Senegal is one of only a handful of countries in Africa that have undergone a genuine democratic transfer of power as a result of the defeat of a sitting president. At the presidential level the electoral system is a two-round majority run-off system very similar to that used for elections for the president of France. Parties have incentives to put up candidates in the first round, and voters can freely vote for the candidate they really prefer while saving their ‘strategic’ vote for the second round. In 2000 the opposition parties denied President Abdou Diouf a first-round victory and, by previous agreement, united behind the leading opposition candidate, Abdoulaye Wade, to defeat the long-reigning Socialist Party (Parti Socialiste, PS) leader in the second round.

For the legislature, the electoral system was changed from a pure PR system by national list in 1978 to a mixed, Parallel system since 1983. Since then it has been modified numerous times. Most of the changes have been designed to provide for democratic legitimacy by ensuring that the system remains open to some opposition representation while maintaining the ruling party’s majority of seats. Like many mixed systems, Senegal’s relies on a national list for a part of the seats. Unlike most other Parallel systems, the plurality seats, rather than being decided in single-member electoral districts, are decided on the basis of Party Block Vote (PBV) in mostly multi-member electoral districts.

The PR seats (roughly half of the total) are allocated from the votes cast for the national list of each party, using a Largest Remainder Method with the Hare formula. The other seats are allocated by plurality vote in multi-member electoral districts in the 30 departments of the country, with between one and five seats each. The smaller parties and the opposition have always argued for a greater number of seats to be allocated from the national list, while the ruling party has always favoured a balance—ensuring that its domination of the plurality seats plus a proportion of the Parallel seats would enable it to retain power. For the 1998 election the ruling PS once again altered the distribution of seats, adding 20 new plurality seats. The PS won 18 of these and was easily able to maintain control of the legislature, despite the fact that it had only won a bare majority of the vote nationally (50.3 per cent). President Wade, when he was leader of the opposition, argued for greater proportionality in the system and less reliance on the PBV seats, which heavily favour the party in power. For the 2001 elections, Wade, who had bitterly attacked the machinations by the PS, was in a position to alter this inequitable formula. Once in control of the presidency and with power to modify the electoral system, Wade could install a system designed either to be more representative of the voters’ wishes or to maximize the opportunities for his coalition (the SOPI Coalition, led by the Democratic Party of Senegal (PDS)). Coupled with the greater resources now available to his party, including the full weight of the presidency, this made the highly inequitable system he had previously attacked seem suddenly attractive.

The PS and the Alliance of Forces of Progress (AFP), the only other large parties, also felt that they could profit from an emphasis on the plurality PBV side of the seat distribution by potentially winning a plurality in several districts. They too chose to argue for increased weight for the plurality side of the election. The smaller parties pushed for pure proportionality based on a national list system or some compromise that would provide greater opportunities for a better seat-to-vote distribution. The ruling PDS opted for reducing the size of the National Assembly from 140 to 120 and moving from a 70 : 70 plurality : proportional distribution to 65 plurality and 55 national list PR seats. The PDS calculated that as the new party in power it could win a plurality in many departments, thus increasing its share of seats relative to its voter support.

These calculations proved correct. Although the SOPI coalition received just under half of the votes (49.6 per cent), it won 89 of the 120 seats (74.2 per cent) in 2001. The former ruling party, the PS, finished second in terms of share of the vote, with 17.4 per cent, but garnered only ten seats, all in the proportional national list. In third place in the voting, the AFP of Moustapha Niasse (with 16.1 per cent of the vote), passed the PS in number of seats with 11, two of which it won on the plurality side by finishing first in one department. The Union for Democratic Renewal (URD), with 3.7 per cent of the vote, garnered three seats, one of which was a plurality seat in a single-member district in the small department which is the home of its leader. The African Party for Democracy and Socialism/Jef (AJ/PADS), with just over 4 per cent of the vote, won only two seats, both on the national list. Five additional parties were given one seat each on the national list by virtue of having the largest remainders, even though they did not achieve a full quota in votes. The remaining 15 parties which presented lists were excluded from the seat allocation.

The disproportionality in the 2001 election greatly exceeded even the high rates Senegal had experienced under PS rule. In the 1993 elections, 70 seats were allocated by the proportional formula on a national list and 50 in department-level districts using PBV; in 1998, seats were allocated 70 : 70 between the two electoral formulae, and disproportionality rose slightly. It rose sharply in the 2001 elections, the results of which were less proportional than the results of most elections in FPTP systems. As a consequence the legitimacy of the legislature is compromised. The SOPI coalition, which came to power in 2001 on the basis of arguments for democratic reform, has taken a major step backwards with its manipulation of the electoral system to its own advantage.

In Senegal, the objective of the then hegemonic ruling party in opting for a Parallel system was to ensure fragmentation of the opposition by discouraging coordination among parties, minimizing strategic voting and thereby providing an advantage to the largest party. The party furthered this objective by employing a ballot that offers a single choice that covers both the proportional and the plurality vote. Since the allocation of the proportional seats depends on the total number of votes a party or coalition receives, Senegal’s opposition parties have an incentive to present candidates in as many plurality districts as possible. The fact that all votes cast at the district level are added together for the allocation of the proportional seats reduces any advantages of coordination between parties across constituencies, and provides incentives for sincere rather than strategic voting. Thus, the ruling party was able to ensure wins for itself in most plurality districts.

A Parallel mixed system is also used at the local (rural council) and municipal levels. To ensure an overwhelming majority for the winning party on every council, half of the seats are allocated in a single bloc for the whole municipality using the Party Block Vote. The other half of the seats are allocated by List PR using the whole rural community or municipality as one district.

Senegal illustrates the way in which short-term political advantage can be the overriding factor in debates about electoral system change. An opposition that clamoured for change became a government which defended a status quo which suddenly looked beneficial. The potential down side of this is that, if the electoral pendulum swings back to the PS, the heavier emphasis on the PBV part of the Parallel system is almost certain to ensure that this will be reflected in a more than proportional gain of seats for the opposition, leaving the forces in the SOPI coalition back where they were before 2001. Alternatively, this approach can be seen as moving towards a two-large-party system, in which the two beneficiaries ensure that any potential third political force has a huge task to break in.