Elections

Elections

Description

Legitimate elections are not sufficient to ensure democracy, but they are its most necessary condition. Regular and genuine elections remain the primary institutional mechanism through which rulers are made accountable to those in whose name they exercise political power. We can envision elections without democracy (indeed, we have plenty of experience of exactly that), but it is difficult to envision modern democracy without meaningful elections. Yet if elections are central to democratic systems of governance, the precise ways in which elections and representative institutions are structured vary greatly across democratic countries. At a high level of generality, a consensus exists regarding the minimal conditions under which elections must take place to be legitimate, such as a broadly distributed suffrage among citizens, the right to speak freely about political matters, the right to form political associations, including political parties, and the right to run for office. But no broad consensus exists on the relationship between democracy, elections, and the forms that political structures must take for countries to be ‘democratic’. Some democracies use first-past-the-post elections, others use proportional representation; some are parliamentary systems, others presidential systems; some democracies view separated legislative and executive powers as central, others do not; some democracies have bicameral legislatures, others, unicameral. In addition, different democracies have dramatically different institutions for overseeing the electoral process and disputes concerning elections. Through constitution or statute, some countries expressly create various independent institutions to oversee and preserve the workings of the electoral process. Other countries leave these issues to be addressed by the ordinary institutions of government, whether courts or political institutions. In some countries, election districts are designed by sitting legislators; in other countries, by independent commissions. Comparative assessment of democracy and elections can thus focus at any of many different levels. It can focus on questions of institutional design; some studies, for example, offer typologies that compare the design of democratic institutions, with an emphasis on questions such as the extent to which different systems permit simple majorities to authorize action or require broad consensus (across groups and interests) to do so. Comparative studies can instead attempt to assess the policy consequences of different ways of organizing elections and institutions. Within political science, for example, a great deal of literature exists trying to assess the comparative performance of presidential versus parliamentary systems, particularly with respect to their stability or risk of lapsing into authoritarian rule. Other social scientists seek to explore how policy outcomes are affected by the particular design of democratic institutions—for example, whether the size of election districts affects the extent of political corruption or policies concerning economic growth. Or comparative analysis can focus on the level of policy, such as by comparing legislatively adopted rules regarding matters such as who is eligible to vote, what preconditions to voting must be met, including voter registration issues, and the like. This chapter will focus on comparative discussion of the issues surrounding elections that have tended to come before judicial institutions. Over the last generation, we have witnessed what I elsewhere have called ‘the constitutionalization of democratic politics’. Starting with the US Supreme Court’s one-person, one-vote decisions in the 1960s, and accelerating greatly over the last 20 or so years, courts throughout the world have become more and more actively engaged in evaluating the design of democratic institutions and processes. Court decisions now routinely engage certain expressive aspects of democracy and elections, such as who should be understood to have the right to participate, and can also have significant instrumental consequences on the ways in which democracies function, such as when courts determine what kinds of regulations of election financing are constitutionally permissible. In addressing various constitutional challenges to the way legislative rules structure democratic participation and elections, courts struggle to reconcile protection of essential democratic rights; the need to permit popular experimentation with the forms of democracy; the risk of political insiders manipulating the ground rules of democracy for self-interested reasons; and the need to protect democracy against anti-democratic efforts that arise through the political process itself.

Source Publication

The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Constitutional Law

Source Editors/Authors

Michel Rosenfeld, András Sajó

Publication Date

2012

Elections

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