Rules That Divide

This chapter analyzes how electoral institutions reshape intraethnic party systems, focusing on Iraqi Kurdistan between 1992 and 2013. While subethnic cleavages rooted in linguistic, regional, and class divisions provided the foundation for political fragmentation, they alone cannot explain shifts from a fragmented multiparty system to two-party dominance and back to multiparty competition. By comparing the 1992 election, held under proportional representation with a 7% threshold, to the threshold-free elections of 2005 and 2009, the chapter demonstrates how electoral thresholds, district magnitude, and ballot structure generated both mechanical and psychological effects that altered voter coordination, party strategies, and the viability of smaller entrants. The findings show that high thresholds encouraged broad, bridging strategies and consolidated dominance by the Kurdistan Democratic Party and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, while institutional liberalization enabled bonding strategies and facilitated the rise of new challengers such as the Gorran Movement. The analysis highlights that intraethnic competition is best explained not by outbidding or ethnic radicalization alone but by the dynamic interaction of institutional design and enduring societal cleavages.