Category: Politics

This is a commentary from someone who thinks that democracy and elections are awesome.  Just keep that in mind.

We’re not sure what the commentary in the US is like, but the BBC commentary and ABC (Australian) commentary that we’ve seen makes the Iraqi election sound like a "smashing success."  From the coalition perspective, this is pretty great.  We’ve heard a lot of commentary especially from pro-war segments that makes the claim that the success of the elections shows that freedom and liberty has spread to one part of the Middle East, and that this shows the power of democracy.

What I (yes, this is TP) think about when I hear this is the following.  Can you name one policy position that any party in this election has taken, aside from something contentless like "prosperity" or "strong Iraq"?  Can you arrange the parties along some sort of ideological spectrum regarding the role of government in business and society?  This is similar to the case of many new democracies.  Parties in Indonesia, for example, are merely vehicles for individuals to seek power.  Parties here have names like Indonesian Democratic Party, Prosperous Justice Party, Community Democracy Party, Democratic Patriots Party, and the like.  There’s not much content behind these names, just a couple powerful figures vying for access to political power.  It’s not quite democracy as we have in the West, at least not yet.

It’s not that this is so much a problem, in Indonesia or in Iraq or in any other place.  It just suggests that before we feel confident that democracy, freedom, and liberty has been brought to Iraq, we ought to see what the elected government does.  I, for one, wish to be cautious in assessing the success of Iraqi democracy, because I have no idea what an elected government would do.  Elections are a first step, and only a first step.  If there’s one thing that living in Indonesia has taught us, it’s that elections are great, but elections are not a sufficient condition for life to be great.  You have to elect good governments, and the governments, once elected, have to do good things, and the people have to listen to what the government says.  We saw on BBC this morning an Iraqi woman who said that she wants her elected government to turn into an Iran-style theocracy.  There’s always the fear that voters can elect terrible leaders.  Remember, Hitler and the NSDAP won legitimate elections.

Some of you will view this as a bit of pessimism by an old-fashioned liberal who is suspicious of the Bush administration.  My response to that is that it’s hard to understand why you would want to ignore a real possibility.  Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst, right?  (Maybe Rumsfeld has learned his lesson now.)  That’s why the Bush administration faces a tough choice right now.  To have heard the rhetoric, and from what we can see of American public opinion, the Bush administration is eager to get ready to pull out of Iraq as soon as possible.  The same line of reasoning that says "you opposed the war, but it’s already happened, so you might as well support the peace" applies again here.  Now that the US has gotten itself so involved in Iraq, the US really cannot afford to pull out too quickly, despite clamberings from some elements of the American left and other populist voices who want to bring the troops home.  I find myself in the awkward position of wanting every individual whom I know in Iraq to come home safely and quickly, but wanting the US to commit to long-term involvement to see the project through.

Consider this thought experiment.  An elected Iraqi government order coalition troops out of Iraq immediately.  We know–remember, this is hypothetical–that if this were to happen, there would be a massive crackdown on Sunni Muslims by pro-government Shiite and Kurd forces.  Should the coalition pull out?  I think that the answer would have to be no, even though an elected Iraqi government has attempted to exert its own authority.

This also puts me in the weird position of having opposed the war when it started, but now hoping that coalition troops remain there for quite some time.

The New Yorker magazine a couple months ago had an article about what political science can tell us about politics.  Turns out, for people interested in voter turnout, it can tell us quite a bit.  The classic study is called The American Voter, reissued every couple years since its original publication in 1960.  It’s a must-have for every grad student who studies American politics and every political consultant.  I bet Karl Rove has a dog-eared copy by his bedside.  I don’t study American politics, so I don’t really know anything more than most of the rest of you do about this election.  I’m particularly bad at elections.  Whenever I try to think about voting, I keep coming across the question of why anyone would ever vote.  The probability that your vote actually is the decisive vote is so small, and the opportunity cost is so high.  But nevertheless, we vote.

Despite my own ignorance, I do happen to know several students of American politics of varying ideological persuasions, and I have been fortunate to receive emails from a bunch of them regarding the recent election, and what we do and do not know about it.  There has been some discussion about whether or not Bush’s electoral victory can be attributed to the existence of anti-gay marriage ballot initiatives in 11 of the states.  This seems to have been a big idea among various liberal groups who seem to believe that homophobic red-staters carried Bush to victory.  Several of them raised the point that if this were true, then you’d expect the change in Bush’s percentage of the two-party vote from 2000 to 2004 to be higher in states with the ballot initiative than in other states.  This is not the case.  In fact, Bush experienced, on average, a bigger vote rise in states without the ballot initiative, although the statistical significance of this change is probably  low.  What this means practically, for all you liberals out there fussing about anti-gay marriage amendments, is that you need to look a little harder to find out why Kerry was less popular than Bush.  More precisely, another friend has noted, this does not mean that anti-gay marriage ballot initiatives were not the reason that Bush fared so well, because indeed Bush may have gained a ton of votes for this reason and lost a ton of votes (but not so many) for some other reason like the economy.  This case may become more plausible when you take into account that turnout increased 1.4% since 2000 in non-initiative states, but increased 6.14% since 2000 in states with the initiative. All that this means is that liberals should not fall into the trap that David Brooks has pointed out of trying to find some simplistic scapegoat for why the Democratic Party did relatively more poorly this election than last time.  It’s very easy to blame someone you think you can feel morally superior to–remember, as Brooks does, "Willie Horton-bashing racists"–and ignore what the true reasons for electoral defeat are.

The other subject, which has had less discussion but which I believe to be fairly important, is why the exit polls were so wrong.  A friend who has an ear to the American Association of Public Opinion Research has reported that the short answer is that no one really knows, but they really want to know why.  Another friend has raised the point that disparities may arise even if the exit polls are unbiased because people vote at different times in the day.  The 2pm polls measured people who tend to vote early in the day, which include both women voters and so-called "angry voters," the former of which have been proven, and the latter of which are believed, to vote earlier in the day.

So, the answer to the question of what political science tells us is not so much that is not available to anyone else in this case, but political scientists are good for synthesizing information and pointing out what is wrong with other arguments.