Larry Diamond travels the world studying what facilitates and obstructs democratic development. The Hoover senior fellow and professor of political science and of sociology advised the Provisional Authority in Baghdad for three months in 2004 and wrote Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq (Times Books, 2005). We asked Diamond, ’73, MA ’78, PhD ’80, to train his eye on conditions stateside; excerpts from that interview follow.
How is the United States deficient as a democracy?
Our system of campaign finance leaves much to be desired, and moves to reform it have not really solved problems that mainly involve the buying and selling of influence. Something needs to be done a) to achieve a level playing field and b) to diminish the role special interests play in funding campaigns.
What circumstances would enable reforms to happen?
You need a very strong bipartisan coalition in which both parties leap over the cliff together, and strong societal and media pressure for reform, so that politicians who defy reform fear they will pay a price, in terms of their reputation, from pissed-off voters. It helps to have presidential leadership or visible national leadership pushing for it, but it’s got to be bipartisan. The [reform] elements would be increased public funding of campaigns for Senate and Congress and maybe state-level offices. And the requirement that the media allocate some free time for campaign coverage to at least the two major parties, because media time has become the single biggest expense. I also think we need to raise the limits on individual contributions to three, four or even five thousand dollars.
But the single thing that is most broke is congressional redistricting. The traditional efforts to draw district boundaries for Congress and state legislators to maximize partisan incumbent advantage have, in the age of computer programming, been taken to a new level of capacity for precision—so you can draw even more tortured boundaries that achieve even more perfect maximization of seats that can be won by the party in control. This is how we’ve got to the point where 90 percent of seats are not competitive. It’s a scandal. I’m all for federalism, but I think we need some national standards—national legislation that may even require a constitutional amendment—that would take this out of the hands of state legislatures. I don’t think partisan politicians should be drawing district boundaries.
Shouldn’t that properly be the function of an electoral officer?
The problem is, who’s the electoral officer? We lag grossly behind Canada, Australia and India and many other democracies in having very few national election standards to begin with—it’s all done at the state level. And secondly, in many states, we have a partisan politician [secretary of state] in charge of this function, which led to the scandal in Florida in 2000. It’s fine if you want to leave it at the state level—that’s in the American tradition—but we need to move to a professional nonpartisan, as in Canada, within each of the 50 states.
One common standard [should mandate] that no voting shall ever take place without a paper record of how people have voted. It is deeply, deeply troubling that we had a presidential election where there was at least one state with voting machines that left no paper trail. There are a number of people who believe—I am not one of them—that the last election was stolen, that the Diebold machines in Ohio, where there was no paper trail, were rigged by a company that has contributed to the Republican cause in order to give Bush the victory.
You don’t buy that?
I see no evidence for it. Before you make a charge that grave, it’s helpful to have some evidence to document it. Until I see evidence otherwise, I accept that George Bush won the last election fair and square. But I think it’s unhealthy for the quality of our democracy that a) there’s no way of proving it didn’t happen and b) there are a lot of people walking around thinking it did happen. And there is absolutely no excuse for this—we have the technology to produce the paper trail; we have the political system capable of establishing national standards. We also need very vigorous enforcement of laws that prevent people from being discouraged from voting on the basis of ethnicity. There was some evidence that happened in the last two elections.
There seem to be more and more citizens’ ballot initiatives. Is this a good thing for democracy?
Not in my opinion. Most of these are not really grassroots initiatives. They are politicians or major political or economic interests hiring professional signature-gathering companies to stand at malls long enough to collect the requisite number of signatures to get something on the ballot. There was for some time a presumption that an initiative could not land on the ballot in a state like California unless there was a strong popular groundswell for having the public initiate new legislation. But, again, there has been a change in the technology of this, a professionalization of this. That has changed the character of our politics and enabled anybody with enough money to get virtually anything on the ballot, and then, if they have enough money to buy time on the airwaves, there’s a certain chance of getting the initiative passed. The second thing is, I think there has been a tendency on the part of the state legislatures to abandon their responsibility to act as elected representatives, and to pass on difficult issues to the public.
In other words, they’re not leading.
They’re not leading, they’re not legislating, they’re not performing representative functions that are intended in representative democracy. We don’t have Athenian democracy: the public is not sufficiently informed about the issues to even read some of these initiatives. So everything gets reduced to slogans, sometimes distortions, in highly charged campaigns. I think one can make the case for having the initiative be a vehicle for the public to act truly in grassroots, bottom-up fashion when some kind of broadly desired public action is blocked by special interests, but it should be a relatively rare occurrence. I don’t think the progressive movement, which brought about these instruments of initiative, referendum and recall, envisioned in the early 20th century that the public would be voting every two years on so many hot-button issues and highly technical matters as a way of getting around the legislative process.
Where are the other weak spots in American democracy?
We need to revive participation in public life, including electoral participation. I think we need better, more frequent deliberation on the issues. We need to innovate more and try to revive practices of informed debate and dialogue to enhance the value of political participation.
Is that possible in this age of shout shows and Jerry Springer?
It’s a great challenge, and I think people who understand the media better than I do are going to have to think carefully about how to get past all of this. For example, we now see growing evidence that the new comedy shows, and Jon Stewart’s show is a paradigm of this, have become a significant source of news for people, and that there’s some proportion of the American population now, particularly young people, whose main or only source of daily news
is The Daily Show on Comedy Central. Well, let’s learn from that and think about whether that provides potential new venues for involving people in public life. And let’s learn from the Internet revolution and political participation in the 2004 election campaign to think about how we can use the Internet to inform people about issues and involve them in public life more effectively.
Looking around the world, who’s got democracy right?
I think you find different pieces in different places. Brazil, for example, is a country with terrible rule of law, but it is innovating in participatory budgeting—having local communities become involved in how their governments are going to spend money and having public debates around it. India, again, is a huge developing democracy with many of the same problems of corruption and abuse of power and really serious electoral violence, yet it has a system of electoral administration that is neutral—and Canada as well—which I think the United States would do well to look at. Some European countries have developed the institution of the ombudsman that provides a mechanism to check the abuse of power and investigate public complaints.
Every country has to pick and choose, for its own culture and benefit, different innovations around the world. I think it’s a mistake to look at one country as a model, just as it is a mistake for Americans to say, “Our country is the model and let’s export it to the rest of the world.” I think the right role for the United States is to say, “Democracy in its multiplicity of forms and instruments from which people can choose is an idea and value about choice, about freedom, about competition, about human rights and the rule of law.” That is a model that is worth exporting and promoting and which every country has to develop for itself and continually improve on.
The following is supplemental material that did not appear in the print edition of Stanford.
Did the Florida Supreme Court and the Supreme Court decisions in the 2000 Bush election enhance democracy or diminish it?
The Supreme Court, the highest court in the land, ruled in a certain way and I, as a Democrat with a big “D” as well as a small “d,” accept their decision. But the whole spectacle of what happened from the beginning—from election day, when it appears obstacles were put in the way of black voters—to that final, (in the view of some) almost party-line vote in the Supreme Court did damage to American democracy in the eyes of some Americans and quite a number of people around the world. Their esteem for American democracy was diminished—I travel a lot and this was the pervasive feeling I found. We need to learn from the experience in a number of respects. The physical ballot in Florida was a mess, and we shouldn't allow that again. We need to be able to go back technically to recount. And we need to be more vigilant in ensuring every citizen has the opportunity to get to the polls and vote.
What did you make of the Gray Davis recall?
We now know that huge amounts of partisan money flowed in to his recall and that Enron deliberately manipulated energy flows to California to create the very crisis they created. I don't think Gray Davis was a very good governor, but I think there was a huge manipulation that was a perversion of the democratic process, although technically [the recall] was certainly clear and democratic.
Looking at Terri Schiavo, do you think this was a case of the courts trying to make laws, and the legislature judgments?
It was a little embarrassing the degree to which the social conservative circles in the Congress appeared to be enthusiastic about exploiting this tragedy for political ends. That only made it a larger national tragedy. We have some horribly difficult issues as a result of galloping medical technology and the ability of modern medicine to keep people alive in ways that would have been much less imaginable a generation ago . . . philosophic, moral and religious issues that the courts are not well suited to adjudicate. In the end, the law ruled the married spouse had a legal right to decide what his wife really wanted and intended. If there had been a living will, there would have been clarity. I think what was most indicative of the gross politicization of this controversy was the rendering of an opinion on her situation medically by people who had not been there with her personally and had come to conclusions on an extremely complicated medical issue on the basis of very, very thin evidence.
So are the judicial and legislative branches sticking to their knitting?
One of the ironies today is that we have a profound role reversal between conservatives and liberals. A generation ago, conservatives were decrying judicial activism and appealing for strict constructionism—adhering to the letter of the law and the Constitution. Now it is the social and, in a way, economic conservatives who want to be judicially active and creative and adventurous in interpreting what the law and the constitutional text must have meant, and liberals, who made a lot of legislative gains in the last quarter century, wanting to consolidate and have a lot of judicial restraint and deference.
We see the same thing in the debate over the use of the filibuster in court appointments. A generation ago, liberal Democrats were horrified by the filibuster because Southern conservatives were using it to block civil rights and other progressive legislation. Now that we've got all that and liberal Democrats are a minority in the Senate, they want to preserve their ability to block things they don't want with the filibuster. No one is challenging their right to use it on substantive legislation, but two things should be said in the spirit of balance: one, if the Republicans had frequently attempted to block Clinton court appointments by filibustering, the Democrats would have been quite outraged; [two,] the Republicans, because they got legislative majorities just two years into the Clinton presidency, were able to block appointments using other methods—they never came to a filibuster because they controlled the committee process. I think there's a good deal of hypocrisy here.
