PDF
PDF

February 25, 2021 | 53 Pages | English | Georgia Dagher
The 2018 Lebanese Parliamentary Elections: What Do the Numbers Say? Mount Lebanon 3 Electoral District: Baabda

In the Lebanese parliamentary elections of 2018, Baabda voters showed strong party loyalty, with nearly all Shia voters voting for Hezbollah and Amal, nearly all Druze voting for the Progressive Socialist Party and Lebanese Democratic Party, and nearly all Christian voters choosing the Free Patriotic Movement and Lebanese Forces. This resulted in a high share of votes given to co-confessional candidates. In contrast to many districts, the confessional bias in Baabda did not significantly vary across geographical areas or across confessional groups—it was strong in all cases. A high confessional bias was observed even among voters who did not vote for an established party or for one of the main political party candidates. Indeed, each of the candidates running on the anti-establishment Kulluna Watani list owed their success to the support they received from their sectarian communities, with barely any voters casting their preferential vote for a Kulluna Watani candidate from a different sect. Apart from the performance of specific Kulluna Watani candidates, the list was generally more successful in more confessionally fragmented areas, highlighting sectarian parties’ higher capacity to mobilize the vote in more homogeneous localities. The analysis of the elections results in Baabda shows some signs of voter rigging on the part of the Lebanese Forces. Two patterns, which tend to occur in irregular elections, were observed in the votes for the party: It generally performed better in polling stations with smaller numbers of registered voters, and in stations that recorded significantly high turnout rates.