Want to take part in these discussions? If you have an account, sign in now.
If you don't have an account, apply for one now.
Vanilla 1.0.3 is a product of Lussumo. More Information: Documentation, Community Support.
Hello,
The first time I encountered this concept, in high school economics class, it was a target for contempt. "Sure, they have elections in the communist countries, but they only have one name on the ballot!" The implication, or direct statement in many cases, was that these were clearly not free-and-fair elections, but muddleheaded attempts at propaganda - some kind of way to say "we have elections" when they don't. Since only a rank idiot could possibly be fooled by such a thing, that was all the more evidence that eastern-bloc nations were ruled by exactly the same kind of banal, vicious tyrants as ruled the roost in Orwell's 1984. In fact, frequent reference to that book was usually included in the same presentation as the reference to the elections.
I did not know until last year that I'd been misled by my teacher, and by all the other speakers or authors when that same message was repeated (and it still is, today). I did not know that in a single-candidate election for a given position, you could vote "yes" or "no."
First, that jarred me because it simply wasn't what I'd been led to believe. I'd thought that in a single-candidate election, you just voted "yes" because that guy's name was front of you on the page, and the entire election was merely an exercise in the regime rubbing people's noses in their lack of power. This is exactly what the classic reference to "one name elections" conveys to the American reader/listener. I hadn't realized that, by the rules anyway, the candidate could receive a flat "no" and would be barred from holding that position.
Second, it jarred me because I realized that here, in the States, we often use this method for specific positions: circuit court judges, for example, as well as in many cases for relatively minor positions (but often locally significant ones) in which only one candidate is available. If single-candidacy is obviously ass, then why do we do it at all?
Third, it jarred me because ... well, considering only this technique, and removing the context of one-party politics and soviets and all that (more on that in a minute), it strikes me as a reasonable technique. The candidate is posed, by whatever method, and if the majority vote says "no! not him!", then well, that guy is out of the window. It's basically saying to whatever process produces candidates, "you fucked up, now do it over and do it right this time." We have no such corrective feature in our multiple-candidate elections, and given our first-past-the-post method of narrowing down the field, the potential for ending up with the two most-well-connected and richest candidates is pretty high. I'm not political scientist enough (or at all) to say it must be better or anything like that, but the technique is at least reasonable and worthy of valid debate, not dismissal.
I have to stress that I'm not saying elections in, say, the GDR were wonderful things. There are other factors which contributed to their corruption. But that's my point, actually - that the problem was corruption, not conceptual or structural.
Well, hold on, let me correct myself on that one. There were other conceptual and structural problems too, in the GDR and other similar nations, not least in Russia. So let me get those outlined. Again, I'm just piecing this together myself, so if anyone knows anything else about any of this, please chime in! I'm posting specifically so we can get "deep and focused" to enhance our shared understanding.
1. The soviet system (small "s", meaning the technical method, not the state called "Soviet Republic of") relies on a pyramid effect of group discussions. A whole bunch of villages, for instance, each has a soviet (council) which meets and arrives at a solution to a problem. Then a soviet that represents all the villages meets, with the individual conclusions on hand. Then after that, a higher soviet meets with equivalent-ranking representatives, with all those earlier soviets' conclusions, and so on. That's what "soviet" means; it's really not all that different from what we have in the States with caucuses, or from what elected representatives are supposed to do once they're elected.
2. The one-party system is, as I understand it, the core of Marxist-Leninism. The idea is that only the Communist Party represents the people, and since the soviet system is designed to represent the people as well as possible, why, it's obviously the case that only Communist Party members would be the participants in the soviets, or candidates for elections of any kind.
Both of these muddy the waters when talking about elections of any kind. I'm not so sure that soviets are such a bad thing as has always been taught to me (in fact, as I recall, the technical definition was never mentioned, just the national title, "Soviet"). The single-party idea seems quite wacky, and if there's some reason it's not wacky that I don't understand, then it at least seems counter to the notion of elections.
(damn, out of room - more in the next post)
So what I'm driving at concerns only the issue of single-candidacy, outside of the context of the former communist states. To work, it needs to be uncorrupted, yes, or relatively so. It also needs to rely on a transparent system of arriving at the candidate. But these are merely the typical caveats that apply to democracy of any kind, including dual or multiple candidacy, so they aren't deal-breakers regarding this particular technique.
Another interesting point: a lot of nations in the eastern bloc were not soviet republics. For instance, on paper, I think the GDR constitution is surprisingly sound (again, I'm not a political scientist) and much of its abuses can be traced directly to Stasi infiltration, to the effects of having only a single party, and to cronyism which violated the standing laws.
Does that mean that single-candidate elections are a viable option, in a multi-party, non-soviet, relatively uncorrupted political system? In most conversational circles I'm familiar with, here in the States, such talk is pure heresy and nonsense. But now, I'm not so sure about that.
Whatever anyone knows about the technique, either in its modern applications or about how it applied in former states, please join in! As always, please try to avoid slipping into polemics.
Best, Ron
Hi Ron,
I was taught the same ideas as you concerning one-candidate or one-party elections, and I'm not yet convinced all of those ideas are wrong, at least in the context they were taught. You say: "The implication, or direct statement in many cases, was that these were clearly not free-and-fair elections, but muddleheaded attempts at propaganda - some kind of way to say 'we have elections' when they don't." In fact, I think we'd agree that they were not free-and-fair, because of the corruption you've already cited. I think it's even fair to say, at least as I understand it, that those elections probably were basically propaganda attempts to portray elections that were really just a forgone conclusion from the beginning.
Now, as you point out, it isn't inherently the idea of a one-party system that brought that about. On the other hand, it didn't really seem to help protect against said corruption, either.
Would they work in a less corrupt system? Maybe, but I think that all has to do with how the candidate gets selected for public approval in the first place, which hasn't really been discussed. Do I think it'd be better than a two-party system, even one as flawed as what we have? I have doubts. In fact, I'd like the process to go the other way - I'm desperate for a powerful, well-represented third party to arise. What we have has led to polarization and stagnation at the same time, both of which are leading to real problems in my opinion.
Dave
Whoa - there's one-party and then there's one-candidate - two different issues.
One party means that you don't get to be in the government at all unless you belong to Party X. I think that's pretty bogus (as long as I'm slinging value judgments around), and like you, I'd like to see more parties than two. I'm beginning to conclude, lately, that the two-party thing is held in place through artificial means, even though I was always educated to think that it was some kind of "natural" or "mature" outcome.
One candidate, on the other hand, means that a given post, when up for election, shows one name on the ballot and you mark yes or no. This technique is conceivably perfectly consistent with two-party or multi-party systems. There'd certainly have to be a system by which that particular candidate got to the "I'm on the ballot slot," which currently hasn't been invented to my knowledge. Basically, the vote is intended to be a corrector of whatever that process is.
Would it work? Yeesh. For all I know, such single-candidate elections would always yield "no no no, not this bastard, and no, not this next one, and ..." unto perpetuity.
Anyway, does that make more sense, regarding what I'm driving at? Not in terms of what kind of political system I'm hypothesizing about (probably badly), but rather, the concept of single-candidate as its own, single variable , and how it was mis-represented to us here in the U.S. as a form of education, perhaps to the point of propaganda.
More generally, I guess I'm asking whether my misconception about those elections is shared among others. I'm glad you posted because I was feeling sort of stupid when I learned that you could vote yes or no on those ballots.
Similarly, I was really embarassed when I finally learned about the geography of Berlin and the Wall; I'd always thought the Wall was part of the Iron Curtain. I debated over whether to admit this to people when I was talking about the project, but then learned that most everyone I met was equally confused. So this thread's purpose is similar.
Best, Ron
More generally, I guess I'm asking whether my misconception about those elections is shared among others. I'm glad you posted because I was feeling sort of stupid when I learned that you could vote yes or no on those ballots.
Oh, very much so. I've even voted in judicial elections like you mentioned, and I hadn't put the two together. (Honestly, the idea of being able to say, "Send him back and give us another option" is kinda appealing.)
Obviously, the use of this technique needs to be seen in the larger context of the political system as a whole. But you're right: as a technique, there's nothing inherently anti-democratic about it.
Seth Ben-Ezra
Great Wolf
The main problems I see with a one candidate system, is that there might not be any significant power center advocating against the option, making a yes vote extremely likely. Even if there is some group providing pushback, I imagine that that sort of ballot makes a majority no vote unlikely. I imagine most people will vote yes unless there is a major problem, sort of like people do with incumbent candidates. Maybe this would be acceptable if a binding yes vote required a super majority. In practice I would guess that if there were multiple powerful groups with different candidates, they would be jockeying in whatever system selected the single candidate to be on the ballot rather than in an attempt to convince the people of the country.
The "send him back and give us another" option is mentioned as worthy of consideration in the Green Party platform.
"I. B) 7. We believe that a binding None of the Above option on the ballot should be considered."
David Shockley
Hi David,
The more I learn about democracy, the harder it gets to figure out how candidates could ever be chosen (arrived at? generated? found?) in a way which is itself democratic. I have no idea what any best way is, whether about the candidates, about the parties, or about the options-per-candidate available to the voter in the moment, and I certainly have no proposal. My concern has finally become, over the years, to identify what aspects of democracy open huge pits beneath the society and how those pits can be avoided over the long haul.
I totally agree that one-candidate voting (yes/no) throws the "how'd you get this guy" question into sharp relief. At this date of writing, I feel so grim about the obscurement of that question in the present-day U.S. that having it be so sharply obvious sounds kind of attractive. Again, not that I seriously propose it for representatives (which judges are not).
As a side issue, a friend and I were talking about the upcoming election in Iran, and unsurprisingly, neither of us thinks the Supreme Leader's vetting power over the various party-proposed candidates sounds like a great idea. On the other hand, and rather disturbingly once I thought about it, the likely result of that vetting (Khatami vs. Ahmadinejad) represents a far more significant range of outlooks and policies being left up to the vote - a really meaningful choice - than our system typically produces, i.e., candidates fighting to occupy the same vanishing-tiny scrap of centrist standing room.
More to the point, what fascinates me about Cold War values is when the existence of democracy was denied as such. In the GDR, the exposure of election fraud in early 1989 was a catalyzing event for the grass-roots uprising that literally destroyed the 40-year-old regime within a year. Which is to say, democracy existed in the GDR sufficiently for it to be (a) utilized as a legitimizer by the regime (i.e. they had to cheat) and (b) valued enough that the cheating, once exposed, delegitimized it. The GDR regime was skanky, corrupt, vile, and many other things ... but throughout its history, to call it "not a democracy" was factually not true.
The idea that democracies (or democratic techniques) of dozens of stripes were found all around the world, without reference to alliance with the U.S., was simply not cognitively tolerable to people like my father or most of my teachers. Yet even a cursory glance shows them all over the place, now as well as then. If we treat corruption/subversion as a separate variable, then high degrees of that can also be found within many of those systems as well, again, without any particular reference to alliance with the U.S. During the Cold War, the word "democracy" took on a meaning that literally ignored the concept of democratic techniques being present or absent.
Maybe that's the key: the noun vs. the adjective. We might be able to talk about the GDR in terms of democratic techniques, how they were done, when they were done with integrity and when not, how the one-party system interacted with them, and so on. But to call it "a democracy" in the ringing tones reserved for U.S. campaign speeches, doesn't work at all. Given that, then the really important question is whether any nation is "a democracy" in those ringing tones, or ever has been.
How do democratic techniques interact with representation, executive power, decision-making in crisis, justice, and significant transformations? I don't know if I've ever read anything really critical, really comparative, that addresses that question. If anyone knows of the right readings, I'd sure appreciate the recommendation.
Best, Ron
rosetta stone software
The rosetta stone software uses a combination of images, text, and sound, with difficulty levels increasing as the student progresses, in order to teach various vocabulary terms and grammatical functions intuitively, without drills or translation. ishiner
1 to 8 of 8