‘Buying’ and ‘selling’ as a concept in democracy

A recent New York Times article about American democracy exports reported that some European and at least one Latin American country have discovered our primary elections, in which each party stages electoral contests to select their nominees for office in the subsequent general elections.

And it got me thinking about the merits of a democracy exchange in which countries might more extensively explore each other’s practices, adopting and adapting those found useful.

One of the iconic principles of democracy is the idea that it should enshrine a “marketplace of ideas”. The great 19th century English philosopher John Stuart Mill is probably the originator of the idea in his classic work On Liberty.

In my country, it was perhaps first expressed most eloquently in the opinions of Supreme Court Justice in the early 20th century and by the distinguished scholar Alexander Meiklejohn.

It has been implied in quests for freedom of expression, freedom for the media, and freedom of association throughout the world particularly in the aftermath of the two World Wars and the Cold War, most colourfully by the late Samuel Huntington who incorporated it implicitly in what he termed democracy’s third wave as the Cold War ended in 1990.

In the efforts to persuade authoritarian countries to become more democratic over the past quarter-century in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere in the global south, much of the time the idea of a marketplace of ideas about democracy has taken the form of meetings of the minds between promoters and African advocates of democratisation, as I felt there was during my time as USAid’s regional democracy and governance adviser in the mid-1990s.

That said, of course, there has still been an underlying element of democracy “selling” on the part of older industrialised country democracies to prospective “buyers” in global south countries, more explicitly so where there has been active resistance on the part of the latter.

Indeed, there has been some evidence of backtracking on those “purchases” on some aspects of democracy, notably in sub-Saharan Africa and even breaking of the “merchandise” in places like Mali, where repairs are being attempted.

EGALITARIAN DEMOCRACY

To extend the metaphor further, there has been some “product diversification” on offer. There has even been some “import substitution,” too, as some countries have promoted constitutional innovations at home as has Ethiopia with its ethnic confederalism and, until recently, Uganda did with its no-party democratic state concept that came to bear a discernible resemblance in fact to the single-party democracy models of post-independence sub-Saharan Africa.

In the post-Cold War era of democratisation around the globe, a key dimension of the marketplace of ideas, indeed of any market in goods and services, has been missing.

Might it not be a fine idea, a new voluntary international regime, to foster exchanges of ideas among countries, all on an equal footing, each prepared to “buy” as well as “sell” democratic institutions and processes that appear to meet their respective needs, proclivities and circumstances?

The beauty of this more egalitarian conception of democracy exchange is that countries would be prompted both to take the initiative in borrowing democratic ideas from others and to adapt them to their circumstances, rather a country being pressured to recognise an externally prompted “need” to “buy” an institution or practice “off the shelf” as distinct from first recognising the need itself and then adopting the institution or practice to its circumstances.

To switch metaphors, wouldn’t this be analogous to the idea of appropriate technology that marries promising innovations with knowledge available in particular circumstances?

That other European and Latin American countries have found it useful to import a particular US democratic institution to strengthen their own democracies without our trying to persuade them to do so is heartening.

Our primary system certainly hasn’t always functioned perfectly, and those countries may want to tinker with the details in their respective contexts. But neither the particular case, nor the fact that it’s a distinctive United States practice, are the points.

Rather, it is the idea that countries can usefully explore each other’s democratic practices and replicate them as appropriate.

This is not an altogether new idea. Kenyan parliamentarians, past and present, have come to the United States and probably other countries to explore the workings of other legislatures.

The two-term limit on presidential terms is another idea that has clearly caught on. But maybe explorations of each other’s democratic practices should be more frequent, more extensive, and a higher priority than at present.

WEAK INSITUTIONALIZATION

Increasingly, the exchanges could certainly be south-north as well as south-south and north-north. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, if perhaps not the first of its kind, has certainly become the gold standard that other countries, Kenya included, have drawn on, and others have or may as well.

Political parties in democracies could certainly benefit from a sustained, free-wheeling, and extensive marketplace of ideas, for they are a problematic, relatively weak dimension of many democracies, north as well as south.

They have not aggregated diverse ideas into coherent packages of policy proposals in my own country as well as they might, nor are they the training grounds and vehicle for promising leaders’ upward mobility that theory says they should be. Even so, the idea of primary elections may prove useful more broadly than it has to date, as the New York Times story reports. Might they also be useful in strengthening internal democracy in sub-Saharan African parties?

The personalistic politics, weak institutionalization, and absence of programmatic focus have been widely recognized as one of principal weaknesses of new sub-Saharan African countries, significantly diminishing the quality of multiparty democratic competition.

Afro-barometer surveys have revealed that citizens of new sub-Saharan African democracies don’t hold political parties in high regard, a drag on their generally strong support and preference for democracy over all the alternatives.

Political parties might benefit especially from a global market place of democratic ideas.