The End of Power (17 page)

SOURCE:
Adapted from Freedom House,
Freedom in the World: Political Rights and Civil Liberties 1970–2008
(New York: Freedom House, 2010).

There have been exceptions, of course—not just countries where democracy has yet to spread but others where it has experienced reversals. Larry Diamond, a leading scholar in this field, calls the stalling in recent years in countries like Russia, Venezuela, or Bangladesh a “democratic recession.” Yet against this is mounting evidence that public attitudes have shifted. In Latin America, for example, despite persistent poverty and inequality, and constant corruption scandals, opinion polls show greater confidence in civilian government than in the military.
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Even autocracies are less autocratic today. According to one study of the world's democratic electoral systems, Brunei may be the only country where “electoral politics has failed to put down any meaningful roots at all.”
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With far fewer repressive regimes in the world, one might have expected the holdouts to be places where freedom and political competition are increasingly suppressed. But in fact the opposite is true. How? Elections are central to democracy but they are not the only indicator of political openness. Freedom of the press, civil liberties, checks and balances that limit the power of any single institution (including that of the head of state), and other measures convey a sense of a government's grip on society. And the data show that on average, even as the number of authoritarian regimes has gone down, the democracy scores of countries that remain politically closed have gone up. The sharpest improvement occurred in the early 1990s, suggesting that the same forces that pushed so many countries into the democratic column at that time had profound liberalizing effects in the remaining nondemocratic countries as well.

This might be cold comfort to an activist or dissident thrown in jail. And from Cairo to Moscow, and Caracas to Tunis, for every step forward, one can find cautionary tales or counter-examples that should restrain any outbursts of democratic exuberance. The backlash by powerful governments against new democratic tools and techniques is a topic that is often present in the news, and it should come as no surprise that the megapowers are resisting
the trends that are sapping their might. For now, though, what can be said with certainty is that democracies are spreading, and therefore trends within democracies are increasingly harbingers for trends in countries that are not yet fully democratic. Moreover, the numbers and the facts suggest that within democracies—in the intricate mechanics of their voting patterns, parliamentary negotiations, governing coalitions, decentralizations, and regional assemblies—the decay of power has found intense momentum.

We are voting more often. A lot more often. This is a major trend of civic life in the last half-century, at least for people who live in the established Western democracies. In a set of eighteen countries that have been consistently democratic since 1960, including the United States, Canada, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and most of Western Europe, the frequency with which citizens are called to the polls increased in a large majority of cases between 1960 and 2000. Citizens in these countries have thus had more frequent opportunities to select and reject the people who represent them as well as to voice through referenda their preferences in matters of public policy or national priorities. The frequency of elections does not mean that voters are more likely to take part: in many Western countries, abstention rates have gone up in recent years. But those who choose to vote have had more chances to do so—and that means politicians have had to re-earn the public's consent many more times. This constant scrutiny and the burden of recurring electoral contests not only shortens the time horizon that elected officials use to make their decisions or to select the initiatives on which they will invest their time and political capital but also greatly limits their autonomy.

How much more are we voting? A study by Russell Dalton and Mark Gray addressed this question. In the five-year period from 1960 to 1964, the countries they examined held sixty-two nationwide elections (see
Figure 5.4
). In the five-year period from 1995 to 1999, they held eighty-one such elections. Why the increase? The cause may be related to changes in election rules, the growing use of referenda, or the advent of elections for the new regional assemblies that some countries have created. Members of the EU have held regular elections to the European Parliament (EP). The researchers point out that the data cover days when elections are held, not the quantity of separate polls held on each voting day. In fact, the trend may be even stronger than their numbers suggest, because several countries have consolidated multiple elections (e.g., presidential and legislative or legislative and municipal) in a single voting day. The United States, with its strong tradition of fixed national-election days in November every two years, is an exception to this trend—but not because Americans are voting any less frequently. In fact, the two-year renewal cycle of the US House of Representatives is the briefest in all the established democracies, making Americans some of the most called-upon voters in the world.
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F
IGURE
5.4. T
OTAL
N
UMBER OF
E
LECTIONS BY
Y
EAR IN
S
AMPLE OF
C
OUNTRIES
A
ROUND THE
W
ORLD
: 1960–2001

 

SOURCE:
Adapted from Russell Dalton and Mark Gray, “Expanding the Electoral Marketplace,” in Bruce E. Cain et al., eds.,
Democracy Transformed? Expanding Political Opportunities in Advanced Industrial Democracies
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

The world in general is following this trend toward more frequent elections at all levels of government. Matt Golder, a professor at Pennsylvania State University, tracked democratic legislative and presidential elections in 199 countries between 1946 (or the year since they became independent) and the year 2000.
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He found that during this period the 199 nations held 867 legislative elections and 294 presidential elections. In other words, during these fifty-four years (which included more than a decade in which democracy had not become as prevalent as it later became), somewhere in the world there were, on average, two important elections
every month.

As Bill Sweeney, the president of the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES), a nonprofit organization that is the world's most important provider of technical assistance to election officials, told me: “The demand for our services is booming. Almost everywhere, elections are becoming more frequent and we can feel the hunger for systems and techniques that ensure more transparent and fraud-free elections.”
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MORE FREQUENT VOTES ARE JUST ONE WAY IN WHICH POLITICAL
leaders are experiencing greater limits on their latitude of action. Another is the stunning decline of the electoral majority. Nowadays, minorities rule. In 2012, among the thirty-four members of the “rich nations club,” the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, only four featured a government that also had an absolute majority in parliament.
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In India, thirty-five parties shared seats in the 2009 election; no party has won an absolute majority since 1984. In fact, absolute majorities are globally on the wane. In electoral democracies, minority parties have won on average more than 50 percent of the seats in parliament throughout the postwar period; in 2008, minority parties controlled 55 percent of seats on average. But even in countries that are not deemed democracies, minority parties are increasing their clout. In those countries, minority parties held fewer than 10 percent of seats three decades ago; now their average share has risen to nearly 30 percent.
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So when politicians claim a “mandate” these days, they are more often than not engaging in wishful thinking. The type of clear-cut election victory that could justify this terminology is simply too rare. Political scientists point out that even in the United States, where the two-party system would seem to produce clear winners and losers, only one recent presidential election—Ronald Reagan's reelection in 1984, defeating Walter Mondale—qualified as a landslide. Reagan not only swept all but one state and the District of Columbia and their electoral votes but also won a massive share of actual votes, with 59 percent—a margin that no US candidate since then has equaled or beaten.
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This sort of victory is even less likely in systems with three, four, five, or more major parties and many small ones splitting allegiances.

Accordingly, the noble art of governing now depends more heavily on a much dirtier, hands-on skill: forming and maintaining a coalition. And the horse-trading that coalitions require gives small parties more clout to demand particular policy concessions or ministerial positions. In a scattered election landscape, it's good to be a small party. In fact, parties on
the fringes—those with extreme views or a single-issue focus, or that cater to a regional base—can wield more power without needing to dilute their stance to attract middle-of-the-road voters. The chauvinist libertarian Northern League in Italy, the far-right party of Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, the would-be secessionists of the Flemish Popular Party in Belgium, and the various Communist parties in the national parliament and regional assemblies in India have all enjoyed outsized influence in coalitions with other partners who oppose their message but have no choice but to bring them aboard. In December 2011, for example, fierce opposition from two parties in India's Congress Party-led coalition forced Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to set aside plans to let foreign supermarkets own 51 percent of their ventures—a humiliating climb-down.

Wrangling over coalitions reveals the compromises that an election's “winner” has to take on from the outset. In May 2010, elections in the United Kingdom produced a hung parliament, leading to the formation of a coalition between David Cameron's Conservative Party and Nicholas Clegg's Liberal Democrats—two parties with sharp differences on immigration and European integration, among other issues. Both parties made notable concessions as a consequence. But sometimes coalition-building may prove to be an elusive goal. The Netherlands spent four months without a government in 2010. Belgium had it even worse. In 1988, its politicians set a national record when it took them 150 days to form a coalition. That seemed bad enough, but in 2007–2008, beset by worsening tensions between its Dutch-speaking Flemish and its French-speaking Walloon regions, the country went for nine and a half months with no government, while extremist factions agitated for the Flemish region's outright secession. That government resigned in April 2010, followed by another prolonged stalemate. In February 2011, Belgium beat out Cambodia to set a world record for the period a country went without a government; finally, on December 6, 2011, after 541 days of deadlock, it swore in a new prime minister. Tellingly for the diminishing power of politicians, despite this absurd and presumably crippling crisis of government, the economy and society kept chugging along and performed as well as other European neighbors; in fact, it was only a downgrade of Belgium's credit rating by Standard & Poor's that pressured the opposing parties toward a solution.
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Recent research into other aspects of government formation, duration, and termination yield further evidence regarding the decay of power. One fascinating source is provided by Scandinavian researchers who have compiled detailed information on the governments of seventeen European
democracies, stretching back to the end of World War II or, in some cases, to the time when countries in the survey (e.g., Greece, Spain, and Portugal) finally became democratic. The data include Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and the other European heavy-hitters. Even though these research findings cannot be generalized to, say, India or Brazil or South Africa, they still offer compelling headlines about how politics in democracies is fracturing today. Some examples follow.

It's generally the case that though incumbent parties and coalitions have built-in advantages such as patronage and visibility, they are likely to lose some votes, if only because their sympathizers may have lost enthusiasm while their opponents have a record to criticize. In recent years, the incidence of this phenomenon has increased: an analysis of seventeen established democracies in Europe showed that in every decade since the 1940s, the average loss of votes by incumbents facing reelection has risen. In the 1950s, incumbents had lost on average 1.08 percent of the vote; by the 1980s, the average loss was 3.44 percent; and in the 1990s, it almost doubled again, to 6.28 percent. In the 1950s, thirty-five cabinets in the countries surveyed won reelection whereas thirty-seven lost; in the 1990s, only eleven cabinets won reelection whereas forty-six lost. Hanne Marthe Narud and Henry Valen, the political scientists who carried out this analysis, also pointed out that the trend was as strong in established democracies such as the United Kingdom or the Netherlands as it was in new democracies such as Greece or Portugal; in other words, the trend was impervious to the length of democratic experience and tradition.
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