Government Structure and Electoral System

This paper discusses various options for the system of government and the electoral system in post-conflict countries. While it does not specifically contextualize its recommendations, the paper proposes to make these suggestions with Afghanistan in mind. First, it defines Presidential, Parliamentary, and Semi-Presidential systems of government, and then sets out their respective advantages and disadvantages. Next the author defines and contextualizes what is meant by electoral system, and describes what he considers to be the three main categories all electoral systems fall into: plurality-majority systems, semi-proportional systems, and proportional representation systems. Each of these categories is further broken down into a total of nine examples of electoral systems. Finally, specific to the context of post-conflict societies and legislative elections, the paper sets out the advantages and disadvantages of electoral systems characterized by: proportional representation, vote-pooling, and/or the explicit recognition of communal groups. Lastly, the paper discusses particular concerns with respect to presidential elections, such as the usefulness of runoff elections where a clear majority is not won, or the benefits of imposing a distributional requirement to ensure the winning candidate does not win based on votes concentrated in one geographic area.