News Of The World

Even as I prepare to administer my Comparative Government exam tomorrow, I look ahead to teaching Russia upon our return from vacation.  And things are getting interesting in Russia.

First of all, there's a certain challenge in teaching a course based on institutions when those institutions undergo change.  Two examples: Britain's First Past The Post electoral system disadvantages the third party Liberal Dems, and therefore Britain never has coalition governments unlike other Parliamentary...what?  They did?  Nevermind.  And then you have Iran.  Iran has a weird hybrid of republic and theocracy.  But the wide spread fraud in the last election has ended any pretense that Iran might have had towards free elections.  Previously, there were limits in who could run, but the elections were not presumed to be fraudulent.  You can't say that anymore, and now Iran is rumored to be considering a move to a Parliamentary system.

I say all this because Russia is in the grips of an important moment in their national history.

We presume in America that officials "derive their just powers from the consent of the governed".  That legitimacy necessarily flows from the ballot box.  But that's not alwats the case.  Mexico, for decades, had a regime kind of similar to Iran, in that the elections were on the up and up, but the PRI controlled the list of candidates, the way the Supreme Leader does in Iran.  And similar to Russia, there were other parties on the ballot, but no one presumed they would be anything more than minor nuisances to the ruling party.

In the 1980s, Mexico saw its petro-economy collapse.  This greatly undercut the popularity of the PRI, which based its legitimacy on the stability and prosperity that it brought the Mexican people.  So, the PRI began to commit widespread electoral fraud.  Now, the Mexican people have a stronger identification with "democracy" than do the Russian or Iranian people, so they took this very hard.  Their choices may have been limited under the PRI, but it was still their choice.  Fraud removes that choice.

This is what we saw in Iran with the Green Movement.  The choices in Iran have always been limited - Khatami and Mousavi and others were not going to overthrow the Islamic Republic - but the people at least had some choice.  The fraud that swept Ahmadinejad back into power took that away from the people and stripped away any pretense at representative government.  And at the moment, Iran teeters on the brink between military dictatorship and a reformulated, parliamentary Islamic republic.

Russia does not have the deep roots of electoral politics that Mexico (or even Iran) has.  Elections have always been problematic there.

But they have had elections.  Putin won those elections, because he is very popular - or was - and did not need to resort to fraud.  He might make it impossible for his opponents to win - see how he hounded Gary Kasparov out of the race the last time through - but he didn't screw with the voting.

It is now abundantly clear that he did this time around.

Now maybe (probably?) the Russian people simply don't care enough about the idea of democracy to be affronted by this naked act of fraud.  The Mexican people did, and they eventually forced the PRI to abandon its fraudulent ways, which directly led to the election of the PAN's Vicente Fox in 2000.  We don't know what the long term effect will be in Iran.

But Russia stands at a very important moment.  As we undergo what might be called a fourth wave of democratization in the Middle East, Russia looks to be sliding back deeper and deeper into authoritarianism.

What will the Russian people do about it?