The Democratic Piece

Via IFES, the AP reports “a nearly complete vote count from Wednesday’s election indicates Saakashvili’s party will hold about 120 of the Parliament’s 150 seats.”

Last week I wrote that electoral “reforms” in Georgia were not actually reformist. While March legislation lowered the threshold for entering parliament from 7 to 5 percent, simultaneous decreases in the total number of seats and proportion of them elected under PR would be new hurdles for small parties. Reform, in other words, would benefit Saakashvili, not his opponents.

Now the main opposition party is threatening to boycott its mere 14 seats. Coverage of protests keeps pointing at fraud, but the electoral rules appear to have been the main source of opposition squeeze.

Glancing at preliminary results from the nominal tier, the ruling United National Movement is the clear leader in most districts. Yet it frequently has less than a majority, and other parties sometimes have sizable vote shares. In the list tier, the UNM is reported to have won 61 percent of votes.

Recall that one “reform” reduced the share of PR seats from 100 to 75. If one considers that no election was held under original provisions for the 150-member parliament, “reform” actually reduced the PR share from 150 of 235 seats at the 2004 election to 75 of 150 today.

The net effect of “reform” was less proportional representation and more first-past-the-post, regardless of what Saakashvili did to the PR threshold. That’s how he’s winning 80 percent of seats on 61 percent of votes.

RFE/RL optimistically reports that Georgian president Saakashvili has reduced the threshold from 7 to 5 percent for the list tier of that country’s parliamentary elections. Of course, today’s elections are for a much smaller parliament with far fewer seats elected under PR rules than in 2004. Despite the optimism, this probably will result in a smaller opposition seat share.

Since winning reelection, a seemingly humbled Saakashvili has taken pains to show that he understands the mood of both the electorate and the opposition, enacting a series of electoral reforms his supporters say are meant to boost confidence in the elections.

What “humbled” Saakashvili was his “close call in [a] snap presidential election four months ago,” according to the news service. Yet he won with over 53 percent, 18 points ahead of the runner-up. Such is his standard for competitiveness.

As usual, the details of the new system depend on the source. The overall picture since 2004 is fewer seats in general and fewer elected proportionally.

According to the electoral law, last updated 17-12-07, 50 members are elected in single-member districts and 100 are elected from party lists (Art. 91). The threshold was 7 percent, and seat allocation is by Hare quota with largest remainder (Art. 105).

IFES’ Election Guide says the 2004 elections proceeded with 75 single-member districts, 150 list seats and 10 seats reserved to “displaced persons.” Via ACE Project, the same organization says this is the system in place. The 2008 Election Guide entry, however, reports a 150-seat parliament with 75 list and 75 district seats. That is consonant with RFE/RL’s report and others.

Angus-Reid has a good description of the politics of the electoral law. Saakashvili’s allies in parliament approved the 75-75 system on March 21, with opposition leaders balking in favor of the 50-100 system, which is the one on the books as published.

Reuters, via the Washington Post, says opposition leaders accuse the president of “rigging” the elections. More problematic than outright fraud, it seems, is a lack of basic agreement (even clarity?) on the details of seat allocation.

It flies in the face of cynical reason to think the president would increase opposition prospects in response to his own electoral “close call.” More important than reducing the threshold to 5 percent, an opposition-inclusive reform, is reducing the PR tier from 150 to 75 seats, which is opposition-exclusive. A glance at the 2004 results-by-region at Electoral Geography shows why. Saakashvili’s National Movement polled an average 69.4 percent. The median share for his party was 71.8 percent. The overall effect of “reform,” I suspect, will be to further weaken opposition. The more small districts, the more seats for Saakashvili. Reducing average district magnitude is what matters here. Lowering the threshold is an empty gesture.

Thomas Friedman in last Wednesday’s NY Times argued America’s oil dependence and declining soft power - but mostly oil dependence - are driving a global “democratic recession.” I’m sympathetic to the concern about oil but not the logic. One, state weakness has raised the costs of freedom in some places. Two, autocrats are simply more sophisticated when it comes to keeping power. Three, and most important, the ‘developed’ democracies have not consistently supported democrats abroad. My working conclusion: soft power is indeed waning for reasons both structural and intentional.

Friedman cites the Freedom House index for 2008. Attention to where and why ratings fell reveals a more complex causal narrative.

Military interventions in democratic politics drove down ratings in Bangladesh and Pakistan.

Faulty, stolen or generally unfree elections affected the Comorros, Kenya, Cameroon, Congo-Brazzaville, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Nigeria and Russia.

Political violence rocked Sri Lanka, Somalia, Pakistan and the Philippines.

Insurgency or generally rising insecurity eroded freedom in the Central African Republic, Mali, Niger and Afghanistan.

Media crackdowns drove down ratings in Georgia, Mali, Azerbaijan, Egypt, Lesotho, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Venezuela and, arguably, the Solomon Islands, where governing authorities refused to address criticism related to a cabinet appointment.

Restrictions on freedom of assembly and organization increased in Burma, Lesotho and Venezuela.

Whether by violence, intimidation or dubious institutional reengineering, executives eroded checks and balances in Malawi, Nicaragua, Kazakhstan and Egypt.

Overt opposition crackdowns took place in Congo-Kinshasa, Malaysia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Syria.

Corruption and the entrenchment of economic oligarchies diminished freedom in Chad, Latvia, the Philippines, Tunisia, Burma, Madagascar and Somalia.

In Switzerland, the election of overt racists merited demotion.

Government paralysis earned negative points in Lebanon.

The infiltration of state and military by drug cartels drove down ratings for Guinea-Bissau.

While Freedom House’s executive summary does mention oil in two other places, only in Chad does it cite falling transparency in the “management of oil revenues.”

Next year’s report no doubt will cite eroding executive-legislative relations in Russia, a(n attempted?) stolen election in Zimbabwe, and whatever dubious constitutional amendments, opposition crackdowns, exiles and media shutdowns the remainder of 2008 brings. It will be interesting to see how Chinese ‘foreign aid’ packages and the Institute for Democracy and Cooperation figure in.

Overall, freedom declined in 38 nominal democracies. The dominant sources of backslide were corruption, media and opposition crackdowns, state weakness, deliberate election mismanagement and entrenchments of executive power.

Oil dependence is a big problem for the US and even the rest of the world, but it is not the principal driver of “democratic recession.” Alongside more structural problems of uneven economic development and state capacity are growing gaps between flagship democracies’ missions to spread freedom and their wills and means to do so. On one hand, emphasis on stability is replacing their post-Cold War emphasis on democratization. On the other, aid conditionality loses efficacy as rising authoritarian states like China and Russia reach out to Africa and Central Asia.

If democracy is to boom in the last seven months of 2008, the old democracies need to (1) renew their commitment to democratization and (2) cooperate to balance the soft power of authoritarian alternatives.

Earlier this week, I called the Indiana voter ID decision American-style backslide. For those outside the jargon community, “backslide” happens when a regime becomes more authoritarian. It is an action (i.e. raiding an opposition party headquarters) or structural rules change (i.e. making it virtually impossible for opposition parties to get on a ballot) that effects a persistent chill in democratic contestation.

“Backslide” usually describes “developing” democracies, but I (with some academic backers) reject the notion that the “consolidated” democracies are fully “democratized” and therefore immune to description as “backsliding.”

My own colleagues pushed back. I was being extreme in my characterization of the decision, they said. Countries do not move along a simple democracy-authoritarianism continuum. They become less perfect democracies, but they do not become authoritarian. Ok. Maybe.

Even academic debate over voter ID takes its democratic compatibility for granted. Much of the discussion on the election-law listserv is dryly empirical. What are the effects of voter ID on turnout? To what extent does it really disenfranchise the groups activists claim it will? How can we operationalize those questions? Most - but thankfully not all - talk of voter ID is in terms of an utilitarian harm calculus. Regardless of the policy, democracy is safe in America.

I disagree. Democracy is relatively new in America, and “backslide” can describe our country as anyone else’s. The Polity IV index (PDF) considers America a stable democracy since 1809, even though slavery persisted for 56 more years. I would argue the transition to democracy happened over a century later, when federal voting rights legislation overturned systematic, mass disenfranchisement at the state level. One might argue the transition is still happening. Where is our enshrined right to vote? Why do elected officials control the elections that elect them?

In today’s NY Times, Adam Cohen draws on history to make the point much clearer than I had using comparative examples. Voter ID, he says, is a “modern poll tax.” Calling for federal regulation and standardization of election administration, he writes:

It is chilling to think that state legislators and election officials would intentionally try to make it harder for Americans to vote, but they always have — with poll taxes, literacy tests and gerrymandering. There was a time when the Supreme Court regularly struck these restrictions down. In 1966, it held Virginia’s $1.50 poll tax unconstitutional. In 1972, it ruled that Tennessee’s one-year residency requirement for voting violated the Constitution.

Now the Supreme Court has switched sides. This week, it upheld a harsh Indiana voter ID law that could disenfranchise many poor, elderly and student voters. The ruling will make it even easier for other states to block voters’ access to the ballot box

Read the article, especially the first few grafs, for appalling worst practices. Here’s a teaser: former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell in 2004 trashed voter registration forms printed on the ‘wrong’ paper weight.

Voter ID is contrived, incremental disenfranchisement through legal channels. It is consistent with historical stains on America’s democratic process, and it is consistent with contemporary examples of backslide worldwide: opposition-fragmenting districting in Morocco, ballot access restrictions and election ‘reform’ in Russia, and power-consolidating election ‘reform’ Kyrgyzstan, to name a few. As we promote democracy elsewhere, we should remember how new and fragile it is at home. We should promote it here too.

As a start, we should see the federalism of election administration for what it is: an excuse for states to inscrutably limit voting rights.

I stumbled across an interesting post from Sean’s Russia Blog detailing a new amendment to Russia’s media law that passed late last week that expands the ability of the Kremlin to go after media outlets. Sean writes:

the Duma passed an amendment to the mass media law that adds slander to the list of unmentionables such as revealing state secrets, supporting terrorism, advocating pornography, and promoting violence. The law doesn’t use the word “slander” but redefined it with “intentionally false information,” which, of course, is just about anything. Perhaps more important than the vague, elastic language is the fact that the amendment gives the Ministry of Justice the power to issue warnings to media outlets for publishing slanderous and libelous material. Two warnings in twelve months allows Justice to shut the media outlet down pending trial.

As Sean also notes, this come on the heels of a recent newspaper being shut down for publishing a story detailing an alleged affair between Putin and a former Russian Olympic Gymnast turned Duma MP. Putin denied the probably false rumor, but the newspaper was shut down days later because of “funding problems.” It is not hard to imagine that this amendment may even be in response to the irresponsible story of a single paper, but I guess the Duma has a duty to protect the integrity of the state Putin.

While Russia has had loose “libel laws” that allowed individuals to sue media organizations for what they print, this is a marked step in a direction towards legalized state coercion of the media - although they already own (partially or in full) most of the television and radio outlets.

This event also dovetails nicely with Freedom House’s recent annual report of Global Press Freedom in the World. Freedom House found, unsurprisingly, that the freedom of the Russian press had declined. (The draft text, maps and pretty charts are available here.)

This report was drafted before this amendment was passed. Putin’s Russia is surely in a sad state when a Freedom House report is out of date before it’s even off the presses.

I am truly spoiled this week by a glut of in-depth Russia coverage by major U.S. daily newspapers.

Earlier I posted about about the series that the NYTimes started this week. It really must be my lucky week; the Christian Science Monitor (CSM) is also starting a series on “The Putin Generation.” The series is examining the lives, views, and involvement of the youth generation that grew up after the fall of the Soviet Union. Some of their earliest memories have been shaped not by the horrors of the Soviet regime, but the chaotic decade under Yeltsin that was plagued by economic turmoil and deteriorating standards of living and Russian standing in the world. There is a great slide show that accompanies this article.

As I mentioned before, to understand why and how the Putin appeal is at the heart of this experience. The Kremlin harnessed this appeal to mobilize youth both within the United Russia party and as a phalanx of foot soldiers to counter opposition groups.

The first CSM piece is really insightful. It is based largely on the reporters interviews with Kirill Shchitov, one of the young, ardent supports of Putin. Their discussions are telling. Money quote:

“We support the political course that Putin started,” says Shchitov, an avid reader who draws inspiration from Peter the Great – “a real example of being proud of your country.” He also likes Stalin, a ruler who could solve any problem – including the defeat of Hitler – “by strict measures.” And he admires Franklin D. Roosevelt for, he says, making the United States a strong nation. And now, Putin.

The perceived humiliation of the Russian population has been used by the Kremlin to stoke a resurgent nationalism. In doing so, the Kremlin has referenced the challenges that the Soviet Union / Russia overcame in World War II. Part of this process has involved rewriting Russian history and partial rehabilitating Stalin’s rule as a period of “principled focus and determination” with some unfortunate zealousness.

Relying on youth organizations to protect and further a movement can have benefits, but also large potential pitfalls. Youths, caught up in the rhetoric and promises of a wooing leader, can become disillusioned when the promised future doesn’t materialize. It’s a risky strategy, but so far it has appeared to be effective, when coupled with the blatent abuse of administrative state resources, for the Kremlin in terms of stamping out opposition movements. I hope they realize that they are playing with fire - once started it can be an effective tool for many goals, but it can also burn you out of house and home.

This weekend I posted a quick note about a NYTimes article detailing the authoritarian government being established by Putin and his supporters within the Kremlin and around the country. The NYTimes has taken an interesting approach to this article by creating a Russian translation and opening a live journal account to host a discussion about the article. Needless to say, the responses have been strong.

A few of my quick thoughts about the article. As I mentioned earlier, I am happy that this series of articles is being written by the NYTimes because it puts the whole picture of what is happening politically in Russia into a somewhat “whole picture” context. Too often, the articles detail with one particular aspect of the Kremlin’s closure of the political space, such as the government crackdown on civil society or the administrative obstacles erected to prevent actual opposition candidates and parties. That being said, some of my comments here may be addressed in follow-on pieces of the series.

First, one of the bid missing section is this article is the lack of discussion regarding the reemergence of the use of psychiatric facilities to detain, hide, torture, and drug opposition activists (here and here, among others). Repeatedly, opposition activists have been detained by local police and federal security agencies and forcibly committed to psychiatric institutions. At these institutions, they have been chained to bed and drugged against their will. A chilling thought and a homage to the Soviet practice.

Second, the article doesn’t mention enough the use of Kremlin “NGO’s” to provide pressure against opposition groups. These cadres of youths are intended to intimidate and counter-protest any groups which disagree with the Kremlin. In the NYTimes defense, they did write a strong article on the topic a few months ago.

Third, there was no mention of the farcical results from the recent parliamentary election in some of the most “unstable” regions. As I’ve mentioned here before (here and here),the official results are absurd. In addition, some of the most interesting challenges to Putin’s electoral facade have been wagged in Ingushetia - where allegedly more than 99% turnout with more than 95% supporting Putin’s party. Local groups have begun to collect signatures from individuals stating that they did not participate in the elections, seriously challenging the regional governor’s fraud to please Putin.

Last, and I want to note that I do think the article does this to an degree, but an important facet of Putin’s regime is that he does not actually control each political detention. Many of these are carried out by regional mayors, governors, prosecutors, or security agencies zealously seeking approbation from the Kremlin. While the blood and abuse by not be directly ordered from the Kremlin, Putin is responsible for the environment in which these acts are carried out and, importantly, never prosecuted. Even more so now that Putin took on the responsibility and power to appoint governors and super-federal administrators. Since these officials can no longer answer to the Russian people, Putin is the only one that can put a check on their transgressions.

Also, the article does a good job to note that Putin’s rise has been facilitated by the turbulent Yeltsin years and the stability brought on by high energy prices. However, we should not be seduced by the stability and be tricked into believing that the lives of Russians are getting “better.” Michael McFaul and Kathryn Stoner-Weiss provide an insightful article in the last issue of Foreign Affairs which frisks the claims of the “authoritarian model” being promoted by Putin and his celebrants.

Finally a large, U.S. newspaper is doing a detailed series on Putin’s regime and the manner in which it operates to preserve itself.  I don’t have a lot of time right now, but I recommend everyone read this good piece by Clifford Levy. Too often the articles on Russia and Putin’s growing authoritarian control focus on a single narrow topic like civil society or journalists.  Get a cup of hot coffee and settle in to read this.

Two interesting posts today regarding the development as Putinism as an ideology.

First, Prespectives on the New Russia has a post on the development of a Putin Museum and the establishment of Putin Studies. Money quote:

This ideology seems to be developing into a strange blend of continued capitalist reforms, Eurasianist ideology (Dugin, the Eurasianist thinker is now featured prominently in Kremlin propaganda and espouses similar ideas regarding Russia’s use of landpower and what he calls a “conservative revolution” - one that seemingly preserves traditional Russian institutions while also brings about needed change), anti-Americanism (see Nashi’s frequent attacks on America and on opposition politicians as being American), and good ole fashioned nationalism (this is mainly manifested through spending oil money on the army and “national projects”, though here, there is a difficult struggle going on between those who are more and less willing to flirt with anti-immigration and racism in Russia as another plank in the Putin coalition).

A few months back, I wrote about the commissioning of new Russian history books.  La Russophobe has an update regarding the project today. Money quote:

Here’s a few lessons from a textbook called Russian History from 1945—2007:

1. The abolition of directly elected regional governors was a good thing because Russians cannot govern themselves.

2. The re-privatization of Yukos means Russia no longer has oligarchs.

3. Georgia gave up its independence in 2004 with its presidential elections and is now illegitimate.

4. Stalin was an “effective manager,” taking Russia from the plow to the atomic bomb in just a few years. His repressions were necessary to mobilize for war and industrialize Russia so quickly. Same goes for Brezhnev. Krushchev, Yeltsin and Gorbachev on the other hand were bad because they were weak.

Brilliant.

Kyrgyzstan had a fraudulent parliamentary election on Sunday, according to the OSCE. As in Russia, the strongman’s party won a lion’s share of seats under a new list PR system (5% threshold).

Russia dumped its mixed system for list PR before elections earlier this month. Kyrgyzstan recently passed constitutional amendments, one of which abolished a single-member district plurality system.

Like Russia, Kyrgyzstan also made it harder for small parties to get on the ballot.

Unlike in Russia, the supreme court is reviewing changes to the electoral law.