Combining Elections Won’t Fix What’s Wrong With Our Politics

A referendum on 4 April asks Maldivians to vote on electoral consolidation. The real question is whether our institutions serve the public or the people who control them.

On 4 April, Maldivians will vote in a referendum on whether presidential and parliamentary elections should be held on the same day within a single electoral cycle rather than as separate contests held months apart. The government’s case appears straightforward; one election instead of two, lower administrative costs, fewer campaign promises, and a clearer governing mandate.

At first glance, this appears to be a sensible effort to tidy up the electoral calendar. But the question before voters is far more consequential than a matter of scheduling. It is about how power is structured and checked in our political system.

Under the current arrangement, parliamentary elections are held a few months after presidential elections, creating a staggered electoral cycle. In practice, however, it already behaves much like a combined election cycle. Parliamentary elections held shortly after presidential elections have repeatedly produced dominant majorities for the presidential winner. Formalising this arrangement does not solve our underlying problem. The real question is whether the Maldives should entrench this concentration of political momentum or pursue deeper institutional reforms that strengthen accountability and balance political power.

Lower costs, but no institutional reform

The most commonly cited justification for combining elections is cost. Supporters argue that holding two national elections within a short period is administratively expensive and that fewer elections could also reduce pressure on politicians to make costly campaign promises. These concerns deserve serious consideration. Public spending should always be efficient, and elections are no exception. But while the cost argument may have intuitive appeal, it is not decisive. The potential savings are modest in the context of national spending, and more importantly, the deeper drivers of state expenditure are institutional rather than electoral.

Combining elections may save around MVR 70 million, as reported by government-aligned Members of Parliament (MPs), covering logistics, staffing, security, ballot printing, and administration. That is not insignificant. In per-capita terms, however, election costs in the Maldives remain modest by international standards for small, geographically dispersed democracies, at roughly USD 14–25 per voter. Efficiency in election administration is a different question from whether elections should be reduced in number. Costs can be lowered through better technology, streamlined administration, and stronger institutional capacity without altering the constitutional structure of democratic accountability. Saving MVR 70 million while weakening structural accountability would be a poor trade.

Genuine democratic reform addresses what is wrong with how power operates in the system – how decisions are made, how institutions function, and how citizens hold governments to account. By that standard, combining elections is not a reform.

The cost argument also weakens when framed as a way to reduce populist spending. Supporters often claim that fewer elections would mean fewer campaign promises and less pressure on governments to expand spending before a vote. The idea draws on the concept of a political budget cycle, where governments increase spending or announce popular projects around election periods to gain support. But in the Maldivian context, the main drivers of spending are structural rather than electoral. Development spending is highly centralised, constituencies expect visible projects, and MPs compete to deliver benefits to their constituencies. These incentives exist regardless of election timing. If governments adhere to credible public financial management frameworks – including binding fiscal rules, realistic budgets, and disciplined Public Sector Investment Program (PSIP) planning – the scope for ad hoc election pledges would already be limited. Fixing weaknesses in fiscal governance would therefore do far more to curb opportunistic spending than changing the timing of elections.

Recent fiscal experience also challenges the claim that frequent elections hinder reform. Both the 2023 and 2024 budgets included plans for fiscal consolidation, yet those measures were not fully implemented even after parliamentary elections had passed. This suggests that the obstacles to fiscal discipline lie deeper in political and institutional incentives rather than election timing.

A Procedural Change, Not Democratic Reform

Reform is a word that should mean something. Genuine democratic reform addresses what is wrong with how power operates in the system – how decisions are made, how institutions function, and how citizens hold governments to account. By that standard, combining elections is not a reform. It changes when we vote, but it does not change how policies are made, how budgets are managed, how development funds are allocated, or how parliament scrutinises the executive.

In other words, it does not address what is actually wrong with our politics. At best, it is a procedural change dressed up in the language of reform. Procedural reforms change how elections are run. Institutional reforms change how power is exercised and constrained. The real question therefore is not whether the election calendar should be tidied, but whether this change solves any of the governance problems that shape how our political system operates. On examination, it solves none of the problems that matter.

The Current Design Already Fosters Extractive Politics

To see why combining elections will not fix the deeper problem, we need to examine how the current political system actually works – because it is not producing the inclusive, accountable governance that a well-designed democracy should. The current design allows power to become increasingly concentrated and encourages political elites to channel development resources in ways that reinforce their political position – what economists describe as extractive institutions.

The distribution of state resources in the Maldives creates three interlocking political incentives. First, development spending and many public sector opportunities are highly centralised. Islands depend on the central government for infrastructure such as harbours, housing, schools, and health facilities, while ministries and the presidency retain significant discretion over which islands receive projects and when. Second, this structure has encouraged MPs to function less as legislators and more as brokers of state resources. Their role often involves securing development projects, facilitating government employment, and helping supporters obtain political appointments. Many of these positions contribute little to productive public administration and instead expand overemployment in the public sector. As a result, the political survival of MPs is frequently judged by what they can extract from the government for their constituency rather than by their legislative work or scrutiny of public finances. Third, voters respond rationally by electing MPs aligned with the ruling party, because alignment increases the likelihood that their island will receive projects, jobs, and other state benefits.

Another reform worth considering is a genuine mid-term parliamentary election. Instead of holding parliamentary elections only months after presidential elections, a mid-term vote would allow citizens to reassess the government’s performance halfway through its term and potentially rebalance political power.

These incentives create a self-reinforcing political cycle. Centralised spending creates broker MPs, broker MPs create bandwagon voting, bandwagon voting creates dominant majorities, and dominant majorities face less scrutiny and less pressure to govern in the broad public interest. The nine-month gap between presidential and parliamentary elections has not broken this loop. In fact, the last three presidential–parliamentary election cycles have produced the same outcome; the party that wins the presidency has subsequently secured an increasingly larger parliamentary majority.

This is the uncomfortable truth at the heart of the debate. In practice, the staggered system already produces outcomes similar to a combined election cycle. The presidential result is largely reproduced in parliament, driven by the same structural incentives; voters want government-aligned MPs, opposition candidates struggle to secure projects, and political momentum sweeps both contests in the same direction.

Same Political Outcome – But That Is Not the Point

Those who support combining elections are not entirely wrong when they observe that the current staggered system tends to produce the same political outcome as a combined one would. The presidential winner already gets the parliament. In that narrow sense, whether we vote nine months apart or on the same day may not change who wins. From that perspective, some argue that if the outcome is largely the same, the country might as well reduce the cost of running two elections and hold them together.

However, this argument misses the deeper issue entirely. The problem is not which party wins parliament. The problem is what parliament does – or fails to do – once it is elected. An independent parliament elected at a genuinely different moment in the political cycle, when presidential momentum has faded and voters are making a fresher judgment, has at least the structural possibility of producing members who see their role as legislators and scrutinisers rather than as agents of the presidency. A formal merger closes off even that possibility.

More fundamentally, the fact that the current system already behaves like a combined system is not an argument for formalising that behaviour in order to save money. It is an argument for asking why our institutions produce that outcome and whether they should be redesigned to counterbalance it. Constitutions are not meant to ratify the strongest political momentum of the moment. They are meant to preserve checks and balances, especially when the tendency is towards the concentration of power within a single branch of the state.

Institutional Drift

In Why Nations Fail (2012), economists Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson examined why some countries prosper while others stagnate across generations. Their answer was not geography, culture, or natural resources. It was institutions. Countries with inclusive institutions – those that distribute power broadly, enforce accountability, and protect against elite capture – tend to develop. Countries with extractive institutions – those that concentrate power and allow the state to be used for narrow gain – tend not to.

The evidence spans centuries. Nogales is a single city divided by the US-Mexico border. The two halves share identical geography, climate, and culture. The American side is significantly more prosperous. The difference is institutions. North and South Korea began from the same civilisational base. Sixty years of divergent institutional design produced two entirely different countries. Across the American continent, the colonial territories that imposed the most extractive arrangements on their populations remained the most unequal long after independence. The lesson is consistent; the quality of political institutions shapes economic and political outcomes over generations.

What Acemoglu and Robinson warn most urgently is that institutional decline is gradual. It does not announce itself. It happens as checks weaken incrementally, as power concentrates a little more with each cycle, as the mechanisms that were supposed to hold governments accountable become quietly less effective. By the time the damage becomes visible, it is often very difficult to reverse. Prosperity slows and inequality deepens. A constitutional change that looks minor – a simple merging of two election dates – can, in this context, be a step in the direction of stagnation and decline.

The proposed change does not strengthen inclusive institutions in the Maldives. Given that the current design already leans towards the extractive, formally merging the election cycles risks entrenching this tendency in the design of political institutions.

What Real Reform Would Actually Look Like

If there is genuine political will to improve governance, the conversation should focus on the incentive structures that produce extractive political behaviour. Combining elections addresses none of them.

That means decentralising development spending, so island councils receive predictable, formula-based allocations for the PSIP rather than relying on political lobbying. It means strengthening parliament’s role in legislative oversight and fiscal scrutiny. It means governments adhering to the fiscal plans they present in their own budgets.

Another reform worth considering is a genuine mid-term parliamentary election. Instead of holding parliamentary elections only months after presidential elections, a mid-term vote would allow citizens to reassess the government’s performance halfway through its term and potentially rebalance political power. Such a mechanism would strengthen democratic accountability rather than weaken it. In fact, similar mechanisms exist in several political systems as a way for voters to reassess governments during a presidential term.

A constitutional change of this magnitude also deserves far broader public debate than it has received. Electoral design shapes how power is distributed in a democracy, and decisions of this magnitude should not be reduced to a narrow administrative discussion about cost savings. Alternatives that might better strengthen democratic accountability – including reforms to decentralise development spending or the introduction of a genuine mid-term parliamentary election – deserve equal consideration.

The Question We Should Be Voting On

The referendum on 4 April will be presented as a question about electoral efficiency and administrative cost. But the deeper question is institutional; whether a constitutional change should formalise an existing concentration of political momentum or instead prompt us to confront the structural weaknesses in our political system.

Combining elections may save around MVR 70 million. But it does not address the centralised patronage that shapes how MPs behave, the fiscal indiscipline that persists regardless of electoral cycles, or the structural incentives that weaken parliamentary independence. It is more likely to reinforce those tendencies by aligning parliamentary outcomes even more closely with presidential power.

If the goal is to strengthen democracy, the focus should not be on simplifying the election calendar but on reforming the institutions that shape political incentives; decentralising development spending, strengthening parliamentary oversight, enforcing fiscal discipline, and considering mechanisms such as a genuine mid-term parliamentary election that allow voters to reassess power during a presidential term.

The Maldives does not need fewer elections. It needs stronger institutions between them.