1.10 Elections

Profs Jarman and Greer talk about elections in comparative perspective. What do other countries do to preserve free and fair elections? What could we do in the US to protect democracy? And how to advocates handle 'election year'?

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• Music: 'Blippy Trance' by Kevin MacLeod

Transcript

Scott Greer: 0:10

Welcome to the HMP governance lab podcast. I'm Scott Greer. And today I'm going to discuss the electoral process in the world and in the United States and in the sphere of public health advocacy with Professor Holly Jarman. So let's start at the top with a nice simple question such as what kind of a political regime needs in electoral process, because we all have got to admit that apart from a few political junkies, most of us don't really enjoy getting caught up in election campaigns.

Holly Jarman: 0:38

I'm not sure that I always enjoy getting caught up in election campaigns. And I do think of myself as a political junkie. But to to back up here, I think what we're trying to talk about is give you guys a little bit of a comparative perspective on how countries around the world organize their elections. And so we can step back a bit from the circus, that is the US election, and try to understand in particular, some of the core characteristics of what a liberal democracy is, right? So we talk about the liberal democratic model, as a very common organization or way of organizing government, around the world. And it's become very popular, right. And liberal democracies require elections. But for those elections to actually function and for the system of liberal democracy to function, there have to be certain characteristics and things that happen. And so I wanted to give you some all a sense of what these are, what are these things that liberal democracies require if they are to be healthy and to thrive, because we're facing a time in the US where our democracy is not looking so good in certain ways. So the first thing on my list, I'm laughing, as I read this is liberal democracies require a functional state. What I mean by that is, the state has to actually be able capable of holding an election, they have to be organized enough and have enough capacity to actually count votes, solicit votes, run campaigns, mobilize various groups and counted on tally it all at the end and produce a result. So there's a minimum floor for state capacity that's necessary for any liberal democracy to exist. So the second thing, though, is a little bit more ambitious. So we talk about this phrase a lot in comparative politics, and also in the specific field of inaction, watching the idea of free and fair elections. So free and fair elections that are recognized as such, and are broadly accepted as legitimate is just a fundamental component of a liberal democracy. And so free in the sense that candidates can stand from a range of different positions, people are free to cast their votes without fear of violence against them for not doing so free in the sense that there's some freedom of public speech in that everybody should be able to express their views in a non violent way. And then fair elections in terms of the procedures involved, so our votes counted fairly. Is there corruption involved? Is there are there attempts to prevent votes being counted or prevent the election officials from carrying out their duties in a fair way, is our votes that are counted recognized in the result. And so in a number of countries, we see election observers being employed, to try to, from other places to try to see if the process is in fact free and fair.

Scott Greer: 4:14

Now, this produces a lot of rules, which don't make sense until you think about the ways in which free and fair could be impinged. For example, a lot of states it's not legal to take a photograph of let alone tweet out your completed ballot. Why is that? It's because they legislators realized that people were giving voters money to vote, so straightforward, electoral bribery. And they needed some sort of a proof. So the proof was that you would take a photograph of your ballot, and then you would show that person and they'd pay you. So now, that's one of the reasons you get the little sticker is because otherwise people would take photographs of their ballot. For the best of intentions. Well, if all you want to do is show that you voted, you get a little sticker and it's You're actually in many states tweeting out a picture of your completed ballot, you could probably be breaking a law. A law that doesn't make sense until you think about all the different ways people have thought of to interfere with free and fair elections over the years.

Holly Jarman: 5:13

Right. So liberal democracies require a functional state with a minimum level of capacity. And they require free and fair elections that are broadly accepted as legitimate. Apart from that, they need to have a realistic chance that power will alternate. So here we're talking about opposing parties, there has to be more than one option, basically, in the election. And these options have to be realistic, and everybody needs to be believe that there is a realistic chance that one party will be kicked out and the other party will be installed. So obviously, political systems can have more than two parties. But there has to be at least two choices in that context, and the the idea that a democracy is only a democracy if power can pass from one person, one administration to another, peacefully, without through a process that is agreed upon by the parties. And this

Scott Greer: 6:16

is magical. The people with all the power, give up the power without a struggle. That's really impressive. And you can see why democracies are hard to establish, and hard to sustain. Because if I have the men with guns on my side, I might not hand over command of them to somebody who might probably by the end of a campaign, absolutely detest part of the basis on which you have this losers consent. And Victor's consent is simply the conviction that your rights are protected. It's the liberal, liberal democracy, if I lose the election, I can go home campaign for the next election, enjoy the protection of the rule of law, not get frivolous tax audits, not have my supporters, economic interests be damaged. So there's a whole web of rules in which Victor's essentially promised not to weaponize the state that they've picked up in their election. And the losers accept the promise from the victors. That means that they leave the protection of the White House and go out and become private citizens. Again, this is really magical. But if you frame it that way, why would I give up command of the US federal executive, then you understand the extent to which there's a promise on both sides being made?

Holly Jarman: 7:31

Right. So an essential component of democracy is protection of citizens rights under the rule of law. And so they're not operating when they're participating in the election, they're not operating under the assumption that there will be recriminations in the form of like smearing their reputation, violence, potentially incarceration, or other negative consequences, like the economic consequences that you mentioned. So everybody involved in the election, needs to be operating under the assumption that these, this kind of recrimination is not going to happen if they lose. And when the the governing party steps out of power, that they're not going to immediately be violently abused or locked up. So then the next feature is, really has a lot of valence in the context of the US, which is constraints on the ability of the majority, to impose its will against a minority. So again, those with opposing views, not just the electoral candidates can express those views without fear of punishment, and losers in the election, don't get shot or incarcerated or otherwise punished.

Scott Greer: 8:52

So that's quite high level. But it's really important to remember that the key thing about democracy is this level of consent. And the extent to which depends on a society in which citizens really can have any kind of an informed take on what their interests are and how they can represent them.

Holly Jarman: 9:08

So the final feature of a liberal democracy is a range of things that support the exchange of political views, therefore, so some examples of that might include a free press where journalists are free to report on different stories without recrimination. And again, without those consequences that could range from smearing their reputation and blackmail through to incarceration or threats of violence against their person. And so, the idea, then, is that the Free Press promotes an exchange of political views, which is really the essential core compact of a liberal democracy. Another potential feature that supports exchange of views is a mobilize our active and engaged civil society where across that society, people with different viewpoints are engaged in politics and debate, but engaged in such a way that it does not devolve into violence.

Scott Greer: 10:10

So given this list of requirements in order to preserve the magic of a peaceful transition of power after a free a fair election, how's it looking globally?

Holly Jarman: 10:22

Right, so I'm in within political science, we have a subfield which focuses on comparative politics and comparative politics looks at how different countries compare, in terms of their political systems. And there's a part of comparative politics that looks at democracies and tries to figure out how are democracies doing because liberal democracy is such a common form of government, but also because there's so much variation in the quality of democracy amongst those countries. So unfortunately, I can say, across virtually all established democracies, political scientists, in recent years have been observing what we would characterize as a hollowing out of democracy, which is basically a number of these important components of a liberal democracy have been somewhat undermined by societal changes, cultural changes and technological change. So I want to just point to three things that I think are really important for us to know about as as health advocates who care about political outcomes and their effects on health. So the first one is a decline in political parties, in many countries as significant forces. So we, we would describe a political party as an organization that aggregates interests. So they play a really important role in the society because they bring people together around particular viewpoints. So they aggregate different people's views and shape that into an agenda essentially. And then they run for election based in some in many cases on that agenda, or, or certain ideologically related elements of that agenda. And so political parties and other interest aggregation organizations, because you can include trade unions in this category, have actually been declining in membership in a number of countries, and not really performing that interest aggregation role in quite the same way. So this is important because it means big changes in society and how governments relate to the population. And some really different expectations in terms of what a party is going to do when it's in government, a lot of political systems that have strongly established political parties in years past, the political party will promise to do a bunch of things in government and then can be judged by the public based on whether or not they do those things. The we're seeing those promises break down essentially, and more parties running on sort of policy free platforms that are more based on emotional appeal, and I broad ideological appeal,

Scott Greer: 13:24

the 2016, sorry, 2020, Republican platform actually didn't exist, they just didn't pass one. Now, American party platforms historically are pretty much ignored. And many different presidential candidates have said they didn't even bother greeted. But it was kind of a moment in the evolution of American politics when the republicans just decided to skip a platform and instead of firm their support for Donald Trump,

Holly Jarman: 13:47

right, and so they're definitely reaffirming their support in the person and the character of that person, rather than necessarily anything to do with the the policies that they might support. So a second issue here, thing here that political scientists have noticed is huge changes in media markets, that are really affecting the availability of accurate information and analysis. So we've really witnessed in recent years, the breakdown in traditional models of journalism, where people will be career journalists attached to a single single media outlet and will be trained in that regard. And that had formerly given them a degree of protection, essentially, in terms of their employment and potentially better labor conditions overall. And what we've seen is a breakdown, collapse in the print media especially, that's led to a breakdown in the Ross shrinkage in the number of people who are career journalists. And so we're seeing more people engage in journalism. Basically, as In terms of consulting for various media outlets and selling stories to those outlets, and content, and obviously, the big changes in social media platforms, web platforms that emulate those social media platforms, and the very fast pace of the new cycle, as well as big consolidation amongst corporate media outlets, so they're providing the whole the same news at not a very clear level of either quality journalism or local specificity to wide media markets. And so that is affecting the availability of accurate information and good journalism. And there's also been a rise in attacks on the media and claims about partisanship of journalism and reporting.

Scott Greer: 15:57

And looking at media economies, local media in particular has been destroyed and the agent of its destruction. It varies by name. But in the United States, it's Craigslist. Because Craigslist means that you don't need classifieds, which were easily the most lucrative thing in the life of a newspaper. And secondarily, once you get into the death spiral of publishing a worse quality product with fewer reporters generating less information, then you basically only get advertisers who recognize the sort of legacy electorate legacy electorate legacy market, which in turn means that they start to become targets for private equity firms that basically figure they'll strip out the last bit of money and then let the company die, which is how the United States is lost something on the order of 20,000 journalists in the last decade.

Holly Jarman: 16:45

So we've got a decline in political parties and interest, aggregation, a decline in professional journalism and a real real change in the structure of the industry. And then the third thing I want to pay attention to is a rise in populism. So populism is a way of describing parties, as well as political leaders that tend to be nationalist or very ethnocentric. They tend to be authoritarian. And they prefer to support their arguments do appealing to what they see as maybe common sense of the people, the people as defined by them, rather than elite knowledge or science, which is very important for us lot over here in Public Health and Health Systems Research. And so, populist parties have been doing increasingly well in a number of political systems. And a number of parties on the center right have actually moved rightwards in response to populist claims in a number of countries. So we've seen kind of populist doing well in their own right in some places, but also conservative parties or all parties on the right of the political spectrum responding to populist claims, and in fact, corporate incorporating some of those claims within their platforms.

Scott Greer: 18:11

Is this a good time to talk about the United States?

Holly Jarman: 18:13

Oh, yes, absolutely.

Scott Greer: 18:16

So Americans, first Fun fact, you don't have an affirmative right to vote, the world is full of countries, many of them are less democratic than the United States, whose constitution say that you as a citizen have a right to vote, the United States does not have a federal constitutional affirmative right to vote. What it has is a number of amendments, the reconstruction amendments passed out of the city after the Civil War, in particular, which eliminate grounds on which states can deny you the vote.

Holly Jarman: 18:47

So that's really weird, right? A lot of countries don't have that.

Scott Greer: 18:52

Bear in mind that the American Constitution is by the standards of constitutions really old. Okay, so there's a number of things in the US Constitution that are characteristic of the 17th or mid 19th 18th or mid 19th centuries, but which just in the world's run of constitutions have fallen out of fashion, often for good reason. So what the United States has, in terms of the basic right to vote, is you don't really have a right to vote in the Federal Constitution. But insofar as you have a right to vote, it can't be abridged, for example, on the grounds of race, states often do have an affirmative right to vote. Now, this produces all sorts of garbled stuff, because states actually run the elections and they certify Victor's and they certify the electoral colleges, because states do it according to state law and state constitutional law. But because of the reconstruction amendments and the Constitution, the federal courts claim oversight, this produces all sorts of bizarre things, not all of which are good for the right to vote. For example, there's four justices possibly five now on the Supreme Court who actually say that because the Constitution says state legend lectures decide how elections should be run. State constitutional courts cannot override state legislatures. So Pennsylvania's Constitutional Court said for supreme US Supreme Court judges has no right to override gerrymandering and ballot restrictions passed by the legislature. Right. That's the kind of thing you're seeing where you have a federal versus state argument. And it's not clear who actually gets to clarify what's going on.

Holly Jarman: 20:30

So that's a good question, actually, how do other countries handle districting? Because I feel like the US is so in impressively gerrymandered, that it's quite an outlier, potentially,

Scott Greer: 20:43

it's extraordinarily simple, have a nonpartisan, and it's easy to design ways to insulate the body from partisanship agency, whose job it is if you have districts to draw the districts and then to administer elections. This is a bit like universal health care access, everybody else has figured out how to do it. So when I'm in Europe, I have detailed conversations about whether the British or the French model is better of vote for the British, the Electoral Commission is far superior to the delegated to the French interior ministry. But those are little micro differences, what the US does, which is give it to the 50 states, many of which give it to local governments under the supervision of in most states and elected politician, the Secretary of State is absolutely bananas. And it leads to obvious democratic malfunctions, such as Georgia, in which in 2018, the Secretary of State while running for governor purge the voting rolls of people who he thought would vote against him. And then one, it's really hard to claim that Georgia had a free and fair election in 2018, when the man running the election and deciding who could vote also was running in that election.

Holly Jarman: 21:49

Right. A core principle of liberal democracy should be that those people running for election don't decide the rules of the election, they shouldn't be able to decide on the by themselves, the the jurisdictions, the districts, they shouldn't be able to decide the rules, you need to have an impartial body that does that and insists on compliance.

Scott Greer: 22:15

It's an old joke about communism, that the party has dissolved the people and is convening a new one. Oh, East Germany, where the joke was originally made is gone. But we still got GA. So the US in term is unique among rich countries, and in fact, unique among countries that have elections. In the decentralization, the legal ambiguity, and the lack of an affirmative right to vote in our elections, as well as the fact that like most of our local governments that are really underfunded, there's plenty of solutions. The fact that they're not on the agenda is striking. We're also unique in the amount of money in politics, legal money, there's plenty of cases of all sorts of dark money and underhanded tactics in jurisdictions around the world. But even before Citizens United, the sheer quantity of legal, often untraceable, we call it dark money that pours into American elections is absolutely unbelievable. And the only saving grace is that a lot of the time it seems to be well past the point of diminishing marginal returns, that everybody from the small donor to the billionaire is actually wasting their money.

Holly Jarman: 23:23

Imagine if we took a big chunk of the money that was just spent in the the election this year, and I don't know funded health care with it potentially.

Scott Greer: 23:34

That's the problem is health care is even more expensive than politics. So American politics is really cheap by the standards of the favoritism you can buy. But, and it's really cheap compared to say what a product launch for a major company would cost or the capital expenditures of healthcare industry. But it's really expensive, expensive in the sense that it freezes out a whole lot of people who don't have either a billionaire or manage to take flight on social media with small donors. It's not a great situation. And broadly, the way you restricted is simply by restricting the things you can spend money on, the big money goes into television, all you do is ban paid TV ads, and the importance of money in politics diminishes considerably. That's the secret weapon. But we're in the America we have today. And this is a class about advocacy. So Holly, professional advocates often refer to an election year. What do they mean by this? And what are the challenges associated with advocacy in an election year?

Holly Jarman: 24:31

Oh, my goodness, that was a pivot. Okay, so we wanted to give you something that balances out the doom and gloom here with some practical ways of thinking about elections, especially if you're in a health role where you're trying to advocate for particular positions. And so, an election year is not an insurmountable challenge. If you are an advocate, it just requires some planning and so these are some of the Real pieces of advice that advocates give around what you should do when it's an election year. And this is quite important in the US context, because our election campaigns last a long time. A lot of other countries don't have, quote, unquote, election year, they have a an election period that lasts maybe eight weeks. And so we have far fewer restrictions on what the election season looks like in America. And so a lot of the time, because we have fixed term elections as well, we have this very long election cycle. And so the whole election year is quite important. So the thing to know, and if you remember nothing else from this part of the podcast, remember this nonprofit organizations, which are those classified as 501, c three, under the US tax code, if you're not American, don't worry about it too much. Just remember the number. We have a tax code that classifies organizations quite specifically into these different categories. those organizations, the 501, C, three s cannot be openly partisan, so they can't support or oppose candidates for office. So that's very important, actually, at the University of Michigan. So I am not going to go on my university of michigan Twitter account and say, vote for Joe Biden, because that would be really violating the advice that we get from the university around advocacy. So the 501 C, four organizations and labor unions can be partisan as long as it's not their primary activity. So understanding the kind of organization that you're working for, and how the tax code and then related election law constrains you, in terms of displaying partisan support is quite important for your organization. The broader things to be aware of to are that many organizations are going to be making demands on the candidates at once, and you're going to be one voice amongst many. So do think about how you can plan to be prepared during an excellent season for an establish relationships in advance, so that you're not starting a new campaign or trying to forge new relationships, when the election campaign is hotting up, because schedules are going to be busier for elected representatives in office, they're gonna be traveling around all over the place. And so you're not necessarily guaranteed to get the amount of time with any of these people that you would normally during a non election year. This also timing wise leads to unpredictable legislative timetables. So in order to assist representatives chances of re election, some bills are going to be sidelined. Other bills are going to be kind of rushed through so months before the election so that then while the election campaign is going on, the representative can claim, oh, I've done this for you, my constituents. So it kind of the election cycle has an effect on it's kind of distorts the legislative timetable. And understanding that is kind of important as an advocate. Not only will the candidates be experiencing a lot of different demands, but the public and your supporters, the supporters of your group, your members, your stakeholders, are going to be receiving multiple requests for all kinds of action. And so, you know, I'm sure you're a bit familiar at this point in the cycle with election fatigue. And so can you still convince them to donate to right in to show up to take actions and to vote in ways that you in the ways that you advise for candidates at this point in time, so you need to think about how to break through that election fatigue, and reach them in in new and interesting ways.

Scott Greer: 29:18

And I want to underline what Holly said at the beginning, which is you cannot speak for the University of Michigan. The president's office has small number of delegated people who after a long process can speak for the university, but you can't speak for it. You can't speak on behalf of it. You can speak as a student at the University. But that only means that you personally have among your many other assets, some engagement with the University of Michigan, everybody gets in big trouble if you put a University of Michigan letterhead on something that you try to use for advocacy or partisan purposes. Or if you claim that you're speaking on behalf of the University of Michigan, you're not unless you're the university president. So

Holly Jarman: 30:00

Yeah, I do some do's and don'ts in don'ts in that regard. Do act as a private individual, right, you can write a letter, and then also say I am a public health student. That's not. That's part of your expertise. That's quite distinct from saying, as a student at the University of Michigan, speaking on behalf of my class at the University of Michigan, you know, you can't claim to make statements on behalf of the university. But my advice to you would be form your own student group, former group, students in the past have formed groups where they've been advocating around a particular issue, they form their own group giving themselves a name. And they have coordinated their actions in with no relationship to the university, but just under that group name, in order to conduct an effective advocacy campaign, and that's worked very well.

Scott Greer: 31:00

So how do we tackle the various challenges that are involved in trying to have any impact in this enormous ongoing campaign? That is American politics? How do you do advocacy.

Holly Jarman: 31:10

So having suffered through the 2020 election cycle, I'm sure you're raring to go for the next one. But it'll be coming up sooner than you think. And the key things to think about here are really, in terms of preparation, be ready to go, you should be once the election really Hots up, ready to go, you should know who your champions are on your issue, and who your allies are, you should have already crafted talking points, and have some materials on hand with the idea that we don't quite know which way the election debate is going to go at any one point. Sometimes issues just become very pertinent to the election campaign, and your issue might be one of them. Given that you're probably advocating in health, it's very likely that some of your issues will become incredibly pertinent to the campaign. So you need to think about how can you pounce on opportunities as they arise to insert your issues and your positions and your arguments into the debate at short notice. So develop relationships, the best ones that you can prior to election season, but have those in your pocket, and develop knowledge of the champions issues, talking points, and all the background that you need, so that you have this on hand. Another thing to think about during election season is to anticipate alternative scenarios. So what will you do if your issue gets talked about by candidates during an important debate or televised debate or a valley? How are you going to respond to that? How are you going to reach out to your members? How are you going to reach out to your allies? How are you going to reach out to the media or the alternative scenario? On lucky you your issue gets completely ignored in the campaign debate and the campaign veers off in another direction? How will you respond then what kinds of messages Will you send out? And through all of this, it's important to leverage any funding and development opportunities for your organizations. So at the same time, you're paying attention to messaging and communications, you're also thinking about how can you raise money that supports the issues and the work that you do in advocacy. And in general, the advice from advocates is don't be afraid to send out multiple messages that are tailored and tailored to your supporters. It might take some night time for your message to be noticed amongst the deluge of election coverage. Most importantly, in all of this, do educate your volunteers or employees or members of your organization about what they can and cannot do under the tax code. And under applicable election laws, like that good background level of knowledge about what is easy to do and good to do. And what things to stay away from is going to be very important to your success.

Scott Greer: 34:14

That is a great set of marching orders. And America increasingly isn't a permanent campaign. So bearing this in mind all the time, because you never know when somebody is going to be out to get you and you can be undone by one volunteer who's got the wrong idea. So educate them, and educate them in how to operate in this environment of a perpetual campaign. Because campaigns are when politicians go out and basically interview the electorate.

Holly Jarman: 34:42

But it's my hope, too, that you'll be able to take some of this on board understand how the system works, but then we'll also be able to actually advocate to change it. I think an understanding of how different democracies work can help you Open your eyes, essentially, to different possibilities that you could put into your advocacy. Different. We don't have to organize elections this way. And other countries do it differently. And I think we should try to learn from them and do better. This has been a podcast from the HMP governance app. If you're interested in learning more about our research, come and find us at HMP governance lab.org or follow us on Twitter at HMP. gov lab.