ELECTIONS (RIGGED AND OTHERWISE) A “PECULIAR INSTITUTION’’ ENJOYS WORLD WIDE STATUS

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31881, 8 January 1969, Page 10

ELECTIONS (RIGGED AND OTHERWISE) A “PECULIAR INSTITUTION’’ ENJOYS WORLD WIDE STATUS

t Reprinted jrom the “Economist" by arrangement/

By Africa’s standards it was a fair decision. By those of north western Europe it was not. The Zambian ruling party, in comparison with most other African ruling parties, did well last month to permit an election in which an opposition party was allowed to function, to win about a fifth of the seats and even to defeat some leading members of the Government. But its own victory was assured by a certain amount of strong-arm stuff, by vigorous pressure on businessmen and the one-sided use of Government-controlled broadcasting facilities. And then President Kaunda hitherto the darling of Western liberals, blotted his own copybook bv taking; care to ensure that his opponents felt the pains he thought they ousrht to feel for their temerity. *

Yet, judged as an election taking place in the African world, it was a good deal fairer than the jiggery-pokery that used to go on in Nigeria, a good deal freer than the recent municipal elections in Kenya. President Kaunda, whose country has a far shorter experience than Pakistan of anything resembling free voting, allows his opponents at least as much rope as President Ayub Khan, and considerably more than Mr Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore, who has jailed a great many more of his Left-wing opponents—admittedly pretty violent ones —than his reputation as a democrat would lead one to expect. Even India, for obvious reasons, has never been able to permit an election in Kashmir that did not make Londonderry look like a citadel of freedom. Lapses From Theory It is easy enough to explain these lapses ■from democratic theory. For a start the problems of authority in most newly independent countries are different, and greater, than in most old ones: the integrity of the State is often a matter of first concern, as it is not even in Britain or Belgium. Hence the Indian aberration, from an otherwise good record, in Kashmir. Second, and this is more basic, the process of free voting is merely one—and not necessarily the most significant—of a great variety of processes, of institutions, conventions and habits that collectively constitute our idea of democracy and which are normally the product of genera-' tions.

The most important elements in this substructure are perhaps a well-established and free, if predominantly capitalist, press, and the existence of a more or less independent middle class. These, and other essentials, I exist, if a little uncertainly,' in India, Ceylon and the Phi-' lippines, the three ex-colonial; countries where (for all the! violence that accompanies the) 'business in the Philippines) 'it has notably been possible to elect opposition parties to power. They do not exist in most of the former colonial; territories which the depart-! ing British hopefully en-| dowed with maces, multi-party; systems and a concept of loyall

opposition which they themselves, while in power there, had very seldom cultivated.

Different Experience

If this were the whole story one might hopefully suggest that new countries, as they develop economically, would develop politically, just as Britain did from the grand corruptions of the eighteenth century via Eatanswill to full adult franchise only 40 years ago. The trouble is that their historical experience has been entirely different. In Britain, freedom has broadened slowly down from precedent to precedent; in most ex-colonial countries it arrived in a mad rush and it is unfreedom that has been broadening ever since. The desire for political freedom appears to be ingrained in the educated or even half-educated portion of the human race; the habit of practising it obviously is not. Latin America is not enormously more liberally governed than it was a century ago. In Russia, a relatively well-edu-cated and developed country, it has been since 1917, and it is now, even harder to discuss ideas not shared by the regime than it was for Tolltoy, and electoral choice is vastly less than it is in Tanzania. Parts of the ex-colonial world were lucky enough, under imperial rule, to de- 1 velop democratic traditions, i Parts were not. and there is I no compelling reason to believe that they ever will be.! A Novel Idea

It is, after all, an astonishing idea that those who hold power should give it up merely because a majority of their fellow-citizens vote the other way. It has only happened over small parts of the globe for short periods of human I history. Even now, it is those :who think it so normal that I they have stopped thinking i about it at all who are actually unusual. j Considerably less than half! the world’s population 'is given a real chance of voting; its leaders down; and, if; some misfortune were to; force India into the other camp, Japan would be the only significant disproof of; the theory that the habit is merely a cqrious tribal cus-| tom of selected portions of the white race. Perhaps a tern-.

porary custom at that: the computer world could well be adapted to provide pushbutton democracy, but it seems rather likelier to be adapted to provide a pushbutton efficiency which will bundle foolish things like political preferences quietly into the oubliette.

Do we despair then? The encouraging oddity about the (world’s elections is that so many of them, however, rigged, are held at all. The notion of popular support expressed through elections is very widely accepted. It can be monstrously abused, as it is in East Germany. But the kind of more-or-less free election whose results can be predicted easily enough, if not

in detail, has a real value. It forces the rulers—President Ayub Khan, for instance —into much the same kind of political self-justification as is forced upon the politicians of the most immaculate democracies. It gives their governments that degree of a visible popular mandate which one can wish for all governments, if only to give them some defence, beyond the machinegun, against being arbitrarily overturned by the first group strong enough to do so.

And every piece of lip-ser-vice paid to the notion of free elections is one small pressure in favour of the real thing. Without supposing that there is any necessity about the development of free political choice in countries unaccustomed to it, one need not suppose gloomily that all the forces, except economic forces, are pushing the other way.