voter casts a ballot for her or hisWrst-choice candidate, and the candidates with the
most votes are elected in each district, up to the number of seats available. SNTV is
attractive in its simplicity, and for its potential to allow minority groups to secure
representation while simultaneously holding out the promise of a bond of direct
personal accountability between voters and their representatives.
SNTV, however, is subject to at least two severe drawbacks that undermine its
potential to provide viable representation in the Afghan context. First, SNTV
presents any collective political actor—a party, for example—with a formidable
coordination problem in translating electoral support into legislative representa-
tion. The problem is a fundamental conXict of interests between the party and its
individual politicians. 3 Parties seek to win as many seats as possible. Individual
politicians may prefer to be members of strong parties, but theirWrst priority is to
win oYce. Under SNTV, candidates who seek to minimize the risk of individual
defeat have incentives to draw votes away from co-partisans, undermining
the collective goal of translating votes to legislative representation eYciently.
By privileging electoral individualism, SNTV presents formidable challenges to
parties’ ability to foster internal cooperation among politicians, and so to provide
collective representation (McCubbins and Rosenbluth 1995 ; Cox and Thies 1998 ).
An even more immediate challenge to the feasibility of SNTV in Afghanistan
is the incompatibility between individualistic legislative representation and the
representation of women. The Afghan Constitution requires that at least two lower-
house legislators from each of the country’s thirty-four provinces be female (Article
83 ). SNTV provides no alternative basis than individual vote totals for awarding
legislative seats, so unless at least two of the top candidates in each province are
women, the Afghan legislature will be confronted with the prospect of bypassing male
candidates with more votes in order to seat female candidates with fewer votes. In a
society where gender-based inequalities in personal resources, as well as gender bias
among voters, may constrain the viability of female candidates, this prospect appears
inevitable, and may undermine public acceptance of the elections generally.
- 2 The Collectivism vs. Individualism Trade-off
The fundamental contrast in the Iraqi and Afghan choices over electoral rules, at
this point, is between privileging collective versus individualistic representation.
For myriad reasons, the system chosen for Iraq’s January 2005 election leans
toward the former. This facilitated the initial, descriptive representation of
various collective identities—most notably by party alliance, ethnicity, religion,
3 The problem is also increasingly severe as district magnitude increases. Magnitudes in Japanese
SNTV elections ranged from three toWve. In Afghanistan, the average district magnitude for
parliamentary elections would be around seven, and some districts would be considerably larger
(Constitution of Afghanistan, Art. 82 ).
436 john m. carey