Tentative conclusions on democracy & governance
-
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.
-
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.
-
Iraq’s endogenous institutional inertia
Reidar Visser of the Iraq democratization website historiae.org has an excellent post on his supplemental blog about electoral reform in Iraq. Until the close of legislative business on Friday, prospects were ostensibly good for a reformed electoral law including open-list proportional representation (OLPR) for Council of Representatives elections. Lo and behold, it increasingly looks like the sectarian forces occupying parliament will not gore their own ox by relinquishing control over their party lists to voters. Visser’s title captures the point: “A Closed Assembly Will Produce a Closed List.” I want to discuss the origin and likely impact of that “closed assembly.”
Prospects for OLPR looked good because Iraqis literally took to the streets to advocate for it last weekend. They were following cues from Grand Ayatollah Ali Husseini Al-Sistani, whose advocacy of the system began last summer and who suggested he might boycott closed-list elections, as well as from other political leaders initially opposed to but who later claimed to support the proposal. Successful OLPR elections for governorate councils last winter fueled proponents’ empirical case, and reform looked likely when Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki joined the choir of supporters.
As Visser notes, however, the reform clamor belies parliamentary leaders’ secret preference for the status quo. Despite the apparent public agreement on candidate-based elections, lawmakers adjourned for the weekend on Friday without taking action. Not having a new law means the old closed-list one will remain in force. One could hope that they come back Monday to vote for a new law, except that the Iraqi Independent Electoral Commission said October 16 was the last possible date to make changes in time for January 16’s polls. Moreover, lawmakers’ inaction has a precedent; the same thing happened last summer.
Why would open lists be a reform? An argument I have made often on this blog concerns candidate-based electoral systems as treatments for divided societies. When transitional elections are run under voting systems that induce disciplined, ‘programmatic’ parties – especially closed-list PR, which has been the treatment in an overwhelming share of post-conflict interventions since World War II or so – the emergent party system is likely to reflect the divisive religious or ethnic cleavages that fuel conflict in the first place.
Skeptics of the treatment argument suggest that institutions are unlikely to alter or mute divisive cleavages because powerful actors in the underlying society will choose democratic rules that reinforce the preexisting power structure. Put differently, institutions are endogenous to social context. Either actors will choose institutions that benefit them, or they will ignore the incentives presented by imposed institutions just as a sickly host rejects a nonetheless needed organ transplant. If the social conditions are bad for democracy and stability, the electoral behavior arising from them also will be. By implication, institutional design is not an effective scope for democratizing interventions.
While aspects of the point about institutional treatment are fair to concede, it overemphasizes the durability of social context. The fatalism of this perspective with respect to electoral rules risks blocking outcomes otherwise auspicious for democracy. Any elections held amidst violent, sectarian conflict are likely to generate a congruent party system, regardless of the electoral system chosen. Four years later, though, Iraqi political discourse has become more secular, more national, and more about government performance.1 That was the lesson of January’s provincial elections, and, as Visser notes, a trend likely to persist into national elections next year. The difference between last and next January’s elections is that, while electoral rules in the former allowed voters to seat performance-oriented candidates, closed-list PR in the latter will not. Institutions eventually do matter, and regardless of the population’s shifting preferences, January’s national legislative elections are likely to be another polarized, sectarian census.
This is unfortunate because something could have been done to prevent it. Namely, occupying powers could have done more to impose a candidate-based electoral system on Iraq in January 2005. We instead granted sectarian actors’ wishes for a system shoring up their power to set the Iraqi legislative agenda, both then and into the future.2
Notwithstanding public demonstrations and party leaders’ pronouncements in favor of more voter choice, Iraq is on track for more of the same: another national election under closed-list electoral rules. If this is what happens, it will be the path-dependent outcome of a fateful choice made four years ago. Now in place is a feedback between social polarization and restrictive elections. Closed assembly, closed list.
- Or private access to public goods, the developmental pathology called clientelism. How to deal with that is a big question for another post, but clientelism is present in all societies in varying degrees. For now, I will claim that the developmental challenge is twofold: generalizing clientelism while increasing aggregate wealth in order to sustain the generalized clientelism we call a welfare state.
- Accurate understanding of the choice of closed lists has been a casualty in recent coverage of the reform debate. See, for example, this typical article by the WSJ where the personal security of candidates is cited as a reason for closed lists. Other arguments have included the simplicity of voting and administration with CLPR ballots. I am more inclined to believe this logic – CLPR is a fast, easy and cheap way to run an election mid-conflict – but not that it mattered more than the preferences of sectarian leaders.
-
BDM Predicts Whether Iran Will Build the Bomb
A recent NYT magazine article profiles Bruce Bueno de Mesquita’s work, including a recent game tree predicting whether Iran will have the bomb. Spoiler alert…..his answer is no.
Could his work be relevant in our understanding of democratic regime change or are there too many preferences to account for?
-
Chavistas: At it Again
It was recently reported that the Venezuelan government has revoked the broadcasting licenses of 34 private radio stations. According to the government, the stations affected failed to comply with concession and registration renewal requirements. Although many within the independent media community are using whatever channels they can to protect their rights, broadcasters are poised for compliance. Meanwhile, regulators continue to investigate over 200 other stations. According to the Associated Press: “Chavez has said the concessions could be handed over to operators who share his vision for a socialist Venezuela.”
This news comes amidst additional reports that the Venezuelan National Assembly approved an election law that is expected to give Chavistas an institutional advantage in the next round of voting. While supporters contend that the law will allow the country’s indigenous population a greater voice in government, critics charge that by giving the National Electoral Council the opportunity to redraw district boundaries, it is merely an underhanded attempt to manufacture a permanent majority through the art of gerrymandering. (Members of the National Electoral Council are selected by a simple majority in the National Assembly, which is currently controlled by Chavez’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela.)
-
The Unsustainability of Afghanistan
Michael Yon, an independent journalist and author, has written a great article about Afghanistan and the work that one Provincial Reconstruction Team is doing there.
Here is the overall feeling of the article:
On one hand, we have a fraction of the troops we need, but on the other, increasing troop levels increases hostility toward us. Secretary Gates has made it clear to me that his biggest concern is that we will lose the goodwill of the people and they will turn against us. This happens to be my own biggest concern. The agony is in knowing we need more medicine and the medicine can be highly toxic here.
Yon also makes an interesting observation about the “dependency” that foreign aid can induce. He gives two examples of such instances:
Unfortunately, these kids had already been taught the benefits of begging and this analogy extends directly to their parents. In Afghanistan, like Iraq, when we invest resources into installing a dieselgenerator for a neighborhood, the people will complain that we don’t supply the fuel. When the Indians paid for local broadcasting equipment in Chaghcharan, the station manager complained that the Indians didn’t make a new office, and there is often a tone that we need something or “give us or we will misbehave.”
While I do not have similiar experiences to Yon’s, the international development literature is full of practitioners worrying about just such a situation. The solution is difficult: on the one hand, not providing the diesel might result in the locals not using the very expensive diesel system. On the other hand, providing the diesel simply encourages the foreign aid dependence and kills any long term sustainability to the project. Once international development organizations cease to provide the diesel, who will step in?
The same concern is echoed with regards to the health facilities in Afghanistan. Yon speaks at length with a doctor in the Ghor Province, who is upset that the national government is mandating “free” health care when the existing system can barely handle those able to pay. As Yon writes:
Dr. Yaqubi wants to show people that health care is not free, but he says that the parliament in Kabul thinks it should be free to all. The Afghan government can’t even drill a well for this provincial hospital, and all their machines and supplies were probably donated, yet they want “free” health care. The beggars of Kabul who refuse to drill a well for the Ghor Provincial Hospital want free health care for all!
I told Dr. Yaqubi that the same argument is raging in America, and I asked the Lithuanian doctor sitting beside me if this is an issue in Lithuania. She confirmed that it is. Dr. Yaqubi said that if treatment were completely free, the hospital would be overwhelmed. With about 750,000 people in Ghor Province, they’ve got 85 dirty beds here, and two smaller clinics elsewhere. Free health care? How about steady electricity to run the X-ray machine?
The comparison to the U.S. debate is a bit of a stretch, but the story serves as a good example of the sustainability problems international development organizations, and the Afghani government, face. The national government is unwilling (unable?) to provide for the basic needs of the hospital but wants to mandate “free” health care without a source of funding. While international development organizations maintain a presence, they can subsidize the bad policy and mute the negative impacts. Once their term ends, however, what will the Afghani government do when faced with a dilapidated health care system that slowly deteriorates every year due to the inability of the hospitals to either, a) receive electricity, water or medicine and materials or b) cannot afford to stay open due to lack of revenue?
-
EIU, Spread of Democracy Has Halted
EIU’s second annual democracy index concludes, unsuprisingly that the spread of democracy has halted. Their index has more statistical detail than Freedom House…have a look
-
Obama Hails Indonesian Elections “Free and Fair”
From the Jakarta Post, in a statement on Tuesday President Obama hailed Indonesia’s July 8 election as free and fair. The President went on to say that increased civil society, media and political party activity was a further sign of Indonesia’s strengthetning democracy.
Obama is immensely popular in Indonesia, his having gone to school here as a child is a constant talking point for all folks from taxi drivers to politicians. In preparation for a potential late year visit, the Indonesian government has launched plans for a cultural center dubbed “American place” to commemerate his visit and to serve as a place to learn about American culture.
While these efforts seem frivolous, there is plenty that can be achieved if the USG takes advantage of the goodwill felt towards Obama. Pressure to step up efforts to curb corruption, to tackle climate and environmental issues in Indonesia, and to increase health and education services are some examples of issues that could go a long way in lifting Indonesia up, while also mitigating shared global concerns.
-
IFES to go in front of Election Supervisory Body in Jakarta
Jakarta – Wednesday July, 15 – According to the Jakarta post (link unavailable), amid accusations by presidential candidate Megawati of illegal campaign activities, the Indonesian Elections Supervisory Board (Bawaslu) will question incumbent Presidenty Yudhoyono, the General Elections Commission (KPU) and US-based International Foundation for Electoral Sytems (IFES) on Wednesday.
As previously posted, the KPU and IFES worked togethr in piloting an SMS voting tabulation system. Criticism has been launched at the KPU for involving a foreign agency in tabulating votes and have asked questions as to why the voting was stopped midstream with only about 20% of the polling stations reporting.
However, critics seem to have misinterpreted the SMS tabulating project. Approval for the program occured 2 days before election day and the pilot program only expected about 15% of polling stations to participate. The results were not intended to be official in any way, but rather were intended to serve as a parallel voting mechanism and to gauge the utility of this type of reporting system. IFES, for its part, only provided hardware and technical assistance, vote tabulation was done by the KPU.
The media outlets, many tied to political party and leadership, have echoed vice presidential candidate Prabowo’s accusation of foreign meddling, but it seems that these last ditch efforts will not only be fruitless, but will also undermine the progress of parallel vote tabulations, whether official or done by non-governmental organizations.
Currently, Indonesia relies on media quick count polls and unreliable exit polling, developing civil society capacity for parallel vote tabulation can go a long way in making the elecotral process more transparent and credible, especially if it can be done inexpensively.
-
Secretary Clinton on the future of USAID
Clinton made a few revealing remarks on the future of USAID, especially in the Q&A session.
Highlights include an effort to build USAID’s capacity to keep some implementation work in house, a question on the future of AID beyondthe Obama administration and a focus on increasing AID’s technical expertise.
Take a look at the transcript and video here.
Recent Comments