This paper argues that political and social representation in Syria under the Assad regime was never primarily about conveying and balancing societal interests through elections. Rather, it constituted a carefully engineered system designed to manage loyalties, distribute benefits, and maintain political control. Representation operated through a dense combination of conventional institutions—such as the People’s Assembly, local councils, unions, and chambers of commerce—and non-conventional mechanisms, including appointments, business networks, religious and cultural figures, and state-controlled civil society, all calibrated to sustain regime dominance.

Electoral design played a central role in this architecture. Large electoral districts, bloc voting systems, and the workers-and-peasants quota structurally favoured the Baath Party while limiting meaningful competition. Seat allocation across governorates bore little relation to population size, instead functioning as a political instrument to reward loyalty and discipline peripheral or restive regions. Alongside formal rules, the regime relied on unannounced quotas—sectarian, familial, tribal, gendered, and economic—to ensure the inclusion of key social formations without allowing them to aggregate real power. “Independent” seats, especially in Damascus and Aleppo, were deliberately left open to manage competition among business elites and integrate them into patronage networks linked to the centre.

Beyond elections, representation was further engineered through appointments in government, the party, the military, and security institutions, as well as through the cultivation of business figures as de facto agents of interest representation. Religious and cultural leaders were selectively empowered to confer legitimacy and social stability, while competition among them was encouraged to prevent the emergence of autonomous political blocs.

The paper stresses that this legacy matters profoundly in the current transitional moment. Any future attempt to reform electoral laws or organise elections will confront entrenched elites, deep mistrust, the absence of reliable data, the realities of displacement and diaspora, and the challenge of integrating divergent governance systems across Syria. The central challenge, therefore, is not merely how to conduct elections, but how to build a genuinely fair and inclusive system of representation that moves beyond engineered loyalty toward authentic societal participation.