Tentative conclusions on democracy & governance
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Google and “Chinese norms”
Reporting on Google’s response to a Chinese government attack on Gmail-using democracy activists, the New York Times reported:
It is also likely to enrage the Chinese authorities, who deny that they censor the Internet and are accustomed to having major foreign companies adapt their practices to Chinese norms.
Sorry, but censorship is not a “Chinese norm.” It is a strategy that authoritarian regimes deliberately use to impede collective action for political change. The slippery use of “norm” smacks of a common problem in sloppy cultural argumentation. Sure, culture matters. Culture is useful, for example, when categorizing actors’ exogenous preferences without time to probe them more deeply. Sometimes culture manifests as a norm, or an ‘informal’ rule of interaction (i.e. an institution). Used in this way, “norm” implies that the rule is highly particular – that it has characteristics identifying it with one or another society. But, in China, we are dealing with neither culture nor norm. Plenty of actors in plenty of societies have used censorship and control: President Tandja in Niger, Stalin in Russia, and Woodrow Wilson in our own country.
Hats off to Google for dumping its search query censorship, which the company began in 2006 to curry business favor with the regime. (H/T to the UN Wire.)
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Sudanese liberalism
Omar al-Bashir’s government has whipped a 16-year old Christian girl 50 times for wearing a skirt that stopped at her knees.
Make of it what you will, but I am reminded of the effort to hold elections in Sudan. This juxtaposition recalls that liberal democratic institutions are entirely compatible with theocratic tyranny over the human spirit. Just ask Rebecca Nurse and Hester Prynne. Like we did 300 years ago, Sudan has a very long way to go.
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One way to model dictatorship
Says the BBC:
Iraqi politics is still a zero-sum game, and one in which the Sunni Arabs feel themselves doomed to be the losers.
Last week I analogized the situation to repeated games of Chicken.
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Iraqi consociationalism woes
Iraq’s Sunni vice president vetoed the hard-won electoral law this week. More about that from Barak Hoffman and Matthew Shugart. The current impasse boils down to the apportionment formula. Sunni and Kurdish politicians think the deck is stacked against them.
So is Iraqi consociationalism coming apart, or is this mundane sectarian brinksmanship?
Iraq is our latest experiment in exporting consociationalism. The Iraqi state is built on explicit recognition and institutionalization of combatant ethnic and sectarian groupings. A closed-list PR system funnels these groups into their respective political parties, and, as we saw this week, governing requires the consent of a member of every ethnic group. Now, Iraq’s constitution is not explicit about this. Articles 66-75 set up a semi-presidential system with a unitary executive whose job is to sign legislation. Then there are the so-called “transitional provisions,” which basically divide the presidency among three people elected by 2/3 vote of the legislature. This all but guarantees that the Presidency Council will include one Shiite, one Sunni, and one Kurd, as it does now.
The problem with consociationalism is that, for it to work, elite politicians have to (1) control the combatant groups they represent and (2) desire compromise. The US constitution’s Framers approached institutional design from the safe assumption that politicians are nihilistic power maximizers. This led them to emphasize checks and balances and to riddle the American political system with veto points. Consociationalism, on the other hand, began as a category of observed behavior.1 It was not the result of a deductive exercise. If game theory is good for anything, it’s good for designing institutions. We begin with an assumption about the preferences of key players (dictatorship by one’s ethnic group > killing each other > dictatorship of the other ethnic group), we choose a desired goal (violence prevention), and we proceed accordingly. Modeling a situation in this way certainly does not lead us to institutions that depend on mutual good will.
The veto of the new electoral law is entirely consistent with the institutional context. That is, we expect outcomes like this one when we run Iraq’s social profile through the consociational machinery of its democracy. I don’t think we are witnessing a constitutional crisis, at least in as much as “crisis” implies an extraordinarily stressful event. From another perspective, Iraq is in a perpetual state of constitutional crisis.
Let me go out on a limb with some predictions.
First, the election will happen, even if a little bit late. Hashemi’s veto is just another round in the ongoing game of chicken that defines constitutional decision-making in Iraq. Brinksmanship and eleventh-hourism have characterized most moments of important political choice since 2003. Why would preparing for the next national election be any different?
Second, there is nothing “transitional” about the “transitional Presidency Council.” What rational group would agree to give up its veto?
Third, Iraqi democracy will not consolidate any time soon. Recall that a car wreck is one solution to a game of chicken. We are more likely to see a dictatorship or civil war in Iraq than we are a stable, electoral democracy.
- Ian Lustick has a good article about this.
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STV in Tonga?
Not yet, but if plans to shift power from the monarch to parliament go forward, it’s possible. Matthew Shugart blogs.
A small handful of countries have experience with preferential voting systems in Oceania (e.g. LPV). Maybe this is due to an Australian diffusion effect or even election assistance from Oz.
Tonga would add to a set of several current, governmental STV implementations (not including IRV implementations):
- Malta – legislature
- Ireland – legislature
- Australia – upper house, several state and local assemblies
- Northern Ireland – legislature, local assemblies
- Scotland – local assemblies
- New Zealand – some local assemblies
- United States – some local assemblies (Cambridge, MA and, pretty soon, Minneapolis, MN)
- European Union – some countries’ EU Parliament delegations
- India – upper house (indirect)
And that list does not include historical implementations (e.g. briefly in Estonia, for decades in at least 2 dozen US cities, Nepal’s upper house before the republic).
If you don’t know how STV works, watch this video, focusing on the determination of threshold and the count. (Then, if you want to know more, watch a more specific video like this one.)
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Iraq’s parliament gets bigger
Under the 2009 electoral law,1 there will be 323 seats in the Council of Representatives. This is an increase from 275 in December 2005. As in December 2005, most seats will be allocated on the governorate level. In that election, however, there were 45 seats allocated nationally to minority groups and parties failing to meet governorate-level thresholds.2 This time, there are only 16 compensatory seats.
And, of course, the new electoral system is open-list proportional representation.
More from Iraq and Gulf Analysis, including the distribution of seats by governorate.
- Score!
- These thresholds were not formal, but arose as a function of apportionment.
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Open lists for Iraq
Reidar Visser reports. More at Fruits and Votes.
I am surprised. Then again, the political leaders who agreed to this are unlikely to lose their seats under the new system. See MSS’ comment on another post, the essence of which supports my prediction.
I do not know yet whether the lists are fully open or just “flexible.”The lists will be open. Candidates will not need quotas of preference votes as they did in the January 2009 governorate council elections. Voters, however, will have the option of voting for the party’s pre-ordered list. -
National elections and Afghanistan: putting the cart before the horse?
As a student of democratic governance and counterinsurgency, I am troubled by the emphasis of US democracy and governance assistance on holding national elections under conditions of extreme physical insecurity. I believe a fair reading of the work of counterinsurgent theorist and practitioner David Galula supports an emphasis on holding local elections, and that only after establishing certain levels of security. As one example, I believe the current structure of elections and governance in Afghanistan overemphasizes national elections and contemplates elections far in advance of setting the basic security conditions that are a prerequisite for success. To be sure, the goals of counterinsurgency and democracy promotion are different and can clash in their respective emphases on providing stability and legitimate governance versus creating institutions that provide legitimacy through political competition. That said, whatever common ground exists for the two disciplines should be built upon.
Why, however, should an observer of democratic transitions be concerned by counterinsurgency theory? The relationship between elections and counterinsurgency operations simply constitutes an extension of Thomas Carothers’s observation in Aiding Democracy Abroad that the United States has a history of engaging in democracy promotion in the same places that it fights wars. A brief glimpse at the Obama Administration’s fiscal year 2010 budget for democracy and governance programming reveals that just over 50% of the funds requested are devoted to regions of the world where the United States is either engaged in or supporting counterinsurgency operations: Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq. Despite this funding support for governments engaged in life-or-death struggles to claim legitimacy and provide security and stability to their citizenry, the focus of the democracy promotion community on support for national elections in Afghanistan under current security conditions seems misplaced.
First, in his seminal work Counterinsurgency Warfare, noted counterinsurgency theorist and practitioner David Galula presents a program for pacification of a rebellious, insurgent-dominated area through destroying the insurgent’s political organization. Under Galula’s program, holding local elections should only occur once the counterinsurgent has effectively removed “the direct threat of the armed insurgents and the indirect threat of the political agents.” Clearly, this victory has yet to occur, even in the parts of Afghanistan in which ISAF is the most active. The use of “night letters” threatening violence to Afghans wno participate in elections and attacks on international election assistance personnel, to pick just two examples, illustrate that Galula’s conditions of stability have not yet been established. Under this theory, elections under these conditions are premature. Such elections will be easily disrupted by insurgents, and will have little ability to enable Galula’s objectives of providing legitimacy to the government and developing a crop of politically astute local leaders who can be groomed for national leadership positions. Even where national elections are primarily driven by concerns other than democracy promotion, such as the need to create interlocutors between the government and the foreign counterinsurgent forces, the value of the interlocutors thus created is questionable. Without obtaining local legitimacy and testing the suitability of leaders for higher office, the risk of engaging in a dangerous, expensive exercise to obtain incompetent interlocutors who cannot effectively fulfill their main interlocutory function due to their domestic unpopularity is too high.
Second, Galula emphasizes a gradual start to national government by beginning with elections for local governmental offices rather than elections for a national government. According to Galula, beginning with elections for “local provisional self-government” enables leaders to “emerge naturally from the population, which will feel more bound to them since they are the product of its choice.” This provides the crucial element of legitimacy to the counterinsurgent government and enables the early identification of competent local leaders, rather than the expedient but uncertain method of designating “men who have been previously identified as supporters, thus imposing them on the population.” One can find echoes of this local emphasis elsewhere in the counterinsurgency literature. In Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl notes the responsibility of counterinsurgent district political officers for “the inauguration and guidence [sic] of elected local councils, building a framework for popular government well in advance of an independent government in British Malaya. More recently, in David Kilcullen’s widely praised book on counterinsurgency The Accidental Guerrilla, Kilcullen cites one Afghan tribal leader who questions a focus on national over local elections, and links the success of counterinsurgent efforts in Iraq to an emphasis on working with local tribal leaders, a “bottom-up structure outside the [top-down] one we have been working so hard to create.”
Criticisms of an emphasis on the local level include that overly strong local power structures would be naturally antagonistic to a central state, and that here elections would simply launder local strongmen to emerge as democratically elected candidates. Although these points are well taken, if the legitimacy and resources of the national government are so weak that they cannot attract village and tribal leaders, efforts to build a central state are futile in any event. Nor is this local focus foreign to the democracy promotion literature. As Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan note, early nation-states “developed a wide range of agencies of unification and standardization and gradually penetrated the bastions of ‘primordial’ local culture … the early growth of the national bureaucracy tended to produce essentially territorial oppositions”. These territorial oppositions may or may not cohere to balance one another in a national government; but strong local governments and interests do not prohibit the later formation of a strong national government. As for the “laundering” nature of democratic institutions, this may be true for initial local elections. However, there is evidence, particularly the work of Staffan Lindberg in African regimes, to suggest that the simple repetition of elections can drive increases in the level of democratic qualities in society, including the subsequent gradual elimination of members of a previous autocratic regime.
By contrast to Galula’s local emphasis, the lowest level of popularly elected leadership in Afghanistan is the provincial council level. The crucial executive office of provincial governor is a position appointed by the President of Afghanistan. The ability of the president to use these appointments as patronage positions has arguably led to the installation of corrupt, unaccountable executives who do not enjoy the support of the local population in their assigned provinces, and in any event have not emerged from the local population in the endogenous process Galula envisions.
Thus, according to Galula, the structural emphasis on national elections, reliance on cooperative leaders whose political origins stem from appointment by the counterinsurgent, and failure to grow competent, locally popular leaders who can eventually assume power constitutes a dangerous flaw. This observation that local, rather than national, political organizations offer the best way forward for counterinsurgent forces is bolstered by practical examples from the history of counterinsurgent warfare. Given the failure of the recent national elections in Afghanistan to restore anything like the hoped-for legitimacy to the Karzai government, perhaps it is time to refocus the tremendous amount of democracy assistance funding being channeled into Af-Pak on local governance, local elections, and growing a generation of Afghan leaders from the ground up, rather than the top down.
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US Election Day’s unsung races
Beyond several “off-year” and special elections with or without predictive significance for major future races, there were several ballot measures or elections today involving STV/IRV, including:
- One on a new IRV implementation (at time of writing, it looks good);
- One on a new STV implementation (at time of writing, it doesn’t look good;
- One on whether to keep IRV;
- One advisory vote on whether to keep IRV;
- One first-time use of IRV;
- Three uses of IRV for the second or more times;
- And two uses of STV in the same town, continuing an almost 70-year run with the system.
Over the last decade, we’ve accumulated quite a set of referenda on these systems. That set does not include legislative votes (probably several) or statewide referenda (one). It would be interesting to identify patterns in support for these measures.
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Tom Friedman steals my idea
At least I’d like to think so. Here’s the key language:
Specifically, the Obama team needs to make sure that Iraq’s bickering politicians neither postpone the next elections, scheduled for January, nor hold them on the basis of the 2005 “closed list” system that is dominated by the party leaders. We must insist, with all our leverage, on an “open list” election, which creates more room for new faces by allowing Iraqis to vote for individual candidates and not just a party. This is what Iraq’s spiritual leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, is also demanding. It is a much more accountable system.
If we can get open list voting, the next big step would be the emergence of Iraqi parties in this election running for office on the basis of nonsectarian coalitions — where Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds run together. This would be significant: Iraq is a microcosm of the whole Middle East, and if Iraq’s sects can figure out how to govern themselves — without an iron-fisted dictator — democracy is possible in this whole region.
H/T to Barak of the thoughtful new blog Democracy & Society.
Update: Ranj Alaaldin at the Guardian is on board, and now is a good time to recall Ayad Allawi’s November 2007 op-ed that effectively called for a more candidate-based system.
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