In democracies the people decide the composition of their government through free and fair elections held at regular intervals dictated by law. Legislation is debated by elected representatives and implemented by an executive answerable to the parliament or national assembly. Disputes about the meaning of laws are resolved by impartial judges independent of the political process or other sources of influence.
So goes the theory; but every link in the chain can be weakened by determined forces. Sometimes it is done crudely, as with farming postal votes in the UK in 2005, or fraudulent attempts to smear opposition candidates in the recent Australian elections as secret Islamist sympathisers. But where serious interests are at stake the pantomime element recedes.
We like to think the standards observed in Russia's December elections are a throw back to an earlier era. True, several parties now contest seats in the Duma, but with media coverage strongly skewed to Putin's Our Russia party, and the atmosphere of tension sustained by the occasional apparently political murder of a journalist, the outcome was never in much doubt. What we do not like to think, however, is that Russian methods in some ways parallel our own.
No, journalists are normally safe to walk the streets of London (though the Gilligan-Kelly affair should give us pause), nor do we close down Channel 4 or block the internet; that's not how we do things. Instead our methods are so open and so public that, like the rules of grammar which all of us unthinkingly observe all the time, we do not notice they exist or how they work unless we make a special effort. A press overwhelmingly owned by corporate interests and dependent on advertising revenue provides the context. An electoral system that generates a two-party duopoly, a two-party duopoly that preserves the electoral system, media that reflect and reinforce the duopoly, together with parties now almost completely reliant on the media for the projection of their ideas - it all adds up to a cosy set of unacknowledged deals which cynics have summarised as "two great parties, one great programme".
In short, we like a little bit of democracy, but - being British - not too much, thank you.
Our system can no doubt work for long periods, provided it is required only to legitimate the fine tuning of an accepted social order. But when it comes to evaluating electoral practices elsewhere, particularly where fundamental issues are in play, our system is a poor guide.
There is the faint absurdity of Gordon Brown (he of the "election that never was") exhorting President Musharraf to hold an early poll in a Pakistan descending into flames, but it is perhaps in Kenya, also with its British-based system, where we see the defects of our approach magnified to monstrous proportions. We taught and teach that democracy simply means majority rule. We forget that this requires either political institutions that focus exclusively on a narrow range of choices based on a stable economy and social order, or else a well-informed and critical electorate able through its media to identify and analyse not just public performance but also the role of special interests. We certainly have the former, though it may eventually play us false. Kenyans meanwhile struggle to acquire the latter.
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