EDITORIAL: Freedom, Fairness, and Other Myths
The views expressed herein represent the views of a majority of the members of the Caravel’s Editorial Board and are not reflective of the position of any individual member, the newsroom staff, or Georgetown University.
Most countries hold elections, but few are full-fledged democracies [Data courtesy of the V-Dem project and the Regimes of the World classification by developed by Luhrmann et al (2018), retrieved from Our World in Data]
The 20th Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Congress drew to a close on October 22, etching into law Xi Jinping’s unprecedented third consecutive term as president of the CCP. The results were, however, unsurprising, as China’s Congress is a symbolic, single-party election. The continuation of Xi’s reign was predetermined long ago: back in 2018, Xi lifted the two-term limit, allowing him to serve a de facto life term. The move signaled Xi’s tightening clench on power and China’s ongoing regression into authoritarianism.
Citizens at home and abroad decried Xi’s political moves, including a rare protest on Sitong Bridge in Beijing that sent shock waves throughout the globe. With the U.S. midterm elections fast approaching, both the Republican and Democratic parties have promised to deliver hard-line policies against Xi if they win. While the international community can recognize China’s elections as hoaxes—mere legitimizing tools for the CCP with no real popular mandate behind them—other traditionally regarded democracies that pride themselves in holding “free and fair” elections manage to escape similar scrutiny for questionable practices. As China demonstrates, it is naive to construct a dichotomy of autocracies and democracies based on the presence of elections.
To complicate that narrative, many authoritarian regimes hold elections, too. Examples range from France under the reign of Napoleon III to the Soviet Union, from late 20th century Mexico to modern-day Egypt. Studies show that autocratic elections are held to measure regime satisfaction, calibrate policy concessions, and preempt overthrows of power.
Elections are certainly not any harbinger for democracy. We must re-examine the role of elections in upholding democracies, and in particular, what “free and fair” elections signify in the context of today’s rampant backsliding.
Who’s afraid of illiberal democracies?
The term “illiberal democracy” seems to be a misnomer: to be both democratic, at the will of the entire people, yet lacking key freedoms that give democratic status its weight and meaning is inherently paradoxical. If anything, a system that weights competition toward a given party, regularly defies set term limits, and possesses an electoral system rife with voting barriers would defy the traditional definition of democracy.
The qualifications for an illiberal democracy are similarly ill-defined, often reflecting not the actual makeup of the state’s electoral system—the definition of democracy is, after all, only that all citizens are capable of voting—but the actions of the government once instated. Russian President Vladimir Putin, for example, utilized a constitutional amendment procedure to essentially abolish term limits, but set the amendment to a popular vote in which a reported 78% of voters approved it. In Uzbekistan, where the government is helmed by a ruling party and several secondary loyal opposition parties, election watchdogs have blamed media restrictions for the 2021 victory of incumbent Shavkat Mirziyoyev.
In both Russia and Uzbekistan, leaders have hijacked the electoral system to maintain power. Certainly these states are illiberal, with opposition leaders routinely jailed and media tightly controlled to influence the state’s image. To call them democracies in any form, however, is misleading. Co-opting the language of democracy while denying freedom of information, itself a crucial component of the UN-protected human right to free expression, defies the very nature of democracy and impinges on vital rights.
Freedom and fairness
The U.S. frequently styles itself the paradigmatic holder of “free and fair” elections. But voting requirements and laws fail to sustain even the pretense of universal adult suffrage. Voting in federal elections is limited to citizens, excluding permanent residents whom resultant policies affect. This is not an insignificant constituency: in 2019, the Department of Homeland Security estimated 13.6 million lawful permanent residents in the country.
In addition, the Sentencing Project estimates that 4.6 million Americans, or 2 percent of the voting age population, will be barred from voting in the 2022 midterm elections due to past felony convictions—a percentage larger than the margin of victory in the 2016 and 2022 elections.
The period following the 2020 election has seen an uptick in so-called “election integrity” legislation that have narrowed mail-in voting windows, limited voting sites and ballot drop locations, and purged voter rolls. The Texas Tribune, for instance, has reported on the difficulties Texas A&M students face in casting their ballots: the only site in the county lies 14 miles from the campus gates.
In Brazil, a free election has initiated a peaceful transfer of power from a defeated, far-right incumbent. Yet free elections do not guarantee representation reflective of the citizenry. AP reports that women make up less than one-sixth of the Brazilian Congress. Moreover, mixed and Black Afro-Brazilians make up a majority of voters but a minority of elected representatives.
A look at electoral procedures also suggests that we use the term “fair” too liberally when discussing elections. The winner of a fair election is a function not just of public sentiment, but of strategically designed rules of the game. Under the Alaska House race’s newly-instated ranked-choice system, for example, Representative Mary Peltola defeated former Governor Sarah Palin to became the first Democrat to represent Alaska’s at-large district since 1972. An expansion of ranked choice voting could reward consensus-building candidates over extremists who prevail from a crowded field.
Free, fair, and failing
Despite holding elections, many countries have slipped into less democratic forms of governance throughout history [[Data courtesy of the V-Dem project and the Regimes of the World classification by developed by Luhrmann et al (2018), retrieved from Our World in Data]
Even when countries do tick the boxes for a “free and fair” election cycle, functional democratic governance may still be elusive.
Haiti offers a prime example of the dubious link between elections and democratization. The country’s elections in 1990—generally labeled as free and fair—propelled priest-turned-politician Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power and interrupted the decades-long rule of military juntas. However, Aristide was ousted after just a few months (and escorted back to Port-au-Prince by US fighter jets). Since then, the Haitian government has been wracked by dirty games of tug-of-war between politicians refusing to leave office, parliament dissolutions, and dishonest or delayed elections. Voter turnout has flopped from 53 percent in 1990 to a meager 17 percent in 2016 amid growing political disillusionment that elections cannot deliver meaningful change.
Elections similarly failed to hold together the sinews of governance in Afghanistan. The U.S. and international community have poured more than $1 billion into three Afghan elections since 2004. Nevertheless, the largely successful and credible elections in 2004 could not be replicated in 2009. In fact, the 2009 electoral cycle became mired in nearly 3,000 allegations of foul play and a string of insurgent attacks.
Today, Port-au-Prince has become a breeding ground for gang violence, and Kabul has been overrun by the Taliban. Despite enjoying the precedent of holding at least one legitimate election, both states are textbook examples of spectacular failures in democratic governance. The problem here—one policymakers tend to overlook—is that there are jagged disconnects between the harsh political realities on the ground and electoral antidotes that the international community attempts to prescribe.
For example, Haiti’s fractured political landscape features a hodge-podge of parties that are animated by personal flair rather than coherent policy platforms, meaning that elections rarely bring about substantive legislative transformations. Meanwhile, Haitian presidential, parliamentary, and local elections are out of sync, which hinders the coordination between distinct levels of government even when electoral outcomes are credible. In Afghanistan, honest elections are similarly unhelpful because the Bonn Agreement designed a centralized government that presides over divergent regional interests. This means that elections are often poisoned with a toxic “winner takes all” dynamic that inspires violence and discord.
As such, polling stations–even functional ones–can’t rein in a country’s worst autocratic tendencies and cure its political woes when its institutions are teetering like a house of cards.
Debunking the Myths
The unsettling truth is that elections are a poor benchmark for democracy. Indeed, markers of a democratic election—freedom and fairness—are often encumbered by procedural deficiencies and inaccessibility. Electoral institutions also have a poor track record as agents of democratization and frequently veil authoritarianism. The narrative that there is an ironclad link between elections and true democracies, therefore, is punctured by a mythology of democracy, one that lacks credence or historical support. Accurate evaluation of states’ ideologies must rest on fulfilling the spirit of democracy, not just the letter, to avoid legitimizing autocrats and single-party rule.
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