Voting in a Time of Democratic Erosion

Transcript

Archive Recording: The coronavirus pandemic is causing a worldwide crisis for democracy.

Archive Recording: Global democratic freedoms are more fragile now than they have been in years, with the global COVID-19 pandemic prompting sweeping restrictions on civil liberties.

Archive Recording: In the months since, normal checks on power in country after country have been suspended.

Archive Recording: The political divide has become deadly, with vaccine hesitancy driven by misinformation and the politicizing of the virus leading to the harassment of health-care workers, hospitalizations, and deaths.

Archive Recording: How much do you trust the government? A new survey shows that public trust is really near an all-time low nationwide.

Archive Recording: World leaders are accused of failing to be transparent about the impact of the coronavirus, prompting public distrust.

Archive Recording, Richard Edelman: People don’t believe their leaders anymore. Sixty percent of our respondents said they think leaders intentionally lied to them, and they don’t believe the platforms either.

Francesca Binda: Hello.

FB: A bit earlier for you than it is for us.

FB: Let me record this.

FB: Yeah, I think – we’ve done quite a bit of research on COVID’s effect. What I think we’ve found are three major impacts. One is the use of emergency powers around the world and how governments have used those to limit freedoms. Now, look, we were all making this up at the beginning. Nobody knew what was going on with COVID, and in secure, strong democracies, emergency powers need to be renewed by legislatures on an ongoing basis, so that they are not subject to abuse. In places where democracy is not so strong or nonexistent, those emergency powers have just continued. For instance, [Hungarian Prime Minister] Viktor Orbán, who has two-thirds of the parliament supporting him, has just, in September, had his emergency powers renewed until January.

So, the abuse of emergency powers, I think, has affected democratic institutions and allowed for shortcuts in different processes. I mean, for instance, the US Supreme Court is now using shadow docket decisions much more, which means they are short-cutting on some of the procedures of oral arguments and having people appear before the court. In other countries, we’ve seen access to legal and judiciary systems curtailed because courts have been closed. The way emergency powers have been used in different countries, I think, has limited procedures and processes.

One of the things that we found is the effect on freedom of expression. In many countries – and, in fact, Freedom House has identified 91 countries that introduced restrictions on media and information. The other freedom of expression issues were the protests. You look at Hong Kong, for instance. The democracy protests were halted because of restrictions because of COVID. So, freedom of expression is another place where we found that democratic institutions were impacted by the pandemic.

The last place is elections. Elections were affected by the pandemic. One of the first countries to hold elections during the pandemic was South Korea in April of 2020. And it’s an interesting case because they did well. They, at the time, had a pretty good handle on the pandemic. They curtailed all in-person campaigning, and the parties adapted pretty quickly to campaigning online. Now, South Korea is very technologically sophisticated, and internet penetration is very high in South Korea. So, the campaigns embracing technology. The election commission using increased technology. They allowed early voting. They had very strong safety and health precautions at polling stations. So, it was an important test early on in the pandemic, and showed that with innovation and reform, it can be done. So, I think a few things, some innovation, has come out of the pandemic that I hope we don’t lose if/when we get back to some normalcy.

FB: Well, there’s always been misinformation. There’s always been foreign interference and dirty tricks in elections. It used to be that only the man – and it was always a man – who owned the ink was controlling the disinformation. Now everyone with a computer can unwittingly or knowingly be a spoiler. You know, disinformation relies on personal relationships. If my mother is sharing something on Facebook or my sister is sharing something on Facebook, it must be true. We need to, as political actors, not demonize people who believe in disinformation. We have to understand that people are disaffected with their politics. Politicians, political parties are not doing a good enough job making politics relevant to the lives of everyday people. It just reminds us that face-to-face interaction is even more important these days. And whether it’s door-to-door or technologically online face-to-face, political parties need to make politics local again, because it’s at the local level that we can see people we trust, we can listen to each other, and we can be swayed by arguments. By just calling everybody “crazy” or “kooks” who spread disinformation or who rely on disinformation is disingenuous to them and their actual concerns. And it’s lazy politics. It doesn’t allow politicians to really talk to people anymore.

Archive Recording, Mark Zuckerberg: I do think that there is a certain profound lack of empathy in asserting that the only reason why someone could have voted the way they did is because they saw some fake news.

Archive Recording, Mark Zuckerberg: We didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake. And it was my mistake. And I’m sorry.

Archive Recording: Facebook and Twitter are taking unprecedented steps to stop disinformation and to slow the spread of discord.

Archive Recording: Facebook says it’s detected, blocked, and removed about 1.3 billion fake accounts, and 20,000 of its employees now work on safety and security.

Archive Recording: Twitter has a new feature to battle misinformation, but it won’t be available to everyone just yet. It’s called Birdwatch.

Archive Recording: As President Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine effort ramps up, religious-based conspiracy theories surrounding the vaccinations are exploding on social media.

Archive Recording: You’ve no doubt heard the conspiracy theory that they are injecting some sort of electronic tracking device in liquid form through a needle into our arms.

Archive Recording: Tweets claiming that Bill Gates planned this pandemic through the use of 5G are rampant and hard to report to Twitter as fake.

Archive Recording: It’s all crap. And in pandemic times, it’s actually a danger to public health.

FB: It’s a good and bad thing. Technology allows political actors to reach far more people than they ever have. It allows people to have conversations with each other, ignoring the political parties. You know, a friend of mine was explaining to me that in South America in the 1960s, at the local level, political parties were usually the only places where a television existed. So, people would come to political party offices to watch TV, and that’s how political parties got members and how they engaged people. People don’t need political parties anymore to have political discussions. Parties need to figure out a way to get back into that discussion. And they’re not doing a very good job of it right now. And if they only rely on social media, if they only rely on these platforms to reach people, they will continue to fail.

They need to go into communities. They need to go door-to-door. If they’re going to use technology, they need to do it to involve people in a participatory democracy. And some parties are doing that. The Cinque Stelle, the Five Star Movement, in Italy reaches most of their people online. They do most of their policy discussions online. The democratic Alternative Party in Denmark crowdsources all of its policies online. You know, these are perhaps fringe or populist parties, but these are parties that understand that using technology to engage people is more than just shouting at them or speaking at them on platforms. It’s about using the technology to involve them in a discussion. You know, Facebook isn’t television. You can’t just put something on Facebook and target it to people that you hope will believe you. You need to engage people in discussions so that they feel that they are being listened to and represented.

FB: You know, populists love polarization, because they benefit the most from it. And polarization has made people not trust elections. And when you don’t trust the election results, you don’t trust the people who are in power, you don’t trust the politicians, you don’t respect results. But besides the result of really narrow election results where there’s no one clear winner or another, it has created this adversarial sense of politics, this zero-sum game, that politicians then take into governing. And that becomes a problem because politics is all about compromise.

We looked – I mean, in Israel – Israel’s had four elections in the last three years. Bulgaria is going into its third election this year in November, because the polarization is so extreme that they can’t figure out how to compromise after the election to form government. And so the wearing down of trust in our political system is a result of polarized elections.

Archive Recording: Voters across Germany are casting their votes in a national election that will decide who succeeds Angela Merkel.

Archive Recording: Exit polls show that the race is too close to call between Merkel’s center-right union bloc and the center-left Social Democrats.

Archive Recording: Now, here are the numbers. They show the left-leaning Social Democrats winning the most seats, eking out a narrow lead over outgoing Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative bloc.

FB: I think it is democracy in action. And I think that this is the nature of German politics. There are always coalition governments, and everyone knew before the elections happened that there would be. It was a matter of, you know, which of the mainstream parties, the [Christian Democratic Union] CDU or the [Social Democratic Party] SPD, would win, and then who would start leading those negotiations. Now with the SPD, there’s a new partner, the liberal [Free Democratic Party] FDP that is sort of new to this coalition-building. So it’s going to take them a little time to get to know each other and to work on a coalition.

But coalition governments are not unusual here in Europe. You know, the Netherlands had an election in March, and they still don’t have a government. The longest was Belgian in 2010; they went 589 days without a government. So, it’s common in Europe.

I think what we saw in Germany was that the extreme right wing, the [Alternative for Germany] AfD, was not as successful as some people were concerned that they would be. So, there wasn’t that polarization.

I think for Europe, the bigger question coming out of the German elections is who will assume Merkel’s role as leader of Europe. And it’s not necessarily going to be a German, and it’s not necessarily going to be Olaf Scholz. You know, I think Emmanuel Macron might be trying to vie for the crown of Europe, as will probably Mario Draghi from Italy. You know, Macron has his own elections coming up next year. So, those will be something to watch on the election front. But I think, you know, Germany is just fine. Nobody’s panicking about Germany.

Archive Recording: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has called for federal elections two years ahead of schedule, asking its citizens to vote for real progressive leadership and health care.

Archive Recording, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau: This is a really important moment in Canada’s history.

Archive Recording: Global news is now projecting a liberal minority government, a liberal minority government. So there you have it. We are right back where we started. Were the 36 days – were they worth it?

Archive Recording: That’s a question I think Mr. Trudeau is going to be asked a lot.

FB: The seat count was almost exactly the same; $610 million were spent on elections that produced exactly the same results. And what happened was, for the second election in a row, the party with the most votes is not forming government. And that’s a real problem with the Canadian system. The Canadian system is a system that was designed for two political parties. In this election, there were six political parties competing, and five got elected to parliament.

When parties or politicians call snap elections that are so obvious to help them increase their majority – now, Mr. Trudeau said it was because Canadians needed to provide a mandate for moving forward on, on the pandemic. A lot of people said, “Well, you already had that mandate.” Now, the mandate is no different than he had before the election.

I think besides wanting a majority government, calling a snap election was probably also in his interest because I suspect that the economy – not just in Canada but in many countries – is going to falter in the next year or two. As people stop receiving pandemic-related income supplements and rent supplements, people are going to start hurting economically and prices, inflation is going up in many countries already. And I think politically, it was probably smart for him to at least renew his mandate right now and have a little bit of a cushion. But people are cynical. And it just shows you that there is room for reforming a system that was built for a different time.

FB: It does give me hope for Hungarian democracy for two reasons. Yes, it was a first for Hungary. They engaged in what we would call a primaries system. The website that they developed was incredible. Every single candidate had a financial-asset disclosure. They signed an ethical charter. It went down to every single constituency level. So at every constituency, all the parties came together and voted on who they want to be their candidate. And so each party will now support the candidate chosen in the primary in each level.

Not only is this a first in Hungary, but Hungary is a very difficult place to be an opposition political party. And they had over 600,000 people show up online, but in person, in villages – where people are traditionally afraid to show their face in support of an opposition party member, because they know that Fidesz is watching – and they had people show up in person to vote in the primaries. So, that gives me hope that the opposition are united and that they won’t be splitting the opposition vote, that the turnout was so high, and that they did things differently. They showed Hungarians that politicians can disclose their financial assets. Politicians can be held to a certain standard. So, I think that we have examples of parties trying to reach out and engage people, listen to people, and include them in their election processes.

FB: The failure to reform established election systems concerns me. You and I have both worked in emerging democracies, where people are actually more willing to reform laws, constitutions, important regulations, such as election regulations. In more entrenched democracies, the people who are responsible for reform usually have a vested interest in keeping the status quo. I mean, the US election system was designed by people who didn’t trust voters. That’s why you have the Electoral College. So, I think that our failure to engage in any serious reform is a problem. Malta, where I live right now, just gave 16-year-olds the right to vote in national elections. And that was very encouraging to see that they’re willing to look at youth engagement in the election process.

My other concern is that political parties are failing citizens. They are making it easier for polarization. They are making it easier for populists, because the mainstream parties have stopped offering clear ideas, clear contrasts. You know, it’s like asking people to choose between Coke and Pepsi. They’re still cola. So, in many countries, the traditional mainstream parties are just not coming up with any ideas that motivate people. And it’s never been easier to engage citizens in a meaningful way. And yet they’re still failing to do that. Parties need to understand how they can engage people more in the democratic process. You know, it’s about going local. I mean, most of our elections and political institutions were designed before most people could vote, including women and including marginalized communities. So, they’re not designed in a way that makes them friendly to more engagement and more inclusion.

Archive Recording: Washington is about to get a lot more female. The midterm elections saw a record number of women winning seats in the US House of Representatives.

Archive Recording: There are now more than 100 female members, the most ever.

Archive Recording: Tomorrow, Kamala Harris will put another big crack in that glass ceiling when Justice Sonia Sotomayor swears her in as vice president.

Archive Recording, Senator Amy Klobuchar: What you are all about to be part of, America, is a historic moment of firsts.

FB: Yeah, as I said, the systems are not only not friendly, but they are just toxic for many women in many countries. And the more toxic the political systems are becoming because of the polarization, the more they are so even for women. And we’ve done a lot of research recently on violence against women in politics, and the level of harassment and online hate, in-person hate, that’s being directed to women candidates makes it a very unfriendly process for women to participate in. You know, we’ve seen this not just in established democracies. In 2016, we saw the member of parliament, Jo Cox, assassinated in the UK. In 2019, the Canadian environment minister at the time was walking out of a cinema with her children and a car drove past her. Some guy opened the window and started yelling profanities at her. Who wants to participate in these kinds of processes?

I was talking to a woman candidate in Kosovo. She said, “I don’t want to put my family through this anymore.” Because when people attack male politicians, they go after their policies, they go after their parties. When people attack female politicians, they go after their families, they go after their children. It becomes very personal; it becomes very sexualized. You know, we need to do a better job of making politics an environment that everyone wants to participate in. Whether it’s elections, whether it’s the legislature, we need to stop trying to fix women to fit into politics and we need to fix politics.

FB: We’re starting to do a little better at the executive level, and it will take a leadership from mostly male politicians at this point. But we have had examples of male prime ministers, presidents, appointing women in good numbers in Cabinet. Right now, we have, I think 15 or 16 countries where women are 50% or more in the executive, in the Cabinet. The latest was Albania. Edi Rama, the prime minister of Albania, just announced his cabinet of 12 women out of 17 in total. So, it does take leadership and working with men in politics as well. And it takes parties making sure that women lead in parties in meaningful positions, that they are decision-makers, that in the legislature, they are chairs of committees. You know, only one person can be prime minister or president. We get that. It doesn’t have to always be a woman, but there are so many other meaningful positions in politics, in the legislature, and in the executive that should be distributed equally among men and women.

Archive Recording: America is in unchartered territory.

Archive Recording: US democracy apparently under siege from its own people.

Archive Recording: Thousands storming the Capitol after a rally with President Trump, during which he urged them to march on the Capitol.

Archive Recording, President Donald Trump: We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong.

Archive Recording: According to latest Reuters/Ipsos poll, 60% of Republicans believe the election was stolen from Donald Trump.

Archive Recording: The poll also shows the vast majority of Republicans want the party to be made in Trump’s image.

Archive Recording: Former President Trump’s baseless claims about his 2020 election defeat are trickling down to the next cycle of Senate races.

FB: Well, just going back to 2020, I think the 2020 elections told us that your democratic institutions in the US are fragile, but they aren’t broken. They survived. And I think that yes, there will be misinformation. I think in the United States, most of the disinformation or misinformation these days is domestic. I don’t think that there’s actually any need for international misinformation these days in the United States. And I really hope that the midterm candidates do go back more local.

I was really impressed in the 2020 elections by some of the secretaries of states from states that were under scrutiny during the election, the ballot counting and the recounts. And obviously some of them were under enormous partisan pressure and, as election officials, understood that their job was to protect the integrity of the election process. And I think that some of them were pretty impressive. So, I’m hoping that the polarization will not be as strong as it was in 2020. Although I suspect it will be.

FB: You’re welcome. It was my pleasure.