by delaying agreement, but by making it more diYcult to alter the status quo, they
should encourage policy stability in the long run, and thereby make legislative
decisions stick once they are taken.
2 Representation
.........................................................................................................................................................................................
In 2005 , as this chapter is being drafted, debate among both policy-makers and
academics is ongoing over how to craft mechanisms to represent diversity in two
particularly challenging legislative environments: Afghanistan and Iraq. 1 In both
cases, US-led invasions in 2001 and 2003 , respectively, produced governments
commissioned to craft new constitutions, and to hold elections toWll the political
oYces so founded. In both cases, there is widespread acknowledgment that plural
societies warrant representation of broad diversity within the legislature. The
fundamental stumbling block in both cases is to identify what sort of diversity
ought to be privileged in legislative representation. Various dimensions of repre-
sentation—including geography, ethnicity, religion, and gender—have been prom-
inently on the table in each case. Less-widely noted is that the Afghan and Iraqi
cases, and the associated debates surrounding how best to move toward electoral
democracy, embody the fundamental trade-oVbetween collective and individual-
istic representation in a context relatively unbounded by existing precedent.
- 1 Iraq and Afghanistan
The Iraqi election of January 2005 , which chose a dual-purpose constituent assem-
bly and parliament, embodies the extreme collectivist end of this trade-oV. The
electoral law handed down by the outgoing, US-led Coalition Provisional Author-
ity, the regulatory details of which wereWlled in with UN assistance, stipulated that
the entire country encompassed a single electoral district with 275 seats, the
implications of which were far-reaching, however, for the types of legislative
representation possible in Iraq. 2 First, the high district magnitude eVectively
1 The brief discussion that follows here of Iraq and Afghanistan at a particular moment in time—
2005 —is not meant to serve as a thorough review of legislative electoral rules, much less as a
comprehensive analysis of the politics of these countries. The former is provided in an impressive
literature on comparative electoral systems (Duverger 1954 ; Taagepera and Shugart 1989 ; Lijphart 1994 ;
Cox 1997 ; Monroe 2005 ), and the latter is well beyond my capacity.
2 One compelling motivation for this choice had to do simply with logistics of electoral admin-
istration: Iraq lacked a reliable census by which legislative seats might be apportioned across districts
according to population.
434 john m. carey