Mediaboss Marketing

Voters Rights Association

Published Jul 10, 2017 at 8:00 am (Updated Jul 10, 2017 at 7:16 am)

Although Bermudas Parliament held its first session in 1620, it is only relatively recently that it has enjoyed proper representative democracy.

The islands first General Election held on the basis of universal adult suffrage and equal voting took place on May 22, 1968, so Bermudas is an immature democracy a young democracy that still has plenty of growing to do.

It is in that context that the Voters Rights Association is campaigning for a Voters Bill of Rights to put into law some things that we believe will enhance, and therefore strengthen, the democratic process in Bermuda.

At present, the party in power invites you to vote at its election, so we want to see the right to vote enshrined in law and we also want to see the right to fixed-term elections. It is up to the government of the day to pick the date of the General Election, giving the ruling party an unfair advantage.

Is it right that a candidate can be parachuted into a constituency they have never lived in? We dont think so, and so we want to see election candidates be from the constituency they live in or an adjoining constituency.

That will lead to a better understanding and representation of that constituency and therefore be of increased benefit to the people who live there.

Debate is important to determine the facts and to see if the potential representative understands the constituents needs, not just the partys needs, so we want the right for all election candidates in a constituency to participate in open debate.

One of the most important issues we want to see addressed is the right of constituents to recall parliamentarians they have elected. Is it OK that an MP should declare themselves as an independent even though they have not been elected as one?

All eligible Bermudians overseas should have the right to vote. We have witnessed discussions and promises but no action. The right to a fair absentee ballot voting system must be enshrined in legislation.

Referendums are used in jurisdictions around the world and if Bermuda is to be truly democratic, there should be a right to voter referendums.

The government must listen and act when the people have spoken. Referendums are an appropriate vehicle to raise and determine public issues and citizens initiatives, and it takes representative democracy one step farther.

There are two other areas where urgent action is necessary.

The Auditor-Generals powers need to be strengthened to ensure full and proper access to all relevant financial and other supporting files and records, including those of government suppliers. The Auditor-General should also have the power of subpoena.

The Human Rights Commission should be an independent commission established in the Bermuda Constitution. The commission should be proactive in looking after the rights of Bermudians not acting as a defence unit to protect the Government. The VRA also believes that it is critical that the powers of the Ombudsman are increased to include the power to be able to subpoena Cabinet ministers and junior ministers.

All these can be included in a Voters Bill of Rights.

The VRA has written to all the parliamentary candidates seeking election to the House of Assembly on July 18.

We wrote: The VRA is adopting the position of negative resolution, whereby only in the instance where you object to any principle of the Voters Bill of Rights will your objection be noted and subject to open debate.

Having observed the process of onboarding and the difficulty of reaching consensus, we are offering you the opportunity for offboarding instead; that offboarding to take shape in the form of declaring any objection to the basic principles of the Voters Bill of Rights.

We ask that you clearly state your objection to any particular principle and put forth your reasoned arguments against that principle concisely and clearly.

The letter adds: Party politics has gone astray and this sentiment is being voiced consistently in the community; and the VRA feels that supporting the principles of a Voters Bill of Rights is a great opportunity for both political parties and individual candidates to stand for a respectful and participatory process that will move to deepen engagement in our democracy.

Both political parties profess their desire to make Bermuda better and the Voters Bill of Rights is an important and fundamental course of action to fulfil and honour that goal.

If you believe in strengthening democracy in Bermuda, we would ask that you approach your parliamentary candidates and ask them to support a Voters Bill of Rights. Make it plain to them that you are dissatisfied with the present system, and that the electorate deserves a bigger role.

Our mission statement says: The mission of the Voters Rights Association is to provide a voice and a vehicle within the political process for voters to participate more fully in the policy decisions that affect their collective lives.

Please make your voices heard.

Submitted by Ian Macdonald-Smith (chairman), Richard Powell (vice-chairman), Sakeena Talbot (secretary), Tasha Jones (committee member), Stuart Hayward (co-chairman emeritus) and Geoff Parker (co-chairman emeritus)

Comments are closed on political content from July 4 to 19 to stem the flow of purposefully inflammatory and litigious comments during the General Election cycle. Users who introduce extreme partisan comments into other news content will be banned.

See original here:
Growing pains of a young democracy - Royal Gazette

The Iraqi government has declared victory over so-called Islamic State in the city of Mosul. That must be counted as a good thing for the cause of civilisation over barbarism.It's important that Islamic State be shown to be incapable of maintaining a state, that its leader may call himself a caliph but that he has no caliphate.

The movement is based on the appeal of the idea of the caliphate as a territorial entity, so discrediting the movement demands that its territory be extinguished. It's only a beginning in the long campaign against Daesh, but a vital one.

Play Video Don't Play

Play Video Don't Play

Previous slide Next slide

Iran launches a cross-border missile attack against IS militants in eastern Syria that it holds responsible for recent attacks in Tehran that left 18 dead.

Play Video Don't Play

Once the UK leaves the EU, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull says he'll move to establish a free trade agreement between the two nations.

Play Video Don't Play

UK court gives the parents of 11-month-old Charlie Gard a chance to present fresh evidence that their terminally ill son should receive experimental treatment. The decision came after an emotionally charged hearing.

Play Video Don't Play

Spontaneous celebrations erupted throughout Iraq as Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi's formally declared victory over Islamic State in Mosul.

Play Video Don't Play

There was nothing inappropriate about a meeting President Donald Trump's son had with a Russian attorney during the campaign last year, says White House spokesperson Sarah Huckabee-Sanders.

Play Video Don't Play

A sacrificial wolf believed to have been buried more than 500 years ago has been uncovered in Mexico City. Researchers believe the wolf was buried by a powerful and brutal Aztec king.

Play Video Don't Play

Turkey's main opposition leader says the country is living under a dictatorship and promises to keep challenging the crackdown launched by authorities after last year's failed military coup at a huge rally in Istanbul.

Play Video Don't Play

Next stop for Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is London where he'll discuss counter terrorism and trade with UK PM Theresa May.

Iran launches a cross-border missile attack against IS militants in eastern Syria that it holds responsible for recent attacks in Tehran that left 18 dead.

It's also a moment to consider the wider state of the Middle East since the threshold moment when the US-led coalition invaded Iraq in 2003, with the enthusiastic support of John Howard and Tony Blair.

All the noise at the time was about Iraq's imagined weapons of mass destruction, but there was a much more ambitious project behind the war.

In making the case for the invasion, President George W. Bush's secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, explained that it was the beginning of an American-led revolution. It wasn't the invasion of a country but the transformation of an entire region. She called it "a period akin to 1945 to 1947, when American leadership expanded the number of free and democratic states" including Japan and Germany "to create a new balance of power that favoured freedom".

Rice acknowledged in her noted Cairo speech in 2005 that the US had systematically repressed democracy in the Middle East. "For 60 years, my country, the US, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East - and we achieved neither." It was a frank admission that the US had long prized access to oil over the rights of the people of the Middle East.

At the time Rice gave her Cairo speech, the arrested development of democracy in the region was glaring. In the preceding 30 years the number of democracies in the world had almost trebled. The end of the Cold War and fall of the Soviet empire had seen democracy flourish in every region of the world, bar one - the Middle East. In fact, the number of democracies had shrunk from three to two. Israel and Turkey were still rated as democratic, but Lebanon had fallen from the democratic sphere. "Now" said Rice, "we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people."

Get the latest news and updates emailed straight to your inbox.

So how is that revolution, that balance of power to favour freedom, as she put it, looking in the Middle East today? "There's more deficit of democracy in the region today or, at least, there is no more democracy, than there was before the invasion of Iraq in 2003," says Professor Amin Saikal, director of ANU's Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies.

Not only has the project failed, the current US president, Donald Trump, has thrown his support behind authoritarianism anew. One common explanation for the failure of democracy in the Middle East was because of Islam. Not so. How to account for the democracy in the most populous Islamic country on Earth, Indonesia, and other Muslim-majority countries with established democracies?

The fall-back claim was that Arabs, in particular, weren't suited to democracy, that they lacked maturity, that they loved their repression by strongman dictators. Of the 16 Arab states, all were dictatorships at the time of Rice's speech.But that fiction, too, was quickly exposed in the Arab Spring movement of 2012, when the peoples of six nations rose up against their strongmen at great personal risk.

There was nothing inherent in the Middle East's state of subjugation. The old excuses were just that. But, while the change in US policy may have been useful in creating an opportunity for an outbreak of democracy, it was certainly not sufficient. Democracy remains a failed project in the region.

Last year, Condoleezza Rice said that even her Middle East role model for democracy had become more cause for concern than celebration: "When I used to be asked what would the Middle East look like when it is democratic, I would say Turkey, because it looked like a country with the right institutions, it was moving closer to Europe, it was moving closer to democratic norms," she said in an interview with RealClearPolitics."A lot of that has been reversed in recent years," as Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan has moved in an ever more authoritarian direction, said Rice. "And it's a story that's been there time and time again with authoritarian governments."

America's threshold state for regional revolution, Iraq, is still far from democratic, its people far from free.Under the US intervention, Iraq fell into sectarian vengefulness, Sunni against Shia. Growing Sunni grievances created the opening for the Sunni movement of Daesh. Iraq has not had an election for seven years. Its current prime minister, Haidar al-Abadi, was installed as a result of US pressure, not the people's choice.The country is in the process of being carved into zones of influence by the Kurds, the Iranians, the government and Sunni militias.

In the six countries that took up the call to revolution in the Arab Spring, five quickly reverted to dictatorship. One, Syria, fell into savage civil war that, again, opened an opportunity for Daesh, which still hold the city of Raqqa.Only Tunisia remains a democracy, an unfortunately fragile one.

The balance of power changed after the invasion of Iraq, absolutely, but not in favour of freedom. The biggest winners are the theocratic Shia state of Iran and the hyper-repressive Wahhabist state of Saudi Arabia.

And now Donald Trump has decided to take advantage of the schism between Iran and the Saudis, reverting to the pre-Bush divide and conquer policy. He's declared Iran the source of all problems and thrown America's lot in with the Saudis and their Gulf allies.The reason, he says, is that the Saudis will help to battle terrorism. Which is, of course, bizarre. The Saudis are the foremost financier and sponsor of Wahhabist extremism worldwide. The old Saudi pact is that the House of Saud gets to run the government on condition that it supports the Wahhabist fundamentalist movement to extend its global mission. None of this brings the region any closer to democracy, its people any closer to civil rights. Daesh's caliphate is being extinguished. The underlying conditions that gave rise to it remain as potent as ever.

Peter Hartcher is international editor.

Read more:
Iran and Saudi Arabia, not democracy, the winners from the invasion of Iraq - The Sydney Morning Herald

The 2017 ALEC Convention in Denver marks 44 years of legislative members & their corporate funders writing laws to benefit the corporate bottom line.

Describing an illiberal or managed democracy, political philosopher Sheldon Wolin and others draw a picture of U.S. government acting as servant of dominant corporate money that subverts democracy, overwhelms representative government and sacrifices the common good, as the major political parties, too, are often captive to corporate control. The people are often excluded from exerting influence, where government takes legitimacy from elections that they have learned to control, and where highly concentrated media corporations determine what is legitimate news.

Almost nonexistent voter fraud captures medias attention, but not the huge disenfranchisement of voters prior to the 2016 elections. The American Legislative Exchange Council, serving large corporate interests, has set the stage for the systematic dismantling of democracy, beginning with voter suppression laws. Since the Supreme Court effectively gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act in Shelby County vs. Holder, Jim Crow tactics have regained a hold. In 2016 Greg Palast cited at least nine methods of attacking the right to vote of Black, Latino and Asian-American voters, including Caging, purging, blocking legitimate registrations, and wrongly shunting millions to provisional ballots that will never be counted.

Prior to 2016 elections, Operation Crosscheck voter lists compiled by Kansas Secretary of State and white supremacist Kris Kobach, and reportedly distributed to 29 Republican state voting officials, led to the purge of over one million registered voters who had the same first and last names. Kobach now serves as vice chair of the so-called Trump Voter Fraud Commission that seeks lists of all voters from every state. It would be difficult to overstate the consequences of widespread voter disenfranchisement, which should not be normalized. Elections have consequences, assert political operatives. Conversely, Illegitimate elections have illegitimate consequences.

At the forefront of mobilization of anti-democratic activity for over four decades is the Koch-/corporate-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), working below the radar, serving as a catalyst to bring together legislators and their corporate funders in common cause to write legislation in service of their corporate bottom lines. As always, their scheduled 44th Annual Meeting in Denver, July 19-21, will take place behind closed doors, open only to corporate members who contribute thousands of dollars and up, and legislative members who pay up to $100, often directly from their campaign coffers. ALEC presents itself as a 501(c)(3) educational organization that provides nonpartisan research, study and analysis; their professed intent - to develop research-based model policies focused on limited government, free markets and federalism. Limited government is an understatement - it is government truly limited to serving and serving up large financial gains to captains of industry who write policy and in turn grease the palms of their legislative servants who enact their policy for them.

Common Cause has challenged ALECs tax-exempt nonprofit status even as ALEC actively lobbies for profit-driven legislation to benefit corporate members.

ALEC Seeks to Crush Participatory Democracy by Supplanting Voter, Worker & Local Power

Century-long judicial activism by conservative courts have reversed the power equation between corporations and the people who created them, even as unlimited cash has come to dominate corrupted politics, exacerbated by the 2010 Supreme Court decision Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission. Massive amounts of cash are directed to campaigns, initiatives and litigation, even as decades of policies have effectively transferred wealth upward.

All that is left for friends of oligarchs is to crush participatory democracy. A primary goal of ALEC and its local government subsidiary, the American City County Exchange (ACCE) has been to suppress voter participation by erecting barriers in the form of photo ID laws and proof of citizenship requirements. Such strategies are intended to disenfranchise many vulnerable voters - the young, the old and minorities.

Achieving corporate goals begins with targeting local government regulations that might impede corporate profits. Ostensibly to promote limited government, ALEC and its allies seek to privatize-for-profit public services, transferring the Public Commons to corporations, thus boosting the corporate bottom line at the expense of the people. Prime targets of privatization include Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, public schools and state pensions.

Furthering the assaults on workers, ALEC-allied corporations seek to ban collective bargaining for public sector unions. Also crippling unions are so-called paycheck protection laws that prevent assessment of union dues for political purposes without annual reauthorization from each member. ALEC-promoted right-to-work campaigns undermine private sector unions. Still more worker assaults preempt minimum wage increases, and require a higher burden of proof in workers compensation cases, while removing no-fault provisions, effectively compelling a worker who loses a claim to pay the employers legal fees.

Preemption laws are part of a dual-track strategy used by corporations and politicians to block progressive policies at the local level. The second track occurs when industries and trade associations file a barrage of lawsuits against local governments as a warning to other localities against considering similar policies. Even as a state preemption bill was being advanced, six New Jersey trade associations rushed to court to challenge the passage of the November 2014 Earned Sick Days ballot measure. ALECs self-described battleground over worker compensation triggered renewed legislation and litigation against raise the wage initiatives in cities like Seattle and Los Angeles in 2014.

Michigans ALEC-backed Emergency Management Laws permit privatization of elected public offices, permitting a governor-appointed emergency manager to replace locally elected officials in a municipality. An emergency manager is granted power to destroy collective bargaining, to lower wages for public workers, to break public employee contracts, and to sell off public assets to the private sector. In such a capacity, a the Flint, Michigan Emergency Manager triggered one of the greatest toxic water emergencies in the U.S. by switching Flints water supply from Detroits system to the contaminated Flint River to save money.

Because it is easier for industry to work their money and influence in 50 state legislatures than in thousands of municipalities, ALEC creates model state preemption laws to directly or retroactively block local laws and ordinances. Preemption laws strip the right of local governance surrounding every conceivable issue, including minimum wage, paid sick leave and benefits, pensions, rent control, community broadband, cyanide heap leach mining, high-volume slick-water hydraulic fracturing (fracking), pesticide and GMO restrictions, plastic bag bans, gun safety laws, factory farming, or anything else industry desires to control.

The ultimate takedown of direct democracy has been the targeting of Citizen Ballot Initiatives, placing the process out of reach for all but the wealthy elite. In order to block proposals for worker protections or industry regulation, ALEC advocates making it harder to qualify referendum language, and requiring super-majorities to pass ballot initiatives. In 2016 the oil and gas industry spent hundreds of millions of dollars on Colorado Initiative 71 to place the Citizen Ballot Initiative out of reach for all but wealthy interests, requiring super-majority passage, as well as a percent of voter signatures from each of 35 state senate districts in order to place a subject on the ballot.

More Model Laws Authored by ALEC with Corporate Funders

Private Prison Industrial Complex Writes Immigration Law Model legislation written by ALEC with member Corrections Corporation of America, the largest U.S. private prison corporation, promoted in various states and enacted in Arizona, permits stopping anyone suspected of being undocumented, and imprisoning those not carrying proper paperwork.

ALEC & Utilities Promote Climate Change Denial & Suppression of Solar Energy Actively promoting climate change denial, ALEC has drafted model legislation in Florida and other states to depress incentives for rooftop solar by ending net metering, while the state Public Service Commission, at the request of Floridas Utility Companies, voted to end Floridas solar rebate program, and granted permission to Power and Light to invest $191 million of customer money in fracking operations in Oklahoma.

Preemption of Local Gun Laws Beginning in the 1990s ALEC worked with the gun industry to enact preemption of gun laws in almost every state. Additionally, super-preemption legislation pushed by the industry creates private right of action allowing individuals or groups the right to sue local governments or local officials if they believe they are enforcing local firearms laws.

Privatization of Public Education for Profit Seeking to privatize public education for profit of private corporations, Charles and David Koch have created a six-figure Colorado campaign through their Americans for Prosperity Foundation and the Libre Initiative (focused on Hispanic community outreach) to promote school choice and education savings accounts (ESAs), currently offered in 5 states. ESAs give tax dollars directly to parents for private education, diverting money from public schools.

Colorado Legislative and Judicial Preemptions of Local Government

State Preemption of Community Broadband Telecommunication companies, i.e., Qwest and Comcast, lobbied the 2005 state legislature to pass state preemption of municipal broadband. The law provides for local Colorado community broadband pending success of a voter referendum, with restrictions applied.

State Preemption of Local Gun Laws In 2003 an ALEC model state preemption of local gun safety laws (SB-03-25) was signed by Governor Bill Owens, rendering local gun ordinances unenforceable. Denver challenged the preemption law in court & got to keep bans on assault weapons and open firearms carry only after a tie vote when a Colorado Supreme Court justice recused herself.

AgGag Laws - Factory Farming ALEC bill, The Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act seeks to criminalize as terrorists whistle blowers who reveal abusive/dangerous conditions at animal facilities. The Colorado Agricultural Protection Act of 1981 C.R.S. 35-3.5-102 voids any local ordinance that makes operation of any agricultural operation a nuisance, with few exceptions.

Minimum Wage Preemption Colorado law SB99-014 passed in 1999 prohibits enactment of a minimum wage by any local governing body, initiative, referendum, or any other process.

Preemption of Bans on Mining with Acidic Chemicals, e.g., Cyanides Acidic wastewater from cyanide heap leach gold mining at the Summitville Mine in the San Juan Mountains killed off 17 miles of the Alamosa River. Five counties that banned use of toxic chemicals/cyanide for mining, saw their bans overturned by the Colorado Supreme Court in 2009 on the basis of state/mining industry preemption of local law.

Preemption of Ban on Fracking A Greeley ban on oil and gas extraction enacted as a local ordinance in 1985, both by ballot initiative in a home rule city, and by city council action, was overturned by two 1992 Colorado Supreme Court cases, Voss v. Lundvall Bros. Inc and Bowen/Edwards Assoc. Inc. v. Board of County Commissioners of La Plata County, holding that the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Act (O&GCA) preempts any outright ban as well as any local regulation that creates an operational conflict with the O&GCA. Fracking bans and moratoriums in Longmont, Lafayette, Fort Collins and Broomfield have all been challenged in court by the Oil & Gas industry.

Preemption of Rent Control A 1981 Colorado law prohibiting control of rents by counties and municipalities was enacted as a reaction against a Boulder citizen initiative to impose rent controls. A 2000 Colorado Supreme Court decision held that the state statute prohibiting local communities from enacting rent control preempted a local ordinance enacted by the City Council of the home rule city of Telluride that would have required a percentage of affordable housing in a new development.

Preemption of Plastic Bag Ban A 1989 Colorado state law, HB 89-1300, prohibits a ban of the use or sale of plastic materials or products in Colorado. A bill to overturn that law in 2014 failed. To work around the prohibition of a ban on plastic bags and to reduce waste, a number of communities have imposed fees on plastic and paper bags.

Learn more: ALECinDenver.com

An earlier version was previously posted on Common Dreams.

The Morning Email

Wake up to the day's most important news.

Original post:
ALEC's Covert War on Democracy - HuffPost

Democratic governance and human rights are critical components of sustainable development and lasting peace. Countries that have ineffective government institutions, rampant corruption and weak rule of law have a 30-to-45 percent higher risk of civil war and higher risk of extreme criminal violence than other developing countries.

To help change this narrative, we are integrating democracy programming throughout our core development work, focusing on strengthening and promoting human rights, accountable and transparent governance, and an independent and politically active civil society across all our work. At the same time, we remain committed to fundamental democratic empowerment activities, including supporting free and fair elections, up-to-date technology for new and traditional media, as well as the rule of law.

By helping societies protect the basic rights of citizens, we prevent conflict, spur economic growth and advance human dignity. Countries with democratic freedoms are more just, peaceful and stable-and their citizens can fulfill their potential. Through its democracy, human rights and governance programs, the United States remains committed to protecting and advancing our most cherished values.

To advance these goals, we launched the new Center of Excellence on Democracy, Human Rights and Governance in 2012. The Center provides technical advice and support to USAID missions implementing programs in democracy, human rights and governance; generates and disseminates knowledge to build the evidence base for global advancement in the area; and elevates the role of DRG in key USAID, U.S. Government, and multilateral strategies.

Since the Elections and Political Processes (EPP) Fund was established in 2006, we have provided critical support to 80 countries or sub-regions, 26 of which were for unanticipated electoral and political processes needs, including snap elections in Molvoda, Serbia, and Yemen.

Since 2011, the Human Rights Grants Program has addressed the most urgent Human Rights challenges in 89 different countries. This includes C-TIP programming in Peru, programming for Indigenous Peoples in Paraguay, Genocide education in Cambodia, migrant rights programming in Macedonia, and womens empowerment programming in Sudan.

Launched in 2016, the five-year Global Labor Program promotes labor rights and access to justice for workers. The program supports country programs in Cambodia, Bangladesh, Burma, Ukraine, Morocco, South Africa, Colombia, Mexico and regional programs in Asia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Southern Africa and Latin America that cover activities in 31 countries. Through its union partners the program directly reaches tens of thousands of workers annually, inclusive of vulnerable populations, including women.

The Disability Rights and Inclusive Development program, which provides financial and technical assistance across the Agency, promotes the inclusion of persons with disabilities in USAID programs and builds the capacity of local disabled peoples organizations. In FY 2015 alone, the DRG Center strengthened the capacity of over 2,000 local organizations that work to support vulnerable populations.

Continue reading here:
Democracy, Human Rights and Governance | U.S. Agency for ...

Today, we hear increasingly about a crisis of confidence in governments. While the pace of history accelerates, democratic governments often find themselves in a deadlock. Scholars now consider a growing percentage of countries to be failed democracies.

The progress of democracy in our world is fundamentally linked to improving the quality of human life. The promise of democracy is that the citizens themselves know how to achieve such progress in the best possible way. If that promise is met with disappointment, then democracy is in danger. But what can we say about why democratic systems often fall short in their efforts to improve the quality of the lives of their people?

There are four elements that could help strengthen democracys effectiveness in meeting this central challenge: improved constitutional understanding, an independent and pluralistic media, the potential of civil society and a genuine democratic ethic.

The current challenges to governance should be seen less as problems of democracy and more as problems of constitutionality. But constitutional revision especially in developing countries is not an easy undertaking. One problem involves the poor understanding of comparative government systems. This subject is not part of most curricula. In developing and developed countries alike, the media rarely explains the logic or the options of constitutional change. Even when a referendum is held to validate such change, most people are neither prepared nor willing to express a considered judgement. The result is that the governments in power often have an open field. As a result, the first step to improve democratic governance is a better public understanding of constitutional principles.

It is easy to say that we want a government of, by and for the people and governments should be servants of the people and ultimately responsible to them. But this does not mean that most governmental decisions must be made by an enormous range of far-flung participants: by vast plebiscites, popular referenda, public opinion polling or the number of hits on a blog. Such misapplied versions of democracy can produce irrational leadership choices and poorly informed policies.

Sometimes efforts to impose simplistic popular democracy can create voids of governance, which can be exploited to dangerous ends and one can see this in various countries in the developing world. But then, who should make various governmental decisions? A simple response would emphasise the idea of balanced authority, including the concept of healthy federalism. For increasingly diverse societies, a constitution that divides and balances power is essential.

In discussing constitutional challenges, it is impossible to ignore the recent revival or creation of new theocratic political parties in the Muslim world. The question involves how theocratic principles of governance can operate constitutionally in increasingly secular political environments. It seems essential that such principles should be regularly tested by the electoral process if only so that the Muslim world can have a better understanding of the secularisation processes, which are inherent to democracy. And democratic principles, in turn, must respect the broad diversity of faiths and cultures.

Finding the right constitutional balance is no easy matter and we can make a grave mistake if we think that one size can somehow fit all. Effective constitutions must be adapted to a variety of cultural and demographic realities. But it can be done. One recent example is that of Tunisia, where after intense and arduous negotiation, a promising new constitution received broad public support. The central point is that we cannot build better democratic performance over time without a better understanding of constitutional values.

A second key variable for enhancing democratic effectiveness is the critical role of competent and independent media voices. We often forget that democracy in Ancient Greece required a highly compact community living within the sound of a criers voice, as Aristotle said. Under such conditions, face-to-face dialogue could foster a sense of trust and political accommodation. But these ideal conditions are now only rarely obtained. Populations are much larger, more widely scattered and far more diverse. They can most easily be mobilised around vivid but superficial symbols and negative propositions. Often what counts most in our extended societies is not what one is for, but whom one is against. In such circumstances, polarisation and an impasse are constant risks.

Nor can we rely on advancements in communication technologies to overcome the obstacles of distance and diversity. In fact, new media technologies have often made matters worse. From the development of written language and the invention of printing to the development of electronic and digital media, quantitative advancements in communication technologies have not necessarily produced qualitative progress through mutual understanding.

To be sure, each improvement in communication technology has triggered new waves of political optimism. But, sadly, if information can be shared more easily as technology advances, so can misinformation and disinformation. If truth can spread more quickly and more widely, then so can error and falsehood. Throughout history, the same tools the printing press, the telegraph, the microphone, the television camera, the cell phone, the internet that promised to bring us together have also been used to drive us apart.

The age-old promise of democracy is that social cohesion and public progress could be achieved through consensus rather than coercion. But genuine democratic consent depends on dependable public information. The danger in the age of the mass media is that information also can be misused to manipulate people. All around the world, authoritarian rulers increasingly use the media to coerce the consent of the governed. Having said that, our technologies alone will not save us. But they should not ruin us as well. It is not the power of our tools, but how we use them that will determine our future. Among other things, this means prioritising the role of the independent media and, indeed, of a multiplicity of independent voices. Demographic pluralism must be reflected in healthy media pluralism.

At a time of democratic disappointment, we must re-emphasise the immense potential of those non-governmental institutions that we refer to as the civil society. Too often, our thinking is trapped in a false dichotomy. We talk about the public sector and the private sector. But we often undervalue the third sector: civil society.

The civil society is powered by private energies that are committed to the public good. It draws on the ancient, classical link between democracy and the publicly-committed citizen. It includes institutions of education, health, science and research, embracing professional, commercial, labour, ethnic and arts organisations. However, the civil society, if not self-conscious, can also be a source of establishing the hegemony of a dominant ideology, regardless of its democratic value. A self-conscious civil society seeks consensus through genuine consent. It can experiment, adapt and accommodate diversity. It can, in the fullest sense, be of, by and for the people. It can, in the fullest sense, only be a remarkable source of support on the condition that is it sustained, accepted and encouraged by the government.

At the heart of a democratic ethic is a commitment to genuine dialogue to achieve a better quality of life, even across new barriers of distance and diversity. This involves the willingness to give and take, listen and bridge the empathy as well as the ignorance gaps that have so often impeded human progress. It implies a pluralistic readiness to welcome diversity and to see our differences not as difficult burdens but as potential blessings.

The ultimate requirement for any effective democracy is the capacity to compromise. Social order rests either on oppression or accommodation. But we can never find that balancing point where the interests of all parties are recognised unless competing leaders and their diverse followers alike, are committed to finding a common ground. That common ground is the global aspiration for a better quality of life built upon opportunities that will provide genuine hope for the future. Democracy can only survive if it demonstrates across years and across the globe that it is the best way to achieve that goal.

The writer is a freelance columnist based in Islamabad.

Email: [emailprotected]

Go here to see the original:
Making democracy work - The News International