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УДК 324
ХАЛИЛ-ЗАДЕ ФУАД АФГАН ОГЛЫ
ПРОЗРАЧНОСТЬ И ЛЕГИТИМНОСТЬ ПОЛИТИЧЕСКИХ ВЫБОРОВ И ИЗБИРАТЕЛЬНАЯ СИСТЕМА В АЗЕРБАЙДЖАНЕ
Демократическое управление в стране сохраняется до тех пор, пока все участники политической системы соблюдают институционные права граждан. Рассмотрена роль демократических институтов в поддержании прозрачности и легитимности политической системы в Азербайджане, организации выборов и избирательной системы государства, обеспечении интересов общества.
Ключевые слова: избирательная система, демократическая теория, прозрачность, пассивное избирательное право, законность, системы голосования.
Democratic rule is maintained so long as all actors in the political system comply with the institutional rules of the game. Since constitutions cannot be enforced by external actors, democratic institutions must be self-enforcing. In this paper, we examine the role of transparency in supporting a democratic equilibrium. Elections are one of the main communications between society and the state. And realizing activity people are organizing the state. The state provides the activity by people. The state embodies the highest value in public. As the .state activity is called policy, therefore, activity ofpeople in power is also nominated by policy. From this point of view, the politician forms the source of society, and directs to the party of society. The policy supplies interests of society Therefore, the necessary directions of society concentrates in itself executing directions ofpolicy. The policy is the activity which has found in itself reflection in members of society. From this point of view, execution of interests sets before itself the purpose. The article examines electoral systems in relation to democratic theory; and it links the study of electoral systems to that of voting systems. It compares elections in various other kinds of systems, and it looks at the differences between Azerbaijan experience and that of other countries. Keywords: electoral system, democratic theory, transparency, passive suffrage, legitimacy, voting systems.
1. INTRODUCTION
A country's electoral system is the method used to calculate the number of elected positions in government that individuals and parties are awarded after elections. In other words, it is the way that votes are translated into seats in parliament or in other areas of government (such as the presidency). There are many different types of electoral systems in use around the world, and even within
© Халил-заде Фуад Афган оглы, 2018
individual countries, different electoral systems may be found in different regions and at different levels of government (e.g., for elections to school boards, city councils, state legislatures, governorships, etc.).
Democracy boosts the effectiveness and cleanliness of government as expect-ed-corruption declines and government effectiveness increases by about a fourth of a standard deviation of the sample as a country moves from an authoritarian to a democratic regime [2].
«Democracy is a system in which incumbents lose elections and leave office when the rules so dictate. «Contestation» is key: ex-ante uncertainty (anyone can win), ex-post irreversibility (losers don't try to reverse results), repeatability» [3].
Dahl's A Preface to Democratic Theory is an effort to identify the central deficiencies of what he takes to be the two major traditions of «classical» democratic theory, the «Madisonian» and the «Populist», and to substitute his more coherent and realistic theory of polyarchal democracy. It stands as a classical expression of contemporary democratic revisionism. In his discussion of the «American hybrid» system of government, Dahl argues that elections combined with continuous political competition between individuals or parties or both are the two critical methods of social control distinguishing polyarchal democracy from dictatorship. Neither leads to the majority rule demanded by maximizing modes of democratic theory, but taken together they do nevertheless promote popular sovereignty and political equality by increasing the «size, number, and variety of minorities whose preferences must be taken into account by leaders». It is here, Dahl argues, that we find the key contrast between polyarchal democracy and dictatorship, which «is not discoverable in the clear-cut distinction between government by a majority and government by a minority [but] between government by a minority and government by minorities». Polyarchy is neither pure majority rule nor unified minority rule. It is an open, competitive, and pluralistic system of «minorities rule» [5].
All of these studies, which are supported by empirical evidence, argue that the policymaking of democratic governments is shaped by transparency and, importantly, democratic governments have incentives
to obfuscate evidence. We thus ask a basic question: do electoral politics in and of themselves provide any incentives for governments to disseminate data? Or, instead, do electoral politics intrinsically generate incentives for governments to hide information? After all, many people believe that the presence of elections alone is not sufficient for a country to be considered a democracy and that transparency must be included as part of the definition of political regime [8].
2. EXISTING MEASURES OF TRANSPARENCY
A large literature in political science relates transparency - broadly conceived of as the flow of information - to government accountability. These theories predominantly build upon retrospective voting models (Barro, 1973; Ferejohn, 1986), in which citizens discipline the government by the threat of removal from office. Information is modeled as improving the precision (reducing the variance) with which the public observes either the outcome of government decisions or the policy choices adopted by the government (Besley, 2006). These studies typically conclude that improvements in the flow of information to the citizenry enable citizens to adopt superior strategies for disciplining their leaders, thereby improving government performance. These theoretical findings have been given empirical support in both cross-national and sub-national analyses. These studies vary substantially in their operationalization of transparency [6]. In cross-national studies, the most commonly used proxies capture two distinct aspects of the media market - notably the freedom of the press, and the penetration of the press. Freedom House's Freedom
of the Press index is the most frequently used measure of the former concept. This index uses subjective expert rankings to place each country year on a 0-100 scale measuring (1) the laws and regulations that constrain media content, (2) the degree of political control over the media, and (3) the structure of media ownership. Numerical rankings are available from 1994 and coverage extends to 197 countries in 2013. For instance, Brunetti and Weder (2003) examine the relationship between corruption and the freedom of the press and find that perceived corruption declines as press freedom rises in a cross-section of countries.
3. PLURALITY ELECTORAL SYSTEMS
Canonical theories of elections assume that rules determining the winner will be followed, which necessitates separate models for democratic and nondemo-cratic elections. To overcome this bifurcation in the literature, we develop a model where compliance is determined endogenously. Rather than serve as a binding contract, elections are modeled solely as a public signal of the regime's popularity. However, citizens can protest against leaders who break electoral rules. Compliance is possible when the election is informative enough that citizens can coordinate on either massive protests or supporting the incumbent in the case of close results. Leaders may also step down after performing poorly in a less informative election independent of the rules, but unlike the case of rule-based alternation, this often requires citizens to protest in equilibrium. An extension shows why reports of electoral fraud are often central to post-election protests and thus why international or domestic
monitoring may be required for electoral rules to be enforceable [9].
Also called «first-past-the-post» or «winner-take-all2 systems, plurality systems simply award a seat to the individual candidate who receives the most votes in an election. The candidate need not get a majority (50%+) of the vote to win; so long as he has a larger number of votes than all other candidates, he is declared the winner. Plurality systems normally depend on single-member constituencies, and allow voters to indicate only one vote on their ballot (by pulling a single lever, punching a hole in the ballot, making an X, etc.) Plurality electoral systems also tend to encourage the growth of relatively stable political systems dominated by two major parties (a phenomenon known as «Duverger's Law»).
Such an electoral system, though, clearly does not represent the interests of all (or even most) voters. In fact, since a candidate need have only a plurality of votes to be elected, most voters may actually have voted against the winner (although their votes are split among several candidates).
Elections for the House and Senate in the United States and for the House of Commons in the United Kingdom use the plurality system. The US presidential election is also generally considered a plurality system, but the existence of the Electoral College actually makes it a strange hybrid of plurality and majority systems.
4. MAJORITY ELECTORAL SYSTEMS
Also called «second ballot» systems, majority electoral systems attempt to provide for a greater degree of representativeness by requiring that candidates achieve a majority of votes in order to
win. «Majority» is normally defined as 50%-plus-one-vote. If no candidate gets a majority of votes, then a second round of voting is held (often a week or so after the initial ballot). In the second round of voting, only a select number of candidates from the first round are allowed to participate. In some countries, such as Russia, the top two vote-getters in the first round move on to the second round. In other countries, such as France, all candidates with a minimum threshold percentage of votes (in the French case, 12.5% of all registered voters) move on to the second round. Like plurality systems, majority systems usually rely on single-member constituencies, and allow voters to indicate only one preference on their ballot.
Presidential elections in Austria, Finland, Portugal, Russia and other east European states, as well as presidential and National Assembly elections in France, make use of various forms of majority electoral systems. The US Electoral College also has components of a majority system, because a presidential candidate must get 50%-plus-one electoral votes (270 out of 538) in order to win. If no candidate reaches the 270 mark, the election is decided by the House of Representatives. In determining who votes for whom in the Electoral College, though, the US presidential race is a strict plurality system: The candidate who gets a plurality of the popular vote in a state gets all that state's electoral votes.
5. PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION
Also known as «PR», proportional representation is the general name for a class of voting systems that attempt to make the percentage of offices awarded
to candidates reflect as closely as possible the percentage of votes that they received in the election. It is the most widely used set of electoral systems in the world, and its variants can be found at some level of government in almost every country (including the United States, where some city councils are elected using forms of PR).
The most straightforward version of PR is simply to award a party the same percentage of seats in parliament as it gets votes at the polls. Thus, if a party won 40% of the vote it would receive 40% of the seats. However, there are clear problems with such a system: Should parties that receive only 0.001% of the vote also be represented? What happens if the voting percentages do not translate evenly into seats? How do you award a party 19.5 seats if it got 19.5% of the vote? More sophisticated PR systems attempt to get around these problems. Two of the most widely used are discussed below [11].
6. PARTY LIST SYTEMS
Under party list forms of PR, voters normally vote for parties rather than for individual candidates. Under a closed party list system the parties themselves determine who will fill the seats that they have been allocated; voters vote only for a particular party, and then it is up to the party to decide which party members will actually serve as representatives. Legislative elections in Israel and Germany are conducted according to such a system. Under an open party list system, voters are given some degree of choice among individual candidates, in addition to voting for entire parties. Denmark, Finland, Italy, Luxembourg and Switzerland all have versions of open party list systems [13].
Under all party list systems, though, one still needs some method for allocating seats to individual parties. One commonly used method is named for the nineteenth-century Belgian mathematician Victor d'Hondt, and is normally referred to as a «highest average method using the d'Hondt formula [14].»
7. TRANSPARENCY
LEGITIMACY OF POLITICAL ELECTIONS
Transparency in elections is different than transparency in other administrative settings. Just as the right to vote is hailed as preservative of all other rights, so too is election transparency preservative of all other forms of government transparency. Without the public confidence in election outcomes transparency enables, no legitimate government could form. It is true that election transparency serves goals similar to transparency in other administrative settings: promoting accountability, enabling an informed citizenry, protecting citizens against arbitrary and capricious state action, and exposing mistake or fraud. Election transparency can also increase efficiency in election administration. But administrative transparency in elections serves an additional - and critical - function that sets it apart from administrative transparency in other realms. Like courts, for which transparency's key goal is to enhance the public's perception of just legal outcomes, a critical function of administrative transparency in elections is ensuring public confidence in electoral outcomes. For elections to achieve their intended purpose, the peaceful transfer of power, the public must believe that outcomes reflect the true will of the people. Without this perception, legitimate gov-
ernment cannot function and all other forms of government transparency are for naught.
Administrative transparency in elections is thus a precondition for all other forms of government transparency. Recognizing that the fundamental goal of transparency in elections is ensuring public confidence in outcomes, election administrators since the founding of this country have understood that more transparency does not necessarily equal a better process. Election designers have calibrated the extent to which the public could see for itself various portions of the election process depending upon a variety of historical, demographic, and technological conditions underpinning the conduct of elections. Election administrators intuitively understood that election processes could not be conducted entirely in the dark without some measure of public oversight [10].
S. ELECTION SYSTEM IN THE REPUBLIC OF AZERBAIJAN
The will of the people of Azerbaijan constitutes the basis of the state authority of the Republic of Azerbaijan. The will of the people of Azerbaijan is manifested through fair and regular elections based on general, equal and direct suffrage by means of a secret and personal ballot, as well through nationwide opinion polls/ referendums based on general, equal and direct suffrage by means of a secret and personal ballot. The Azerbaijani State guarantees the free expression of the will of the people of The Republic of Azerbaijan through the protection of principles and norms of universal suffrage. This Code establishes the rules for the organization and conduct of elections of deputies to the parliament of The Republic of Azerbaijan (the Milli Majlis),
presidential and municipal elections of the Republic of Azerbaijan and nationwide opinion polls/referendums.
The Milli Majlis of the Republic of Azerbaijan is a unicameral (single-chamber) body composed of 125 members elected for five-year terms through direct common voting. Milli Majlis has a power of approving and regulating the state budget [14].
The Milli Majlis of the Azerbaijan Republic develops constitutional laws, acts and orders on issues within its power. The laws and orders of the Milli Medjlis of the Azerbaijan may not include definite instructions to executive power and judicial bodies. The Milli Majlis of the Azerbaijan Republic approves the appointment of the Prime Minister and gives the vote of confidence to the Cabinet of Ministers. By introduction of the head of state the Milli Majlis of the Azerbaijan Republic appoints judges of the Constitutional Court, Supreme Court and the Economic Court. Under the Constitution of the Republic of Azerbaijan, the Milli Majlis of the Republic of Azerbaijan can dismiss the President by means of impeachment. Moreover, the Milli Majlis has the power to ratify and annul international contracts, appoint referendums and deal with the establishment of the Auditing Chamber. The Milli Majlis of the Republic of Azerbaijan has a scheduled activity of autumn and spring sessions [12].
9. CONCLUSION
Through comparative cross-national and cross-temporal analyses, we can clearly understand that countries with similar political culture.
In general, the study of election rules has not drawn much on recent advances in the analysis of voting systems is a point to which we return shortly. First, though,
it is important to stress that studying the rules of an activity is an important subject partly because it helps us to understand the strategic elements of that activity.
The Azerbaijani law system is based on civil law system. The Constitution of Azerbaijan Republic has the highest legal force in the territory of Azerbaijan and acts directly. The Constitution of the Azerbaijan Republic is the basic foundation of the Legislative system in the Republic. The Constitution created the system of presidential republic with a separation of powers among the legislative, executive and judicial branches. The Constitution provides an adequate legal basis for the domestic implementation of International Law in general and International Human Rights Law in particular [1]. The International Treaties to which Azerbaijan is a Party, are recognized as an constituent part of the internal legal system (Art. 148(II)) and given a higher hierarchical status in the case of a conflict with a national law (Art. 151). While expressly stipulating that an international treaty may not contravene the Constitution and laws adopted by referendum (Art. 151), see also Art. 130(III(6)), The Constitution at the same time implicitly, as a lex specialis rule, provides for the primacy of international human rights over the appropriate constitutional provisions (Art. 12). Thus Art. 12(II) of the Constitutions empowers domestic courts to apply International Human Rights treaties to which Azerbaijan is party. This is a very progressive statement which needs to be corroborated and developed by the judicial practice, particularly by the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court [4].
In sum, political corruption and inferior economic situation are some of the most frequent barriers to the development of party system. Lack of information about
the programmers and agendas of the political parties creates chaotic situation in democratic transition. The point is, that in the context of new democracies, where the
consolidation process is not completed, it is difficult to attribute voting preferences in the same way as in institutionalized consolidated democracies.
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