Elections are a necessary but not sufficient component of democracy. It's widely, and correctly, said that U.S. policy sometimes forgets this. I'll be attending an event tomorrow on Democracy Support and will write up the results, but I had a thought after attending a preview.
That said, I'm more of a booster for electoral, or thin, democracy than the average international relation type. My reason is that the most controversial part of democratization from the U.S. perspective is that some times the 'wrong' people win. Most common recent example is Hamas. Time and again there's a corrupt government in power and a popular radical group out of power and we think the solution is to reform the corrupt government or, to paraphrase a Quiet American, to create a third force. This approach fails time and time again when the opponents are not marginal?
The virtue of thin democracy is that it forces the issue. The power structure of a government will be reworked in to roughly mirror the preferences of the population. This is no panacea, I'm not a fan of Hamas, but addressing the concerns that drive them is a necessary step.
I think what I may have been missing in my support for thin democracy is that there are other ways to work on incorporating the outside group. Mitchell used a whole range of tools as part of the Good Friday process that included regularly booting Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA, out of the process. These tools may be substantial better than elections for resolving the conflict. However, ultimately longstanding popular movements must be co-opted. Discrediting the movement can be part of that process, but it's much harder when they're out of power.
Photograph of Palestinian Election posters by pharaoh.berger used under a creative commons license.
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