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While struggling with the statistical evidence for the second paper, I found this article in the Globe and Mail about the good sides of polling. It is interesting as it provides arguments for why polls foster democracy.

As a poli sci student polls have always been a topic on which I had ambiguous and paradoxical feelings.

In my first year I remember my ‘introduction to research’ prof telling us how bad and biased polls are. They were pictured as the new opium of the media, creating public opinions where there were none and transforming the pure will of separate individuals into an aggregated meaningless and manichean reality. This was reinforced by my anthropology course and political sociologists that emphasized the necessity of qualitative research and interviews to catch the complexity of human behavior, that, again, cannot be reduced to numbers and percentages.

Then, came my statistics course in second year. The art of probabilities and their capacity to produce relatively true assesments of reality based on a pretty small sample of the population. However, my teacher took a lot of time to distinguish good statistics from bad statistics and the latter were usually found in newspaper and in the media. Therefore, my faith in polls was growing theoritecally but I was still skeptical about what I was reading in the news.  What I was tought is that apparently some people know how to do polls but those people do research and publish in scientific journals and not in the media or not too often. Too bad.

So, are polls of any use? Are they completely biased, unprofessional and non-orthodoxical statistically? Well, apparently they prove to be not that far from reality when it comes to elections. Pretty mysterious.

Mr. Keeter hold out hope: In the collective sampling of public opinion, we become rational. The averaging of diverse perspectives, he says, offsets the errors of the uninformed – which sounds like a pollster’s definition of true democracy.

This is where my skeptical side jumps in and thinks: the conclusion could as well be that polls reflects a reality that is imperfect and so does the votes. Both are biased in some ways, maybe they are biased in the same way? Is there a way to know the public will? Does such a will even exists?

And that is when I read myself and think that after four years of political science my judgement is biased. As political scientists we try to understand the social reality as well as we show how complex and impossible it is to understand it. Once that acknowledged there is only one thing to do: pick a side. Choosing between being an idealist and a skeptic. If I choose the second option, I answer no to any question and stop trying to understand the world. If I choose the first option, I might be wrong but at least I will have tried to understand something, which cannot be a bad thing after all.

As I chose the  first option I guess I have to believe that we can create useful polls. They might not be perfect but as long as we acknowledge their biases and do not take them as the mirror of the public will, they are a way to measure ‘something’. This something can help us understand ‘something’ else which might take us closer to reality.

(This is the result of a 4 years degree in falsificationism, aka Political Science)

Building on what professor Nyblade posted about campaigning in Canada, I found this article wrote by Elizabeth May herself in the Globe and Mail.

She gives a few reason that I find  interesting:

“How can a group of five television executives decide to exclude a party running in 308 ridings when they include a party that can never form government as it runs in only one province? How can debates, a critical part of the democratic process, operate in such a high-handed and arbitrary fashion? How can a party with the support of one in 10 Canadians be excluded? And most fundamentally, how can TV executives tell Canadians that a vote for Green candidates is not a real choice?”

If  we take Robert Dahl’s procedural minimum definition of democracy, which involves 8 institutional guarantees, excluding the leader of the Green Party from the television debates goes against at least three of them:

1. freedom of expression
2. the right of political leaders to compete for support and votes
3. alternative sources of information

In fact, by excluding her arbitrarily from the debates, they do not respect her right to express her opinion equally to the other national parties. Indirectly, it does not allow her to compete for support and votes because she will be disadvantaged in comparison to the other candidates, incapable of getting the same support and therefore probably reducing her chances to win new electors.

The television is one of the most important medium through which candidates can convince the people and have a political debate with other politicians in a way that is accessible for a majority of the population.

Finally, as this decision as been made for all televisions debates it provides no alternatives sources of information to expose Elisabeth May’s ideas to the public. It shows that the media is not neutral and objective but biased by a conservative view of politics. In fact, if only the parties that are actually represented in the House of Commons can publicly compete on televisions it favors the status quo and prevent minor political formations to express their ideas.

By preventing her to speak, they actually fail to represent the million of canadians that vote for the Green Party, which is breaking another democratic principle.

The link between democracy and repression is a topic that interests me particularly. In fact, after studying and assessing (or trying to assess) democracy in Southern Latin America in the first paper, I realized that electoral democracy does not always move together with civil liberties. Therefore I was really curious to know the results of empirical assessments on the question of democracy as a vector of pacification.

By reading Zanger and Davenport on that subject I realized again that it was all a matter of definition. Both of them acknowledge the negative relationship between democracy and repression. However, whereas Zanger has a “restricted” definition of repression, defined as the “violation of life integrity rights”, Davenport as a more “maximalist” definition, disaggregating “repression into violent (personal integrity violations) and non-or less-violent activities (restrictions of political/civil liberties) (p.543).

This difference of definition results in different causal results. Democracy appears to be a barrier against violent repression but no as much when considering restrictions of political and civil liberties. However, Davenport reaches this conclusion by defining Democracy in a very very narrow way. In fact he uses only one component of the already minimalist definition of democracy by Polity, the constraints on the executive.

I completely understand the choice of a minimalist definition. As explained by Zanger, “when correlating democracy with a human rights measure, such as the Political Terror Scale, it is more appropriate to use a measure that employs only institutional characteristics. In including the respect for civil rights as an indicator for democracy, the measure of the dependent and independent variable might interfere with each other”. This is even more the case because measures like Freedom House lack of transparency and it would be impossible to disaggregate the measures in order to have only certain components.

However, I wonder, in the case of Davenport, if he would have achieved the same results with another definition of democracy, one that would not be a “diminished subtype”. In fact, it is not maybe the constraints on the executive that is the dimension of democracy that pacifies the most. The level of participation, as well as the nature of the electoral system, the independence of the judiciary, the strength of the legislature, the fact that it is a presidential vs. a parliamentary democracy, etc. I haven’t thought about it enough but intuitively I would question the choice of such a narrow definition of democracy to assess the causal relationship between democracy and internal peace.

It seems like authors can argue for any type of relationships depending on the definition of the concepts they chose. However, there is a fundamental finding, that seems to be recurrent and encouraging for the spread of democracy, is that it seems to reduce high levels of violence and killings against civilians. And even if it is not “enough” in terms of what we usually pretend democracy can achieve, it is already something that can build a strong faith in this type of regime.

Again there are some nuances that should not be ignored, depending on other factors, such as previous experiences of repression, and wars etc. that also influence the more or less peaceful state of a country. Let’s say that, ceteris paribus, “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried” – Winston Churchill

I have been reading and thinking about Libya again and again, balancing whether or not the intervention was a good thing.  This commentary in the Globe and Mail states that as it is a civil war and we don’t know who are the rebels, Canada and the western coalition should not have intervened.

The author of the comment makes a good point by stating that Libya “is a tribal society fraught with arcane rivalries”. In fact, as I learned recently in my History course about the Middle East, Libya is a stateless country.

“Without bureaucracies, ministries, and simply an effec- tive governmental apparatus, Libya is an anomaly of being a stateless coun- try with three distinct regions: Tripolitania, Cyrenaica, and Fezzan.” (Philip C. Naylor, Historian)

Therefore, it is true that answer of who  “we” are supporting is rather ambiguous. We might be helping the “bad” ones by intervening in what is actually a civil war and not a popular uprise for democracy. We don’t know who represents the people and who is legitimate to represent them.

However, I think that her arguments are weak. First, it seems very incongruous to compare Libya with Iraq in 2003. The latter was a “preemptive” attack, which had not credible justification. Libya, is a humanitarian situation first of all. The intervention is lead by a broad coalition supported by the Security Council and used as a last resort.

Secondly, I don’t think that saying that there hasn’t been interventions elsewhere is a reason not to intervene there either. It is impossible to intervene everywhere and if it’s true that the reason why they intervened there should be made more clear the problem lies somewhere else.

Then, she writes : “What’s certain is that, as despotic as he is, Moammar Gadhafi wouldn’t have stayed in power for more than 40 years if he hadn’t been able to forge strong alliances with at least a good part of the country.” Does she mean that even if he kills his own population is entitled to do so because “a good part of the country” is behind it? First, we don’t know it, and unless a democracy is installed we will not know if Kaddafi would be elected. Secondly, she mixes the majority with the ruling elites. If Kaddafi is still in power it is certainly because is supported by the powerful and not by the many. Finally, there are rules that are superior to the rule of majority, at least I think so, like fundamental freedoms. It is not because the majority say the minority can be killed that it should be so.

Finally, I am always very surprised by the high level of expectations people seem to have when it comes to the international scene (me included). Most of us now expect that the UN and its members will be able to solve problems that are eternal moral dilemmas. Yes, it is true, the coalition does not seem to agree on what should be done. However, they still took a decision in two weeks, which is very long time for the victims, but very short in comparison to previous experiences at the international level!

Furthermore, if they don’t know if Kaddafi is a target or not, it’s because they don’t know if they are pushing for a change of regime or if they are just preventing people from being killed, both of which are sometimes very linked to one another. And how can we expect them to agree on that when it is taking years to agree on what the “responsibility to protect” norm should be? It is not an easy question and the situation clearly illustrates the complexity of this tension between human intervention and imperialism. However, while academics and politicians discuss about those dilemmas people are dying and it is not morally acceptable to let them die because nobody agrees on something that is so complicated!

Therefore, I do recognize all the potential dangers of this intervention, but I don’t think that anything is more important than stopping innocent people from being killed, whoever these people are, even if they have political opinions that we do not share. They have the right to express their ideas, and only democracy can reveal who they want to see in power.

“With no formal mechanism in place to ensure a smooth transition of power, the post-[Qadhafl] era can be expected to be a time of tension and uncertainty, with numerous socioeconomic and political groups vying for power” (St. John 2008, 67).

It is certainly going to be complicated but it does not mean it should not be done!

In response to Tehminah’s post I found this article in the New York Times. It offers an explanation for the changing mood of the Arab League.

According to the author, the support given by the Arab League to the no-fly zone was probably only a personal revenge from some of the Middle East rulers against Kaddahfi:

It was clear that those backing the no-fly zone, the analysts said, especially the king of Saudi Arabia and the emir of Qatar, most likely drew personal satisfaction from the effort to push Colonel Qaddafi from power, though they did not say so.

The question is then what kind of legitimacy does this organization has anyway? Is it supporting the “Arab Street” or is it just a club of angry leaders wanting to punish the villain Colonel who claimed to be the King of the kings of Africa?

In any case, as I wrote in Tehminah’s blog I honestly think that some of the leaders might have wanted a western intervention because they knew  that they were the only ones who could stop Kaddafi . However, obviously, when the intervention started and civilians got killed they did not want to be held responsible for the collateral damages.

Not only, this proves the inconstancy of the decisions made by the League, but it also shows a recurrent tension with the West that they don’t how to deal with. In their everlasting fight against Western imperialism it is truly hard for them to admit that they need a Western coalition to save their civilians. Furthermore, as Tehminah mentioned, with the current unstable situation, each decision they take can be crucial for the evolution of the situation in their own country.

It is essential to understand their ambiguous relation with the West and I acknowledge that it is hard to deal with such a long history of imperialism. Furthermore, cynics claim that the Western “humanitarian” intervention is an imperialist move to control the revolution and the natural resources that are in Libya.  However, whether that is true or not, I think that people were being killed on the ground and someone had to act. It is too easy to ask for help and then withdraw support.

I found the subject of this article very relevant to the part of the course we are at now. It talks about Obama visiting Brazil and naming it a model for the Middle East.

I found pretty ironic that Obama chooses Latin America and Brazil to say that “democracy delivers both freedom and opportunity to its  people” as it is the region that let arose the notion of “illiberal democracies”. Latin America is therefore the region that exemplifies the fact that electoral democracies do not always equal civil liberties.

I know and acknowledge that the situation in Brazil has improved a lot but as the Freedom House country report states:

• Brazil has one of the highest homicide rates in the world
• Brazil’s police are among the world’s most violent and corrupt
• Afro-Brazilians earn less than 50 % of the average earning of other citizens, and they suffer from the highest homicide, poverty, and illiteracy rates
• Rural laborers still work under slavery-like conditions
• etc.

Despite that, Obama says “The people of Brazil should know the future has arrived. It is here now.” It seems that the future has arrived not because of an improvement of democracy but more because of a great economic performance.

Therefore I don’t really know if Brazil is a good example of democracy delivering both freedom and opportunity to its people, or more an example of economic growth delivering the possibility of becoming a trade partner of the U.S.

Since the diplomatic cables were revealed by wikileaks, there has been a debate about the tension between freedom of expression and the security of the state. With Japan, once again, wikileaks revealed precious informations saying that Japan had been warned two years ago that their nuclear power plants might not be capable of withstanding powerful earthquakes.

It might be that they did what they could and that it was not possible to have better infrastructures. Whatever we think about that information, it will probably put the government’s choices into question and provoke a debate about nuclear power plants that is necessary. It will also force the government to be more transparent about the issue.

This example shows us how wikileaks could cause a constructive discussion about important issues between the people and their government. However, it is necessary to be careful not to take that information without its context. Who was governing at that time? Who took the decisions?

The danger of the “explosive” revelations provided by wikileaks is to forget that they are incomplete information. It is something that need to be investigated to avoid blaming the wrong people for what happened. It is very easy to read this as a scandalous information and directly link it to the actual government and its current handling of the crisis concluding that they are the one to blame.