Chapter Eighteen

The Story So Far

The changeover from the nineteenth to the twentieth century saw a long plateau of political stability in which most nations of the West had reached a consensus over the best kind of government.  Depending on where you’re from, you might call it the Gilded Age, La Belle Epoque or the Victorian Era. The civilized world was trending towards constitutional monarchies with universal male suffrage, free elections, equality before the law, freedom of religion and a free press. Because the kings of Europe were often cousins to one another, a web of interrelated monarchies linked all the nations of Christendom together in bonds of kinship. Because most of the world was run from Europe, there was a strong sense of unity across the globe. Multinational investment had created a global economy. In fact it was widely argued that a big war between great powers would nearly impossible in such a pragmatic and intertwined world.

When Freedom House published a summary report at the end of the 20th century covering all the changes over the previous 100 years, they counted no full democracies at the beginning of the period under study in 1900 – not even New Zealand which had been letting women vote since 1893.Ⓐ  The Polity IV database, on the other hand, scores 11 countries high enough to count as full democracies in 1900, although most of these still required voters to have property or a Y-chromosome. This would make them very undemocratic by modern standards.

• Belgium
• Canada
• Costa Rica
• France
• Greece
• New Zealand
• Norway
• Spain
• Switzerland
• United Kingdom
• United States

Here's my assessment of political systems at the beginning of the Twentieth Century:

How Government Works

The unspoken core of any government is the bureaucracy, the faceless drones who carry out all the tasks that the government has decided are a public responsibility. The oldest of those responsibilities include administering justice, defining ownership, promoting morality, fighting wars and maintaining an infrastructure of roads and ports. During the nineteenth century, the bureaucracy also took responsibility for water, sewage, mail, public safety and education. The twentieth century added social welfare, telecommunications and commercial regulation to the list, while cutting back on promoting morality.

Bureaucrats are sorted into ministries and departments, each of which is assigned a specific task and placed under the executive control of a minister or secretary, but they generally do their jobs the same way every day, no matter who’s in charge. As a general rule, the bureaucracy hums along nicely without any guidance from above. Taxes get collected, streets get paved, children get taught, and criminals get arrested based on procedures and budgets already in place. In fact, if a massive but highly focused disaster were to wipe out the legislature and chief executive, it would probably be many months before the absence of leadership would actually be felt on the day-to-day operation of the government.

Only at the very top of the bureaucracy does politics come into play. When most people  argue about the government, they usually mean the legislature, which sets the rules, and the chief executive, who runs the bureaucracy via his/her cabinet of top ministers; however, these are not really necessary to the operation of the government. Legislatures and cabinets only have a purpose when someone decides to change the procedures.

Power

Power is a zero-sum game. There is a fixed amount of it; someone will always have it, and if you want a share of it, you have to take it away from someone else. For example, consider the power to decide which church I go to on Sunday. At some point someone has to make that decision, whether they decide Catholic, Baptist, Episcopalian or none. You might think there are only two possibilities - either I decide for myself or the government does - but even if the government stays out of it, others might try to take the decision away from me. My landlord could put it in the lease or my employer in my contract as part of a morality clause.

When decisions are in the hands of the government, we then have to decide which part of the government and how to reconcile disagreements. Because there are a limited number of ways to allocate powers and duties, society was reaching the point by 1900 where there were more democracies than permutations. With a century of trial and error behind them, the basic structures of democratic governments were becoming standardized.

Democratic legislatures tend to be bicameral, with the independent approval of both houses required for almost anything to get done. This forces every innovation past multiple filters, creating two lines of defense to stop anything really dangerous from sneaking through.

The upper house (a Senate or Council) is usually the smaller of the two, with limited but dignified duties such as foreign policy, judicial appointments and constitutional revisions. By having longer terms, larger constituencies, indirect elections or appointments, the members of the upper house are more venerable and less susceptible to the fickle whims of the people. The upper house often reflects an archaic, pre-democratic power structure. In the UK, the House of Lords is still the home of the nobility and the church, although, to be fair, it’s not nearly as hereditary as it once was, and many members are elevated for their accomplishments rather than ancestry. In the United States, the Senate represents all states equally, even though most state borders were finalized at least a century and a half ago when their land was almost empty, so they no longer reflect modern demographic or economic realities. The Senate of Canada is appointed by the crown and members must meet property qualifications.

The lower house (a Chamber, House or Assembly; of Deputies, Commons or Representatives) is larger, more rough-and-tumble and more representative of popular opinion by way of direct, frequent elections for smaller districts with smaller populations. It usually handles all the mundane duties of government, especially the budget.

Parliamentary System

The Parliamentary System (also called the Westminster System) is the most common way of structuring a democracy. At the top is a ceremonial head of state – a king, queen or powerless president – to provide continuity and stability for diplomacy, the civil service, the military, and other important but nonpartisan governmental institutions that run on autopilot. The head of state is supposed to be so bland and dignified that any citizen would be honored to receive an award, a kind word or a congratulatory handshake from him or her without getting into an argument over policy.

Most real power (especially the power to spend money or change policy) rests with the parliament, elected by the people and organized by party. Although members of some parliaments (such as Great Britain) are elected individually from geographic constituencies, about half the parliaments worldwide have some sort of proportional representation. Voters pick their preferred party from the ballot, and seats are then allocated according to those votes. Many constitutions will set aside a number of seats for certain oppressed minorities (or maybe women) who might not earn them in a straight contest.

In parliamentary systems, the leader of the strongest party in the lower house is appointed by the head of state to be the prime minister (sometimes called a premier, chancellor or some unpronounceable local word, such as Ireland’s taoiseach②). As the head of government, the prime minister formulates policy, administers the executive branch and coordinates legislation. He recruits allies in parliament to be ministers in his government. These lesser ministers have virtual autonomy over their departments and can only be pried loose with serious effort. This means that ministries can be used as attractive rewards to keep political allies happy; however, the prime minister only holds power as long as the parliament remains on his side. If his party loses control in the next elections, or if his own party withdraws support for the prime minister via a vote of no confidence, the prime minister and his cabinet falls and must be replaced.

The courts are independent of the other branches of government and it is hoped that they will prevent specific injustices from going too far; however, they are only allowed to judge the case at hand.

Presidential System

Worldwide, the Presidential System is the most common way of structuring a government. Under this system, most power is focused at the top with a president who is elected by the people to be head of state, head of government and commander-in-chief all rolled into one. He can often make extensive policy charges by executive order. Having a fixed term of office, he cannot be removed from office between scheduled elections except with great difficulty. Cabinet secretaries have mostly middle management duties and serve at the president’s pleasure.

Congress passes laws and budgets, but it has no administrative duties and no direct relationship with the president. Congress has a few tricks it can use to restrain a rogue president, and if those don’t work, an independent court system can completely overturn any laws or actions that contradict basic civil rights or structural principles established in the constitution. In a few countries (the United States most notably) the judicial branch has such broad powers to interpret the law that many important changes in society have historically come from case law rather than legislation. This really annoys the losing side, which had drummed up widespread public support to enact the law in the first place and now must watch a lone judge coldly shoot it down like a rabid dog in the street.③

Gridlock is a big danger when the legislature is elected separately from the chief executive. With the two equally legitimate branches of government working independently of one another, the government can easily stall. Unlike parliamentary systems, presidential constitutions rarely have a provision for calling spur-of-the-moment elections to settle disputes. Often, the army will have to step in to get things moving again. Presidential republics are especially prone to coups.

The United States is the largest and oldest example of a Presidential System that works more or less as intended. In fact, as Yale political scientist Juan Linz wrote in a 1990 essay,

"Aside from the United States, only Chile has managed a century and a half of relatively undisturbed constitutional continuity under presidential government — and Chilean democracy broke down in the 1970s.”Ⓑ

Elsewhere, the Presidential System has often become the easiest way to look democratic without actually being it. Focusing so much power into an independently elected president means a dictator must rig only one election every few years to hold onto power, which explains why the Presidential System is only the second most common way of structuring a real democracy. On the other hand, when a country has a built-in instability that makes coalition-building nearly impossible – say, ethnic divisions, a recent civil war, class differences, or an economic crisis – it helps to have a strong, independent president making all the decisions without argument, who only has to face an up-or-down vote from the people every few years and avoid provoking an impeachment by insulting too many members of Congress. Most of Latin America and much of Africa runs on the Presidential System.

Variations

By the late 19th century, democracy had been around long enough for people to notice that fair voting is more complicated than simply casting the votes and giving the job to the man with the highest count, a system called “Plurality Voting” or “Winner Take All” but most commonly called “First Past the Post” (FPTP). Number nerds and party bosses quickly figured out the main problem with this system -- that the man who received the most votes in a district didn’t really have to be the most popular candidate. A spoiler candidate could siphon votes from an ideologically similar candidate, thereby splitting the opposition and handing the election to a person whom most voters disliked, simply because they couldn’t agree on a single person to run against him. Or a slightly-more-popular party could sweep all the elections and win all the seats, even though the only-slightly-less-popular opposition party had a respectable minority across the board. [video explanation]

Because Plurality Voting is the easiest system to understand (first you vote, then you count. Highest number wins!), most of the world’s oldest democracies such as the United States and Great Britain locked themselves into it early in their histories and never went back to change it. Late-blooming democracies recognized the problems with FPTP and often chose more complicated voting systems that allow for more nuanced selection.

The most obvious improvement to simple Plurality Voting is to have a runoff election if no one gets an absolute majority of 50% plus one. Usually this means a quick follow-up election between the two most popular candidates from the first election (The Two-round System). This cancels out any spoiler effect in the general election by reducing the choice to a simple binary.

However, rather than crank up the whole electoral apparatus for yet another full election, a state can use an Instant Run-Off system instead, also called Ranked Voting. You ask every voter to rank the candidates in order of preference in the first (and only) election. If no candidate gets a majority among the first choices, then the least popular candidate is removed, and his votes are redistributed to their second choices. This continues until someone gets a majority. [video explanation]

In the mid-nineteenth century, Thomas Hare in England (1857) and Carl Andrae in Denmark (1855) independently developed a variation of the Instant Run-Off – called the Single Transferable Vote (STV) -- as a fair way of electing several people to fill multiple seats. It’s all terribly mathematical, but the gist is this: Let’s say we need to fill several seats on a city council, or select several people to represent a district in the legislature. Each voter would rank all the candidates in order of preference. At first each candidate is given the votes from all the ballots where he is ranked number one. If any candidate passes a predetermined quota, then he (…or she (…but probably he)) gets a seat. The surplus over the quota is then trimmed off and redistributed according to those voters’ second choices. If that pushes anyone over the quota, then they win a seat as well. If you still have empty seats, you start taking the votes away from the least successful candidates and reassigning them to their second choice candidates until enough of them reach the quota. [video explanation]

The main advantage of the STV is that no votes are wasted – none are wasted by voting for someone who already has enough to win anyway, nor are they wasted by voting for someone who never had a chance to begin with. Any votes that fall into those categories are reassigned to where they will have an impact. There are no spoiler candidates and no gerrymandering.

Another advantage is that it elects a variety of ideological viewpoints while bypassing the party establishment. Among political science geeks, STV is usually considered the fairest system there is, which is probably why so few countries use it. (Basically just the Irish Assembly and the Australian Senate.)

All these voting systems are designed for voters to select a specific individual to serve as their proxy in the legislature; however, the problem with voting for an actual, specific person is that then personality drives politics. Every election cycle erupts into personal attacks, insults and rumors instead of discussing issues. When voters are expected to judge a candidate based on his character, his opponent is going to concentrate on proving just how morally corrupt that character is. Even worse, when you vote for an individual candidate, you only have his say-so that he's going to keep his promises. You have no guarantee that he won't just turn around and do the opposite. If you vote instead for political parties, at least you have a track record of previous votes. If a candidate is a Democrat or Republican, you have a pretty good idea where his priorities lie.

Therefore some systems are designed for the voter to select a party rather than a person. In the Party List Proportional Representation System or PLPR, votes are awarded to the party, and the party plucks a name from a presorted list of individuals to be seated according to the vote. If the party earns ten seats, they take the first ten names; if they earn 15 seats, they add the next five names. The party gets to decide who gets put at the top of the list, often the friends of the party bosses rather than the people’s favorite leaders.

The number of countries using each voting system, according to Wikipedia (2019):

System	Lower House	President
First Past the Post	80	19
Party-list proportional representation	80	n/a
Two-Round System	20	88
Instant Run-Off	2	1

Secret Ballot

Here’s how voting day went in George Washington's Virginia:

As each freeholder came before the sheriff, his name was called out in a loud voice, and the sheriff inquired how he would vote. The freeholder replied by giving the name of his preference. The appropriate clerk then wrote down the voter's name, the sheriff announced it as enrolled, and often the candidate for whom he had voted arose, bowed, and publicly thanked him.Ⓒ

When voting is aloud and public, voters can be intimidated and punished by bosses, neighbors and bullies for voting the wrong way. They can also be paid to be more accommodating. Nowadays, this is so obvious that Article 21 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights comes right out and declares a secret ballot to be essential to a free democracy, but the issue was still up for debate for much of the nineteenth century.

The secret ballot wasn’t a new idea. Revolutionary France began with a public balloting -- the Jacobins obviously liked keeping track of how everyone voted. French voting only became secret under the 1795 Constitution (“Year III”) and the moderate rule of the Directory. Ancient Athens had used the secret ballot. Rome had begun with public voting but shifted to a secret ballot in 139 BCE. In fact, Cicero considered this to be one of the causes of downfall of the republic because it allowed the commoners to vote any way they wanted without the supervision of their betters. There’s no record of what the commoners thought of this argument.

In the middle of the 19th Century, Australia became the first country to resurrect the idea on a large scale, and the secret ballot was then called the Australian ballot since naming it after failed democracies like Athens, Rome or France would have been unlucky.  It was implemented in United States between 1878 and 1880 and in the United Kingdom in 1872.

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② If it helps, the a, o and e are silent, and the h is in the wrong place: “Tishac” would make more sense.

③ Most famously, equal education for all races (Brown vs. Board of Education, 1954), abortion rights (Roe v. Wade, 1973) and same-sex marriage (Obergefell v. Hodges, 2015) became law when private citizens challenged restrictive laws in court. In contrast, the constitution of France allows only a few specific office-holders to challenge the constitutionality of laws in court.

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