[EL] If it were a World Cup of Democracy....

Fri Jul 4 06:20:15 PDT 2014

Voter turnout is the life blood of my industry – political consulting. Elections are won and lost based on who votes and who does not. While Lorraine is correct in theory, and she has done some excellent work in this area, as a practical matter we find it easier to get discontented voters to cast ballots and more difficult to get contented voters to participate in an election. When voters are angry about high crime rates, high utility rates, high rents, etc. they can be more easily motivated and mobilized to come out and vote to do something about it. When there were high crime rates, riots, red baiting and race bating the turnout was high; when the crime rate dropped to the lowest level in 60 years and there were no other negative motivating factors at work, the turnout dropped. At the start of the first hearing of the Citizens Commission on Los Angeles Election Reform the then interim city clerk said, “Voters will vote when they are interested.” Nothing we did or heard as a commission contradicted that.

Larry

From: Lorraine Minnite [mailto:lminnite at gmail.com] 
Sent: Friday, July 04, 2014 5:38 AM
To: Larry Levine
Cc: Zachary Roth; Smith, Brad; Election Law
Subject: Re: [EL] If it were a World Cup of Democracy....

The notion that low voter turnout signals democratic strength is an old canard.  It is not necessarily an indicator of contentment.  It can also signal that voters are resigned to irrelevancy - of the power of the office (i.e., mayor), of the fact that the issues they care about are not being addressed (i.e., high rents), of their place in the democratic order as completely insignificant in terms of being able to effect change through the vote.  Approval ratings for Congress and the incumbency rate are different metrics of Congressional performance, but they are not unrelated, and the gap is stark.

Lori Minnite

On Fri, Jul 4, 2014 at 2:07 AM, Larry Levine <larrylevine at earthlink.net> wrote:

Turnout percentage is a sign of neither strength nor weakness in Democracy. It’s a sign of how interested voters are in the issues being presented in the election and how content they are with their government.

In 1969 the turnout in the Los Angeles Mayor’s race was 82%. That was four years after the riot in Watts and two years after an anti-war Demonstration turned into a riot when police attacked the demonstrators. It was the year Tom Bradley was running to become the city’s first African-American mayor and the incumbent was red baiting and race baiting throughout the campaign. 

In 2013 the turnout was 23%. Things are fairly tranquil in L.A. The crime rate is down to the level of the 1950s. The two candidates were liberal/moderate Democrats. 

As for the percentage of Members of Congress who are re-elected in the face of the unfavorable ratings of the institution, I think that’s more a produce of the nation’s long-standing cynicism more than anything else. “My member is doing an OK job; it’s the other 434 people who are screwing things up” has been a position of the American public for as long as there have been polls on the subject. From Will Rogers to Jay Leno, humor has built an underlying cynicism in the institutions of government.

I think the rankings in this so-called World Cup are designed more to justify the position of a particular group than they are a reflection of reality.

Larry

From: law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu [mailto:law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu] On Behalf Of Zachary Roth
Sent: Thursday, July 03, 2014 4:24 PM
To: Smith, Brad
Cc: Election Law
Subject: Re: [EL] If it were a World Cup of Democracy....

Can you say what the arguments are for low turnout being a sign of our democracy's strength, and whether you agree? I know some people think this and am interested to hear a smart version of the argument.

Sent from my iPhone

On Jul 3, 2014, at 7:04 PM, "Smith, Brad" <BSmith at law.capital.edu> wrote:

What's interesting is that there are very strong arguments that all of these things represent the strength of American democracy and our electoral system. The absurdity of a ranking putting Argentina and Russia ahead of the US may be evidence that the raters do not understand what their data means.

Bradley Smith 

Sent from my iPhone

On Jul 3, 2014, at 6:59 PM, "Rob Richie" <rr at fairvote.org> wrote:

Not to bore the list, but just briefly, the FairVote crew used four different measures. One is based on the Economist's "Democracy Index", which measures overall democratic health -- court system, press, etc. The US does pretty well there, ranking 7th among the nations, with countries like Algeria and Russia far behind. So good for us there, even if we're a good bit behind countries like Australia, Netherlands, and Switzerland. 

But they did want to make this more heavily focused on elections. And there, Americans do have to face up to a few facts like:

- Voter turnout in the US is exceptionally low in internal norms

- Representation of women in Congress is very low, which we see as a window into other limitations in how well we represent the electorate.

- Congress can have an approval rating around 10%, yet more than 98% of House incumbents almost certainly be returned to office this November - returning us to the four elections from 1998 to 2004 where each year more than 98% of House incumbents won even in years like 2002 when more than half of states switched parties in gubernatorial elections. (Note that FairVote will be able to call winners for November 2016 in close to 90% of races just two days after this November's election using a methodology that is quite likely to be 100% accurate.)

- Republicans won 54% of seats in 2012 with 48% of votes, and likely would not lose control of the House this year without dropping below 45% of votes (and this can happen to the GOP in some states, like in NJ, where its assembly candidates won only 40% of seats with 50% of votes in 2013). So we don't do seats-to-votes very well for the major parties, and of course not all for emerging parties seeking to hold the major parties accountable.

On some of these electoral measures, generally less democratic nations like Russia and Argentina do a lot better than us. And we think that matters, even if we recognize the Economist measure as critically important.

Onward,

Rob

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Rob Richie
Executive Director, FairVote   
6930 Carroll Avenue, Suite 610
Takoma Park, MD 20912
rr at fairvote.org  (301) 270-4616 <tel:%28301%29%20270-4616>   http://www.fairvote.org 

Social Media: FairVote Facebook <https://www.facebook.com/FairVoteReform>    FairVote Twitter <https://twitter.com/fairvote>   My Twitter <https://twitter.com/rob_richie> 

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On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 6:25 PM, Ilya Shapiro <IShapiro at cato.org> wrote:

Um, Russia is tied with the US and Argentina is way ahead. Time to go back to the drawing board on that ridiculous measurement.

Ilya Shapiro

Senior Fellow in Constitutional Studies,

Editor-in-Chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review

Cato Institute

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Washington, DC  20001

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From: law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu [mailto:law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu] On Behalf Of Rob Richie
Sent: Thursday, July 03, 2014 6:20 PM
To: Election Law
Subject: [EL] If it were a World Cup of Democracy....

Some soccer fans at FairVote are also fans of representative democracy. Even as they get ready for the quarterfinals this weekend, they decided to compare nations according to measures of their level of electoral democracy.

Spoiler alert: the US wouldn't even have advanced to the round of 16 based on this measure.

Happy July 4th - -a good time to mull over how well we're measuring the "consent of the governed."

- Rob Richie

##############

http://www.fairvote.org/research-and-analysis/blog/world-cup-of-democracy-goes-to-the-netherlands/

World Cup of Democracy Goes to the Netherlands

by  <http://www.fairvote.org/list/author/Anthony_Ramicone> Anthony Ramicone,  <http://www.fairvote.org/list/author/Nicholas_Golden> Nicholas Golden,  <http://www.fairvote.org/list/author/Bogdan_Popescu> Bogdan Popescu // Published July 3, 2014

  fifa <http://www.fairvote.org/assets/_resampled/ResizedImage627495-fifa.jpg> 

The FIFA World Cup is underway in Brazil. And while that tournament will eventually crown the best national soccer team in the world, we wondered what it would look like if it was crowning the best democracy in the world. With that in mind, we decided to put together an index that compares democracies across countries and then apply it to this year’s World Cup field.

In the end, the Netherlands came out on top, defeating Australia in a fairly lopsided final. You can see how the whole tournament played out in the graphic above. As to the United States, it didn’t even escape its “group of death” in our Democracy World Cup and ranks 17th among the 32 nations overall.

But what does it mean to have the world’s best democracy (or at least the best out of World Cup entrants)? Here is what went into our calculation:

1) Turnout

If a lot of people don’t bother to vote, your democracy is probably not healthy. Political participation is at the root of representative democracy, and voting is perhaps the most basic form of participation. Our turnout metric is an average of the turnout of the last two nationwide elections as a percentage of the voting age population,  <http://www.idea.int/vt/index.cfm> as reported by IDEA. 

2) Fair Representation of Political Views

How likely is it that your vote will elect someone? Do political parties receive a share of the power equal to their share of support? These questions are at the heart of measuring fair representation, or “proportionality” in political science terms. If, for example, one third of the voters support a particular political party, they should not be excluded from the system. To measure this, we use the  <http://www.tcd.ie/Political_Science/staff/michael_gallagher/ElSystems/Docts/ElectionIndices.pdf> Gallagher Index, which calculates the overall difference between how many votes that different parties get and how many seats they receive in a country.

3) Women’s Representation

Is your democracy inclusive of underrepresented groups? While an ideal calculation of this would include racial, ethnic, and religious measures, what constitutes a minority is so varied across countries that it is too difficult to encapsulate in a single metric. Instead, the percentage of women in government serves as a good barometer for understanding how well a democracy represents those who are traditionally excluded. In particular,  <http://www.ipu.org/wmn-e/classif.htm> drawing on the Inter-Parliamentary  Union, we use the percentage of women in the lower house of the legislature, since almost every lower house is directly elected.

4) Legitimacy

Is your democracy a sham? It doesn’t matter how inclusive your legislative chamber is or how many people show up to vote if your elections are rigged. We use the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, which measures the robustness of democracies, as a multiplier in our calculation. This ensures that superficial democracies, which look good on the surface, or not rewarded.

You can find all of our  <http://www.fairvote.org/assets/World-Cup-Democracy.xlsx> sortable data and calculations here which allow you to see which nations are best in each category. We hope that this serves as a foundation for building an index that serves to compare democracies around the world, not only measuring how free or fair they are but also how successful they are at representing the people they serve.

Some might be surprised to see that the United States did not make it past the group stage. Not even Tim Howard could save the US from its weak turnout and poor representation of women in Congress. You can read more about FairVote’s proposed reforms that would  <http://www.representation2020.com/> enhance women’s representation ,  <http://www.promoteourvote.com/> increase voter turnout and  <http://www.fairvoting.us/> improve fair representation.

Stay tuned for our next edition of  <http://www.fairvote.org/assets/Uploads/DubiousDemocracy2010.pdf> Dubious Democracy, where we have rated states in congressional elections. Historically we have done a relative index, but the method presented here is a step towards an absolute measure that will allow for more meaningful comparisons.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Rob Richie
Executive Director, FairVote   
6930 Carroll Avenue, Suite 610
Takoma Park, MD 20912
rr at fairvote.org  (301) 270-4616 <tel:%28301%29%20270-4616>   http://www.fairvote.org

Social Media: FairVote Facebook <https://www.facebook.com/FairVoteReform>    FairVote Twitter <https://twitter.com/fairvote>   My Twitter <https://twitter.com/rob_richie> 

First Million Campaign  Thank you for considering a tax-deductible donation <http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/2495/t/10346/shop/custom.jsp?donate_page_KEY=5643>  to support FairVote's Reform2020.com vision. (Combined Federal Campaign number is 10132.) 

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