social Liberal Union

bloc (SLON)

0.9 0 (0) -0.9 (-100)

Regional Revival

(PRVU)

0.9 0 (0) -0.9 (-100)

Soyuz 0.7 0 (0) -0.7 (-100)

Against all 5.3

Unrepresented parties 4.4

Invalid 3.1

Total 100 100

Sources: Joint Project of the University of Essex, IFES and ACEEO (2000); Birch, 1998

designed to determine the number of parties in a party system, taking into account each

party’s relative size. It can be based on either the proportion of the electoral vote (Nv), or on

the proportion of seats a party receives after those votes are translated into seats (Ns). Thus,

by comparing the effective number of electoral parties (Nv) with the effective number of

13

parliamentary parties (Ns) we are able to determine the effect of the electoral system on the

number of parties. The index measure is defined as follows:

N = (pi2)

–1

N denotes the number of effective parties and Pi is the share of votes or seats won by the ith

party (Laakso and Taagepera, 1979; Anckar, 1998:49).4

Table 3 compares the effective number of parties in the PR part of the electoral system in

Ukraine and Russia in their initial post-Soviet parliamentary elections. The calculations are

based on the percentage of seats (Ns). The effective number of parliamentary parties in the PR

contest of the 1998 Ukrainian elections was 5.0. While party fragmentation could be expected

in the PR part of the system, this number is quite high in a comparative perspective. In

comparison to other post-communist elections in Eastern Europe 5.0 definitely remains on the

higher end. Only the Polish parliamentary elections of 1991 and the Russian elections of 1993

produced higher numbers with 10.9 respectively 6.4 (table 3) effective parties (cf. Moser,

1993, 1999).

Table 3. Effective number of parties in the PR part of the electoral system-

Ukraine and Russia

Effective number of

parties, List-seat

Contest

(Ns)

Effective number of

parties (total seats)

Ukraine 1994 - 13.4 (3.1)*

Ukraine 1998 5.0 9.8 (6.0)

Russia 1993 6.4 14.0 (5.8)

Russia 1995 3.3 6.15 (3.6)

Notes: * Percentages within parentheses refers to the effective number of parties when all

independent candidates are calculated as one single party.

Sources: Joint Project of the University of Essex, IFES and ACEEO (2000); Moser, 1999;

Birch, 1998

When analysing the effective number of parties one should also catch sight on the number

of effective electoral parties (Nv), which in the PR part of the 1998 elections was 10.7. Thus,

the legal threshold of 4% constrained the number of parties gaining parliamentary

representation by over 5 effective parties. As mentioned above, this suggests that the

4 The advantage of using the effective, rather than the actual number of parties is that it establishes a nonarbitrary

way of distinguish ‘significant’ from ‘less significant’ parties. The index weights each party to its relative size.

Thus, minor parties contribute little to the index and larger parties contribute relatively more (Taagepera and

Shugart, 1993:455).

14

threshold did have an important effect in limiting the high number of parties. However, the

contesting of 40 parties in the elections also revealed that the threshold was not high enough

to encourage substantial pre-electoral bloc building. Therefore, a large proportion of the

voters ‘wasted’ their votes on parties that failed to cross the threshold. The situation was not

as extreme as in the Russian parliamentary elections of 1995 where half the electorate voted

for ‘losers’, but even so 32% of the list votes were nevertheless submerged in parties that

failed to reach the crucial 4% limit. Birch claims that the acting of pre-electoral ‘irrationality’

among the parties could partly be explained due to the short passage of time between the

adoption of the new law and the elections.

It might be wondered why so few parties acted ‘rationally’ and created joint lists. The

answer is that there was some of this ‘rationally’ at work, but the party system was still too

protean and the electoral system too new for most political organisations to have been able

to make a reasonable assessment of their chances on the list ballot (Birch, 1998:149).

Another measure common in the electoral literature is the least-square index of

disproportionality proposed by Michael Gallagher (1991). Like the effective number-of-

parties index, the Gallagher index weights the deviations between seats and votes so that

small deviations have a lesser effect than larger ones. According to earlier cross-national

studies disproportionality tends to be higher in plurality systems than in PR systems, because

plurality systems penalise small parties in favour of larger ones. The Gallagher index (GLsq)

measure is as follows: the differences between the percent of votes (vi) and the percent of

seats (si) for each party are squared and added; this total is divided by 2 and finally the square

root of this value is taken (Gallagher, 1991; Lijphart, 1999:157f).

GLSq = 1/2(vi-si)2

According to Taagepera and Shugart, the number of parties and hence the level of

disproportionality will be underestimated by the actual vote share because voters and elites

make strategic considerations favouring larger parties before the elections even takes place

(Taagepera and Shugart, 1989). Those effects have obviously not taken hold in the initial

elections of several post-Soviet states. Table 4 provides us with the levels of

disproportionality in the PR part of the parliamentary elections in Ukraine, 1998 and Russia

1993 and 1995. In the Ukrainian 1998 elections the level of disproportionality produced by

15

the legal threshold was 11.9, which in a comparative perspective is extremely high. It is, for

example, more than twice the average level found in consolidated democracies. This number

further confirms the absence of strategic behaviour in those post-Soviet countries where the

institutionalisation process of the party system has not taken place. In a consolidated party

system the voters and elites should have anticipated the disproportionality that would be

produced by the threshold and hence gravitated towards larger parties capable of overcoming

the 4% mark. Hopefully, this process will increase over time as voters and elites learn the

rules and adapts to these incentives.

Table 4. Disproportionality in the PR part of electoral system

in Ukraine and Russia

Index of

disproportionality, List-

seat Contest

Ukraine 1994 -

Ukraine 1998 11.9

Russia 1993 4.9

Russia 1995 20.6

Sources: Joint Project of the University of Essex,

IFES and ACEEO (2000); Moser, 1999; Birch, 1998

Effects of the Single-member Plurality contest

The impact of the plurality portion of the Ukrainian 1998 elections was surprisingly

ineffective in its inability to constrain the number of legislative parties. According to the

literature, single-member elections are supposed to encourage substantial pre-electoral bloc

building because smaller parties are presumably punished for their inability to win a

significant number of pluralities in SM districts (cf. Duverger, 1965, Lijphart, 1999).

As earlier mentioned, pre-electoral consolidation did not occur in the 1998 elections. Table

5 shows the distribution of votes and seats in the plurality part of the elections5. As could be

seen, the outcome of the plurality contest did not in any way contributed to consolidation of

the party system. Among all the parties gaining parliamentary representation, only one - the

Green Party - did not succeeded in the SM seat race. In fact, there was a significant rise in

party system fragmentation in the constituency elections compared to the results in 1994.

5 Those calculations should, however, be interpreted with caution. The large proportion of independent

candidates weakens the reliability of these calculations because many of the so-called non-partisan deputies

joined party factions soon after the elections. Therefore, in this table, the level of disproportionality for each

party has been left out.

16

There was for example, an increase in the number of small parties gaining representation

through the SM-contest. Whereas in 1994, there were only two parties with one seat each, in

1998 this number had risen to eight. Moreover, there was also a slight rise in the proportional

number of independent candidates who achieved success from 49% in 1994, to almost 52%

(as a proportion of the total SM seats) in 1998. Thus, without the introduction of the PR

element, the 1998 elections would most probably have witnessed a dramatic increase in party

system fragmentation.

Table 5. Results of the Single-member contest

SM votes % SM seats %

(No. of seats)

Left

Communists (KPU) 14.7 16.9 (38)

Socialists/Peasants (bloc) 4.5 2.2 (5)

Progressive Socialists (PSPU) 1.0 0.9 (2)

Working Ukraine (bloc) 0.5 0.4 (1)

Centre

Greens (PZU) 0.8 0 (0)

Popular Democrats (NDP) 4.2 5.3 (12)

Hromada 3.7 3.1 (7)

Social Democrats United (SDPU) 1.9 1.3 (3)

Agrarians (APU) 3.3 3.6 (8)

Reforms and Order (PRP) 1.9 1.3 (3)

Labour and Liberal bloc

(RAZOM)

1.3 0.4 (1)

Forward Ukraine (bloc) 0.6 0.9 (2)

Christian Democrats (KhDPU) 0.8 0.9 (2)

Bloc of Democratic Parties (NEP) 1.2 0.4 (1)

Right

Popular Movement [Rukh] (NRU) 6.3 6.2 (14)

National Front (bloc) 2.7 2.2 (5)

Fewer Words (bloc) 0 0.4 (1)*

Russophile

Social Liberal Union bloc

(SLON)

0.5 0.4 (1)

Regional Revival (PRVU) 0.9 0.9 (2)

Soyuz 0.2 0.4 (1)

Independents 49.2 51.6 (116)

Total 100 100

Note: * this seat was won by a member of the Social National Party

Sources: Joint Project of the University of Essex, IFES and ACEEO (2000); Birch, 1998

When calculating the SM effective number of parliamentary parties (table 6) this assumption

seems even more likely. Twenty-two parties won in the SM-seat contest and the effective

number of parties in these seats taken separately was 25.5 - almost double the number in

17

1994. When comparing the effective number of parliamentary parties in the plurality race

with the analogous number in the overall mixed system - as in column 2 - the effects of the

plurality component becomes even more obvious. In the Ukrainian 1998 elections as well as

in the 1993 and 1995 Russian elections, the plurality component has largely contributed to the

high degree of party proliferation. Thus, in neither its psychological, nor its mechanical

aspects did the single-member plurality element enhance party system consolidation in these

post-Soviet elections. Even though a higher degree of party fragmentation might be expected

in new democracies the number of significant parties exceeds anything found in western

countries. In Taagepera and Shugart’s (1989) analysis of 48 countries in the 1980s, the

highest number of effective parliamentary parties was 7.0 (found in Belgium). The

corresponding number for the 1998 Ukrainian elections was 9.8 (in the overall elections,

PR+SM), and for the 1995 Russian elections, 6.15 (cf. Taagepera and Shugart, 1989: 81-83).

This is not to say that the consolidating effects of the plurality elections will not come into

play over time. The psychological effect suggested in Duverger’s law is most probably

manifested over a series of elections when the lessons and logic of electoral systems have

been better internalised by voters and elites. Comparative analysis does suggest a decline in

the effective number of parties with subsequent elections. However, in the plurality part this

has certainly not been the case in Ukraine between 1994 and 1998.

Table 6. Effective number of parties in the SM part of the electoral

system- Ukraine and Russia

Effective number of

parties,

SM-seat Contest

(Ns)

Effective number

of parties (total

seats)

Ukraine 1994 13.4 (3.1)* 13.4 (3.1)*

Ukraine 1998 25.5 (3.3) 9.8 (6.0)

Russia 1993 35.2 (2.3) 14.0 (5.8)

Russia 1995 11.2 (4.8) 6.15 (3.6)

Notes: * %age within parentheses refers to the effective number of parties when all

independent candidates are calculated as one single party.

Sources: Joint Project of the University of Essex, IFES and ACEEO (2000); Moser, 1999; Birch,

1998

PR and SM: ‘Winners’ and ‘Losers’ in the 1998 Elections

In the analysis we have not yet addressed the question of which blocs of parties gained and

lost from the different electoral components. The results of the 1998 Ukrainian elections do

suggest that the electoral rules had certain effects on which blocs actually won and lost. In

18

figure 1 the proportion of seats won by the left-centre-right-Russophile blocs are compared. In

terms of seat distribution there was relatively little ideological change from 1994 to 1998. The

main inter-electoral change was the decline of independents (as a percentage of the total seats

due to the reduced number of SM seats) and the rise of centrist parties. In 1994 the centrist

parties won less than 4% of the seats and in the 1998 elections they gained over 20%. Of the

four centrist parties that overcame the threshold, three had been founded since the 1994

elections. All of these parties - including the Greens - are associates of specific business

interests, and the success of the centre in the 1998 elections can actually be interpreted as a

politicisation of the business community (Birch, 1998:151). It is interesting to note that the

left bloc gained strongly from the PR part of the electoral system, while the Russophile

counterpart would not even have been represented in the parliament without the SM-

component.

Figure 1. Distribution of PR and SM seats (%) among the four party blocs in

the PR- and SM-part of the Ukrainian 1998 elections

Based on the outcomes of the party list votes, we can estimate the results of the 1998

elections under different alternative electoral systems6. As I have already argued, great

caution must be exercised in interpreting such results. The number, size, and composition of

districts would have been different if Ukraine used the SM plurality system exclusively.

Furthermore, we cannot assume that voters would have responded to an exclusively PR or SM

system in the same way as they actually did to the mixed system. In other words, the electoral

system itself is most likely to have certain effects on voting behaviour. With these

6 The idea of simulating the election results under different electoral systems is derived from a study on the 1993

Russian parliamentary election conducted by Remington and Smith, 1996: 1265f

19

considerations in mind we set out to estimate the hypothetical consequences of alternative

electoral systems for distribution of seats across the conventional left-right political spectrum

(table 7).

The first column – reflecting the outcome of an all SM ballot – is based on the actual

shares of the district seats. The second column – simulating the outcome of a one-third PR

system – is based on the assumption that the blocs hold the same SM seats that they actually

did while there are only 113 PR seats rather than 225. The third column reports the seat shares

that were actually obtained in the mixed system. The fourth column reports the results of a

simulated election in which the PR component determines two-thirds of the seats. As in the

previous simulation the parties retain their actual share of the SM district seats, but in this

simulation there are instead 450 PR seats to allocate. Finally, in the last column we are

projecting the results of an all PR election in which the votes cast for parties who did not

reach the 4% threshold are redistributed to those parties that actually did.

The simulation suggests that changing the proportion of PR seats have some substantial

effects on the party system. In an all SM system, only the Russophile faction (as a whole)

would have been better off than in a more PR dominated system. The other three blocs would

all have gained from increasing the PR part of the system. However, that is not to say that

each party in these blocs would have been better off. Among the right parties for example,

only Rukh would have taken advantage from a more PR dominated system. Rukh saw an

actual rise from 6% of the seats in 1994 to 10% in 1998.

Of all parties entering the distribution of list seats, the Communist Party did best out of the

PR component and would probably have gained even more strongly from an all-out PR

system. In fact, the PR component helped the left bloc to maintain its strong position in

parliament. But, as Birch claims, the increase in the number of leftist deputies may not

actually indicate an increase in ‘support’ for the left. In the post-Soviet context party

affiliation is seldom the most important factor when voters evaluate candidates. Rather it is

factors such as the candidates’ ‘professional experience’, ‘personal qualities’ and similar

aspects that are crucial to the voters (cf. Birch, 1998: 151f).

However, the leftist success in the PR part of the system becomes even more obvious when

comparing the outcome of 1998 with that of 1994. In the previous elections, the Communist

candidates obtained 25.4% of the seats, and the left bloc as a whole 35%. In 1998, by contrast,

the Communists hardly received 17% of the SM seats, and the left as a whole only 20%.

Thus, what the left appears to have lost from the SM part since 1994, they made up for in the

PR party list contest.

20

Table 7. Simulated Results under Alternative Electoral Systems

If 100% SMD

(225 seat)

If 1/3 PR (338

seats)

With 50% PR

(actual results,

450 seats)

If 2/3 PR (675

seats)

If 100 % PR

(450 seats)

Left

Communists (KPU) 16.7 23.7 27.1 30.5 37.3

Socialists/Peasants (bloc) 2.2 5.9 7.6 9.3 12.9

Progressive Socialists (PSPU) 0.9 2.7 3.6 4.4 6.2

Working Ukraine (bloc) 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.2 0

Total Left 20.2 32.6 38.5 44.4 56.4

Centre

Greens (PZU) 0 3.0 4.2 5.6 8.4

Popular Democrats (NDP) 5.3 6.2 6.4 6.8 7.6

Hromada 3.1 4.4 5.1 5.8 7.1

Social Democrats United

(SDPU)

1.3 3.0 3.8 4.6 6.2

Agrarians (APU) 3.6 2.4 1.8 1.2 0

Reforms and Order (PRP) 1.3 0.9 0.7 0.4 0

Labour and Liberal bloc

(RAZOM)

0.4 0.3 0.2 0.2 0

Forward Ukraine (bloc) 0.9 0.6 0.4 0.3 0

Christian Democrats (KhDPU) 0.9 0.6 0.4 0.3 0

Bloc of Democratic Parties

(NEP)

0.4 0.3 0.2 0.2 0

Total Centre 17.2 21.7 23.2 25.4 29.3

Right

Popular Movement [Rukh]

(NRU)

6.2 8.9 10.2 11.6 14.2

National Front (bloc) 2.2 1.5 1.1 0.7 0

Fewer Words (bloc) 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.2 0

Total Right 8.8 10.7 11.5 12.5 14.2

Russophile

Social Liberal Union bloc

(SLON)

0.4 0.3 0.2 0.2 0

Regional Revival (PRVU) 0.9 0.6 0.4 0.3 0

Soyuz 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.2 0

Total Russophile 1.7 1.2 0.8 0.7 0

Independents 51.6 34.3 25.8 17.2 0

Total 100 100 100 100 100

21

Conclusions

The experience of the 1998 Ukrainian elections shows some of the powers and limitations

of electoral engineering in countries where the party system is still underdeveloped. In the

electoral literature, plurality and majoritarian elections are deemed the most powerful

reductive systems. In cases such as Ukraine and Russia, not only have the single-member

district elections failed to produce local bi-partisanship at the district level, but also in

producing the dramatic mechanical effect of reducing parties entering the legislature. The

findings presented in this paper indicate that, in such contexts, electoral systems affect the

number of parties in a way that sharply contrasts to most western cases. Without an

institutionalised party system, voters and elites could not be expected to behave strategically

and may not even have the information necessary to differentiate between ‘significant’ and

‘non significant’ contenders. As Cox rightfully claims, under such conditions one could not

rely on the reductive impact of plurality systems. Thus, the limitations of Duverger’s

psychological effect are clearly evident in a case like the Ukrainian one. Under conditions of

profound party underdevelopment, the use of proportional representation may in fact be more

effective in constraining the number of parliamentary parties than the plurality system,

provided - of course - that a legal threshold is used. However, the threshold of 4 % was

obviously not enough to encourage substantial pre-election bloc building among the parties in

the 1998 elections.

The post-Soviet states provide a great challenge to scholars devoted to the issue of

electoral engineering and its different effects on party systems. Unconsolidated party systems,

such as those found in Ukraine and Russia, produce such a high degree of fragmentation that

even the constraining power of plurality systems have limited effects. Such phenomena

suggest that greater attention must be paid to the institutionalisation and the time aspect of

party system development. Those aspects have been more or less left out in this paper which

of course is a limitation when interpreting these results in a brother comparative context.

However, the paper points to the fact that theoretical expectations about electoral engineering

based on western stabilised democracies are not in any way easily interpreted into the context

of transitional countries.

22

References

Anckar, Carsten (1998) Storlek och partisystem: en studie av 77 stater. Åbo: Åbo

Akademis Förlag

Birch, Sarah (1998) ‘Electoral Reform in Ukraine: the 1998 Parliamentary Elections’

in Representation. Vol. 35, No. 2-3, pp. 156-154

Birch, Sarah (2000) Elections and Democratization in Ukraine. London: Macmillan

Press Ltd. and New York: St. Martin’s Press Inc.

Birch, Sarah and Andrew Wilson (1999) ‘The Ukrainian Parliamentary Elections of

1998’ in Electoral Studies. Vol. 18, No. 2, p. 281

Cox, Gary W. (1997) Making Votes Count: Strategic Coordination in the World's

Electoral Systems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Duverger, Maurice (1965) Political Parties: Their Organization and Activity in the

Modern State. 4th

edition, London: Methuen & Co. Ltd.

Gallagher, Michael (1991) ‘Proportionality, Disproportionality and Electoral Systems’

in Electoral Studies. Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 33-51

International Foundation of Electoral Studies (IFES) (1997) ‘Law on Parliamentary

Elections’ (1997), available on the Internet, www.ifes-ukraine.org, 2001-01-15

Joint Project of the University of Essex, IFES and ACEEO (2000) ‘Elections in

Central and Eastern Europe’, available on the Internet, www2.essex.ac.uk/elect,

2001-01-29

Lijphart, Arend (1999) Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance

in Thirty-Six Countries. New Haven and London: Yale University Press

Kuzio, Taras (1994) ‘The Multi-Party System in Ukraine on the Eve of Elections:

Identity Problems, Conflicts and Solutions’ in Government and Opposition. Vol.

29, No. 1, pp. 109-127

Laakso, Markuu and Rein Taagepera (1979) ‘Effective Number of Parties: A Measure

with Application to West Europe’ in Comparative Political Studies. Vol. 12, No. 1,

pp. 3-27

Miller, Arthur H., Gwyn Erb, William M. Reisinger and Vicki L. Hesli (2000)

‘Emerging Party Systems in Post-Soviet Societies: Fact or Fiction?’ in Journal of

Politics. Vol. 62, No. 2, pp. 455-490

23

Moser, Robert G. (1995) ‘The Impact of the Electoral System on Post-Communist

Party Development: the Case of the 1993 Russian Parliamentary Elections’ in

Electoral Studies. Vol. 14, No. 4, pp. 377-398

Moser, Robert G. (1999) ‘Electoral Systems and the Number of Parties in Post-

Communist States’ in World Politics. Vol. 51, No. 3, pp. 359-384

National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI) (1998) ‘The March 29,

1998 Parliamentary Elections in Ukraine: a Pre-Election Report’, available on the

Internet, www.ndi.org/, 2001-02-19

Norris, Pippa (1997) ‘Choosing Electoral Systems: Proportional, Majoritarian and

Mixed Systems’ in International Political Science Review. Vol. 18, No. 3, pp. 297-

312

Rae, Douglas (1971) The Political Consequences of Electoral Laws. New Haven: Yale

University Press

Remington, Thomas F. and Steven S. Smith (1996) ‘Political Goals, Institutional

Context and the Choice of an Electoral System: the Russian Parliamentary Election

Law’ in American Journal of Political Science. Vol. 40, No. 4, pp. 1253-1279

Sartori, Giovanni (1997) Comparative Constitutional Engineering: An inquiry into

Structures, Incentives and Outcomes. 2nd

edition, London: Macmillan Press Ltd.

Stanclik, Katarzyna (1997) ‘Electoral Law and Party System Formation in New

Democracies: The Case of Poland’ in Micgiel, John S., ed., Perspectives on

Political and Economic Transitions after Communism. New York: The Institute on

East Central Europe, Colombia University

Taagepera, Rein and Matthew S. Shugart (1993) ‘Predicting the Number of Parties: A

Quantitative Model of Duverger’s Mechanical Effect’ in American Political

Science Review. Vol. 87, No. 2, pp. 455-464

Taagepera, Rein and Matthew S. Shugart (1989) Seats and Votes: the Effects and

Determinants of Electoral Systems. New Haven: Yale University Press

Wilson, Andrew and Sarah Birch (1999) ‘Voting Stability, Political Gridlock:

Ukraine’s 1998 Parliamentary Elections’ in Europe-Asia Studies. Vol. 51, No. 6,

pp. 1039-1068