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For years, a number of researchers and analysts myself included have been sounding the alarm that American democracy is facing a foundational crisis. If this warning seemed overanxious in 2016 (or 2011, or 2000), its now ubiquitous.

From top to bottom, our governing institutions have been significantly eroded by conservative assaults on the legitimacy of our elections, the growing influence of shadowy political front groups in electoral politics, conservative attacks on voting rights, opportunistic partisan abandonment of governing norms, sclerotic legislative processes, polarization fed by the culture wars and a bevy of other worrying trends.

The depth and breadth of the problem are most visible at the elemental level, where the American democratic spirit is ostensibly most fervent: our thousands of school boards. These little local legislatures have been revered as cornerstones of American democracy since at least the early 19th century. In theory, they provide local schools with democratically elected leadership that is maximally responsive to local needs and the public interest.

And yet, the pandemic has brought months of news cycles where local school board debates have escalated into screaming matches complete with threats of violence over issues both imaginary (e.g. the supposed rise of critical race theory in U.S. classrooms) and/or conspiratorial (e.g. fights over mask or vaccine mandates). Things have gotten so bad that the National School Boards Association recently sounded the alarm, asking for the federal government to do more to protect elected local leaders from threats of violence. Rather than calming the waters, this just prompted further outrage particularly from conservative politicians in Washington, D.C. who cast it as an assault on parents free speech and eventual backpedaling from the NSBA.

Problems like these are why, in recent decades, some major cities places like Washington, D.C., Chicago, Boston, and New York City moved away from elected school boards. The idea had a three-part theory of action: 1) it makes school governance more coherent by unifying control of city schools under mayoral leadership, 2) it insulates education decision-makers from political pressure and 3) it gives mayors a reason to prioritize school funding and improvement.

The returns from this experiment have been largely encouraging. According to Stanford University researcher Sean Reardon, Chicago schools are dramatically outperforming not just the other big poor districts, but almost every district in the country, at scale. Research on public schools in D.C. including a recent Mathematica study has also found significant improvements.

And yet, recently, the mayoral control model in these cities has faced criticism from a cacophony of voices claiming that returning public education to school board control would restore an elemental part of U.S. democracy representative government at its most profoundly local level.

As the country wrestles with a national crisis of democracy, it seems odd to focus outrage and energy towards shifting local school governance from the control of elected mayors to elected school boards precisely at a moment when school boards across the country are providing daily proof of their weaknesses as institutions.

Aside from the novelty of conservative groups converting local protests into a coordinated national effort to inflame board meetings, there is nothing particularly exceptional about this latest spate of outrage. Remember the furor a few years ago over how the Common Core State Standards were ostensibly going to push schools to conduct mass retinal scans, promote student promiscuity and advance the cause of global communism? Sure, school board meetings are often sleepy for months even years but whether its school boundary changes or sex ed or school closures or school diversity or hiring and firing, periodic eruptions of dysfunction are pretty much a given.

And those are just recent examples. School boards institutional failures have deep historical roots. School boards have long been complicit, for instance, at designing and maintaining racist, inequitable structures in public education including decades of segregated schooling. Who did Oliver Brown and his fellow plaintiffs have to sue to begin the long, slow, difficult, haphazard work of integrating American schools? Topekas Board of Education. It was the same in Washington, D.C., where Spottswood Thomas Bolling sued the president of the local school board over segregation in the Districts schools. Indeed, over and over again, the fight for integration required (and still regularly requires) confronting and appealing to a higher authority over local school boards.

Its a reliable rule of education politics: elected school boards are almost always most responsive to vested and/or privileged interests in their communities. Consider, for instance, the Los Angeles Unified School District. For most of the last decade, their school board has faced criticism from experts, lawsuits from community groups, and pressure from the state to focus more resources on historically marginalized communities. And yet, nonetheless, the board has defaulted to allocating resources away from those communities. School boards simply arent designed to prioritize the less powerful, organized and noisy.

So why, in light of significant educational progress in places that have experimented with other forms of school governance, is it suddenly so important to shift more power to local school boards? Notably, pushes in this direction in Chicago and Washington, D.C. have sparked as these cities black residents are increasingly being displaced. In D.C., at least, a move away from mayoral control would almost assuredly strengthen the voices of white, privileged voters who would have a better chance of swaying the outcomes of a handful of low-turnout, ward-by-ward school board elections than the citywide mayoral race.

Indeed, what constitutes a democracy? Can it really be reduced to whether the public elects a mayor or a board to run the schools? Of course not. Institutionally speaking, modern democratic governance requires choosing leaders through regular, free, and fair elections but it also requires the expertise of civil servants and other experts chosen by those leaders. Thats why, for instance, we dont hold a national referendum every time the Mine Safety and Health Administration wants to adjust its regulations, nor do we establish elected panels to determine how much radium is safe to drink in our water supply.

So: you should absolutely be concerned about the state of U.S. democracy. It cannot long sustain when voting rights are selectively narrowed to grant partisan advantage, or when bills with majority support in both houses of Congress are regularly filibustered dead, or when sitting lawmakers resist efforts to fully investigate a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol.

But if youre looking for a way to ensure that our schools have elected leadership thats fair, equitable and democratically accountable, school boards pretty obviously arent the way to go.

Read the rest here:
Williams: Replacing Mayoral Control With Elected School Boards is Not the Best Way to Shore Up Our Fragile Democracy Or Run Schools - The 74

We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both, American Supreme Court judge Justice Louis Brandeis wrote once. The growth of economic inequality fuels the growth of political inequalities and vice versa, resulting in a dangerous vicious cycle.

Democracy across the world is being undermined by money, most worryingly so in India. With the introduction of electoral bonds, India is currently the most unregulated country with regards to electoral funding in comparison with other similar democracies. The greater the inequality of political funding, the greater the chances that public policy is tilted towards the interest of the super rich, ignoring the interests of the majority, particularly the poor and the vulnerable.

Also read: As Electoral Bond Sales Begin Again, Critics Reiterate Need to End Anonymous Political Donations

Why electoral regulation is a must

As elections become more expensive, politicians become more dependent on electoral donations. This dependence of the political class on the rich for political funding has skewed elections in favour of the top 0.1% of the population.

According to Robert Dahl, the fundamental characteristic of democracy is the continuing responsiveness of the government to the preferences of its citizens, considered as political equals. However, growing inequality and dependence on the super rich for political funding make their votes much more powerful than those of the rest of the population; democracy is no longer one person one vote but rather one dollar one vote.

There is a clear relationship between a countrys policy on electoral donations and the public policy decisions made. For example, Germany remains the only country in the EU that has not banned outdoor smoking advertisements by cigarette companies. Why? Because its the only country where all political parties receive a good amount of funding from cigarette companies.

Another example can be found in the United States: The share of the super rich (0.01% of the American population) in electoral contributions increased from 15% in the 1980s to 40% in 2016. The same period saw a significant decrease in the annual incomes of the bottom 50% of the American population as well as a significant reduction in corporate taxes.

Similarly,Loukas Karabarbounis of the University of Chicago, in his paper One dollar, one vote, compared Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries for differences in the Gini index (which measures the degree of inequality in the distribution of wealth) and found a correlation between countries unrestrained electoral funding and high inequality.

If you think this is bad, wait for the data on India

Recently, Yasmine Bekkouche and Julia Cag (2018), based on extensive research on electoral funding, concluded that there is a direct correlation between electoral spending and electoral success. The same paper also identified that the cost of one vote in France in the parliamentary and municipality elections stood at six Euros and 36 Euros respectively.

European countries such as France and Belgium have curtailed private spending on elections through a series of legislations since the 1990s, thereby successfully negating the influence of the super rich in elections. In fact, France banned all forms of corporate funding in 1995 and capped individual donations at 6,000 Euros.

Brazil and Chile also recently banned corporate donations after a series of corruption scandals related to corporate funding particularly Petrobras and introduced the public financing of elections.

Illict funds from the Petrobras corruption scandal were often paid back to politicians through anonymous political donations. Photo: Reuters/ Sergio Moraes.

Also read: In Blow to Big Money, Brazil Bans Corporate Donations to Parties, Election Campaigns

What are electoral bonds?

While more and more OECD countries are bringing about strong electoral funding regulations and bans on corporate funding, India under Modi is going decades backwards.

Electoral bonds were introduced through the Union budget in 2017 and allowed corporates, in India or abroad, to anonymously donate a theoretically infinite amount of money to political parties (the fact that the only party that has gained from this system is Modis BJP is another matter.)

Electoral bonds lead to information asymmetry; only the ruling government has information on who lends and to whom, leading to issues of moral hazard and adverse selection. Before electoral bonds were introduced, it was mandatory for political parties to make public all donations above Rs 20,000 and no corporate company was allowed to make donations amounting to more than 10% of their total revenue. The introduction of electoral bonds not only increased the number of anonymous donors, but also the number of shell companies donating to political parties.

In the year 2019-2020 alone, out of the Rs 3,429 crore received by political parties, the BJP received Rs 2,606 crore or 76% of the total electoral bonds encashed, followed by the Congress which received a mere 9%.

Comparison of income received by BJP and INC from FY 2005-06 to FY 2018-19.

Another worrying fact about electoral bonds is that 92% of the money encashed is from Rs 1 crore bonds, with the same organisation donating in multiple tranches of 1 crore bonds. Assuming the average donation made by an organisation via electoral bonds is Rs 3 crore, then that organisation would have a profit of at least Rs 30 crore and a revenue of Rs 600 crore (net profit of a company is assumed to be 5% of the total revenue).

There are only 7,500 companies with a turnover of more than Rs 500 crore. If 92% of bonds cashed are multiples of one crore bonds, one can easily infer that its just a few thousand corporates that are funding the majority of the BJPs donations.

A breakup of the denominations of electoral bonds redeemed from phases 1-14. Source: ADR reports.

When the BJP receives most of its electoral donations from several thousand corporates, will its focus be on doing broader public good or on taking care of the interests of the super rich corporates?

As we have seen above, political parties, like individuals, respond to incentives. So the BJPs main policy motive would be to take care of the interests of the super rich and interests of these businesses are usually at odds with the general interests of the masses.

The most profound example of the same would be the reduction of corporate taxes since 2017 and the simultaneous, gradual increase of fuel taxes. Indians, along with Pakistanis spent, on average, 17% of their total income on fuel before the recently reduced fuel tax; the highest in the world by far. At the same time, corporate tax eshave, since 2017, been reduced from 35% to 23%; among the lowest in the developing world.

Indias corporate tax revenue since 2015.

Also read: Explained: Heres Why Modi Govts High Taxes on Fuel Dont Just Affect 5% of India

Assuming a similar growth of corporate tax revenue as previous years (~15%), the Union government,by reducing corporate taxes, has missed out on a potential revenue of Rs 6.27 lakh crore in the last two fiscal years (2019-20, 2020-21).

This reduction in corporate taxes over the years raises concerns of a potential case of returning the favour to the corporates for their anonymous donations to the ruling party; the entire process enabled by electoral bonds (Bethanavel Kuppusamy).

This not only calls attention to a weakening democracy but also highlights the dire situation of the Indian economy, which affects the common people more than the affluent sections. Other examples of corporate influence would be the monetisation of public assets where extremely lucrative Indian assets are given away at a throw away price, at a loss to the exchequer or the passing of the widely criticised farm bills.

Proposed policy solutions to reinvent Indian democracy

The danger with the Indian system is that, as the rich use their political power more and more to cement their interests, we become more and more likely to move away from democracy and towards plutocracy. This is because the interests of the super rich are directly in conflict with the interests of the poor. As the poor are increasingly left out of the electoral process, they become disillusioned and slowly move away from it entirely.

The equality of all citizens in the funding of elections is the first step to save Indias democracy. The Union government should, therefore, immediately ban all forms of corporate donations, including electoral bonds. French political scientist Cag in her book The Price of Inequality proposed democratic equality vouchers whereby each citizen can anonymously donate a fixed amount, lets say Rs 1,000, yearly to the political party of their choice. This Rs 1,000 should be reimbursed to citizens.

The second step would be to introduce the public funding of elections whereby each candidate who receives more than 5% of the votes is partly reimbursed for their electoral expenditure. Currently, the rich corporates who contribute to electoral funding are reimbursed via income tax rebates, thereby making the common public pay for the electoral preferences of the super rich. This lost tax revenue could partly make up for the democratic equality vouchers and the public funding of elections.

The third and arguably foremost measure would be to control individual spending in elections. Though the Election Commission of India (ECI) has set a limit of Rs 75 lakh per candidate, such limits are often exceeded. Therefore, the ECI should reinvent itself and make sure that such limits are respected by contesting candidates.

Unless India reinvents its political funding and spending regulations, she is not a true democracy. For India to be true democracy, the dictum of one person one vote must be reinstated in favour of the current one Rupee one vote regime.

Dharanidharan Sivagnanaselvam is an alumnus of the University of Oxford and the Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po, Paris). He is an executive coordinator at Dravidian Professionals Forum and co-founder of the Oxford Policy Advisory Group.

View post:
Electoral Bonds Are a Threat to Indian Democracy - The Wire

There are three basic problems with the army. The first has to do with the political authorities weakness in controlling the armed forces. There has been a seditious, conspiratorial culture in the armed forces since the nineteenth century. Bolivia is the Latin American country that has had the most coups. The armed forces believe they are meant to stand above public authority.

But there is also a weakness in society. The population pays its taxes to support the military but has absolutely no knowledge of the military, its doctrine, its weapons, its mentality, and its history. In our fourteen years in office, we [MAS] failed to fill political offices with defense personnel who would democratize knowledge of the armed forces. This left the armed forces exempt from accountability to society.

Second, there is a colonial culture in Bolivia. This has to do with the consequences of more than a hundred years of military service. Rural farming communities assume that their sons have to pay a blood toll to become citizens. Abolishing compulsory military service is unthinkable, because, as a society, we have not created any alternative spaces for exercising citizenship.

The army believes that it has a license to be the guardian of society. How come? Its contact with society is contact with the indigenous, rural world. There is no contact with the middle class, with the sons of the oligarchy, because the sons of the oligarchy do not go into the barracks. Those who do go are the indios, the peasants, the workers. The armed forces contact with marginalized layers gives them a feeling of cultural superiority. Still today, they have not understood the concept of the plurinational state. So it is necessary to work on decolonizing the armed forces. They must understand that ours is a state that recognizes diversity among nations, coexisting in a complementary way.

The third problem is foreign interference. For seventy years, Bolivias armed forces were ideologically ruled by the United States. The appearance of their uniforms, their weapons, their doctrine, their training, their trips to the United States made the armed forces lose its identity as an institution dependent on the Bolivian state. You are proud to be an ally of the most powerful army in the world, even though the relations between you are colonial. According to the colonial armed forces, local criollos are an invincible power.

Today, they realize that the US armed forces can be defeated. The US empire is in decline and suffering historic defeats. It left Afghanistan in worse conditions than it left Saigon in 1975. So the idea is starting to arise in the armed forces that they dont automatically have to be aligned with the worlds greatest military power.

What war will you win with an army that has a colonial mentality? The only battle it has won in the last seventy years is the war against the Bolivian people. The armed forces doctrine stems from US anti-communist ideology: the people are the enemy, we cannot be a modern country because most Bolivians are miserable, ignorant, indigenous people, and so on. In this idea of modernity, indigenous peoples can only achieve social value if they meet the conditions for living in a civilized society: They have to speak Spanish. They have to have Western urban customs. They have to mimic the US way of life.

Thats why we have to change this nineteenth-century defense model to a twenty-first-century one.

Read the original post:
How the US War on Drugs Subverted Bolivian Democracy - Jacobin magazine

Bowdoin Presents is available here.

This audio offering will tap into the array of talent available within the Bowdoin community, says producer Lisa Bartfai.

The first season, which runs throughout the semester, will examine the broad issue of democracy from several different angles, she adds.

Well be featuring in-depth one-on-one conversations with people who have thought long and hard about our democracy, adds Bartfai, who also hosts the podcast.

The episodes range in length from twenty to forty minutes and feature guests who approach the subject from a number of different perspectives, including a tech entrepreneur, a conservation advocate, and someone with direct experience as a political representative.

The first season contains six episodes, she explains, and the opening one features a conversation with Associate Professor of Government and Asian Studies Henry Laurence.

He and Bartfai discuss the politics behind public broadcasting, which is also the subject of Laurences latest book project.

We talk, among other things, about the role of public broadcasting in laying the groundwork for civic discourse and countering the spread of misinformation and so-called fake news, she says.

Well be featuring in-depth one-on-one conversations with people who have thought long and hard about our democracy.

See the original post:
New Bowdoin Podcast to Tackle Issues of Democracy - Bowdoin News

At a time when democratic institutions are under pressure and the University of Michigan community is looking to engage, U-M will continue Democracy & Debate, its universitywide collaboration on democratic engagement, through the 2021-22 academic year.

The announcement of the programs continuation was made by Michael Barr, dean of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, and Anne Curzan dean of LSA, along with other Ann Arbor deans and directors.

I am delighted to be partnering with Anne Curzan and our fellow deans and directors across campus to continue the important work of Democracy & Debate, Barr said.

Our democracy is strong when we nurture and protect it every day, not simply in election season. Our programming this year will help to engage students, faculty, staff and alumni, and educate the broader public on critical local, state, national and global issues.

A multidisciplinary faculty Steering Committee and a Core Team of faculty, staff and students will shape unique engagement opportunities in five focal areas: arts and democracy, civics education in democracies, climate change and democracy, democracy and racial and social justice, and democracies in peril.

From the arts to engineering, the School of Information to the Ford School, and in partnership with the National Center for Institutional Diversity and the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, the offerings will touch all students and U-M community members.

Democracy & Debate 2021-22 builds on the success of last years campuswide theme semester in which thousands of students, faculty, staff and alumni engaged with programming to enhance voter education and increase voter participation during the tumultuous 2020 election season.

Throughout the academic year, Democracy & Debate will offer programs and engagement opportunities, including events with national experts, student competitions to expand understanding of participation in the democratic process, and partnerships to galvanize voter participation and civic engagement.

It also includes a suite of self-directed learning resources, including Michigan Onlines Democracy and Debate Collection, a portfolio of learning experiences curated to address the complexities of democratic systems, and Michigan Publishings, Dialogues in Democracy, an interdisciplinary collection of University of Michigan Press books that explore the core tensions in American political culture.

More information about events, programming and learning resources can be found on the Democracy & Debate website.

We enthusiastically endorse the mission of the Democracy & Debate effort because it is strongly aligned with our values and beliefs, said Thomas Finholt, dean of the School of Information. We welcome the opportunity to continue to engage U-M students, faculty and staff in conversations about what it means to be a member of a democratic society and how this has changed in the face of new modes of interaction and communication.

NCID Director Tabbye Chavous said the programs impact has been felt across the campus.

Democracy & Debate has mobilized our communities to think more critically about movement towards a more diverse and inclusive society, she said. The contributions this year from expert diversity scholars will continue to help us all better understand and further examine the history of democracy and leverage this opportunity to engage with students, faculty and staff to envision a more just campus, community and society.

Democracy & Debate underscores the deans and directors commitment to the universitys future-enriching mission and aligns with U-M core values as it develops leaders and citizens who will challenge our present for the better, Curzan said.

It feels essential that we as an institution sustain our focus on what it means to be a member of a democratic society, in the U.S. and globally, she said. We are committed to open, informed dialogue about key issues, from free speech to voting access to structural inequalities, as part of our mission to contribute to the common good and create more sustainable and just societies.

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Democracy & Debate project to continue through 2021-22 | The University Record - The University Record