• Electoral systems & reforms

Electoral systems & reforms

This Background Paper is part of a wider UNDP regional initiative that focuses on a number of core issues related to representative systems and local elections. It includes a detailed review of the systems in place in eight countries in South/West Asia, five countries in Southeast Asia and three Pacific region countries.

The paper brings to the fore some of the basic electoral principles that underlie the diversity of electoral systems and how they may affect representational outcomes. The paper also tries to look at the fundamental options available, and some of the trade-offs inherent to each. It also explores some of the ways that different countries have tried to tackle the difficult issue of safeguarding and promoting local level representation for those citizens whose political voice often goes unheard.

Other issues addressed in the paper are:

• the ways that different countries have tried to deal with sensitive socio-cultural situations and sub-national strife by making special local arrangements
• how non-electoral issues such as broader demographic and administrative context of local representational system impinge upon representational outcomes
• the ways that traditional modes of local governance interact and articulate with their moderncounterparts;
• diversity in current local electoral and representational arrangements that have been put into place in Asian and Pacific countries

The paper identifies the following areas for future research:

• the concrete outcomes of different electoral systems, in terms of who gets elected and how; how different systems are subject to manipulation, how they affect the machinery of day-to-day governance
• the ways in which political parties interface with local electoral systems, and what the representational outcomes of that encounter are
• the wider bottlenecks and constraints that limit the extent to which localrepresentation translates into local actions of benefit to voters
• the ways in which the legitimacy conferred by local custom and tradition can be harnessed to improve and strengthen local representational arrangements without diluting fundamental democratic principles and rights

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