The attempt to adopt a mixed-member proportional election system ...

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The initial stage
Early on in the drafting of the constitution by the CDC, some members started pushing
for abolishing the national-level party lists, which would have left the election
system with only constituency MPs, as was the case before the 1997 constitution
came into effect. In the ninth CDC meeting on February 15, 2007, Jaran Pakdithanakul
12 reported on the deliberations of the sub-committee on political institutions, of
which he was the chairperson (CDC 9:14ff.). According to his report, the number of
MPs was to be reduced from 500 to 400. Moreover, all of them were to be elected in
multi-member constituencies or districts (MMD), while the party-list component of
the election system would be abolished altogether. Many members of Jaran’s subcommittee
saw the party lists as giving too much power to the party leaders and their
executive boards in selecting the candidates to be placed on the lists. It was thought
that this would indebt those selected to their selectors, and thereby limit the MPs’
freedom in making legislative decisions (the experience with Thaksin’s TRT provided
part of the background for this approach). Furthermore, rather than following the intentions
of the 1997 constitution to put knowledgeable and capable people from various
fields on the party lists, parties (mainly referring to TRT) had allegedly stacked
them with their financiers. However, Jaran added, some sub-committee members had
defended the party lists as useful. Yet, these supporters wanted to replace the single
national party lists by a number of regional lists covering a number of provinces.
Thus, at this early point in the drafting process there were two main proposals
regarding the design of the election system. One represented a return to the pre-1997
system, while the other wanted a modified version of the 1997 model. Six weeks later,
however, in the CDC’s eighteenth meeting on March 28, 2007, Krirkkiat Phipatseritham
13 suddenly (though there seemed to have been some talk on a proportional election
system at the CDC’s informal brainstorming sessions in the seaside resort town of
Cha-am in Petchaburi province, from March 5-10, 2007) 14 proposed the introduction
of a proportional compensatory system. This proposal was expressly based on the
German model. This would have meant a switch from a mixed-member majoritarian
to a mixed-member proportional election system (CDC 18:49). Krirkkiat suggested
what he henceforth would stick to, namely a House consisting of 400 MPs, with 200
elected in single-member constituencies and 200 elected from party lists. This proposal
thus still reflected the original intention of most CDC members to reduce the num-