The Spirit of Democracy, page 41
The problem of neutrality has particularly vexed designs for electoral administration, one of the most sensitive of regulatory functions. In political systems with a tradition of corruption and abuse of power, and in which democratic norms are not deeply rooted, the electoral administration must have constitutional autonomy. There are a number of possible models. In Costa Rica, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal is virtually a fourth branch of government, whose members are elected to staggered six-year terms by a two-thirds vote of the Supreme Court. In India, the electoral commission’s independence is protected by explicit constitutional mandate and by a powerful chairman who is appointed by the nonpartisan president. In other countries, independence is attained through supervision by a judicial body or by being made accountable to the parliament rather than the executive branch.30 More generally, where there is some tradition of judicial independence at higher levels, it may make sense to vest the appointment and supervision of a number of horizontally accountable agencies with the constitutional court.
MOBILIZING CIVIL SOCIETY
The Thai experience shows that even elaborate and well-designed accountability institutions are at risk of being conquered or subverted unless society has the will, the organization, and the resources to defend its institutions. Horizontal accountability needs to be stimulated and reinforced by vertical pressures from civil society, as well as from outside (the subject of the next chapter).
As we saw in chapter 7, a vigorous civil society is vital to sustaining democracy. Civil society deepens and invigorates democracy by checking and reversing abuses of state power, recruiting and training new political leaders, developing new agendas for reform, and raising citizens’ awareness of their rights and responsibilities. In addition, civil society can be a vital instrument for opening access and transcending a predatory state by breaking down the vertical bonds of clientelism and dependency, fostering horizontal forms of political participation and trust, generating new bonds of interest that cut across ethnic and local identities, and organizing citizens to demand “more effective public service.”31 Thus, Robert Putnam was also right when he wrote, “Tocqueville was right: Democratic government is strengthened, not weakened, when it faces a vigorous civil society.”32
Three forms of societal accountability stand out:33
NONGOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATIONS. A variety of civic organizations—bar associations, women’s organizations, student groups, religious bodies, think tanks, election monitoring and human rights groups, and other citizens’ watchdog groups—may form coalitions to lobby for constitutional changes to improve governance while also monitoring the conduct of public officials. Transparency International (TI), with incipient or established chapters in more than ninety countries, has demonstrated the vital and creative role that international civil society can play in forming coalitions with domestic constituencies for good governance and accountability. While not all of TI’s national chapters are equally dedicated or effective, in many countries they represent the most focused civil society effort ever to monitor the conduct of government agencies and officials, to press for legal and institutional reforms to promote transparency and control corruption, and to raise public consciousness about the problems and costs of corruption. Each chapter pursues its own agenda, but they are all guided by a common operational philosophy, which includes focusing on long-term, systemic issues, avoiding the investigation of specific cases of corruption or the naming of corrupt officials, and seeking participation and cooperation from across the social spectrum in a strictly nonpartisan manner.34 Both the international organization and national chapters have drawn extensive support from bilateral and multilateral aid donors, including the World Bank. Internationally, TI has also been a driving force behind the adoption of the Anti-Bribery Convention of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
A wide range of other NGOs, research centers, and social movements are monitoring government conduct, documenting abuses of human rights by the police and other officials, and “demanding information about the financial assets of public officials or denouncing electoral fraud or violations of environmental rights.”35 Independent democracy and public policy research institutes, like the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (IDASA), the Ghana Center for Democratic Development, a similarly named center in Nigeria, and dozens of others in the developing world36 have a particularly important role to play because they have the expertise and resources to examine policies and budgets and to gather evidence from within their own countries. Since its founding in 1987, during the period of South Africa’s transition, IDASA’s policy research and advocacy have expanded to a breathtaking scope that makes it one of the largest, most multidimensional and effective pro-democracy organizations in the developing world. Today it tracks government budgets, spending, and service delivery; monitors the legislative process at both the national and provincial levels; surveys public opinion; periodically audits the quality of democracy; tracks the uses of money in South African politics; develops human rights training materials for schools and communities; grooms new leaders from the grass roots; conducts training, technical assistance, and workshops to improve local governance; promotes community dialogues; and campaigns for the “right to know” by developing legislation to promote access to information and protect whistle-blowers. Its programs also address judicial ethics and accountability, local government funding, government responses to the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and demands for transparency in a parliamentary scandal over abuse of travel vouchers. As its work becomes institutionalized in South Africa, IDASA is increasingly reaching out to build wider regional partnerships on issues such as governance, electoral administration, and police reform, and it also conducts election-monitoring and training activities in other African countries.37
AN INDEPENDENT MASS MEDIA. Transparency, virtually by definition, requires free and open flows of information. Without a free and pluralistic press, transparency is not possible. Pluralism entails market competition as well as diversity. The emergence of professional journalistic norms and standards is key to the growth of press freedom, vigor, and autonomy, which in turn may advance or accelerate democratization, as it did in Mexico.38 Controlling corruption requires a press that is free from intimidation and restraint; a press that has the resources to investigate rumors and evidence of corruption; and a press that has the maturity, restraint, and professionalism to eschew loose and sensationalist charges based on any whisper of malfeasance. This latter point needs emphasis, because if the press is constantly accusing without credible evidence, it will discredit itself and the quest for accountability. For much of the developing and postcommunist world, it will take many years to develop the needed levels of pluralism, capacity, and responsibility, even where a climate of freedom exists.
Investigative reporting of corruption requires training and resources that few newspapers and magazines can afford. Yet it is increasingly becoming a field in itself, with an accumulation of lessons, tools, guides, clues, and standards, and a growing international network of cooperating organizations. The Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism trains journalists in this area and has published a comprehensive manual, Investigating Corruption, which distills a wealth of information on how to interview victims and eyewitnesses; catch wrongdoers in the act; look for procedural gaps and irregularities; map the structure of power and influence; trace money flows; determine who benefits in society; investigate the assets, lifestyles, conflicts of interest, and public behavior of public officials; and uncover their friends, relatives, and cronies.39 The growing public disgust with corruption generates a strong market demand for such reporting, and the mass media need to develop the skills and tools to supply it.
A VIGILANT CITIZENRY. The last line of vertical defense is a vigilant, politically aware, and informed citizenry, concerned with public affairs and ready to utilize one or more of the overlapping mechanisms of accountability to report corruption and challenge abuses of power. Citizen reporting, including whistle-blowing by lower-level government and corporate officials, can be powerfully facilitated by laws that offer protections from dismissal and other retaliation and even incentives for reporting wrongdoing. In addition, government can do much to facilitate citizen reporting of corrupt conduct by providing ready and confidential channels, particularly via the Internet. The GAO, for example, operates the “FraudNET to facilitate reporting of allegations of fraud, waste, abuse, or mismanagement of federal funds.”40 Anyone may report evidence of wrongdoing over the Internet, or by e-mail, fax, or postal mail. Citizens thus are able to augment the efforts of civil society organizations, the mass media, and political parties and accountability institutions.
New rules and organizations take time to develop capacity and authority. As Robert Putnam observes, “Those who build new institutions and those who would evaluate them need patience.”41 But before they can take root, they must take shape. Getting to the roots of corruption and bad governance requires comprehensive institutional reforms to open up access to information and power and to constrain the way that state power is exercised. Why should government officials—even if they are elected more or less democratically—want to accept these constraints?
Occasionally, political leaders come along who embrace the reform cause and even lead it, out of conviction and perhaps an enlightened view of the long-term bases of their success. The more old structures of domination have begun to dissolve under the pressure of popular mobilization or economic development, the greater the possibility for a leader—such as Ernesto Zedillo in Mexico or Fernando Henrique Cardoso in Brazil—to step forward and push the reform cause. But rulers rarely blaze the trail to reform when the political status quo leans heavily toward a predatory state that offers too many potent inducements to resist. In predatory-state contexts, reforms are spurred by complex coalitions of actors from below, in civil society, from within the state structures of accountability, and from outside, in the international community.
International actors can strengthen civil society actors, support their governance reform initiatives, improve the capacity of a wide range of horizontal accountability institutions, and press government leaders to accept painful reforms. But pressing successfully means having, and then effectively mobilizing, powerful leverage, as I explain in the next chapter.
PROMOTING DEMOCRACY EFFECTIVELY
Beyond its sheer scope, the most distinctive feature of the third wave of democratization has been the rise of a broad range of international efforts and initiatives to promote democracy. More than in any previous era, established democracies have pursued policies, pressed diplomacy, and built institutions and organizations to advance democracy elsewhere in the world. As we have seen in earlier chapters, these initiatives have paid significant dividends, helping to bring democracy to such diverse countries as Portugal, the Philippines, Poland, Chile, South Africa, Serbia, and Ukraine. In these cases and others, international efforts have helped tip the balance in favor of a democratic transition or at least accelerated the pace of transition and ensured that it would, for the most part, be peaceful. In many cases, assistance, often through small grants to grassroots organizations, has helped to till the soil of authoritarian stagnation and inspired democratic hopes and capacities, allowing democrats to prepare and mobilize for change when dictatorships fell into crisis. Ongoing political and economic aid efforts, both governmental and nongovernmental, have sought to create the foundations for successful democratic functioning as well as the economic reform and development that can help to consolidate public support for democracy. The expansion and refinement of democracy promotion and the growing international legitimacy of peaceful efforts to support local democratic initiatives are major reasons to be hopeful about the long-term future of democracy.
Yet, the authoritarian states that consider themselves as targeted for extinction orchestrated a pronounced backlash against democracy promotion. Since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the public in many democracies, including the United States, has with growing intensity rejected the use of force to impose democracy elsewhere. This is true whether in Iraq (which is widely viewed as one such failed effort), the Middle East more generally, or other regions. Peaceful and especially multilateral efforts to foster and sustain democracy now run up against a brick wall of authoritarian resistance, at a time when global efforts to combat international terrorism seem to be taking precedence over concerns about democracy and human rights.
Moreover, foreign aid and other so-called international development assistance programs often do not take account of the underlying logic of politics—the incentives that lead officeholders to misuse aid, repress the opposition, rig elections, and barricade themselves in power. If the whole world is going to become democratic, these assistance efforts and their accompanying diplomacy must target the way politics itself works. We need a transformation in the way the rich, established democracies—the “donor countries”—relate to the less developed world.
Despite recent reversals, the democratic progress of the past three decades shows that there is no intrinsic economic, cultural, or religious obstacle to democracy and that democracy is becoming an increasingly universal value. But in order for the promise of a democratic world to be realized, the international community will need to do much more to generate the conditions that facilitate democratic development—and do it more wisely.
POLITICAL ASSISTANCE
Not every dimension of our approach internationally requires reinvention. As recounted in chapter 5, international efforts to support and strengthen democratic institutions have gained impressive scope, depth, and experience since the establishment of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in 1983.1 From its initially modest efforts, NED has grown dramatically to over $80 million in annual congressional appropriations.2 In addition, NED’s four core institutes—the National Democratic Institute (NDI), the International Republican Institute (IRI), the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE), and the Solidarity Center—receive tens of millions of dollars each year in other government funding.3 Counterpart organizations have emerged, such as Britain’s Westminster Foundation, the Netherlands’ Institute for Multiparty Democracy, and the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy.4 In the summer of 2007, the Canadian parliament was encouraged by its foreign affairs committee to create a NED-style “arms-length Canada foundation” for supporting democratic development around the world.5 Traditional aid donors are now providing much more extensive assistance—amounting to over one billion dollars a year each from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), European aid agencies, and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP)—for democracy and governance reform (including civil society).
Democracy assistance programs vary in effectiveness and impact. Sometimes the impact is visible only later, when a moment of democratic opportunity arises and an array of democratic actors—including opposition parties, NGOs, professional associations, business groups, and trade unions—are able to take advantage of it because international assistance over the years has widened their support base and enhanced their organizational skills. Democratic assistance to state institutions sometimes has little impact because there is no political will to make use of it. As a result, parliaments and courts may have more modern buildings, advanced computer equipment, larger staffs, and better training, but still do not effectively stand up to executive branch abuses of democracy and human rights.
A few key principles can guide democracy assistance efforts. First and foremost is the need for local ownership, not government ownership. Assistance efforts must be grounded in the interests and needs of societal stakeholders, most of all the general public.6 For democracy assistance to be legitimate, effective, and sustainable, it must respond to local priorities and initiatives rather than impose preconceived formulas from the outside. One reason for the NED’s success is that it receives and funds proposals generated by organizations that are struggling to build, improve, or reform democracy in their various countries. These proposals, and the individuals and organizations who submit them, must be carefully vetted and periodically evaluated, given the opportunism and even charlatanism that seep into any field where funding becomes available. Further, democracy promoters need to formulate broad strategic goals, as the NED does every five years.7 Potential grant recipients may consult with foundation program officers to identify comprehensible goals and feasible projects. They may also work with parties, business associations, or trade unions to develop a reform agenda. In the end, the best democracy work comes when the country’s own stakeholders identify the imperatives and opportunities on the ground and craft programs in response.
Local ownership is necessary not only for financial grants but for the design of strategies for democratic change. Donors should involve individuals and organizations from the country when they target obstacles and priorities for democratic development. Such bottom-up assessments yield surprising and valuable insights. For example, based on Western experience, rule-of-law assistance programs instinctively tend to invest in courts. “Yet it is by no means clear that courts are the essence of a rule of law system in a country,” according to Thomas Carothers, since “courts play a role late in the process.”8 The first question is, What laws are they enforcing? If the country’s laws are undemocratic, a strong court system will do little to promote democracy. Further, in many societies traditional practices of dispute resolution hold more legitimacy and, in any case, are far more accessible. Police may be abusive, poorly trained, and poorly paid, but they are also a much more frequent point of contact between citizens and the state than are the courts. And then there is the underlying issue “that poorly performing judicial systems in many countries [serve] the interests of powerful actors.”9 Thus, a bottom-up assessment may point to the need to support other categories of rule-of-law reform—such as alternative dispute resolution mechanisms, traditional justice practices, civic education and empowerment, legal aid clinics, police training and monitoring, and human rights organizations—if anything significant and lasting is to be achieved.10
