The U.S. has long envisioned itself as a democratic world leader. Yet, as the results of the 2004 U.S. presidential elections demonstrate, the U.S. may have more in common with struggling democratic neophytes than with mature, cosmopolitan democracies.
Two weeks ago, I was knee deep in mud in a Kosovo village. As the sole American on the Council of Europe’s election monitoring team, I watched while villagers proudly cast their ballots in well-scrubbed white-walled classrooms. It was the first Kosovo-wide elections run by the Kosovars themselves, instead of the international community, and the population showed up in droves.
I was duly impressed to see in each polling station a squad of domestic poll watchers, representing the main political parties and the key independent human-rights organization. There was a certain visceral satisfaction with being able to inspect each hand-marked ballot, even though the electronic machines we have in the U.S. look flashier. Under the watchful eye of so many domestic monitors, no one could claim that the vote was somehow fixed.
Granted, some things about the Kosovo elections seemed strange to me, as an American observer accustomed to two-party rule. The Kosovo ballot provided a tremendously long list of choices, with more than 30 political parties vying for power. To make matters even stranger, under the “closed-list” system adopted by Kosovo, voters chose among the parties, not among the individuals. The parties would receive a percentage of seats in government according to the percentage of votes they had received. In addition, a set number of seats were to be reserved for ethnic minorities, thus ensuring minority representation regardless of the vote outcome.
Unlike America, in Kosovo it was after the voting ended that the negotiation over the composition of government really began. As long as no single party received a supermajority of the votes, each party would be forced to somehow work with other parties to get their candidates appointed to top posts. Thus, the resulting coalition government could conceivably include a president from the populist party, which got about 50 percent of the vote, and a prime minister from the liberal intellectual-leaning party, which succeeded in attracting a mere 6 percent.
Doing democracy in Kosovo does differ greatly from American traditions. Even so, the final results were strikingly similar.
Both the Kosovo and U.S. election results seemed to be dictated by the will of rural folk over the desires of urban intellectuals. More accurately, however, both cases pitted a group of citizens composed of those well-informed about how the status quo harmed their interests against a group composed of two factions: those privileged by status quo politics and those ignorant of the ways in which the status quo caused them harm. While the former group urged that it was time for new beginnings and a change of leadership, the latter felt it was better to play it safe and stay the course. Kosovo and the U.S. proved unready for a change, as the latter option prevailed in both cases.
The men retaining power–George W. Bush and Ibrahim Rugova–are strikingly similar. Both men claim to be more in touch with authentic national morals than their opponents. In so doing, both men have a keen ability to ignore factual truth, especially when doing so entails fessing up to having done wrong. Instead of being guided by facts, Presidents Bush and Rugova consistently base their behavior on the mythologies they have created for themselves. For Rugova, this means ignoring the issue of revenge killings and overlooking the complicated nature of his demands for Kosovar independence. For Bush, this means ignoring how things are really going in Iraq and reimagining the economy at home to somehow account for rising prices and lost jobs.
Today, in America and Kosovo, groups of people are wondering how their democracies could have functioned better, so as not to end up being represented by men who have diminished reputations on the world stage. Perhaps they should talk a little to each other.
These are democracy lessons that need to be shared; the process is messy, the results often favor consistency over change, and the disconnection between urban and rural voters is stark. How to move forward with this knowledge will be a continuing challenge for voters and opposition parties in the U.S. and Kosovo. The 200 years of the American experience with democracy may provide good historical and political background for Kosovo’s new electoral system. But also as we consider our democracy’s own limitations, it would behoove us all to think of the possibilities and experiences of fledgling democracies and to remember the importance of pluralist politics, with all of its ups and downs.
In addition to being a teacher of democracy, the U.S. is still taking democracy lessons.
