By Sunil Khilnani
In the narratives that contemporary democratic societies tell themselves, elections hold a special place: as sharp punctuation points in otherwise monotonous, rambling political routines. In this rendition, elections are cast as political market days, in which leaders and parties tout the harvest of their electoral campaigns to consumers—and those who sell successfully retreat to their governmental palaces, there to rule, undisturbed, until the next market day.
In the current era of “promoting” and “advancing” democracy, with its various misbegotten adventures, such electoral moments are celebrated as a vital gauge of democratic vigor. Merely holding elections is seen as a measure of success, and they can be advertised as having enabled even the forsaken Iraqis to have “taken rightful control of their country’s destiny,” as President George W. Bush announced in 2005.
Real politics, however, lends itself less readily to narrative. In fact, all politics, everywhere and always, is a perpetual election campaign—the continuous struggle by rulers to win and sustain in the face of challenge the good opinion of those over whom they claim to rule. This holds true even within nondemocratic or coercive regimes: The Praetorian Guard still has to believe in the legitimacy of the orders it is given, and when it ceases to—caveat emperor.
The salience of elections in contemporary politics is greater than ever before—as the territory over which they are held expands and as the ideological importance of the democratic politics they are believed to presage grows. That ideological force of democracy and elections lies less in the capacity of elections to deliver forms of authority that are stable or benign than in the monopoly power of elections to corrode the legitimacy of all who refuse them.
In substance, elections are, in the first instance, heavily local contests that divide societies into victors and vanquished; and, if they function as they are designed to, they serve also to reconcile the divisions they provoke. But as a form, elections also have become a common global currency—their comparative frequency and regularity, levels and profiles of participation purporting to measure the extent of a state’s democratic reserves. A Condition of Democracy
Political scientists are proficient at quantifying and, based on such quantification, offering lessons about electoral practice. Indeed, insofar as political science can at all claim to be a science, it is largely as a result of the degree of deftness it has developed in filleting and analyzing elections and the whole range of practices associated with them—campaigns, parties and party organization, social bases of support and so forth. At a more popular level, elections have become the favored political fare of the media, lending themselves to an appetite for human drama, stories of triumph and hubris. Unsurprisingly, we know more about elections—they fill more of our political imaginations—than the long, dull intervening periods of routine politics.
And yet elections in themselves do not signify democracy, let alone the achievement of regimes with some degree of accountability. They are a necessary, but far from sufficient, condition of democracy. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s jibe that the English—in the days of the Septennial Act—were free once every seven years still resonates. In fact, to the inventors of democratic politics, the ancient Athenians, elections were not at all part of their conception of democracy: They selected all important political offices through lot.
What, then, do elections do? Elections are ideologically central to the efforts of all modern states to legitimate themselves (even the remote monarchical mountain steadfast of Bhutan has got itself in training for elections). But the centrality of elections lies in the very vagueness of what they signify. Elections promise the assertion of collective will and control over processes—economic, geopolitical, global—whose causalities are usually opaque and whose effects are often uncomfortable.
The imaginative potency of elections relies on the assumption that states are in command of their own destiny, a belief whose credibility and appropriateness vary sharply in relation to different states. Certain states are considerably more hapless than others when it comes to shaping their own futures. In this respect, it is illusory to think of elections as a common measure or currency. In terms of their consequent effects, elections mean and matter more in some political environments than in others. How the electors of the Central African Republic choose will be of less international consequence than what the electors of the United States of America decide. Not all voters are equal. Equally, in terms of the lived experience of elections, they signify quite differently to different citizen bodies. Depending on where one happens to be, living through elections can approximate a carnival, a low-intensity war or a tea party.
Shifting Power
Electoral campaigns and their outcomes are a way of picturing a relationship between political elites and citizenry—a relationship whose bases may range from deliberation and persuasion to manipulation and blatant coercion. Most real cases involve convincing of both the hard and soft varieties. And while election results shift political power from one group of actors to another, the importance of such shifts varies according to just how concentrated power has been in the hands of previous incumbents, how long they have held it and how large the difference is between the goals of the incumbents and of their successors—and how far the latter carry out their stated goals.
At one extreme, the consequences of electoral shifts can approximate the effects of internal revolution or external military defeat, producing a change of regime. Dramatic shifts of this kind are infrequent, but it is their imaginative possibility that sustains the ideological power of electoral democracy. It is, of course, not elections themselves, but the conditions that allow them to happen in the first place that explain such regime crisis and change—conditions that usually involve the combination of a collapse of a regime’s ideological credibility coinciding with its structural vulnerability. This is often the result of international factors: In Burma today, the former holds but not the latter.
A deep ideological patina burnishes the practice of elections in any modern representative democracy. Whatever else they may do, elections are designed to confuse the symbolic identifications of large numbers of people with the actual decisions and actions of a relatively small number of people. Voters choose a person who presents himself or herself as the vehicle of some moral or material aspiration or promises a sense of felt community. And to deliver their legitimating payoff, elections blur what voters hope to achieve with how those same voters assess what in fact they have achieved by voting for their chosen person. Elections have to sustain the illusion of connecting the intimate world of individual hopes with the impersonal machinery of the modern state.
Beyond their function in legitimating states, their convenient ability to dispense with old rulers and authorize new ones, do elections provide any actual cognitive input into domestic or international political processes? Do they improve the information, knowledge and judgment at the disposal of states? Do they improve the way states can hope to interact with one another (for instance, does the spread of democratic regimes bode well for world peace, as one line of liberal thought has pressed?), and do they increase the possibilities of collective ac-tion in the face of pressing global threats—above all, that of ecological destruction? Not as much as is popularly believed.
Promising Change
Elections rely for their ideological force on their promise of change: the passing of disliked rulers and the heralding of new dawns. Aspirants feed off this hope, while incumbents play on the fears of those who stand to lose. But a strong dampener on the possibility of transformation comes from certain conceptions of the international realm. Whether from the point of view of realist interpretations of the structure and dynamics of international relations, or from the viewpoint of economic theories of globalization and the convergence of markets, elections appear at best domestic distractions and at worst real threats to the task of pursuing the interests of the state or the business of smoothing the progress of the market.
For realists, such interests and reasons of state are usually unknowable and unavailable to the citizen body at large—they must be pursued in secretive ways by the custodians of state power, acting for the security and benefit of their people at large. For adepts of the market, as for idealists of other kinds who stress norms and values, the electoral choices of particular citizen bodies can be equally misguided, perhaps seeking to stem the expansion of global markets or revealing their unconcern for values and norms that, were they only more enlightened, they might appreciate.
The relationship between elections within national states and international politics yields at least two possible perspectives. Should the outcomes of such elections be viewed as particular assertions of autonomy, one of the few remaining means of expressing national sovereignty and defiance in a world where state actions are constrained by processes that escape their control (consider the electors of Iran)? Or should elections be seen as mechanisms of normalization, designed to bring difficult and obstreperous regimes and their citizens into line with the requirements of those who set the terms of international politics? Are elections mechanisms through which national societies gradually learn how to pursue interests, especially through markets, producing a convergence on common habits of production, exchange and consumption—as well on political norms? Or are elections better seen as expressive of civilizational, religious and cultural identities and, as such, as inserting more surprise and unpredictability into the international realm (the latter, because more deeply felt, is evidently more combustible material)? Even the most fervent advocates and promoters of democracy remain confused over how to decide between these perspectives.
Local Votes, Global Impact?
Over the past two decades or so, various thinkers and political actors have announced the triumph of an historically unchallengeable concept: The extension of democracy and markets across the world has been construed as a directional process that ultimately will lessen the levels of international conflict. Yet, if democracy is a way of bringing the impersonality of the modern state into a somewhat closer fit with the local, if one of the reasons democracy commands such widespread favor is because it promises to infuse more fully the beliefs of particular peoples into the political process, then it seems mistaken to imagine that its extension will result in convergence on shared sets of beliefs. As more states adopt forms of democratic legitimation, the practice of elections will force into the crowded space of modern politics more imaginative aspirations.
Seen from a greater distance, from the viewpoint of planetary dangers, might elections within national states, when all added up, yield outcomes that are helpful in addressing the single greatest threat that human beings collectively face: the globe’s ecological viability? The idea is laughable. What elections do is to channel—through the prism of the modern state—the full glare of national narcissisms into the messy gloom of international politics.
Wherever electorates are able to voice themselves, they (we) want the most of what they (we) can get—now. And for those individual candidates whose political fates are decided by these electorates, it is rational to promise as much as they possibly can of what they detect their electorates (or at least their focus groups) want. To the extent they are effective in delivering this in the short term, they can be relied on to be damaging longer-term human prospects.
In the year ahead, as electoral campaigns and then elections themselves come to fill all the political space, it may be worth recalling this and other limits of elections as a means to address the most urgent questions of modern politics.
Sunil Khilnani is the Starr Foundation Professor and director of the South Asia Studies Program. |
