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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: frankw1900 who wrote (98674)	5/21/2003 10:29:00 PM
From: Dayuhan	Respond to of 281500

As a Pakistani columnist (of military background) pointed out a long time ago, the response to an elected government which is inadequate, is another election. The formal democratic structures Pakistan had in place have never been allowed to work. The military has always interferred and democracy has not been allowed to play out. The columnist missed a word. The ideal response to an inadequate elected government is another election. In the real world it doesn’t always work that way. If an elected government is bad enough, especially if it simply fails to govern, it creates a power vacuum that somebody is going to fill. It may be filled by a military coup, or a communist revolution, or any number of other things, but nature abhors a vacuum, and if a government creates a vacuum, the rest of the nation is not going to simply wait for another election. This is especially true when the electoral system is dominated by parties with no clear policy differentiation, that are little more than vehicles for the personal ambitions of various elite factions. When this happens, people lose faith in the electoral process, and often regard its demise as a blessing. This is the kind of scenario that led to the rise of the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines, and for that matter to the rise of the Baath party in Iraq. It’s also something we’ve seen over and over again in Latin America. If a democratic (or pseudodemocratic) government is bad enough, nobody will protest when it is dissolved. Even dictatorial government is better than no government at all. The electoral process does not necessarily produce better government, especially in the sort of semi-democracy that we see so often in the developing world. These countries may have elections, but they are not true democracies: the rule of law is often weak or nonexistent, and the electoral process has been co-opted to the extent that it is little more than a merry-go-round for elite factions pursuing their own interests. When this happens, governments stagnate until they are replaced.