| District | Population (thousands) | District size |
|---|---|---|
| Aleppo (City) | 2098 | 25 |
| Aleppo (province) | 2502 | 29 |
| Raqqa | 919 | 10 |
| Suwayda | 500 | 5 |
| Damascus | 2211 | 26 |
| Daraa | 998 | 11 |
| Deir ez-Zor | 1201 | 14 |
| Hama | 1593 | 19 |
| Al-Hasakah | 1272 | 15 |
| Homs | 1762 | 21 |
| Idlib | 1464 | 17 |
| Latakia | 1278 | 15 |
| Quneitra | 87 | 1 |
| Rif Dimashq | 2831 | 33 |
| Tartus | 785 | 9 |
“too long, didn’t read” summary
Using the existing electoral districts and party list PR would be a reasonable basis for a Syrian election.
Warning
I am not an expert in Syrian politics, and there are lots of issues that I don’t consider here concerning minority representation.
It is now over a month since Bashar al-Assad was overthrown as leader of Syria. The de facto leader of Syria, Ahmed al-Sharaa, has said that it might take a year for Syrians to see improvements to public services, and four years before democratic elections can be held. Al-Sharaa argues that a census must be held before elections can be held. Only then can fair shares of seats be allocated to (new or existing) electoral districts reflecting their population.
The allocation of seats between districts is a sensitive issue, since under Ba’ath party rule the number of seats per electoral district was set by presidential decree, and those decrees unsurprisingly rewarded pro-regime areas. There are therefore good reasons why democrats might want an accurate census before elections are held, and might therefore want elections to be held later rather than sooner.
Having said this, running an accurate census is neither easy nor quick, and other elections in the region have been run using administrative data to work out the number of people in each region. In Iraq, re-districting following the 2020 electoral reform was carried out on the basis of counts from the public rationing system. Even without administrative data, it’s possible to estimate populations in defined areas using satellite imagery, and in the UK DfID has sponsored such work. Seats could be allocated to electoral districts using reasonably accurate data in a four month period rather than over a four year period.
Of course, in order to allocate seats between districts, we first have to know what districts are to be used. District magnitude – the number of legislators elected in each district – is one of two key factors which determine the proportionality of an electoral system. Generally, the seat share of the largest party is equal to district magnitude, time the total number of legislators, raised to the power of negative one-eighth, at least for “simple” electoral systems.
This rule of thumb means that if district magnitude is small, then a single party might win a legislative majority and use that legislative majority to eliminate political competition. If district magnitude is very large, then forming a government will be a protracted exercise which requires collaboration between many parties, leading to popular unrest or the emergence of non-democratic movements.
Choosing a path between these two risks involves value judgements. Where people with different values disagree, the status quo can often win out. In this case, the status quo is not too bad – at least on paper. The People’s Assembly has 250 members, elected in 15 multimember constituencies, which correspond to the country’s provinces or governorates, except that Aleppo City forms a separate constituency from the rest of Aleppo province. This gives an average of 16.7 members per constituency. Table 1 shows the expected number of legislators per district on the basis of 2018 population counts, except that I have split Aleppo province and Aleppo city according to the most recent estimate of the population for Aleppo city.
If Syria were to use closed or open party lists to allocate seats between competing parties, and if the seat allocation were as I have suggested it might be, we might expect the largest party to win around (16.7 * 250)^(-1/8) = 35% of the seats in equilibrium.
Generally post-war elections are not “in equilibrium”, and elections in the region have seen hyper-fragmentation due to a large number of independents or micro-parties. The actual seat share of the largest party could be lower or indeed higher (if a large number of votes are cast for parties which do not win seats).
Although our knowledge of the consequences of electoral systems is never exact, using the existing number of districts, and allocating seats to those districts before the completion of a national census, would be a reasonable basis for free and fair elections within the next year or eighteen months rather than four years.