External Imposition
A small number of electoral systems were more consciously designed and imposed on nation states by external powers. Two of the most vivid examples of this phenomenon occurred in West Germany after the Second World War, and in Namibia in the late 1980s.
In post-war Germany, both the departing British forces and the German parties were anxious to introduce a system which would avoid the damaging party proliferation and destabilisation of the Weimar years, and to incorporate the Anglo tradition of constituency representation because of unease with the 1919-1933 closed list electoral system which denied the voters a choice between candidates as well as parties.
During 1946, elections in the French and American zones of occupation were held under the previous Weimar electoral system. In the British zone a compromise was adopted which allowed voters to vote for constituency members with a number of list PR seats reserved to compensate for any disproportionality that arose from the districts. Thus the Mixed-Member Proportional Representation (MMP) system, which has since been emulated by a number of other countries, was born. This mixed system was eventually adopted for all parliamentary elections in 1949 but it was not until 1953 that two separate votes were introduced, one for the constituency member, and another based on the Länder, which ultimately determined the party composition of the Bundestag. The imposition of a five percent national threshold for party list representation helped focus the party system on three major groupings after 1949 - the Social Democrats, Christian Democrats and Free Democrats - although in all a total of 12 parties gained representation in those first post-war national elections.
The rationale for a nationally based list Proportional Representation (PR) system in Namibia came initially from the United Nations, which urged as early as 1982 that any future non-racial electoral system ensure that political parties managing to gain substantial support in the election be rewarded with fair representation. The option of discarding the First Past the Post (FPTP) electoral system (the whites-only system operating in what was the colony of south-west Africa) and moving to a rigid list PR system was then proposed by Pik Botha, the then South African Foreign Minister. Although the South Africans had previously unsuccessfully pressed for separate voters rolls ( la Zimbabwe 1980-1985) which would have ensured that whites gain seats in the new Assembly.
There was some unease that the South Africans were promoting a PR electoral system solely to fractionalize the Constituent Assembly. This led the UN Institute for Namibia to advise all political parties interested in a stable independence government to reject a PR system because it would fractionalize party representation. But this advice remained unheeded and the option of a threshold for representation - one of the chief mechanisms for reducing the number of parties in a list PR system - was never put forward by the UN or made an issue by any of the political parties.
For the first elections in 1989 the South West African People's Organization (SWAPO) had expressed a preference for keeping the single member district system, no doubt reasonably expecting (as the dominant party) to be advantaged by such winner-take-all constituencies. However, when the Constituent Assembly met for the first time in November 1989, and each parliamentary party presented their draft constitution, SWAPO gave in on the issue of PR apparently as a concession to the minority parties for which they hoped to gain reciprocal concessions on matters of more importance.
Colonial Inheritance
Inheriting an electoral system from colonial times is perhaps the most common way through which democratising societies come to use a particular electoral system. The map of electoral system usage in 'The International IDEA Handbook of Electoral System Design' dramatically illustrates the post-colonial diffusion of electoral systems. Out of 53 former British colonies and members of the Commonwealth of Nations, a full 37 (or 70 percent) use classic First Past The Post (FPTP) systems inherited from Westminster. Eleven of the 27 Francophone territories use the French Two Round System (TRS), while the majority of the remaining 16 countries use list Proportional Representation (PR), a system used by the French on and off since 1945 for parliamentary elections, and widely for municipal elections. Fifteen out of the 17 Spanish speaking countries and territories use PR (as does Spain), while Guatemala and Ecuador use list PR as part of their parallel systems. Finally, all six Lusophone countries use list PR, as in Portugal.
Interestingly, the influence of French constitutional design has also played heavily on the institutional designers of the former Soviet Republics of the CIS. Eight of these satellite states use TRS in some form. Only Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Russia itself fail to follow the trend. Nevertheless, the electoral laws of the former Soviet Union have had a high impact on the consolidation of democracy in the new states of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, many of which retained the old Soviet requirement that turnout had to exceed 50 percent for the election in a given constituency to be declared valid. This has caused particular problems in the Ukraine, where the process of filling empty seats carried on for years, generating considerable popular disaffection.
Colonial inheritance of an electoral system is perhaps the least likely way to ensure that the institution is appropriate to a country's needs, as the begetting colonial power was almost always, by its essence, very different socially and culturally from the society colonised. And even where the coloniser sought to stamp much of its political ethos on the occupied land, they rarely succeeded in obliterating indigenous power relations and traditional modes of political discourse. Indeed, the colonial inheritance of Westminster systems has been cited as an impediment to stability in a number of Anglophone nations such as the Caribbean, Nigeria, and Malawi. Mali's use of the French TRS has been widely questioned, and Jordan and Palestine's use of the British-inspired Block Vote has also led to problems.
