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Examples From Kenya

Kenya's Present Electoral System

Kenya's electoral system is typical of electoral systems in former-British colonies in that almost all members of the national legislature are elected from single member districts (SMDs) on the principle of "first past the post"- i.e. candidates win election by obtaining a plurality of the vote.

Kenya's electoral system is controversial because its electoral districts (i.e. constituencies) vary greatly in population and size. As shown in the following map of Kenya's 210 current constituencies, the least populous district has less than 4,000 people while the most populous district has nearly 302,000. Most districts have populations that are well above or below the mean population of 103,000.

This huge variation of population across districts violates the democratic principle of one person one vote. Residents of constituencies with populations below the mean are over-represented in the National Assembly, while residents of constituencies with populations above the mean are under-represented as shown in the next map.

Kenya's present configuration of constituencies systematically over-represents residents of the most sparsely populated areas of the country, and under-represents the residents of the most densely populated areas. Because Kenya is divided into distinct ecological zones, residents of arid and semi-arid areas in the Rift Valley, northern, eastern and southern Kenya are over-represented while the residents of western and central Kenya, and especially residents of the capital city of Nairobi, are underrepresented.

This pattern of representation was established in 1961 and 1963 when Kenya held multi-party elections prior to independence. The pattern was established, because the Kenyan constitution was (and remains) vague about the criteria for the delimitation of electoral districts.

The constitution is vague because it specifies multiple criteria that are often in conflict with each other.

According to Section 42(3) of the Constitution, "all constituencies shall contain as nearly equal numbers of inhabitants as appear to the [Electoral] Commission to be reasonably practical, but the Commission may depart from this principle to the extent that it considers expedient in order to take account of (a) the density of population, and in particular the need to insure adequate representation of urban and sparsely populated rural areas; (b) population trends; (c) the means of communication; (d) geographical features; (e) community of interest; and (f) the boundaries of existing administrative areas . . ."
If the principle of one person one vote is respected and constituencies are established with equal or nearly equal populations, the principle of establishing constituencies that reflect communities of interest or "sparsely populated areas" will be violated, and vice versa.

Although Kenya's electoral system has over-represented and under-represented peoples from different regions for many years, this defect was never a source of controversy during the era of the one-party state (1969-1991), because it did not affect the distribution of seats among political parties. However, since the return of multi-party politics in 1992, the pattern of unequal representation has been increasingly regarded as "unfair" by political leaders from the western and central areas of the country. They note that because different parties tend to represent the peoples and ethnic groups (i.e. "tribes") of different regions, the current system favors the regions that support the ruling party, KANU, and discriminates against the regions that support opposition parties. The extent to which this argument is valid is illustrated by the results of the 1997 election.

As shown by the map, KANU won a narrow majority of 107 of the 210 seats in the National Assembly while the opposition won 103 seats. It should also be noted that the average number of voters in a constituency won by KANU was 36,350 while the average number in a constituency won by one of the opposition parties was 53,387. However, the extent to which the present system awarded KANU a higher proportion of seats (51%) than its proportion of the vote (43%) is relatively modest. As noted at the bottom of the map, the Index of Disproportionality which measures the gap between the proportion of votes and the proportion of seats received by all parties was 6.9. Had the gap been very small as in electoral systems based on proportional representation, the index would have been slightly greater than zero.