Jocelyn McLean's POLI333 Blog

Wow. Americans love democracy. Please, correct me if I’m wrong, because the following is based on a not-so-recently read “Intro to American Government” textbook. This is what I understand: Americans go to the polls all the time. There are presidential elections every four years, the House of Representatives is elected every two years, and Senators are re-elected every six years, though they do one-third at a time so that again, there are elections every two years.

They do this all over again on a state-level.

Before any of the presidential elections happen, of course, there are presidential primaries for the parties in need of a candidate. I followed the Republican Primary debates pretty closely, partly for entertainment value (Rick Perry!), and partly out of genuine interest in Republican platforms (Ron Paul!). Primaries are where Americans, in my opinion, take democracy to the extreme. Registered voters in each state vote for for their candidate of choice. Those choices are then reflected in delegates who go to the National Convention to cast their vote for the leader of their party. Is this process necessary? I’m not sure. If there’s anyone in the class who has a better understanding of American government, and why there is a three-step process in which we basically elect delegates, to elect candidates, who then run in a general election – I would love to be enlightened.

It certainly makes for interesting politics, though. This GOP race seems to change so quickly with every state primary. With a close race in Iowa between Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, and Ron Paul, it seemed at that point to be anyone’s game. However, when Romney won by a huge margin in New Hampshire, he headed into South Carolina with a lot of momentum. Yesterday’s win for Newt Gingrich in New Hampshire, however, once again changes the game entirely. In this handy chart tracking the results of the primaries, it’s clear that Romney and Gingrich are neck and neck in projected delegates, and Gingrich has a significant lead in pledged delegates. If things stay this close it’ll be an exciting run.

I suppose anyone with access to a computer is aware of the Stop Online Piracy Act that was introduced to the House in October – especially if you’re someone who uses Wikipedia as obsessively as I do. When I say obsessively, I mean obsessively – I probably look something up five times a day, and at least once of those five times, I’ll end up spending hours link-surfing Wikipedia pages.

Needless to say, Wednesday’s blackout was an effective way to get my attention. Every time I forgot about the blackout and searched for something on Wikipedia, only to find the highly frustrating image as featured in this post, I cursed SOPA and everything it stood for – and then attempted to look it up on Wikipedia.

It was, undeniably, an effective protest. My twitter-feed was abuzz, and Facebook was overloaded with political comments by friends I know would have trouble naming a local newspaper. The protest became an interesting reflection on democracy when Rep.  Smith announced that he was postponing action on the bill for the time-being. It was an exciting moment for a lot of people, I imagine, who may feel as jaded as I do about the limited impact that peaceful protest seems to have nowadays.

In a country where “lobbying” is a bad word, it seems to me that Wikipedia’s protest – and the similarly peaceful protest of many other websites – can be seen as democracy by a different definition. While there is no general election to give power to these websites, we do so by electing to use them on a regular basis. Without a constitution, or a charter, many of these websites chose to represent the wishes of their own “constituents”, and acted as delegates for a massive online community of people who would be negatively affected by the implications of SOPA and PIPA. It was a perfect example of E-Democracy, a fun term you can read all about on Wikipedia, for free, because the internet is a great and powerful thing.