The Democratic Piece

As I write, democracy assistance groups are helping lawmakers develop an electoral system for Iraq’s 18 governorate councils. Some creative electoral engineering could take the sectarian sting out of Iraq’s party system. One proposal worth serious thought is using the single non-transferable vote (SNTV) with open endorsements in governorate-wide districts.

Reuters last week claimed that “Iraq’s local elections could reshape power structure.”

Major players — such as the movement of populist Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and Sunni Arab tribal groups — will be competing for the first time and are expected to make gains at the expense of those now in power.

“New alliances will form, old ones will fall. Everything will change. It will redraw the political map of Iraq,” said a senior Shi’ite government official on condition of anonymity.

Really, Reuters means reshaping a balance of power, not an underlying power structure. A party system that continues to revolve around sects will not help consolidate Iraqi democracy. Luminaries from Lipset to Lijphart have taught that stable democratic politics are about more than race, religion or language. The challenge is to get Iraqi elites talking about more than sectarian interest. What candidates need are incentives to cultivate a personal vote. Campaigns need to be about what’s-in-it-for-me: jobs, schools, roads and, as a colleague quipped, a shawarma machine in every kitchen.

Thankfully, beltway rumor has it that the chosen system will be candidate-centric. This is a major step away from the closed-list PR systems that blew open Pandora’s box in 2005.

That leaves us with a few basic options:

First-past-the-post: As long as parties don’t control who gets on the ballot, this system might work. Yet the number of votes needed to win is fairly high, meaning current parties likely would fare best, unless there were numerous candidates in each district, in which case outcomes would be wildly unpredictable. Ultimately, the lack of reliable census data would make fair apportionment virtually impossible.

Open-list PR: Basically, the system modifies list PR so that voters control who ends up being a party’s most popular parliamentarian. While it gets around the apportionment problem, it is unlikely to change much. The list logic would preserve current parties, the logic of party discipline would remain the same, and we would expect the most popular person under such circumstances to be a sectarian leader.

STV: For all its virtues, this is not appropriate for the context. Illiteracy and innumeracy are likely to cause widespread voter error. The only way to get around the apportionment problem is to use one big district in each governorate. Can we really ask Iraqis to rank up to, say, 200 candidates?

Bloc vote: Two words. Palestine 2006.

SNTV: With open endorsements, of course. If the parties controlled who got on the ballot, there would be little chance for a shawarma machine in every kitchen. The system would stimulate hyper-personalistic campaigns, party fragmentation and pork-barrel politics at its finest. On one hand, these are ugly dynamics. On the other, they’re just what are needed to break the grip of sect on Iraq’s party system.

Using SNTV in governorate-wide districts would obviate the apportionment problem. If each council were the cube root of its respective governorate’s population, council sizes (and district magnitudes) would hover around 100, meaning each candidate would need about only one percent of votes to win.

Open endorsement SNTV is not a magic bullet. Its efficacy depends on federal-governorate linkages, ballot access rules and the (in)abilities of current parties to coordinate in local contests, to name just a few variables. Iraq nonetheless faces a tradeoff. As long as its electoral rules stimulate disciplined, programmatic parties, sect is likely to be the dominant cleavage. Legislative politics will remain zero-sum with negative implications for the country’s future. On one hand, electoral engineers can reinforce the nasty equilibrium that is Iraq’s party system. On the other, they can try to force it open by stimulating fragmentation and clientelism.

I just saw this interview from last weekend with Barack Obama on the Washington Post site today. The first question was on democracy promotion in U.S. foreign policy:

Q. Do you believe democracy promotion should be a primary U.S. goal? If so, how would you achieve it? How would you balance democracy and human rights priorities against other strategic needs in the case of countries including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, China and Russia?

A. We benefit from the expansion of democracy: Democracies are our best trading partners, our most valuable allies and the nations with which we share our deepest values.

Our greatest tool in advancing democracy is our own example. That’s why I will end torture, end extraordinary rendition and indefinite detentions; restore habeas corpus; and close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay.

I will significantly increase funding for the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and other nongovernmental organizations to support civic activists in repressive societies. And I will start a new Rapid Response Fund for young democracies and post-conflict societies that will provide foreign aid, debt relief, technical assistance and investment packages that show the people of newly hopeful countries that democracy and peace deliver, and the United States stands by them.

I recognize that our security interests will sometimes necessitate that we work with regimes with which we have fundamental disagreements; yet, those interests need not and must not prevent us from lending our consistent support to those who are committed to democracy and respect for human rights.

The whole thing is worth a read.

Fidel’s brother is officially the president of Cuba. According to the BBC, “The US said Raul Castro’s appointment offered potential for change but said its embargo would remain until there was a transition to democracy.”

My gut reaction is threefold, and most readers will assess the embargo in at least one of the following ways: (1) It’s a Cold War anachronism. (2) The costs fall on the people, not the dictators. (3) It’s an excuse for incumbent lawmakers to keep their districts on lock.

Yet the pressure of a foreign power matters for democracy promotion. If nobody inside a country has the capacity to make leaders respect democratic institutions, maybe external forces can. I enter the treacherous territory of counterfactuals in suggesting the apparent suppression of an IRI exit poll last month helped Mwai Kibaki steal Kenya’s election. Moreover, most would agree the carrot of European Union accession has sped democratization and economic reform in the former Soviet satellites. Diplomacy seems to matter.

The efficacy of the Cuba embargo turns on two questions. One, what are the costs for Raul? We know it contributes to general poverty, but how does it make letting go more attractive for him? Two, does the lack of similar policies by all other powers render useless our own?

If we take democratizing Cuba seriously, there’s a third question: how do we minimize the pain to Castro II of stepping down?

President Bush put all of his eggs in the Musharraf basket and the Pakistani people have smashed that basket right in his face by wholeheartedly rejecting Musharraf’s political party. President Bush undermined U.S. standing in the world and our security by believing that the best way to fight Islamic extremism and terrorists in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region was unquestioningly supporting President Musharraf and funneling billions of dollars to the Pakistani military without oversight. The results of the Pakistani parliamentary elections have left the Bush administration with a lot of egg on its face.

As the State Department scrambles to get its bearings in the fluid Pakistani political environment, it is important for us to consider three things. First, why did the Pakistani government allow these elections to be carried out in a relatively unfettered manner? Second, what are the likely outcomes? Third, what should the priorities of the U.S. government moving forward in terms of security and democracy promotion? Continue Reading »

It appears that President Musharraf is playing his cards exactly right in order for him to maintain his grip on power while still complying with demands (of varying intensity and credibility) from the US and other Western donor states, and the opposition movement.  In the last two days, Musharraf has announced that elections will be held in February, that restrictions on foreign media imposed on Saturday will be lifted, and that he will resign as army chief of staff very soon.  All of these promises have been made, however, without reference to specific dates.  The BBC has a good summary of events in the last few days here.

Musharraf’s promises have had two major effects:

1. They have drawn the wind from the sails of some opposition figures who claim that Musharraf is only interested in maintaining his own power at the expense of Pakistani democracy.  While they might be right (and I’m inclined to think that they are), it has suddenly become harder to rally their supporters in blatant defiance of the ban on demonstrations in place since saturday.
2. They have eased the pressure on the US and its allies to make good on their rhetorical support for democracy with genuine action.  Now that Musharraf has made vague moves toward fulfilling the conditions set out by President Bush and Secretary Rice this week for continued US support (don’t delay elections, lift emergency restrictions, and take off the uniform), there is less immediacy on the Bush administration (from Congress, the media, Europe, etc.) to withdraw aid or rhetorical solidarity from Musharraf.

While the president is walking his fine line, however, trouble is brewing in Rawalpindi.  The town, located about 30 miles from Islamabad, is scheduled to be the location of a major opposition rally (in defiance of the emergency order) tomorrow, led by former Prime Minister Bhutto.  The rally had been scheduled prior to Musharraf’s declaration of emergency rule, and was supposed to be a ‘historic welcome‘ for Bhutto as she returned from exile.  It may still be historic, but it will be far from welcoming.  Additionally, Bhutto has threatened to call out her supporters in a long march from Lahore to Ismalabad to protest the extra-constitutional rule of Musharraf. 

For now, we’ll have to wait and see what happens in Pakistan tomorrow.

In his monthly column in Sunday’s Washington Post, the Carnegie Endowment’s Robert Kagan argues that free elections should come first in the struggle against autocracy.  My colleague here at the Democratic Piece, Danny Adams, posted his thoughts on this issue earlier this week, arguing that in many ways this approach makes a lot of sense.  Naturally, democracies need elections.  While I agree with his assertion that the “priority should be democracy first, not only development,” I think Kagan misses the broader point: ‘elections first’ is often just as bad of a policy choice as focusing solely on economic development.

Kagan’s argument mirrors the Bush administration’s strategy in both Afghanistan and Iraq: if you have elections, democracy will follow.  I think it is safe to say at this point that having elections first in each of these countries was at the very least unhelpful in moving either country toward sustainable democratic government.  Without a stable security situation, developed political parties, and a set of institutions that allow the elected government to effectively govern, elections can often do more to solidify a certain set of interests rather than lay the foundations for democracy.

Kagan points to Russia as an example of a ‘resilient autocracy’ whose rulers have been strengthened rather than undermined by its increased integration into the world economy.  Certainly this seems to be the case in Putin’s oil-rich Russia.  He forgets, however, the period shortly following the fall of the Soviet Union when Western governments were promoting democracy equally as much as economic liberalization and development in Russia.  While there is debate on how democratic Russia actually was between 1993 (first Duma election) and 1999 (Putin comes to power), it cannot be conveniently forgotten that elections did come first in Russia, and in many ways they contributed to the current backsliding we see there.

If we’ve learned anything from the past two decades of democracy promotion efforts, in which elections have played the starring role, it’s this: elections have consequences that do not always have a positive impact on a country’s transition to democracy.  We need to learn from our past mistakes and realize that, while necessary, elections don’t always come first.

Writing for Brookings, Georgetown’s Steven Heydemann notes that Arab authortiarian regimes are upgrading their survivability toolkit with implications for democracy promotion approaches.
Continue Reading »

In this week’s New York Times Magazine, Noah Feldman writes about Democratosis, an American political disease characterized by our politicians’ excessive use of the rhetoric of liberal democracy.   Feldman argues that democracy is a good thing except that its focal point as a foreign policy tool can backfire do to the hypocrisy that this entails.  He suggests a “chastened version of the democratization doctrine – one that makes no exceptions for friends while also recognizing that building durable institutions may do more good than holding snap elections.”   

I don’t disagree with either of these arguments per se, but some clarifications are warranted.  Firstly, whenever I see a reference to Iraq in an article about democracy promotion, I become a little queasy (although, Feldman may not be guilty of any crime here).   In Iraq we are nation building.  We are NOT promoting democracy.  While in nation building we try to build institutions from – essentially – ground zero, in democracy promotion, we encourage institutional capacity building and provide skills training so that parliamentarians, for example, can read a budget.  For an example, check out NDI’s Morocco Democracy Online references section, where they have translated manuals on all-things-democracy into Arabic.   

For Feldman’s part, it seems that he believes the Bush administration’s democratic diarrhea.  He writes:

“Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, sometimes sounding suspiciously like an apostate from the democratization cause, argued in a recent speech for the necessity of using realist methods – including short-term alliances with despots – to pursue idealistic goals such as the establishment of more democracy.”

Continue Reading »

In an unprecedented display of cooperation, a new multilateral democracy initiative was announced on Monday that has the potential to fundamentally change the way democracy assistance is approached by both national and international donor organizations.  The Partnership for Democratic Governance (PDG) is a joint venture aimed at supporting new or fragile democracies, as well as states emerging from conflict, by building governance capacity and especially at improving service delivery to the countries’ citizens.  What makes the PDG remarkable are the partners themselves, which include both donor countries and international and regional development institutions, all of which have until now worked independently of each other in promoting democracy and governance in the developing world. 

The founding members of the PDG are Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Denmark, Japan, Korea, Mexico, New Zealand, Poland, Turkey, the United States, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Organization of American States (OAS), and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).  All of these members have pledged to work together to further their mutual goals of promoting democracy and governance (though I was unaware that DG work was a high priority for Turkey, Mexico, or Poland).  The plan is to use the new PDG to better coordinate international assistance given to developing states by allowing its operational arm, the PDG Advisory Unit (housed at the OECD), to conduct assessments and recommend particular countries that have specialized knowledge or experience in dealing with challenges faced by particular developing countries.  In addition, the PDG is intended to coordinate the focus of the international community on countries with problems of particular slaience by using the considerable combined clout of the partner countries and organizations.

The bottom line - if this works, it has the potential to drastically increase the efficiency and effectiveness of democracy and governance assistance.  There are two caveats, however, that I feel should be mentioned: 1) the PDG can only provide assistance to countries whose governments officially request it, and 2) will non-PDG santioned democracy assistance activities still be allowed in countries that have requested PDG assistance.  The first caveat will obviously prevent PDG activities in many of the countries that need democracy and governance assistance the most, which the second one could have serious effects for NGOs and foreign-funded civil-society organizations working in countries that then decide to assert some control over democracy-related assistance efforts in their country by applying to the PDG for help.  They then have more control over the money tap, as well as an excuse to restrict the activities of non-sanctioned organizations.

Fundamentally, the PDG is a new template for providing democracy assistance with great potential, but also with some potential drawbacks.  As it begins to develop its Assistance Unit and review requests for aid, we will get a better picture of how well this new template will work.

Australia’s Foreign Minister released a statement last week announcing that long-time diplomat and democracy advocate Roland Rich has been appointed as the new Executive Head of the United Nations’ Democracy Fund (UNDEF), and is expected to take up his post early next month.  Mr Rich was the founding director of Canberra’s Centre for Democratic Institutions, and has 30 years’ experience in diplomacy and international law.

In an interview released today by Radio Australia, Mr. Rich characterizes the somewhat controversial UNDEF as working “at the level of the people of a nation, not at the level of international relations,” in response to a question regarding the recent use of democratic rhetoric as a political and diplomatic weapon by China, among other savvy, non-democratic states.

It remains to be seen how effective the UNDEF will become under Mr. Rich, who sees the main challenge for the Fund as effectively using “the legitimacy that the UN brings to be involved in countries where bilateral democracy promotion projects are finding it difficult to be effective.”  Given that these countries will also be sovereign members of the U.N., and will most likely resist any international efforts for reform, the challenge Mr. Rich identifies could be a great one.  Despite these serious challenges, however, the UNDEF represents a welcome alternative to the current perception of democracy promotion as an American enterprise, or even as a pet project of President Bush.  Hopefully the UNDEF under Mr. Rich will indeed be able to bring the substantial legitimacy offered by the United Nations to bear on states that have to date been recalcitrant political reformers.