A country in the transition process to a democratic system must develop its own strategy for elections that often oscillates between two extremes:
In the first one, it may adopt what one could call a maximalist strategy. Here the starting point is the importance of the drafting process for an electoral law and the impact that this choice has for the acceptance of the law and the new system as a whole. For this, a dialogue among all the political forces is opened to try to reach the widest possible consensus. This is the point of view adopted in the document drawn up by the International Foundation for Election Systems (IFES) studying the transition processes in Africa in the nineties.
It concludes that the process was carried out most satisfactorily in countries such as Mozambique (see Reform and Electoral Process in Mozambique), Guinea-Bissau and Senegal where
multi-party commissions were set up to create the electoral law. Thus, a broad consensus in this process is the most desirable way to start an electoral process and democratic transition itself.
However, we consider that this point of view needs to be explained in great detail, at least in relation to the first elections that initiate the transition process. This choice poses at least two drawbacks:
- In the first place, it could contribute to prolonging the provisional position of the authorities that have taken over power beyond what can be considered reasonable, with undesirable consequences in terms of their legitimacy, as well as from the point of view of the functionality of the new regime.
- In the second place, a law developed this way can provoke a certain 'illusion of representation', relatively frequent in transition processes, if the forces that take the initiative at first do not acquire electoral approval afterwards in the same proportion as the role they have fulfilled. Thus, it might turn out that the electoral law, in fact, lacks a representative basis, inasmuch as it will have been elaborated by parties that did not obtain sufficient representation in its application.
On the other hand, it can adopt what might be called a minimalist strategy. In such a case, the government prefers not to wait for the long process involved in the elaboration of an electoral law established by consensus and opts for changing only the provisions of the previous law most clearly related to the single party system. Often an expert commission is appointed, at times with international support, to perform this task. Such a strategy does however have some drawbacks:
There are several recent examples of inadequate or internally contradictory reforms, however, insofar as some of the less obvious authoritarian aspects of the previous system have not been modified. Problems of this type have been identified in Africa, especially in countries like Kenya and Gabon.
The clearest example of the disadvantages of the minimalist strategy is produced in the application of the electoral law of 18 November 1993 in the Ukraine (see Inadequate Electoral Law Reform Process in the Ukraine). This law retained many of the provisions of the previous Soviet regulations and is considered to be directly responsible for the failure to cover 32 seats needed to bring the Rada up to 450 members, in spite of four consecutive elections between 27 March 1994 and 10 December 1995. As prescribed by the law, the elections in constituencies where a vote of less than 50% of the voters list had been achieved or where the winning candidate may have obtained less than 25% of the votes were invalid. These provisions have been eliminated at the suggestion of IFES, who even mediated in the constitutional reform of 28 June 1996. It is evident that the 'oversight' by its writers of the difficulty to obtain the same participation rates in a democratic system as in an authoritarian system led to some clearly unsatisfactory results by transposing the precepts of the Soviet electoral law to the new Ukrainian system.
Another example of an inadequate electoral reform is the case of Chile (see Constitutional and Electoral Reform in Chile) in which Pinochet designed a strategy that tended to perpetuate his influence and power after the implementation of the democratic system.
Furthermore, most approved electoral laws seem to generate a kind of inherent resistance to reform, so it is not always easy to modify them in-depth. The Ukraine is also a case in point here, where the reform, despite obviously being necessary, only achieved political legitimacy through a constitutional reform which was found to be legally inaccurate.
This sort of universal characteristic of electoral laws described above leads to yet a third strategy, which aims to make the advantages of the first two strategies compatible. This is a synthetic strategy in which the government drafts provisional regulation aimed exclusively at governing the first elections. A mandate to draft a new electoral law directed at the parliament that is to be elected is incorporated in its very text. Examples of this strategy can be found in Africa (Burundi), as well as in the democracies of southern Europe. A particularly interesting case is Spain (see Reform of the Spanish Electoral System) where the essential elements of the transition regulations approved by the government in March 1977 for the election of the first democratic Parliament after the death of the dictator Franco literally became part of the Constitution, as the system designed within the regulations is taken up in the Basic Rule.
Finally, reference can be made to the situation that arises in countries where the transition process to the democratic system is very slow and gradual, through several elections that progressively introduce pluralist elements that are reflected in the electoral law itself.
This gradualist strategy, present for example in Morocco and Tanzania, is always the result of a certain dialogue or commitment between the forces in power and the opposition, which can however can be more explicit or less explicit. The more explicit it is, the more the reforms will tend to appear to be a commitment to transition each time they are made.
The case of Mexico (see Electoral Reform in Mexico) which has undertaken a gradual, profound process of electoral reform since the beginning of the nineties can also be regarded as falling under this category.
