Max Cameron

I was recently asked by the Inter-American Dialogue to answer the following question (in 250 words):

Peruvian President Ollanta Humala on Dec. 4 declared a state of emergency 60 days in the Cajamarca region. Local groups say a $4.8 billion gold mine will be detrimental to the region’s water supply and protests have threatened the project. The conflict also spurred a major cabinet reshuffle in the young government; Humala replaced 10 ministers on Monday, including Prime Minister Salomon Lerner. How well is Humala balancing the desire to promote economic growth with the demands from his base of support? Will the confrontation in Cajamarca erode support for Humala and his party? Does the government have a strategy to deal with the protests? What changes will the cabinet reshuffle bring?

Here is my reply, which appears in the Latin America Advisor, Monday, December 19, 2011:

The cabinet crisis and emergency measures have created alarm about the prospect that President Humala is taking a hard line on protests, aligning with investors over local communities, asserting the power of the military, and adopting a caudillo-style of rule. These are all real concerns, and deserve to be watched closely, but they may be overstated. The cabinet retains members like Rafael Roncagliolo who inspire confidence for those who want to see a balanced approach to mining and consultations with affected populations. Nobody said it was going to be easy to manage the hundreds of conflicts created by extractive industries. It is unclear that the military has more power in the new cabinet, or that Humala is building the foundation of a civil-military regime. At least Humala is trying to govern. Previous governments have sat on their hands or even made protests worse by either ham-handed repression or ill-conceived concessions. That said, the loss of Lerner is significant — he has been credited with much of Humala’s success so far. Emergency measures can easily provide cover for the abuse of power. The rupture with Toledo and Peru Posible creates challenges for making the legislature work. Although I’m not signing in the chorus of denunciations just yet, the emerging pattern is troubling.

A shorter version of this essay appeared in The Mark, December 20, 2011.

The Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions recently organized a conference on “Why Don’t (More) Good People Enter Politics?” One of the main conclusions of the conference was: we need to empower ordinary parliamentarians. There is a pretty powerful logic behind this idea.

Let’s start with the basics. What do we want from a leader? I think it is fair to say that nobody likes a phony. We don’t want people in politics who we don’t believe and can’t trust. But politics seems to attract just that kind of person. Why?

One of the reasons why “good” people (for the sake of argument, lets say we mean by this people who try to be truthful and treat others with respect) don’t want to go into politics is that they have to pretend to be something that they are not. As Carole Taylor put it, “we expect politicians to be perfect, and if you’re not perfect then you better pretend you’re perfect. And if you do that then you rule out most of the world.”

She said that when she has tried to encourage people to run for office they often say things like: “I could not withstand the kind of media scrutiny that looks at everybody I’ve ever dated, every business I’ve ever been in, every person I’ve ever had coffee with, and say that I have led an error free existence.”

Media scrutiny discourages good people from participating—and encourages those who do to pretend to be something that they’re not. This is an especially powerful inhibitor for women who don’t want their children to see them dragged through the mud and slandered.

Another way politics selects phonies (or turns otherwise good people into phonies) is by creating disincentives to admit mistakes or to change one’s views. In an adversarial game there is no incentive to admit your opponent may be right. “I’ve never belonged to a political party with which I agreed 100 percent of the time,” said Rick Anderson, a leading political strategist and consultant. “There is no such beast. But day after day after day partisans are expected to go out and pretend otherwise. The other folks are always wrong, we’re always right. The other folks are all here for the wrong reasons; we’re all good folks, here for the right reasons. These things are not true, and the beginning of a deceptive approach to politics starts in that partisan caucus mentality. We can’t acknowledge that the other people have anything to say.”

When we talk about partisanship, we’re talking about parties. As a political scientist, I am reluctant to criticize parties because I know they are an essential part of democracy: modern, large-scale democracy does not work without them. And yet, Anne McLellan, former Deputy Prime Minister, citing a recent report by the Samara Foundation, noted that for many parliamentarians “their own party was identified as the reason they could not do the job they believed they were set to Ottawa to do on behalf of their constituents.” Parties have become, as Anderson puts it, “vehicles for obstructing critical thinking.”

The problem is not parties per se, but the fact that partisanship has reached such toxic levels. Again, Carole Taylor said: “I don’t think [politics] should be a bash-bash kind of thing… it should be about the arguments of ideas and different approaches to things, and there should be an arena…where I can say I think we should do this, the other party says this.” In other words, there should be scope for meaningful debate and deliberation. Instead, parties implicitly tell candidates: “Come to me with your good ideas.” But, says Taylor, there is a hidden transcript: “Walk through the door and I’ll never hear your ideas again.”

Taylor is not saying there should be no party discipline: “I do think if you say matters of confidence, money bills, we’re all together, but there is room if it is some issue that’s really, really important to you for you to speak up and express it. If you can’t express it and in some instances you can’t even express it in caucus why are you there? What is the point?” If we make politicians pretend that they always disagree with the other side, and their side is always right, then the political process manufactures phonies.

“You do see some good people who agree to run,” says Taylor. “You know their past, you know what they’ve done; you can’t wait until they get in there. And they get in there and they’re squished because they have to absolutely do what the Prime minister or the Premier says and don’t have any chance to debate. So question period is meaningless – I mean it is meaningless – because everybody is going to toe the party line, so they just yell at each other. There is no chance to say ‘I want you guys to think about this from this point of view—you might change your mind.’”

Of course, not all partisanship is a bad thing. “Democracy,” former BC Premier Mike Harcourt reminds us, “is war without bullets.” Sam Sullivan, former Mayor of Vancouver, also puts it colorfully: “You’re a boxer, you get in the ring,” he said. “And when someone smacks you in the face, it’s your job, that’s what happens.” Politics is clearly not for the thin-skinned! “There is nothing wrong with partisanship about ideas about values” insists Harcourt. As a former criminal defense lawyer, he appreciates the value of an adversarial system, “allowing different values and different ideas to clash.” The problem is when partisanship becomes “becomes a grotesque sideshow, as question period has become. It’s when you get into really vicious negative advertising that is just there to pummel somebody—and it works,” he adds.

So what are the limits of partisanship? Can we be ethical partisans? When does partisanship serve the public good, and when do it hurt it? The answer is, surely, rooted in the very principles that underpin our democratic institutions. And these principles need to be better understood and articulated.

We make ordinary members of parliament irrelevant when we assume that parties are made up of people with a Vulcan mind-meld on all matters of policy. We make matters worse by insisting that parliament is an electoral college for forming government. And we compound the problem by subordinating the role of the opposition to ineffectually criticizing but never getting in the way of government business. We might as well do as comedian Rick Mercer suggests and tell parliamentarians to stay in their ridings rather than go to Ottawa: “Do something useful; help someone fill out a passport application.”

Perhaps the underlying problem is that we have lost the ability to articulate visions of the public good and we’re losing confidence in the ability of our political process to generate them. But our institutions cannot work unless their incumbents are committed to the idea that democracy is about more than voting for elective dictatorships.

As Rick Anderson put it, the purpose of parliament is not to pass the government’s budget or legislation but to decide what they should be! Parliament is supposed to be a check on the power of government to raise taxes and spend public money. It is not supposed to simply do the government’s bidding. And it is supposed to legislate on matters of public interest. But these powers are gutted to the extent that party leaders and their whips control access to cabinet positions, committee assignments, and other resources that are absolutely necessary for parliamentarians to do their jobs.

This is compounded when members of parliament enter office with only the foggiest sense of the job description. And they make it worse when they passively accept the idea that there is no place for free votes and meaningful deliberation in the House.

So how can we make our democracy better? In the spirit of generating an ongoing conversation on these matters, here are some initial thoughts on an agenda for democratic reform that came out of the conference at UBC:

First, the purpose and role of parliament and parliamentarians in our constitutional system needs to be re-examined, with an eye to strengthening our understanding of its essential function in the separation of powers as a check on the executive.

Second, the culture of politics needs to be cleaned up. Independence should be rewarded and celebrated, not punished; leaders should expect less deference from their caucus members.

Third, with the caveat that disciplined parties are essential in a parliamentary democracy, there is scope within the political process for more free votes, stronger committees, and less centralized decision-making.

Fourth, votes of confidence should be used to reinforce parliamentary power over the executive; it should not be a bludgeon used by the executive to subordinate the parliament.

Fifth, the nomination process needs to be better regulated and less controlled by the party leadership so that individual MPs may be freer to act as powerful and responsive representatives of their constituencies.

And finally, for all those would-be candidates out there, here is a further thought. Carole Taylor said “today if I were starting all over again and the Prime Minister asked me to run I would make it a condition of my running that I would be free on very important issues to me to not vote the party line. Otherwise, I wouldn’t go.” Anderson imagined saying: “I’ll run when 50 other people run at the same time – and I don’t care whether they’re left wing or right wing, for this party or that party – but that our common agreement is that we’ll support each other when we break with our party line.”

If you’re asked to run, don’t check your conscience, free will, and ethical principles at the door.

Download the full report on the CSDI conference here.

Watch the videos of the conference on YouTube here.

By Carlito Pablo, November 24, 2011
Straight.com

Many people might be wondering what lessons the B.C. NDP can learn from its farm team, Vision Vancouver.

While New Democrats struggle to shake off their image of being antibusiness, Vision has cozied up to corporate interests and, at the same time, maintained its organized-labour and environmental connections.

With Vision’s decisive win in the November 19 civic election, the question now is whether or not the B.C. NDP can use the former’s formula for success. Political-science professor Maxwell Cameron doesn’t provide a simple answer. Instead, the UBC academic starts by claiming that the NDP is not what it was.

“The NDP now is, like any other party, essentially an electoral machine,” Cameron told the Georgia Straight in a phone interview. “It no longer represents a mass movement. It has ties to labour that are increasingly frayed. The labour movement itself is no longer confident that it represents an alternative. In fact, many labour movements can be very conservative. And far from representing an alternative society, the perception is that labour represents the status quo. The NDP is stuck with a kind of a mismatch between a conception of itself, its vision for itself, and what it really is.”

Turning to Vision, the director of UBC’s Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions noted that it provides “a shining example of what a smart, progressive-minded political party can do to win the support of environmentalists who want—whether it’s densification or bike lanes or backyard chickens—those sorts of policies, which cost very little to the business community”.

“Meanwhile, business is also happy with what the party represents in terms of its management of the economy and its position on development,” Cameron continued. “The ability of [Vision mayor] Gregor Robertson to get the backing of major business people just simply reminds everyone that there’s absolutely no reason in principle why a party that reinvents itself along those lines can’t be very successful. The caution is these issues will not always align in the same way. What works at the municipal level I don’t think is necessarily going to work at the provincial or federal level.”

He recalled attending a recent meeting of New Democrats. At that gathering, one participant made the case for eliminating government subsidies for Alberta’s tar sands. A labour person stood up to oppose it, saying there are 15,000 jobs in that sector.

“That’s the kind of discussions you have within the NDP,” Cameron said. “There are areas where there are going to be choices to make between a business approach and an environmental approach.”

According to the professor, those choices are going to be awkward with the NDP. “One, because the NDP wants to persuade business that it is fiscally responsible and pro-growth but also because labour is as conservative as business on these issues—in fact, more conservative,” Cameron said. “So, in other words, one can’t assume that just because Gregor Robertson has been very successful in finding that kind of middle ground that it will always be there.”

Former NDP cabinet minister Bob Williams argued that asking what the B.C. NDP can learn from Vision’s relationship with the business sector is like talking apples and oranges.

“In the city, the corporate interest is mainly in land development,” Williams told the Straight by phone. “And they [the city] are able to create the conditions or the rules or the zoning or the development permits that the corporate folks are looking for, so clearly there’s an interest in getting along with the councillors. That’s a very different ball game than the provincial level.”

The Vancity director also noted that on many issues New Democrats have taken positions other than what corporations are looking for. That includes serious questions about the Alberta-to-B.C. oil pipeline by Enbridge.

“A really cozy relationship between all elements of the corporate sector and the NDP may not be what most people want,” Williams said. “Certainly not me.”

Former NDP cabinet minister Tim Stevenson has been elected three times as a council candidate for Vision. In an interview two days after his reelection, Stevenson noted by phone that although many say B.C. NDP leader Adrian Dix is “too ideological”, people are now “finding he’s very pragmatic”.

“You’ve got to be pragmatic nowadays,” Stevenson told the Straight. “People want vision, but they want pragmatism at the same time.”

From The Vancouver Sun. November 16, 2011, p. A15.

Some people say politicians are no good. They’re all the same – they’re only in it for themselves.

Others say politicians get a bad rap. Politics is a tough life, one that demands finding a balance between power and principle, between the interests of the party and the public interest.

Recently we had a taste of this debate when two Opposition New Democratic Party members of Parliament from Thunder Bay, Ont., voted with the Conservative government to scrap the long-gun registry. They were promptly muzzled, removed from their committee posts, and their travel privileges were suspended.

They were punished by party brass for doing what they thought was right for their constituents. This is the kind of thing that turns off many voters.

Getting good people to go into politics is an age-old problem, one that preoccupied ancient philosophers like Plato, Aristotle and Confucius. They believed that a well-governed state demanded virtuous citizen and rulers.

The most important virtue in politics is what Aristotle called “practical wisdom.” In their book, Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing, Barry Schwartz and Ken Sharpe define this as the moral will and skill to deliberate and act on what is right for one’s self and community, and to do so for the right reasons.

The idea that we are ethical problemsolvers has found surprising support in research from a range of fields.

Kiley Hamlin at the University of B.C. has found that babies prefer those who help rather than harm others, as well as those who reward positive social behaviour and punish wrongdoers – even before they can speak!

Neuroscientists have identified oxytocin as a crucial hormone that fosters caring and reciprocity among mammals. It kicks in when we care for offspring or engage in other forms of sociability. As Patricia Churchland says in her recent book Braintrust: “It feels good to do good.”

Evolutionary biologists like Frans de Waal have shown that empathy is part of the evolutionary advantage that humans share with other mammals.

I’m not arguing that moral character comes naturally. We are all capable of appalling ethical lapses.

Fifty years ago, Stanley Milgram demonstrated that experimental subjects were willing to administer lethal dosages of electroshocks to others simply because they were told to do so by a scientist. But my colleague Sylvia Berryman recently argued that even these experiments should not lead us to conclude that practical wisdom is beyond our grasp.

Milgram’s subjects failed to properly perceive the ethical decision they faced and thus acted in ways they would later regret.

But they were nevertheless making ethical choices: to support science, to be obedient to authority.

They just didn’t understand that the experimenter had put them in an ethical position that required them to step outside one role and play another.

We learn ethics through experience, not by reading textbooks or following rules.

As Aristotle put it: “We become brave by exposing ourselves to danger and learning to make light of it.” Similarly, politics demands what Max Weber called a “trained relentlessness in viewing the realities of life and – [measuring] up to them inwardly.”

We need to pay a lot more attention to how our major institutions structure the roles which shape how we act – and what we experience.

Canadians enjoy some of the best political institutions in the world. But the power of Parliament has been steadily eroded.

Parliament is a place for deliberation and legislation. It is the one branch of government whose supreme duty it is to make the general rules by which all citizens shall abide.

A recent study by the Samara Foundation found that MPs perform a variety of roles beyond the traditional conventions of the Westminster system. The Parliament is supposed to legislate, hold the government accountable and determine the life of the government through votes of confidence.

Today MPs do many other things besides. They have to find a balance between representing constituents and doing what they think is best; between advocating local and the national interest; between advancing the interests of their party and doing what is right for the country; between providing services to voters and developing policy and legislation.

Sadly, parliamentarians increasingly do what party leaders tell them rather than what they think is right. Subordination to the party begins with the nomination process, a typically opaque and poorly regulated affair. Individual candidates often come out of the process more beholden to the party machine than to constituents.

When they get into Parliament, elected officials are often unsure what they are supposed to be doing. It quickly becomes clear that legislation is a small part of their job. Why? The process of making policy has been concentrated in the hands of party leaders, the cabinet, and above all the prime minister.

Parliamentarians routinely vote for bills they don’t like, or don’t understand. To the extent they are involved in meaningful deliberation it is in committees or the caucus. What the media see are the circus antics of Question Period.

The media contribute to excessive partisanship by reporting adversarial theatrics to the detriment of the less entertaining behind-the-scenes work.

Is it possible for Canadians to take back Parliament? Not if we simply tune out. As Plato said, the greatest punishment for those who refuse to rule is to be governed by those less worthy.

A better response is to reward politicians who demonstrate they have the practical wisdom to figure out what is right for their communities and to act accordingly.

Which brings us back to the dissident MPs in Thunder Bay. Whatever one may think of the long-gun registry, surely MPs should be allowed to speak for their constituents without being muzzled.

We the people authorize MPs to legislate on our behalf. Should we allow political parties – publicly funded organizations – to control their votes to the point that they no longer speak for us?

Our system is built on the principle of parliamentary supremacy. In practice we have a partyarchy – the rule of political parties at the expense of our constitutional order. We need politicians with the moral skill and will to restore balance to our parliamentary system.

Maxwell A. Cameron is director of the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions at UBC, which is organizing a conference on “Why (More) Good People Don’t Enter Politics” on Nov. 24-25. As Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, he has also organized a colloquium series on Practical Wisdom with additional sponsorship from Green College.

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

The following note was prepared for an upcoming conference at the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions, at UBC, on November 24-25, 2011.

THE QUESTION TO ASK

“Why don’t more good people want to go into politics?”

I put this question to Mike Harcourt, former Premier of BC, over lunch. I want to know whether he thinks this would be a good place to begin a public conversation about Canadian democracy. He smiles wryly and tells a story about a talk he gave at UBC’s Vancouver Institute after he left the premier’s office. He asked his audience to think of words that came to mind when he said “politician.” Most of the audience came up with expletives like “scum bag” and “crook.”

And yet Harcourt, who calls himself a “recovering politician,” continues to be astonished by the quality of people in politics today. He recommends I read a couple of books written by Steve Paikin on the extraordinary qualities of many elected leaders—as well as the heavy personal price they often pay. Like Harcourt, Paikin is concerned about the diminishing prestige of Canadian politicians.

In one notable passage in The Life, Paikin says: “Unless the memories of my blessedly normal childhood in Hamilton, Ontario, are completely indicative of nothing—and I don’t think they are—there was a time when young people in this country grew up thinking politicians were regular, decent folk.” Politicians “weren’t up there with hockey players, but they weren’t disreputable bums either” (2001: 39).

So why is it that politics has come to be, as one political scientist calls it, “the despised profession” (May 2001)?

Pamela Goldsmith-Jones has part of the answer. The energetic mayor of West Vancouver points to excessive bickering. “If I got up in the morning and decided to spend the entire day arguing with my husband, where would that get us?” Many Canadians, she suggests, see their politicians as doing little more.

“My style is definitely consensual,” she told Vancouver Magazine (June 2011, p. 56) “An adversarial system presumes that people want to see a fight—a winner and a loser.” But that is not right for local politics.

“Being mayor is the best job in the world,” she continues, because it involves working with people to get things done without the constant partisanship that bogs down other levels of government—and some other municipalities. Goldsmith-Jones is evidently much sought to run provincially, but (so far, at least) she is having none of it.

The theme of partisanship comes up in a different way in the political career or David Emerson. Emerson’s decision to enter politics after a successful career in business is not unusual. A recent study of former parliamentarians found that few were what one might think of as “consummate insiders” (Loat and MacMillan 2010: 13). Many entered politics relatively late in life, often unexpectedly, and they did so because they were approached by a friend or acquaintance and asked to run. These parliamentarians tended to think of themselves as “outsiders.”

After crossing the floor to become a government cabinet minister in the Tory government, however, David Emerson was startled by the visceral hatred toward the Liberal Party in the Tory caucus (Martin 2010, p. 3); he was also surprised by the intensely negative reaction to his decision to cross the floor by his former Liberal colleagues.

Politicians like Emerson are different from what Jeffrey Simpson calls “political lifers” – people who spend their entire lives in politics (Globe and Mail, August 28, 2010). For David Duncan Chesman, Q.C., a partner in Gowlings in Vancouver and the former elected Chair of Vancouver`s Board of Parks and Recreation, the largely self-appointed career politicians who occupy and surround elected offices are a disincentive to talented citizens circulating through the political system, renewing leadership.

Perhaps the skepticism about politicians derives from the very nature of political life itself. To be a good politician you need what Max Weber called an “instinct for power,” but you also have to persuade people that wish to serve the public. It’s a difficult balancing act. The problem, in other words, is not just the kind of people who enter politics, but also the activity into which they enter.

Sam Sullivan, the former mayor of Vancouver, and soon to be appointed community professor at Green College in UBC, distinguishes government from politics: “They require different values. In politics, you have to rigorously favour your friends and oppose your enemies, but in good government you have to be impartial, and try to rule for all society. Once you’re in government, you should pursue government. I have a disdain for those who see government as merely an extension of politics – it’s harmful to the public good” (Evans 2009, p. 5).

The Best Laid Plans, an engaging novel by Terry Fallis, winner of the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour, tells the story of a crusty but decent citizen, aptly named Angus (Celtic god of wisdom), who agrees to be nominated for election after being given assurances that there was no possible way he could win. When the wildly popular incumbent is caught in a lurid sex scandal, cantankerous Angus is elected. In a gratifyingly populist—if not altogether unexpected—twist of the plot, Angus turns out to be an exemplary member of parliament precisely because he is indifferent to power or partisan politics and does exactly what he thinks is right.

It would be naïve to think ordinary Canadians, untainted by power, are more virtuous than the elected officials who lead us. As an exasperated colleague of mine put it, “do we really believe we are morally superior to every last one of the 308 member of the House of Commons?” Maybe not. But we do want politicians to serve something larger than their own egos. Nothing spells political disaster like the perception that a politician is in it for himself.

One of the most effective Tory attack ads in the last election said of Liberal Party leader Michael Ignatieff “he didn’t come back for you.” Perhaps it was the way he was recruited, and the fact that he was never elected in a convention, or perhaps it was personal qualities of the candidate, but somehow, Ignatieff never managed to come up with a credible story about why he returned to Canada, other than to be Prime Minister. That wasn’t good enough.

Whatever the personal motivations of the elected official, the reality is that a political career demands deep sacrifices. In the last few months I have made a point of buttonholing everyone I know who has chosen not to run for office. Most point to the personal cost. A successful lobbyist said he would have made a lot less money in his career had be been elected to office. A medical researcher did not want to live in a fish bowl. A family therapist pointed to the grueling travel between Vancouver and Ottawa.

“The harsh truth,” according to former Prime Minister Paul Martin, is that “many people who have been successful in their lives – whether it is in business, public service, sport, or in the community – are reluctant to sacrifice the reputations they have succeeded in building up over decades to the bitter attacks that characterize so much of our public life. The challenges facing women are particularly tough since they are often expected to balance family and career in a way that many men are insulated from” (Martin 2008: 264). Anne McLellan served as Martin’s Deputy MP, and she concurs. She cites three reasons women don’t want to run for office: personal costs, not wanting families to be dragged into the spotlight, and partisan conflict.

We might better ask why anyone runs for office at all. And yet there seems to be no shortage of volunteers.

THE CONVERSATION TO HOLD

UBC’s Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions seeks to stimulate publicly engaged research and teaching on innovations in democratic governance and the performance of democratic institutions. Attracting good people into politics is among the central problems of contemporary democracy, but it is only the point of departure for an ongoing conversation that will begin with a conference to be held in the fall of 2011.

For the conversation to be meaningful, we have to be sure we’re asking good questions. The best thing about the question “Why don’t more good people want to go into politics?” is that it is provocative and touches a nerve. Yet the answers go in different directions.

For Jack Austin, the question is elitist. “The real question,” he says, is “what discourages community leaders from entering federal politics?”

For Gerald Kristianson, who founded BC’s leading government relations consulting firm, “the question is almost insulting.” He makes a great point. When I say someone is a good person, do I mean anything more than that I like that person? One’s idea of a good politician, it would seem, cannot be separated from one’s partisan politics. Or can it?

Are there positive qualities in a politician that transcend partisanship?

We can begin by thinking about key activities that form part of political life. We know that partisanship is an inevitable part of politics, but also that all politicians purport to act in the interest of something bigger than their own careers. We may doubt there are universally held “goods” in politics, and yet democratic politics seems to demand some notion of the common good.

In Thinking about Leadership, political theorist Nannerl O. Keohane (2010: 19) argues that leadership is about “providing solutions to common problems or offering ideas about how to accomplish collective purposes, and mobilizing the energies of others to follow these course of action.”

This is an impressive vision; as such it finds politics today sadly deficient. Instead of focusing on common problems, politicians too often look for wedge issues to divide us. Instead of mobilizing people for collective purposes, we see voter suppression strategies and negative campaigning.

McGill University political scientist professor (and UBC graduate) Stuart Soroka argues that negative advertising works because humans are genetically programmed to “monitor error.” For evolutionary reasons, we monitor negative forces more closely than positive ones (Winnipeg Free Press, 2 February 2011).

No law says you cannot ridicule an opponent, questioning his or her personal motivations, or suppress the vote for an adversary by making false or misleading statements. Political scientist Tom Flanagan argues that elections are merely “war by other means” (Globe and Mail, April 4, 2011).

But there is another view. Politics requires what Aristotle called “practical wisdom.” Practical wisdom is the prudence or good judgment to know how to do what is right for oneself and others. This is similar to what Keohane means when she talks about our common problems and collective purposes.

Ken Sharpe, a political scientist who will be a visiting professor at UBC in the spring of 2012, draws on Aristotle to make the case that good judgment comes from practice and experience, not learning or textbooks. There is no school where one can learn to be a good politician. Just as one could only become brave, as Aristotle argued, by exposing oneself to danger and learning to make light of it, political judgment—and virtue—is learned through practice.

Successful politicians recognize the importance of good judgment. “They are always balancing what they think best with what is possible,” says Sharpe. “They are always balancing the core principles that are inevitably in tension in a liberal democracy—like freedom versus equality, civil liberties versus national security, property rights of the haves versus the welfare of the have-nots.”

Such balancing demands practical wisdom. So does managing an NDP caucus, which a bemused Harcourt says can often be like teaching a kindergarten class. Leaders need to figure out who is going to take problematic files off his or her desk, and who is going to bring new ones.

Sam Sullivan makes a similar observation: “many of us in politics have concluded that you can’t teach good judgment, which I think is practical wisdom. Just like you can’t teach a person to think strategically. Being on a team, or in a political caucus, with someone who lacks judgment is like sitting with a ticking time bomb. Occasionally, people who have varying degrees of lack of judgment get elected on each team and they necessitate enormous amounts of energy that go into damage control and constant supervision.”

If such practical wisdom is essential to be a “good” politician of any party, how are wise politicians recruited? How do our electoral, party, and government institutions encourage or corrode the learning of such good political judgment? Are we draining the wisdom out of politicians, and the wise politicians out of politics?

The same kind of practical wisdom that is demanded of politicians as they balance the pursuit of their own power and interests with the public good is demanded of another profession that it deeply intertwined with modern political life: journalism.

Former UBC journalism professor Stephen Ward argues that journalistic activity involves a kind of applied ethics. Journalists can destroy reputations and intrude in private lives in ways that inhibit political life. The phone hacking scandal that has engulfed the Murdoch media empire in the United Kingdom is an extreme example.

The media can also contribute to the public good by acting independently in pursuit of the truth—“without fear or favor” (Ward 2010 p. 44). And the spread of new social media make it easier to get past the traditional media gatekeepers. And, as Sharpe puts it, “good journalists—in the new or traditional media—need practical wisdom in the most ordinary of their everyday decisions: how is the story to be framed, what level of fact-checking is enough, how to balance the ‘being first’ that markets seem to demand with the ‘being right’ that professional journalism demands.”

Part of the conference at UBC will address the role of the media, both as a potential inhibitor of political recruitment but also as the new agora in which political life is played out.

SOLUTIONS TO FIND

UBC’s Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions played a major role in the Citizens’ Assembly process in BC. It has creating a wiki-type platform to build an encyclopedia of participatory innovations around the world. And it has developed a mechanism for monitoring democratic progress and backsliding in Latin America. Can it contribute ideas for the renewal of democratic life in Canada?

Ideas are not in short supply.

Jeffrey Simpson of the Globe and Mail (May 13, 2011) argues for a council of candidates between elections. “Parties should value their losers, instead of forgetting about them the day after the election,” he argues. “Why not keep them interested in the party, validate their contribution, and summon their commitment between elections by creating something we might call the Council of the Candidates for each party.”

David Chesman suggests periodic summits of political, community, business, and academic leaders.

Sam Sullivan proposes an institute to help prepare candidates for holding elective office. The idea is not without precedent. To improve the gender balance in local politics, the Canadian Federation of Municipalities runs a campaign school for women. The decision to run, financing campaigns, campaign ethics, public speaking, and media training are among the issues addressed.

These are just some of the creative ideas that are worth exploring to see if a new generation of political leaders can be cultivated.

If we fail to cultivate, recruit, and retain leaders with a vocation for politics, we risk seeing more of the same in Canadian politics. We may continue to see the kind of partisanship that inhibits good people from entering politics, perhaps especially women, and encourages instead those with the requisite ruthlessness rather than substantive qualifications. We will see public trust and confidence in institutions decline, and continuing cynicism and contempt for politicians. We will continue to see science and evidence-based policy squeezed out by a poisonous partisan point-scoring mentality.

By convening a conference at UBC in the fall of 2011, the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions hopes to start a public conversation about politics and democracy in Canada. What is wrong with it, and what can be done better? Everyone is welcome. Come and join the conversation.

WANT TO READ MORE?

Evans, Julian, “The Stoic Mayor,” Registry Report, Issue 24, November 2009, pp. 3-6.

Keohane, Nannerl O. Thinking about Leadership. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.

Loat, Alison and Michael MacMillan, “The Accidental Citizen?” Samara Report, 2010.

Martin, Lawrence. Harperland: The Politics of Control. Toronto: Viking, 2010.

Martin, Lawrence. Iron Man: The Defiant Reign of Jean Chretien, Vol. 2. Toronto: Viking, 2003.

Martin, Paul. Hell or High Water: My Life In and Out of Politics. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2008.

May, William F. Beleaguered Rulers: The Public Obligation of the Professional. Louisville: Westminister John Knox Press.

Paikin, Steve. The Life: The Seductive Call of Politics. Toronto: Penguin 2001.

Paikin, Steve. The Dark Side: The Personal Price of a Political Life. Toronto: Penguin, 2003.

Sabl, Andrew. Ruling Passions: Political Offices and Democratic Ethics, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.

Schwartz, Barry and Kenneth Sharpe, Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to do the Right Thing. New York: Riverhead, 2010.

Ward, Stephen, J.A. Global Journalism Ethics. Montreal & Kingston: McGill/Queen’s University Press, 2010.

Weber, Max. “Politics as a Vocation.” In H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1946, pp. 77-128.

Weder, Adele. “Growing Up?” Vancouver Magazine, June 2011, pp. 55-58.

The Ethical Oil campaign makes Canadians look ethically challenged. The Mark got it exactly right when it ran the headline: “The Truthiness of Ethical Oil.” Truthiness, as defined by comedian Stephen Colbert, means “things that a person claims to know intuitively or ‘from the gut’ without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.” We need a mature public debate about climate change in this country. The rhetoric of ethical oil is designed to thwart any such debate.

In a beautiful paper entitled “Moral Complexity: The Fatal Attraction of Truthiness and the Importance of Mature Moral Functioning”, social psychologist Darcia Narvaez argues that “Mature moral functioning is evident in action that balances intuition and deliberation with individual capacities for habituated empathic concern, moral imagination and moral metacognition and with collective capacities for moral dialogue and moral institutions, offering tools for moral innovation.” We need these skills more than ever in an era of climate change, resource depletion, loss of species diversity and habitat, and unsustainable growth.

The “ethical oil” debate is manifestly designed to dumbfound the moral intuitions of the naïve, deflect meaningful deliberation, silence those who actually have something to say, and polarize debate on climate change. The advocates of ethical oil could not be happier with the angry reaction of Saudi Arabia to their Karl Rove-style commercials. The use of women’s rights as a wedge in the debate on energy and the environment would be laughable were the lessons of recent history not so clear: we are unwise to think that such blatant manipulation of the public can be ignored. Truthiness is on the rise.

See: Narvaez, D. (2010). “Moral complexity: The fatal attraction of truthiness and the importance of mature moral functioning.” Perspectives on Psychological Science, 5(2), 163-181.

First posted at CIC: Rapid Response.

The following is an interview in La Republica, Peru, 18 September 2011.

El canadiense Maxwell Cameron es uno de los principales estudiosos norteamericanos de la política latinoamericana y, en particular, de la peruana (lo que significa que casi nunca se aburre). En esta entrevista, expresa su convencimiento de que Ollanta Humala se ha alejado del camino chavista pero, a la vez, advierte que si no emprende reformas de fondo las altas expectativas que ha despertado su gobierno podrían hacer que decepcione a muchos.

Por Óscar Miranda

Maxwell Cameron recuerda que su interés por América Latina nació de niño, cuando a su pequeño pueblo en Nueva Brunswick, en el atlántico canadiense, llegaron refugiados chilenos y argentinos, que huían de las dictaduras de Pinochet y Videla, y lo encandilaron con historias sobre persecuciones y luchas por la libertad. Lo primero que hizo cuando acabó el colegio fue viajar por México, Centroamérica y casi todo el cono sur. Luego decidió hacer de nuestra región su objeto de estudio. En la Universidad de Columbia Británica un profesor le sugirió investigar los movimientos sindicales peruanos. Fue así que llegó a nuestro país, en los ochentas, a analizar nuestra violencia, nuestras elecciones y nuestras crisis, apasionadamente.

En el 2000, Cameron asesoró a la Misión de Alto Nivel que envió la OEA en las postrimerías del fujimorismo, y al año siguiente colaboró en la elaboración de la Carta Democrática Interamericana. En los últimos años coordinó un conjunto de investigaciones sobre el estado de la democracia en seis países andinos (Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Chile y Perú), labor que dio como fruto el libro Democracia en la región andina, publicado en noviembre por el IEP. Hace unos días volvió a Lima, invitado a la cumbre de ex presidentes latinoamericanos que organizó Alejandro Toledo. Domingo aprovechó esta visita para entrevistarlo.

–¿Qué impresión tiene de las primeras semanas del gobierno de Ollanta Humala?

–Mi impresión es bastante positiva. Ha tenido una transición ordenada y las primeras medidas han sido positivas, tanto el tema de las regalías a la minería como el de la consulta previa.

–¿Le sorprende su 70% de aprobación?

–Sí y no. Es evidente que no fue la primera elección de la mayoría de los peruanos. Salió elegido en gran parte porque la gente tenía más desconfianza en Keiko Fujimori, pero también es verdad que en el proceso electoral hubo mucha satanización de él. Hasta ahora ha mostrado un comportamiento bastante pragmático. Lo hemos visto en la cumbre de los ex presidentes (el domingo) y después en la Cancillería (el lunes), y su discurso ha sido bien fundado, claro y bastante positivo.

–¿A qué se refiere al decir que su conducta es pragmática? ¿No tiene ideología?

–En el 2006 fue exageradamente criticado por su relación con Hugo Chávez, y ese era un momento en el que Venezuela tenía mucho protagonismo. En este momento, Chávez ha perdido mucha influencia y, más bien, Brasil se ha vuelto un modelo más atractivo. Humala ha tenido la inteligencia de presentarse como un Lula antes que como un Chávez. Se ha presentado más pragmático y creo que va a gobernar respetando el mandato constitucional.

–¿No hay una posibilidad de que tome, de nuevo, el camino de Chávez?

–No hay ninguna razón para pensar eso. Él no va a seguir esa receta. Sería un gran error político. Es demasiado inteligente para hacerlo. Por eso dije en la reunión de ex presidentes –y creo que eso provocó algo de consternación– que me parecía bien que haya jurado por la Constitución de 1979.

–¿Por qué le parece bien?

–Porque no creo que vaya a seguir la receta bolivariana de convocar una Asamblea Constituyente ni (que vaya) a hacer cambios radicales. Y es perfectamente válido hablar de cambios constitucionales, siempre que estos cambios sean respetuosos del pluralismo, del legalismo y se hagan mediante procesos abiertos, deliberantes. No me sorprendería que se puedan plantear algunos cambios políticos. Pero que (Humala) lo haga de una manera radical como en Venezuela, Bolivia o Ecuador lo dudo seriamente.

–No hacer esos cambios podría causarle problemas con los sectores que votaron por él precisamente esperando ello.

–Creo que algunos sectores pueden estar decepcionados de él. El gran miedo que yo tengo es que pueda terminar como Obama: que inspire muchas esperanzas y que termine haciendo poco. Por eso es importante enfocarse en cambios pragmáticos que se puedan llevar a cabo. E iniciar este proceso de consulta previa me parece la mejor política para iniciar un proceso de cambio.
–En el gabinete hay gente que viene de la izquierda, como la ministra de la Mujer, y gente con una visión de derecha, como el ministro de Economía. ¿Qué dice eso sobre este gobierno?

–Es el primer gabinete y habrá que ver cuánto dura. Seguramente habrá peleas internas pero por ahora parece un gabinete plural, que inspira bastante confianza. Es un buen gabinete; hay que darle la oportunidad de que trabaje.

–Tener a gente de izquierda y de derecha pretende dar un mensaje.

–Claro.

–¿Cuál cree que es ese mensaje?

–Bueno, el del cambio responsable.

–¿También se puede interpretar que este es un gobierno pragmático al que no le interesan las ideologías?

–Yo creo que sí. Humala es pragmático, definitivamente. Es pragmático y enigmático. Es difícil ubicarlo ideológicamente. Pero si aceptamos el concepto de que quiere gobernar al estilo de Lula, lo que vimos con Lula al inicio de su gobierno fue un intento de tranquilizar a los inversionistas, que estaban preocupados, para luego mostrarse capaz de gobernar eficazmente. Y Brasil ha crecido y ha mantenido su estabilidad macroeconómica y, al mismo tiempo, ha hecho un esfuerzo muy grande para reducir la pobreza. Humala tendrá que hacer lo mismo.

Un país impredecible

–Sus colegas politólogos se equivocaron totalmente. Nadie previó que Humala ganaría las elecciones.

–Bueno, el Perú es un país muy difícil para hacer predicciones. Yo he dejado de intentar predecir lo que pasa. Acá puede pasar cualquier cosa y nada es lo que parece, así que hay que ser bastante agudo para entender lo que está pasando.

–¿Conoce otro país con ese nivel de volatilidad electoral?

–Hay otros países volátiles, como Ecuador y Venezuela. Son aquellos donde, como en el Perú, ha colapsado el sistema de partidos, donde las instituciones representativas están en crisis y donde muchas veces surgen los candidatos llamados outsiders, que no pertenecen a partidos establecidos y que a veces son antisistema. Entonces, Perú no es el único país de volatilidad electoral en la región… Lo que a muchos extranjeros les sorprende es cómo muchísima gente toma la decisión de a quiénes va a elegir en las últimas semanas, días u horas de la campaña.

–¿Por qué cree que ocurre eso?

–Gran parte (de la razón) es por la ausencia de un sistema de partidos políticos. Hace años escribí con (el politólogo) Steven Levitsky un artículo llamado “¿Democracia sin partidos?”. Y nuestro argumento fue que la democracia es impensable sin partidos. Tienen que existir. Y donde no hay partidos muchas veces las legislaturas pueden ser mercados de compra y venta de influencias. Y eso desprestigia mucho a las instituciones.

–Pero en el Perú tenemos democracia a pesar de casi no tener partidos.

–Sí, la democracia ha sobrevivido, y en la anterior elección (2006) ganó el único partido sólido, que ahora al final de su gobierno se ha visto muy debilitado. El mismo Humala planteó, en su discurso del domingo, la necesidad de fortalecer las instituciones y de fortalecer los partidos para que estos dejen de ser solo reflejos de liderazgos personales.

–Es curioso que Humala plantee eso, tomando en cuenta que a su partido lo dirige él junto a su esposa.

–Así es. Él es uno de los líderes que no tienen sostén de un partido sólido. Por eso creo que se debe fortalecer el sistema de partidos en el Perú. Por ejemplo, con una reforma del sistema electoral, con una labor más coordinada entre el Jurado Nacional de Elecciones y la ONPE, y que se aplique la ley de partidos que los obliga a tener ordenado su financiamiento.

On September 11, 2011, Alejandro Toledo, the former president of Peru (2001-2006) held the “6th summit of ex-presidents” in Lima, which included Vicente Fox, Carlos Mesa, Nicolas Artido, Antonio Saca, Ernesto Samper, Fernando de la Rua, Hipolito Mejia, Martin Torrijos, Gustavo Noboa, Rodrigo Borja, Jaime Paz Zamora, Cesar Gaviria, Jose Aznar, and the Secretary General of the OAS, Jose Miguel Insulza. President Ollanta Humala opened the meeting and one of his first comments was about the need to democratize the summit with more ex-presidents. I think that may have been a subtle hint that the group needs to be a little more diverse. Lula sent a letter, but it would have been nice to have had Bachelet both for gender and ideological balance. Since Latin America has been swept by a red-tide, it is inevitable that a meeting of ex-presidents tends to tilt to the right. But then so did the audience.

Ollanta Humala gave a decent speech. He argued that democracy means that the voices of all must be channeled through the political process, without opinions being fragmented or excluded. He talked about how there are democratic deliberations in communities throughout the land, but whereas some groups have the power to translate their views into law, others can only influence politics through mobilization. I said Peru’s republic has always excluded the indigenous, the cholos, the slaves. Indeed, democracy did not come with the republic and independence. He also called for parties that are not identified with individual personalities and criticized the tendency to caudillismo in Peru, which I thought was rather interesting given his own personality-driven approach to politics. Finally, Humala spoke of the importance of creating a Peru in which people can live in communities where there is clean potable water, their kids can go to school, and people can enjoy a decent life.

From my perspective, the worst presentation by the ex-presidents was made by Aznar. He seemed to want to take Humala’s speech as somehow implying that all Peru needs is a more efficient state. There are no alternative models, only markets and democracy, and there cannot be two or more Latin Americas any more than there can be two Germanys.

Insulza argued for better monitoring of compliance with the Democratic Charter. Recognizing that states don’t like monitoring, he suggests that rather than a democracy rapporteur, there should be a peer review process. He argued for an increase in the capacity of the OAS to review situations in which democracy is at risk. Preventive action requires that the government in question requests OAS involvement. This hinders the capacity of the Secretary General. He said we should not reopen the democratic charter. Just look at ideological division of region, if you open the Charter it will all fall apart. But there is room for additional resolutions to strengthen it. We need, for example, a better definition to “serious ruptures.” These are not defined, but it is clear that in Quebec in 2001 the chiefs of state understood this to mean more than coups. It means intervention in other powers of the state – the dissolution of another branch – or massive fraud. Another example would be when states close all or most of the media. If these things are defined on a case-by-case they become politicized. Above all, unity of the region should be maintained.

Gaviria’s point was that the Democratic Charter has the same status as the OAS founding Charter. There are mechanisms to implement it. If countries don’t use them, that is because they don’t want to. If they want to act, they can; the Charter empowers them. That said, he felt that the power of the Secretary General should be reinforced.

Fox made a weird case for decriminalization of drugs. He said drugs should not be the last prohibition. We’ve legalized abortion, and gay marriage, but not drugs. Say, what?

Carlos Mesa noted that Latin America has a history of executives attacking legislatures and vice versa, but noted that it is hard for judges to destabilize democracy. Yet who defends the judiciary? If judges want an audience in OAS, the executive will be the first to block them.

Noboa harangued us about Correa concluded with the prediction that all forms of 21st Century Socialism are but steps toward totalitarianism. I was more impressed by Borja’s criticism of Correa: that he uses the rhetoric of socialism but has done little to implement socialist reforms. Instead, he has spent most of his time building up presidential powers.

My own intervention can be found in the previous post. Rather than reading the speech, however, I improvised a bit and threw in a few lines to pick up on previous interventions. In particular, I tried to reinforce Humala’s message about the importance of recognizing that there is no single model of democracy and that democracy means not just respecting a given democratic model but also the right to choose the form of government that the public wants. I suggested he did the right thing by swearing himself in on the 1979 rather than 1993 constitution, because it is valid to talk about the kind of constitution one wants. That was the point that generated the most controversy. That, and the suggestion the OAS should apologize to Chile for holding its General Assembly in Santiago in 1976 in the height of the military dictatorship. That is the other anniversary of this day: the coup in Chile was 38 years ago.

Here is the final declaration of the ex-presidents. “Constituir, en el marco del Centro Global para el Desarrollo y la Democracia, y como aporte de la Sociedad Civil, un mecanismo de observación y monitoreo de los avances y promoción de los principios establecidos en la Carta Democrática Interamericana de su aplicación y de alerta temprana en los casos de alteración de la institucionalidad democrática en los países de la Región, con la finalidad de coadyuvar a los esfuerzos que en ese mismo sentido realizan las organizaciones regionales y subregionales. El mecanismo tendrá una Secretaría Técnica encargada del desarrollo de mecanismos e indicadores que permitan la evaluación y el monitoreo. Con base a las recomendaciones de la Secretaría Técnica los Ex Presidentes se reunirán para deliberar y, en su caso, actuar en consecuencia.”

Sounds good. The challenge will be, as it is with the Charter itself, how to execute this mandate.

The following comments were prepared for presentation in the “VI Cumbre de Ex-Presidentes: Institucionalidad Democrática e Inclusión Social,” organized by the Centro Global para el Desarrollo y la Democracia, Hotel Country Club, San Isidro, Lima, September 11, 2011.

Executive Summary

The Strengths of the Charter are that it:
- defined democracy as a right;
- encompassed more subtle threats;
- made democracy a condition of OAS membership.
The Weaknesses of the Charter are that it:
- did not recognize multidimensionality of democracy;
- was vague on what counts as an interruption/alternation of the democratic order;
- has very weak enforcement mechanisms.
Recommendations for improvements include:
- clarification of the meaning of interruption/alternation of the democratic order;
- creation of a democracy traffic light;
- establishment of a democracy inspector.

Introduction: The Strengths of the Charter

The Inter-American Democratic Charter, adopted by the members of the Organization of American States on September 11, 2001, represented three major steps forward with respect to the defense and promotion of democracy in the Western Hemisphere.

First, it established representative democracy as a right, and it defined the elements of democracy broadly to include “free and fair elections,” a “pluralistic system of political parties,” and the “separation of powers and the independence of the branches of government.” The Charter also recognized the “right and responsibility of all citizens to participate in decision relating to their own development” as a condition for the “full and effective exercise of democracy.” Despite references to participation, however, and notwithstanding objections by Venezuela, democracy was defined as a representative regime.

Second, the Charter broadened the understanding of threats to a democracy to encompass the more subtle challenges that had confronted Peru and other Latin American countries in the 1990s. For this reason, the Charter refers to “situations” that may affect “the democratic political institutional process or the legitimate exercise of power” (Article 18). Under Alberto Fujimori, for example, Peru had experienced democratic backsliding without recourse to the kind of conventional military coup that policy makers had in mind when they wrote of “sudden or irregular” interruptions of democracy in Resolution 1080 in 1991.

Third, the Charter reworked the compromise between non-intervention and democracy that was already implicit in the 1948 OAS Charter. This meant not only that the entire Hemisphere accepted democracy as the basis of membership in the OAS, but also that the most powerful states in the system, including the US, could not sponsor or accept non-democratic regimes within the OAS. It is worth recalling that the 1976 OAS General Assembly was held in Chile at the height of the Pinochet dictatorship.

The Problems with the Charter

From the outset, the Charter had three problems.

First, the meaning of democracy grew more contested after the Charter was signed in 2001, especially after a wave of left-wing governments emerged in the context of crises of representative democracy. Since that time, Latin America has undergone considerable democratic experimentation. Most governments (across the ideological spectrum) continued to regard free and fair elections as the cornerstone of electoral democracy, but many failed to uphold basic constitutional rules. In particular, judicial independence has often been undermined. A number of governments have promoted direct participation in an effort to make democracy more meaningful, but often in ways that did not reinforce representative institutions. Since democracy is a multidimensional concept, it is possible for progress along one dimension to be accompanied by backsliding along another. The consensus around the key elements of representative democracy in 2001 gave way in the face of a more diverse array of models of democracy.

Second, the meaning of an “unconstitutional interruption of the democratic order or an unconstitutional alteration of the constitutional regime” (Article 20) was left undefined. Despite efforts—both by scholars and policymakers—to specify what this language means, confusion often arose over when countries were not in compliance with the Charter. Even more crucially, the ambiguous phrase was followed by a key qualifier: the interruption or alteration of democracy would only enable the OAS to act if it “seriously impairs the democratic order in a member state.” That, obviously, would be a matter for political judgment. Yet the last decade has seen the growth of tensions within the OAS with respect to the how to exercise such political judgment.

Third, the Charter had very weak enforcement mechanisms. As a political document, it depended on the will of the member states, and they typically did not like to criticize each other. Moreover, the Secretary General needs permission to send a mission to investigate abuses of democracy (see Article 18). But, of course, the abuses of democracy are most likely to occur due to the behavior of the governments and leaders in question. Another way of putting this is to say that the Charter has a bias in favor of the executive: legislatures and courts have no standing in the OAS, and hence no formal role to initiate the enforcement provisions of the Charter.

Recommendations to Reinforce the Charter

In order to more fully realize the Charter’s potential as an instrument for flexible and preventive diplomacy, it needs to be reinforced. These changes would not necessarily require formal amendments to the Charter. They could take the form of codicils or complementary efforts in at least three general directions.

While recognizing the diversity of democratic regimes, it is necessary to establish the minimum features beyond which no country can be considered democratic. This also involves more clarity on what counts as a coup, and what must be done when a constitutional order has non-democratic features. As a point of departure, the 8 points outlined by former US President Jimmy Carter in his 2005 speech to the OAS might be formally adopted on a voluntary basis as a codicil to the Charter.

Mr. Carter’s 8 points include: “1. Violation of the integrity of central institutions, including constitutional checks and balances providing for the separation of powers.

2. Holding of elections that do not meet minimal international standards. 

3. Failure to hold periodic elections or to respect electoral outcomes.

4. Systematic violation of basic freedoms, including freedom of expression, freedom of association, or respect for minority rights.

5. Unconstitutional termination of the tenure in office of any legally elected official.

6. Arbitrary or illegal, removal or interference in the appointment or deliberations of members of the judiciary or electoral bodies.

7. Interference by non-elected officials, such as military officers, in the jurisdiction of elected officials.

8. Systematic use of public office to silence, harass, or disrupt the normal and legal activities of members of the political opposition, the press, or civil society.”

Making assessments with respect to whether member states are in compliance with the Charter along the lines of Carter’s 8 points should be based on solid empirical evidence. The Inter-American system lacks robust monitoring and reporting on the state of democracy. Such reporting should be arms-length from both the OAS and member states, and should result in publicly accessible, peer-reviewed research. At the same time, the empirical research needs to be presented in a format that is useful for policymakers.

An effort to develop a mechanism for monitoring and reporting on the state of democracy in the Andean region was undertaken by a group of scholars under the aegis of the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions at the University of British Columbia, the Andean Commission of Jurists, International IDEA, and the Carter Center. Together, these groups created the Andean Democracy Research Network and commissioned a series of studies on the state of democracy in the Andean region. Over 20 scholars were involved from six countries. These studies adopted a common methodological template which examined not only the electoral and constitutional features of democracy, but also the issues of citizenship and participation that have become central to the debates on the quality of democracy over the past decade.

Monitoring would be most useful if it were to highlight those situations in which a member state is at risk of serious impairment of democracy. A “democracy traffic light” could usefully identify the political regimes in which such risks exist. Member states in good standing would be given a green light. There is one country in the Western Hemisphere that is unequivocally non-democratic, and which would be given a red light (Cuba). But there are a number of other regimes that have both democratic and authoritarian features. If the authoritarian features are sufficiently strong this may indicate the impossibility of holding elections that can be considered to be free and fair by the international community. Such regimes exist in a zone of indeterminacy between democracy and authoritarianism, and would be given a yellow light.

A yellow light would indicate the need for collective deliberations by OAS member states. Ideally, this would trigger the Chapter IV provisions of the Charter. Since this does not occur due to the Charter’s “Catch-22,” alternative institutional mechanisms are needed. For example, the Inter-American system could create a “democracy inspector.” The work of the democracy inspector would be similar to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Honduras. A less ambitious version of the same idea would be a peer review mechanism. This might begin with the development of a compendium of best practices in democratic governance, an idea proposed by the Canadian government in the most recent General Assembly of the OAS.

Conclusion

The Democratic Charter is a work in progress. It represents an advance over previous instruments and has the potential to be use in proactive and preventive ways to reinforce democracy in the Western Hemisphere. At the same time, it is a flawed document that has a number of loopholes and vague provisions that need to be tightened and more sharply defined. Much of this can be done without amending the Charter, but it demands leadership with vision and energy, both inside and outside the OAS.

Differences between Liberal and Conservative foreign policies are easily summarized but their sources are deep and complex. Liberals believe in rules, multilateralism, soft power, peacekeeping missions, humanitarian intervention, and the United Nations. Conservatives see the world as a dangerous place, where hard power rules. In such a world it is imperative for a country like Canada to stay inside the security perimeter of the United States.

More important than the policy differences, however, are the differences in the underlying frames used by liberals and conservatives (here I use lower case “l” and “c” to designate the ideologies not the parties). An emerging body of evidence—much of which is nicely summarized in Berkeley linguist George Lakoff’s recent book The Political Mind—suggests that liberals and conservatives think differently. Whereas liberals emphasize caring, fairness and reciprocity, conservatives focus more on loyalty, authority, and obedience. That is why the Conservative government wants to restore the moniker “royal” to the name of the Canadian forces. It also explains why the Conservative government has systematically eliminated terms like “gender equality” and “indigenous rights” from the foreign policy lexicon. Such terms evoke inconvenient cognitive frames.

Message discipline also reassures Conservative supporters, who are typically intolerant of ambiguity, that their leader states his intentions clearly and delivers. A major danger inherent in framing policy options in terms of authority and obedience, however, is that science and evidence take a back seat to the shared beliefs of the leader and his followers. The best example of this is the failure to take climate change seriously.

See other views in the CIC Rapid Response site.