Malapportionment in Myanmar's Elections: A Slumbering Menace.

• Author: Ostwald, Kai

Relative to its Southeast Asian neighbours, Myanmar's electoral system has received little scholarly attention until recent years. This is because elections did not play a decisive role in the distribution of power from 1960 until the 2015 general elections. Even those elections had significant limitations in determining control of the state, since Myanmar's institutional features make it more a hybrid regime rather than a full democracy. (1) There are reasons to believe, however, that elections will become increasingly competitive and politically decisive in the foreseeable future. (2) The November 2020 elections already shows such signs, with strategic mergers of ethnic parties and nascent plans of cross-ethnic alliances. (3) As political actors continue to become more sophisticated at leveraging the nuances of the electoral system for partisan advantage, understanding the system's unique features and dynamics likewise grows in importance.

The implications of Myanmar's electoral boundaries have been addressed only peripherally in earlier studies. (4) The country's approach to boundary delineation is critical, however, in that it creates a staggeringly high degree of malapportionment. In simple terms, this means that voters are unequally distributed across electoral constituencies, with some constituencies having significantly more voters than others. (5) Since each constituency is typically allocated one representative in first-past-the-post (FTPT) systems like Myanmar's, the practical effect is to amplify the influence of votes in constituencies with relatively few voters, while diluting the influence of votes in constituencies with relatively many voters. Using standard measures, malapportionment in Myanmar matches or exceeds the highest levels seen across the world. The remarkable ratio of 323 to 1 between the largest (454,307 voters) and smallest (1,408 voters) lower house electoral constituencies in the 2015 election hints at the magnitude of the discrepancy.

While malapportionment was a non-issue under military rule, it has the potential to significantly affect political competition and its outcomes as elections become more relevant in the distribution of power. From a normative perspective, malapportionment violates the "one-person, one-vote, one-value" principle of representative democracy by creating disparities in the relative value of individual votes. (6) More importantly, it can significantly distort the translation of votes into parliamentary seats, thereby biasing electoral outcomes. (7) This can be leveraged for partisan advantage, which explains why malapportionment is prevalent among hybrid regimes. (8) Its full potential to distort outcomes is evident in nearby Malaysia, where it was an important contributing factor to the dominance of the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), which won every general election between 1955 and 2018. In the 2013 election, for example, malapportionment turned a 4 per cent popular vote defeat for UMNO and its coalition partners into a 20 per cent parliamentary seat victory, allowing the coalition to continue ruling despite the erosion of its popular support. (9)

This article provides a systematic assessment of malapportionment in Myanmar. It highlights two major implications. First, it demonstrates that non-Bamar areas are systematically over-represented. This complicates the widespread assumption that the country's political system fundamentally favours the majority ethnic Bamar. There is little question that the Bamar will retain numerous advantages and continue to control many of the country's key institutions in the near future, but due to the under-representation of Bamar areas, that control is likely to come under increasing challenge as electoral competition normalizes in the years to come. In an electorally competitive environment, in other words, Bamar dominance may be on shakier footing than appearances suggest. This has secondary implications for the debate around electoral system reform. Several ethnic minority parties have joined the military-aligned Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) in calling for the adoption of a proportional representation (PR) system. Since a PR system would entail formulating new electoral constituencies, it would likely reduce or eliminate the over-representation of minority votes, and may thus ultimately be counterproductive for increasing minority representation.

Second, malapportionment is generally associated with a range of problematic practices, including poorer governance and clientelistic behaviours. The effects of malapportionment on politics in Myanmar have been modest so far, since with the possible exception of the military-aligned USDP, there is little evidence that parties responded strategically to it in the 2015 election. As parties become more strategic in coming elections, however, the problems associated with malapportionment are likely to manifest more strongly, thereby undermining efforts to strengthen governance. Moreover, there is a risk that malapportionment could exacerbate Myanmar's long-running ethnic tensions. This is because its practical effect of under-representing Bamar votes could feed dangerous narratives of Bamar precarity that extremist groups like MaBaTha have advanced in the past. (10) In short, the main effects of malapportionment may still be dormant, but they have the potential to become a menace to Myanmar's development as electoral competition normalizes. This underscores the broader point that the 2010 and 2015 elections were exceptional events, and scholars should, therefore, be highly cautious in making general inferences about future electoral competition in Myanmar based on them.

Several features of malapportionment in Myanmar make the case interesting for general scholars of democratization as well. In many hybrid regimes, malapportionment results from the dominant party actively manipulating electoral boundaries to secure partisan advantages. Malaysia again provides a clear example, as its electoral boundaries have been regularly redrawn in ways that over-represent the dominant party's strongholds and align with its strategic orientation. By contrast, Myanmar's electoral boundaries are quasi-exogenous, as they are based on colonial era administrative divisions that have not been significantly altered since independence. This makes Myanmar unusual among states with high malapportionment. Moreover, the absence of experience among most political actors when elections were reinstated means that few took the types of strategic actions that are associated with distortions in other highly malapportioned systems. As actors gradually adopt those actions, the associated distortions will appear as well. Myanmar presents a rare opportunity to observe the sequencing and cross-party variation in that process, which may reveal interesting theoretical insights.

This article proceeds as follows. The next section provides an overview of Myanmar's electoral system and its history of elections. The third section provides a descriptive overview of malapportionment at the infer-state/region and infra-state/region levels. The fourth section assesses the correlates of constituency size. The fifth section assesses the findings in terms of party strategies, while the final section focuses on the current and potential future political implications of malapportionment.

Elections in Myanmar

Myanmar (then known as Burma) gained independence from British colonial rule in 1948, beginning a period of parliamentary democracy under FPTP electoral rules. A military coup in 1962 ended the democratic era, following which the country experienced nearly three decades of military rule under General Ne Win. Widespread protests in 1988 precipitated Ne Win's downfall and led to elections in 1990 that were to fill a parliament-sized constitutional committee to draw up a new constitution. The Aung San Suu Kyi-led National League for Democracy (NLD) secured nearly 60 per cent of the popular vote and 392 of the 485 seats. By contrast, the military-aligned National Unity Party (NUP) won a mere 10 seats. The election was fraught with poor communication and misunderstanding, including over its basic purpose, which the military eventually contended did not include the right to form a new government. (11) In any case, the military's State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) disregarded the results and went on to rule Myanmar for an additional two decades, later under the name State Peace and Development Council (SPDC). The National Convention was finally reconvened in 2003 under SPDC guidance, eventually leading to the 2008 Constitution. Viewed broadly, the nearly half-century of military rule in Myanmar had elements of stability, but was also riddled with ongoing factionalism, power struggles, and centre-periphery tensions. (12)

Following the implementation of the 2008 Constitution, the SPDC scheduled general elections in 2010. The military contested these by proxy through the newly formed USDP, which was comprised mainly of former military officials and related civil servants. The elections, however, were boycotted by the NLD and riddled with allegations of abnormalities, following which the USDP and the pro-military NUP secured over 70 per cent of the vote. (13) In several respects, the elections marked the culmination of the ruling junta's 2003 roadmap towards a "Disciplined Democracy" that has features of an electoral democracy but nonetheless maintains the military establishment's core interests. (14) The new USDP-led pseudo-civilian government initiated a series of reforms in 2011 that brought about the most significant political and economic opening in decades. (15) The reasons behind it are still debated, but it is clear that both external factors and liberal reformers within the USDP played important roles. (16) Openly contested by-elections in 2012 were dominated by the NLD...