In 2003, Iraq emerged from decades of dictatorship during which political dissent was highly dangerous and brutally repressed.[13] In consequence, at the time of the US invasion there was little familiarity in Iraqi political culture with broad-based, institutionalised political parties, using politics as a venue for forging difficult compromises between opposing factional interests, or acceptance of the functionality of the rule of law in a democracy. Moderating political practices and institutions (e.g. parliamentary management, courts of law, organs of state) largely did not exist, or did not function in a meaningful sense. Instead, most political parties such as Da’wa or the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI) – existed outside of the country. Their leaders and dissidents returned en masse in 2003 with ideas and entitlements, but not with recent governance experience or even socio-economic familiarity with life in Iraq under Saddam Hussein.[14] The religious centres of Najaf and Karbala had kept the flames of social resilience, public duty and social obligation alive, but they had been stripped of their political role as the deaths in the 1980s and 1990s of a number of prominent religious leaders, such as Mohammed Baqir al-Sadr, Mohammad Taqi al-Khoei and Mohamad Sadiq al-Sadr, testified to..

It is in this context that the 2005 constitution defined Iraq as a unitary federal state with a ‘republican, representative, parliamentary, and democratic’ system of government.[15] Discussed, written, put to a referendum and a parliamentary vote in the span of barely two years, while being boycotted by the country’s Sunni population, the Iraqi constitution introduced a set of governance principles, terms and conditions that were poorly understood, contested and inadequately thought out in terms of their implications for the actual business of governance. Plenty of practical, but highly important, issues – such as the precise authority of different bodies of state and the division of power between key public roles – were deferred to later parliamentary decision making. These decisions were subsequently gridlocked in sectarian strife and engulfed in the flames of the Sunni guerrilla resistance to US forces, the Sunni-Shi’a civil war, and internal Shi’a violence.[16] Major ‘meta-rules’ – i.e. rules that govern political contestation about rules, such as the political parties law – do not exist, remain vague or are not implemented, with little prospect for improvement since the resulting ambiguity largely suits Iraq’s political elites.

Together with the fact that many of Iraq’s leaders lack democratic experience, it should therefore hardly have been a surprise that a major gap opened up in Iraq’s nascent democracy between its governance model as laid down on paper and its actual practices of rule. Iraq’s constitutional framework rapidly transformed into a practice in which politicians are nominated and appointed based on their ethnic or sectarian identity rather than their politics, ideas, merit or competence. This system is known as Al-Muhasasa. Although it has no formal legal basis, it grafted easily onto existing ethno-sectarian identities that had been forged in the fire of the Ba’ath regime’s repression and collective punishment of Iraq’s Shi’a and Kurds.[17] Today, it continues to form the basis of Iraqi politics, although it is facing growing dissatisfaction across broad swathes of the Iraqi population, transcending ethno-sectarian divides, because of the poor output it produces (see Section 5).[18] To its credit, it can be argued that Al-Muhasasa has managed to maintain a degree of political stability at the elite level over the past 16 years and ensured a fair, albeit somewhat symbolic, representation of most of the ethno-sectarian groups that make up Iraq’s diverse society.

The Al-Muhasasa system is applied top-down throughout the Iraqi government. Essentially, it combines a pre-arranged division of top-level political executive functions between Iraq’s main ethno-sectarian groups – Sunni, Shi’a, Kurds and minorities – with a points system to take care of the actual distribution of jobs between particular parties and coalitions within a given ethno-sectarian group. The points system is based on parliamentary seats and gives parties or coalitions the basic political capital to negotiate for jobs if they decide to explore the possibilities of forming a ruling coalition. For example, a party or coalition with 48 seats in Parliament had 24 points ‘to spend’ during the formation of the 2018 government.

To start with, the offices of President, Speaker of the Parliament and Prime Minister – the ‘three presidencies’ – are staffed by respectively a Kurd, a Sunni and a Shi’a by prior agreement. A party or coalition needs to spend roughly 15 points to obtain one of these positions, or 10 to obtain the position of one of their deputies on the proviso of an ethno-sectarian match. As to ministries, these are informally divided using the approximate formula: 54% Shi’a, 24% Sunni, 18% Kurdish, 4% minorities. Thus, in Adel Abdul-Mahdi’s cabinet of 22 ministries, 12 ministries are allocated to Shi’a, 6 to Sunni, 3 to Kurds, and 1 to minorities (usually the Christian community).[19] A further distinction must be made between the ‘sovereign ministries’ that have greater status, authority and budgets (Interior, Finance, Oil, Foreign Affairs and Defence)[20] and other ministries as well as bodies of state. Since 2006, based on a ‘gentlemen’s agreement’, a Sunni controls the department of defence and a Shi’a the Ministry of Interior. The finance and foreign affairs ministries are split between the Shi’a and Kurds. If the Kurds take the finance ministry, a Shi’a minister assumes the foreign affairs ministry and vice versa. To actually obtain any of these ministries, parties or coalitions must spend five points on a sovereign ministry and four on another ministry or body of state.[21] Only coalition parties with a meaningful number of seats in the Parliament assume ministerial posts. Ministries with little political influence and/or small budgets are sometimes allocated to minorities or women.[22] Positions pre-allocated to women tend to be divided on ethno-sectarian grounds and usually held by women with strong affiliations to the main political parties.[23] The result is that they tend to be party ‘yes-women’ rather than representatives of their gender. Finally, it should be noted that the points system is applied with some flexibility. In other words, if the situation warrants it, deviations can occur. A good example is the political deadlock in respect of the presidency in 2018. The Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) could not agree on a candidate and so both nominated one. The Iraqi Parliament voted overwhelmingly in favour of the PUK candidate – Barham Saleh – although it had only 18 seats in Parliament. The points system is a set of guidelines rather than carved in stone.

Political parties also vie for posts at the provincial level. By acquiring the governorship of a province for one of their members, a political party obtains appreciable influence over the province's budget, bureaucracy, resources and state-funded projects. Iraq’s federal system enables the governor and his council to function with a considerable degree of autonomy,[24] but governors are financially dependent on Baghdad and encumbered by burdensome bureaucracies at federal and provincial levels. Resource leakage typically occurs at both points: upon the transfer of funds from Baghdad to a province and within the provincial bureaucratic system. Provincial bureaucracies are highly politicised and entrenched mechanisms of corruption and nepotism allow officials to direct substantial funds towards their party and allies.[25] Leakage increases when several larger parties enjoy sizeable representation in the bureaucracy of a particular province as they each seek to appropriate a part of the provincial resources and budget. In such cases, levels of public service provision tend to deteriorate further. Basra exemplifies this kind of situation, which helps to explain the recurrence and increasing size of protests in this province (see Box 1 below).