Election Eve in Doha

Adam Przeworski, a political scientist of some renown, famously (at least among political scientists) described democracy as a system of “organized uncertainty.” For a democratic system to function, all participants (parties, candidates, and voters) must accept that their access to power is not guaranteed; they stand a chance, at some point, of losing out in electoral competition, and they accept the fact that they will have to wait for the next election cycle to try again (at which point they may once again lose). According to Przeworski, it's this acceptance of perpetual uncertainty that fundamentally separates democracy from authoritarianism.

I remember articulating some less coherent variation on this argument back in 2004, trying to reassure friends (and partially myself) who were disillusioned by the result of that year's presidential election. I also noted that the one time this uncertainty principle broke down in American history (1860), the country went to war with itself (in part) over the results of a presidential election.

That said, it goes without saying that the benchmark of functional democracy should probably be set a little higher than absence of civil war. And while I basically agree with Professor Przeworski's thesis, I can't help but think we should hold our conception of representative governance to a higher principle than mutual acceptance of the crapshoot. Such a definition says little about the quality of outcomes we as citizens should expect from the system. Should our acceptance of uncertainty in electoral contestation imply a concurrent acceptance of uncertainty in the quality of our wellbeing as citizens and democratic participants? Somehow I don't think this should be the case, but it's difficult to reconcile how one achieves uncertainty in the former with greater relative certainty in the latter.

I want to tell myself that it all comes out in the wash, so to speak; the back and forth of the electoral process should average out policy and policy outcomes in favor of a happy medium, as hard as that may be to see in the near term. As I'm sure you gather from the content of this blog, I'm by no means convinced that this is the case.

Thus the cognitive dissonance I'm currently experiencing on the eve of my country's upcoming election, one that I'm observing from a distance this year, from a country in which the system is diametrically predicated on more perpetual certainty in the continuity of leadership. On the one hand, I am trying to reassure myself that the uncertainty of tomorrow's outcome is indicative of a democratic process that is working per design. On the other hand, I am trying to reconcile this attempt at reassurance with a conviction that the potential outcomes carry fairly significant consequences in one direction or the other, both for Americans and a global community writ large that are now staring into a deepening chasm of social, economic, and geopolitical uncertainty.

Paz.