Now that open conflict is more or less a matter of mopping up, the focus in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya will now turn to elections, just as it did in Iraq and Afghanistan in years past. As a civilization we are fixated on elections and they (their freedom, their fairness, their numbers of participants, their having happened at all) have become the one all-powerful litmus test of whether or not a nation is a democracy. This is not surprising; when representative democracy first kicked off, voting in elections was a privilege granted to few people. In Great Britain, prior to 1832, 2.7% of the population was entitled to vote for parliament. Only in 1884 were the majority of adult males permitted to vote, with university graduates and businessmen retaining two votes each until 1948. This pattern is fairly similar in most Western countries with universal adult male suffrage usually being achieved in the latter part of the 19th century or earlier years of the 20th century (1), female suffrage being achieved much later, and effective voting rights for marginalized sectors of the population (African-Americans in the USA, Native Canadians) not fully realized until the 1960s. These were all major victories in the cause of equality. If one is going to hold elections, I think we are now all more or less on the same page that suffrage should be universal. But should we be holding elections in the first place? That is the question that has gone under in the general struggle about who should be allowed to vote.
As I previously mentioned, modern representative democracy was consciously modelled on the Roman Republic, and the Romans - who lived in close proximity to the Athenian democratic State and could take a look at it any time they wished - were emphatic about neither being nor wanting to be a democracy. They knew that one characteristic which distinguished their form of government from a democracy was that all of their major officials were elected, whereas the Athenians used elections only for a few key positions (mainly the positions of treasurer and strategoi (generals)). Otherwise, Athenian officials were chosen by lottery. This included everything from judges to officials in charge of such exciting duties as cleaning the streets or ensuring the accuracy of weights and measures. The lottery system was extremely sophisticated, nearly impossible to rig and utilized an apparatus, which (I am not making this up) rather resembled an ancient Lotto 649 machine (you know, that thing where the balls spit out).(2)
Even though this process meant that officials weren't exactly experts in their area of responsibility (a point that didn't matter much, anyway, given as none of them individually exercised any real power), the Athenians kept it up, because they thought that elections were anti-democratic. Elections favoured the rich, well-educated and those willing to do anything to boost their popularity. They created an upwards spiral in which wealth could be turned into votes and votes into wealth, once one was ensconced in an influential, decision-making position. That was what happened in the Roman Republic where this upwards spiral eventually destabilized itself to the point that Republic became Empire.
However, what most people do not fully realize is the extent to which this continues to be true today. The more cash you have, the more likely you are to win an election - and I mean overwhelmingly likely. Not just in the United States where Supreme Court rulings like that issued in Citizens United basically give carte blanche to the influence of wealth on "the political process" - it's true in all electoral systems.
In Irish local elections (and I assure you, nothing could be more mundane than an Irish local election, but if you want to get into Irish politics, this is where you start), each 1% increase in a candidate's spending as a share of their party's total spending resulted on average in that candidate receiving a 0.45% greater share of that party's first preference votes (Ireland uses the single transferable vote). The amount of finance necessary to win an Irish local election can almost be put in concrete terms. For example, a candidate who increases his spend from 500 Euros to 1000 Euros will receive an additional 1.27% of first-preference votes, while a candidate who jumps from 500 Euros to 5000 Euros can expect this to bring him a further 4.20% of the vote, a decisive margin.(3) An early 1980's study in the United States showed similar results: in 1978 there were 307 contested races for the US Congress. The candidate who spent more on his campaign won the seat 78.8% of the time. In 159 out of the 307 contested elections one candidate outspent the other by a ratio of more than 2 to 1, resulting in electoral victory 93% of the time. In 58 of the contested elections, one side outspent the other by a ratio of more than 5 to 1 - in 100% of those cases the winner was the bigger spender.(4) And that was before I was born. Things have escalated since. In the UK, Lord McAlpine, a former treasurer of the Conservative Party, is on record as having once told a reporter "a poster campaign costing £1 or £2 million is a waste of money...but give me £8 million and I will deliver whatever you want.'"(5)
These are just a few examples taken from my thesis research - I could go on like this for twenty pages without breaking a sweat, but I think you get the point, which is that running around like idiots celebrating the fact that someone somewhere in the world has managed to cast a vote is setting our expectations rather low, because before long the statistics in whatever lucky nation that is will also reveal that the better-financed candidate will almost always win the election (anyone think that sounds fair?) and their party functionaries will boast about what they can deliver "for enough money" (creepy, isn't it?). Like clockwork. And this is just scratching the surface on one problem of the electoral system. We'll get to the others in due course.
The good news, however, is that this method of making political decisions via a system which is easily controlled by wealth isn't democracy, nor is it "the way of the world" or "just how things are". This isn't as good as it gets and the next segment of this column will show how this one particular aspect can get better.
(1) Gregory Fox, "The Right to Political Participation in International Law", in Fox and Roth, eds. Democratic Governance and International Law, (Cambridge University Press, 2000) 48 at 52.
(2) For more on this, you can always see Sterling Dow, "Aristotle, the Kleroteria, and the Courts" in Athenian Democracy, (Rhodes, ed.), Edinburgh University Press, 2004
(3) Kenneth Benoit and Michael Marsh, "For a Few Euros More: Campaign Spending Effects in the Irish Local Elections of 1999", (2003) 9 Party Politics, 561, at 575 et seq.
(4) Skelly Wright, "Money and the Pollution of Politics" (1982) 82 Columbia Law Review, 609 at 622.
(5) Martin Linton, Money and Votes, (Institute for Public Policy Research, 1994) at 29.