In a vastly changed political climate, Iraqis will go to the polls Saturday for the first time since 2005 to vote on provincial councils -- equivalent to state legislatures in the United States -- in what is considered the next important test for the country's democratic process.

With violence down across the country, there is less sectarian strain on this poll than in Iraq's presidential and parliamentary elections in 2005, observers say.

"The dominating reality of the 2005 elections was that they were not seen by large factions of the electorate as a path to improvement," said Stephen Biddle, an Iraq expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. "It was viewed as a life and death, existential struggle. The Sunnis were frightened of Shiite autocracy and genocide and the Shiites the reverse. And the Kurds were frightened of everybody. In that setting everyone was using the elections strategically in an increasingly dangerous environment."

According to Biddle, the trends are much improved in Iraq, and the electorate's concerns are less sectarian and more about things such as improving services and staunching corruption.

Iraqis say the sheer number of candidates already highlights an achievement. Some 14,400 people are vying for 440 provincial council slots. The vote will take place in 14 of Iraq's 18 provinces. The exceptions are the Kurdish provinces in the North and the heavily disputed mixed Kurdish-Arab province of Tameem, which some feared would lead to violence if a vote went forward now.

A secular and nationalist movement
In the election, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki will be looking to build a stronger base for his Shiite Dawa party ahead of national elections later in the year. Dawa is currently a minor player in the governing coalition and Maliki was selected as prime minister as a compromise by some of the more dominant members of the coalition.

"Dawa may do better now because Maliki has become much more popular," said Joost Hiltermann, an Iraq expert at the International Crisis Group. "Rather deftly, he has sort of pushed back against several actors and thereby scored support among the enemies of those actors. He's looking at this vote as a test for national elections, to parlay his growing popularity into electoral support."

Maliki's message of "restoring the prestige and respect of the state" resonates with many Iraqis. His supporters say, in the past year, the Shiite leader has led the fight against both Sunni and Shia forces trying to destabilize the country. He went after Al-Qaeda in Iraq, but also elements of the Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi militia in its southern stronghold and in Baghdad.

Critics, however, say Maliki has been becoming more authoritarian by taking control of the armed forces as if it were his own personal militia, accusing him of sacking political opponents, and creating and financing tribal councils across the country that he controls directly from his office.

"Some are attacking him, calling him a dictator," said Raed Jarrar, Iraq consultant for the American Friends Service Committee. "He's insisting he wants the Iraqi army to operate in the Kurdish areas, which is a red line for the Kurds. And, he's against Shiite autonomy in the South," a position that has put him at odds with his coalition partner, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq.

"The political map is shifting in Iraq," Jarrar added. "And the prime minister's position has shifted with it."

The shift is toward a more secular and nationalist platform, experts say. In 2005, with the country enmeshed in a bloody sectarian war, Iraqi voters turned to parties that billed themselves as defenders of religious and sectarian communities -- Sunnis, Shia or Kurds. But in the past year, as violence has waned, Iraqis have grown increasingly frustrated by the central government's inability to improve services and tackle corruption.

"One thing I've been hearing, and it is across many different Iraqi political groups, is there is increasing dissatisfaction with the religious parties and the way they have run the show," said Edmund Ghareeb, a professor of Middle East studies at American University. "Many people believe this was a mistake to try to divide the government along sectarian lines. So this might be a more representative vote."

Already, some prominent religious leaders in the country -- including the most senior Shia cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani -- have refused to endorse specific candidates or parties.

That's bad news for groups like the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, the most dominant Shiite party in the country, and the one most backed by Iran, which is likely to lose control of at least several provinces in the South, where it currently dominates the political landscape.

The downturn in violence
The splintering in the Shia community may be a result of the country's decrease in violence, experts say. As sectarian fighting has lessened in the past year, the sense of unity among the Shiites has weakened.

"It's much easier to unite the Shiites when there's the threat of Sunni genocidal violence," said Biddle. "As the Sunni threat recedes, that glue among the Shiite factions gets weaker and weaker."

The vote also might highlight tensions in the Sunni community. Most Sunnis boycotted the last election, but this time experts say the Sunnis are expected to vote in much higher numbers. And observers are waiting to see if the Awakening movement -- which started in Anbar Province as a group of tribal leaders rejecting al-Qaida's influence in their community -- will gain a stronger footing in the country's politics.

Biddle said a victory for the Awakening movement would send a strong signal to the parties in power in Baghdad. "Many people in Iraq look at the Awakening Councils and say they are the only people actually accomplishing anything," he said. "Neighborhoods they control are peaceful and they get credit for that. One of their central claims to fame is that unlike the government they can deliver services and do things for their constituents. So if they do well in the election, the upside is that other political groups will view that as a model for electoral success in Iraq" as opposed to a reliance on appealing to sectarian fears.

The concern, however, is that either by design or valid electoral process, groups like the Awakening will once again be shut out of power and view the election results as illegitimate. And if the losers conclude that their political avenues have collapsed, they might see violence as the only alternative.

"Elections are inherently disaggregating events," said Feisal Istrabadi, a law professor at Indiana University and a former deputy ambassador to the United Nations for Iraq. "You want your candidate to win. I want mine to win. We've seen them be polarizing events around the world, but in Iraq, where society for the past four years has seen ethnic cleansing, sectarian death squads, you can take that and multiply by 10 or 100. If the same parties, which engineered their victories last time, manipulate the results again this time, it's difficult to see how we get out of this dangerous cycle. So these elections are extremely important."

The best case scenario is that the elections will be perceived as relatively clean and they will reverse the "destabilizing legacy of the January 2005 elections," said Hiltermann. "The absence of certain parties and groups that boycotted the last election led to highly imbalanced local councils in some governants. Groups that didn't have real support wound up taking most of the seats. We shouldn't overstate it -- the ruling parties aren't going to be ousted from office, at best they will be reduced somewhat in power -- but these elections promise to overturn that legacy to some extent."

It may be some time before the final results are known, and the outcome will set the stage for national elections expected by December.

-- By Robert Zeliger, NewsHour with Jim Lehrer