The Hindu Business Line : How Europe elects its leaders

In Europe, while an election is considered the ultimate expression of any free sovereign democratic nation, freedom and accountability are the essential for a country.

Last week, I was on a visit to Dwarka, in Gujarat, where I happened to observe in the media reports of the heated election campaign of political parties involved in the upcoming State Assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh. I was reminded of the English word "accountability", which is rare in the finer aspects of Indian polity and is often difficult to translate into any other language.

To be accountable means to have the duty to provide an account: that is, to explain and justify one's actions in terms of appropriate criteria and in sufficient detail. Accountability, therefore, includes, answerability; that is to say, a duty — legal, political, or moral — to respond to questions about a particular matter.

The concept of accountability also includes liability to some form of sanction if the performance revealed is considered unsatisfactory. In the first variant of democracy, the natural parallel of the idea is that the winners of an election can legitimately claim a plenary right to exercise power on behalf of the sovereign people. The sanction attached to such accountability is that, if electors deem a government's performance unsatisfactory, they can vote it out of office.

While we wait and watch the consequences in UP, I shall, in this article, very briefly run through the major electoral systems in Europe and describe some of the properties that constitute an electoral system.

Electoral systems

Within the member-states of the Council of Europe, several electoral systems are prevalent. These systems can be categorised into three main types: Plural-majority systems, semi-proportional systems, and proportional systems.

Characteristic of plural-majority systems is that the candidate who gains the most votes in a district wins all seats in that district.

In a proportional system, the parties receive seats in proportion to their overall share of the national vote. Five of the Council of Europe member-states apply plural-majority systems (United Kingdom, France, Macedonia, Moldova, and Ukraine) and five apply semi-proportional systems (Croatia, Russia, Albania, Lithuania and Andorra).

In the remaining 30 countries there are various proportional electoral systems.

Formal Threshold

Most countries in Europe have thresholds of representation: That is, the minimum level of support a party needs to gain representation. Formal thresholds are legally imposed as a mathematical property of the electoral system.

In the mixed systems of Germany, for example, there is a 5 per cent threshold in the Proportional Representation section. Political parties that fail to secure 5 per cent of the vote nationwide are ineligible to be awarded seats from the PR lists.

e-Voting in Europe

In 2000, the European Commission launched the CyberVote project with the aim of demonstrating fully verifiable on-line elections, guaranteeing absolute privacy of the votes and using fixed and mobile Internet terminals.

Penalties

Australia, Belgium, Luxembourg are among the countries that impose penalties and sanctions on non-voters.

Gender-Friendly Policies

In Europe, gender-friendly policies are common across countries. Women's increased presence in German government since the late 1990s testifies to this generational change. Women have secured more than 30 per cent of the Bundestag (Lower House) seats, showing that they are making a difference in Germany.

Election Observation

The EU has been active in election observation around the world since the early 1990s. The Commission has developed a standard methodology for election observation.

Since then, and with a total budget of over Euro 80 million, the EU has deployed over 50 missions in 40 countries involving the participation of over 5,000 experts and observers.

European Ombudsman

The European Parliament has an elected an Ombudsman, whose independence is mandated by the EC Treaty. No other institution with any role in the electoral process, but only the Court of Justice can dismiss the Ombudsman before the end of the term. The Ombudsman is accountable only to the European Parliament, and renders an account of activities through annual reports and special reports.

Transparency

The basic idea of transparency is that European citizens should easily be able to obtain the information they need in order to call public authorities to account, whether during elections, or between elections.

In addition, transparency requires public authorities to react promptly and positively to requests from members of the public for access to information and documents that have not been published.

In most European countries, Sweden being the most notable exception, legal rights to obtain access to information and documents have traditionally depended on having a special interest, greater than that of the public, as a whole.

Funding Elections

Transparency is a common rule throughout Europe which is the disclosure of both income and expenditure of political parties. In some countries the identity of donors is also disclosed, as in Italy, Germany, France, Greece and the UK.

Next is the issue of contribution limits, though these are not universally accepted. Countries such as Germany, Denmark and the UK are very liberal, with no limits imposed on the parties. In France and Belgium there are limits for both parties and candidates.

The type or nature of donation can also be regulated. Foreign donations from foreign states or foreign companies are prohibited in France, Germany and recently the UK. France Belgium and Italy prohibit donations from businesses or any other legal entity, such as trade unions.

The most stringent supervision by an independent regulator takes place in the UK.

Media Role

In Europe, the role of the fourth power, the media and civil society, is important. Regulations with universal principles are in place. The press, the auditors and the Court are becoming progressively more rigorous and intrusive, as is civil society.

The taxpayer and the voter are watching. With such safeguards in place, in Western Europe political corruption can only be declining.

Finally, in Europe, while an election is considered the ultimate expression of any free sovereign democratic nation, freedom and accountability are the essential for a country to count as democratic, so that its people would exercise free and fair elections and enjoy in full the fruits of democracy.

(The author is former Europe Director, CII, and lives in Cologne, Germany. Feedback may be sent to mohan.murti@t-online.de)