In post-conflict and transitional situations, there is often little time for debate and reflection. The political momentum generated by a peace agreement or by the fall of an authoritarian regime can lead to pressures for elections to take place quickly. While a general discussion of the political desirability and constraints surrounding transitional elections is outside the scope of this text, there are some particular issues and pressures which relate to electoral system design.
The time needed to set up the infrastructure for different electoral systems varies. For example, electoral registration and boundary delimitation are both time-consuming exercises which can lead to legitimacy problems. At one extreme, if all voters vote in person and voters are marked at the polling station, List PR with one national district may be feasible without either registration or boundary delimitation. At the other extreme, a plurality/majority system with single-member districts may require both if no acceptable framework is in place. In any event, the system adopted for a first transitional election may not be the most suitable in the longer term—although a process of continual change in which voters and parties are never able to adapt to the effects of the evolving system may also be undesirable.
Those negotiating a new institutional framework or electoral law may wish to be as inclusive as possible and therefore be compelled to make entry to elections easy both by setting relaxed criteria for nomination and by adopting an electoral system in which any threshold for representation—either formal or effective—is low. Link to voter registration. Conversely, there are often concerns about the fragmentation of the party system driven by the politics of personality and ethnicity, and the negotiators and designers may thus want to set the bar for representation higher. The flowering of a multiplicity of parties is, however, a feature of elections in countries emerging from authoritarianism, and unsuccessful parties usually disappear of their own accord.
Arguments are sometimes offered suggesting that, when building democracy in a fragile or divided political environment, it may be politically desirable to start with local elections and build over time to provincial and national elections as the infrastructure and political situation allow—as has been proposed in Sudan. If such a strategy is chosen, it is important that the system is both designed to meet the political requirements of the local elections and feasible to organize given the timetable.
Provisions for voting by refugees and displaced persons may be particularly significant in post-conflict elections. The influence and importance of out-of-country voting is well illustrated by Bosnia and Herzegovina. 314,000 voters, out of a total of some 2 million, were registered to vote outside the country’s borders in 1998, over half of them in Croatia and the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (now Serbia and Montenegro), the remainder in 51 other countries. Of these, 66 per cent cast valid ballots.
