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February 25, 2021 | 69 Pages | English | Georgia Dagher
The 2018 Lebanese Parliamentary Elections: What Do the Numbers Say? Mount Lebanon 4 Electoral District: Aley and Chouf

The Lebanese parliament agreed to hold parliamentary elections in 2018—nine years after the previous ones. Voters in Aley and Chouf showed strong loyalty toward their sectarian parties and high preferences for candidates of their own sectarian group. The majority of Druze voters voted for the Progressive Socialist Party, the majority of Sunnis voted for the Future Movement, and the majority of all Christian groups voted for the Lebanese Forces and the Free Patriotic Movement. However, among voters who cast their ballot for a candidate from a different sect, the majority chose candidates affiliated with their sectarian party, again, highlighting party loyalty. Even those who voted for one of the anti-establishment lists—Kulluna Watani and Madaniyya—generally gave a higher share of their preferential vote to a co-sectarian candidate, which partly created variations in the performance of these candidates running on the same list. Apart from this, certain geographical factor affected the performance of anti-establishment lists: They both performed better in cadasters that were more confessionally mixed, had lower turnouts, and had lower poverty rates. This highlights these lists’ weakness in mobilizing voters, and their difficulty in appealing to all socio-economic classes. Beyond this, the results of the votes provide some evidence of irregularities, in particular, voter rigging in Chouf that benefited LF and FPM candidates. Both parties generally performed better in polling stations with smaller numbers of registered voters and in stations that recorded significantly high turnout rates.