Democracy isn't all it is cracked up to be

Statistical analysis can reveal election fraud, a paper says. But the problems with democracy go deeper, argues Philip Ball.

27 January 2012

“The people who cast the votes decide nothing,” Joseph Stalin is reputed to have said. “The people who count them decide everything.” A paper uploaded to a preprint server this month suggests that little has changed in Russia.

Peter Klimek, a complex-systems scientist at the Medical University of Vienna, and his colleagues say that the 2011 election for the Duma (the Russian lower house), won by Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party with 49% of the votes, shows a clear statistical signature of ballot-rigging1.

This is not a new accusation. Some, such as Russian physicist Sergey Shpilkin, have claimed that Russian voting statistics show suspicious peaks at multiples of 5% or 10%, as though ballot officials have simply assigned rounded proportions of votes to meet predetermined figures. And last December, The Wall Street Journal conducted its own analysis of the election statistics, which led political scientists at the Universities of Michigan and Chicago to concur that the data showed potential signs of fraud.

Naturally, Putin denies this. But for those who suspect that neither he nor The Wall Street Journal is exactly the most neutral of sources on Russian politics, Klimek and his colleagues offer a welcome alternative. They say that the statistical distribution of votes in the Duma election diverges from a normal (bell-curve or Gaussian) distribution — the expected outcome of a set of independent choices — by over one hundred times more than would be expected for an unbiased election.

The same is true for the Ugandan presidential election of February 2011. Both of these statistical distributions are, even at a glance, profoundly different from those of recent elections in, say, Austria, Switzerland or Spain (see Figure, below).


Plots of voter turnout versus number of votes for the winner clearly show something fishy is going on in Russia and Uganda, with many districts reporting 100% turnout and 100% of votes going to the winner (red circles).

Ref. 1

Breaking down the numbers into scatter plots, with the voter turnout plotted against the number of votes for the winner in each voting district, lays the problems bare. Most countries show a single, broad peak, but both Russia and Uganda also have an extra, smaller peak. For both countries, distortion in the main peak suggests ballot rigging — for Russia, this afflicts about 64% of districts.

But the smaller peaks suggest much cruder fraud. They correspond to districts showing both 100% turnout and 100% votes for the winning party. As if.
No perfect system

It is good to see science expose these corruptions of democracy. Yet science also hints that, in general, democracy isn’t quite what it is popularly sold as. Take the choice of voting system. One of the most celebrated results of the branch of economics known as social choice theory is that there can be no perfectly fair means of deciding the outcome of a democratic vote. Possible voting schemes are manifold — first-past-the-post (used in the United Kingdom), proportional representation (Scandinavian countries), schemes for ranking candidates rather than simply selecting one, and so on — and their relative merits are hotly debated.


But as Kenneth Arrow, winner of the 1972 economics Nobel prize, showed in the 1950s, none of these systems can satisfy all the criteria of fairness and logic that one might demand2 — for example, that a system under which candidate A would be elected from A, B and C should ideally also select A if B is the only alternative. Arrow's ‘impossibility theorem’ implies that societies must either accept that democratic majority rule has some undesirable consequences, or find fairer alternatives — which none has.

Other considerations can also undermine the democratic principle: for example, bipartisan votes may fall within the margin of statistical error. As demonstrated in the US presidential election of 2000, between George W. Bush and Al Gore, the result is then not democratic but legalistic.

Furthermore, analysis of voting statistics suggests that, regardless of the voting system, political choices are not free and independent (as most definitions of democracy pretend), but partly the collective result of peer influence. That is one — although not the only — explanation of why some voting statistics don't follow a Gaussian distribution, but instead show a relationship called a power law3, 4. Klimek and his colleagues find less extreme, but still significant, deviations from Gaussian statistics in their analysis of ‘unrigged’ elections1. They assume that some of these deviations result from collective effects such as voter mobilization: targeted, often single-issue campaigns to sway votes.

In fact, a key premise of current models of voting and opinion formation5, 6 is that most social consensus arises from mutual influence and the spreading of opinion, rather than from isolated decisions. On the one hand, you could say that this is just how democratic societies work. On the other, it makes voting a nonlinear process in which small effects (media bias or party budgets, say) can have disproportionately big consequences. At the very least, it makes voting a more complex and less transparent process than is normally assumed.

This isn’t to invalidate Winston Churchill’s dictum that democracy is the least bad political system. But let us not fool ourselves about what it entails.

Nature
doi:10.1038/nature.2012.9925

http://www.nature.com/news/democracy-isn-t-all-it-is-cracked-up-to-be-1.9925

Interesting article, thanks, A

There are other basic problems I have with democracy, but of course I do not have a better suggestion.
I have a problem that everyone's vote should be of equal value. A highly intelligent and compassionate person, who has studied political science, economics, whatever, has no more say than an uneducated moron, living off welfare. What makes it worse, is the latter tend to propagate faster, in countries that pay welfare based on the number of kids.

What happens when the number of net tax recipients exceeds the number of net tax payers?

Also surveys in USA show that most of the voting public would prefer anyone but and Atheist as president. Hence almost no presidential hopeful would admit he is an Atheist. That means the most powerful country in the world can be led by a man who is intelligent, or is honest, not both.

Scary?

The title is mis-leading and erroneous. All problems shown simply show how corruption disrupts the democratic process.

A better title would be "corruption in democracies : how it undermines the process of elections"

Yes, or "In corrupt countries, elections can be corrupt too"
Like "Duh!"
One would not expect it to be otherwise.

The best system is a benevolent dictatorship. Unfortunately dictators do not stay benevolent for long.

TRIBUNA: MARIO VARGAS LLOSA

Las ideas y el caos

El último libro de Enrique Krauze explica la actualidad y las perspectivas de América Latina. Ya no es el continente de las oportunidades perdidas, sino que ha entrado en un rumbo de progreso

MARIO VARGAS LLOSA 29/01/2012



Quienes creen que la historia de América Latina es una obra maestra de la sinrazón, un producto del puro instinto y de la fuerza bruta, deberían leer el reciente libro del historiador mexicano Enrique Krauze, Redentores. Ideas y poder en América Latina (Debate, 2011). Este ambicioso y audaz ensayo quiere mostrar, a través de perfiles biográficos de 12 latinoamericanos de diversa vocación -políticos, revolucionarios, escritores, dictadores- que la evolución de América Latina no es un caos, resultante de las pasiones y los apetitos desbocados, sino una compleja trama movida por ideas y convicciones que, aunque a menudo disimuladas detrás de desplantes, matonerías y retóricas rimbombantes y huecas, le dan a aquella sentido, coherencia y racionalidad.



Es una obra clave de nuestros días, una de las empresas intelectuales más audaces

Como los autores de las dos obras capitales que le sirven de modelo, Russian Thinkers, de Isaiah Berlin, y To the Finland Station, de Edmund Wilson, Enrique Krauze cree firmemente que las ideas hacen siempre la historia y explican todos los grandes hechos -repugnantes o admirables, generosos o mezquinos, liberadores o esclavizantes- que constituyen el devenir de todas las sociedades y naciones.

Aunque rigurosamente trabados entre sí, los capítulos del libro son de dimensión y profundidad variada y entre el riquísimo y exhaustivo dedicado a Octavio Paz -un libro dentro del libro, en verdad- y los más breves y someros consagrados, por ejemplo, a José Martí y a Eva Perón, hay diferencias acusadas. Pero todos están escritos con desenvoltura, astucia y felicidad y se leen con la expectativa y la excitación de las mejores novelas. Redentores es una obra clave de nuestros días, una de las empresas intelectuales más audaces concebidas en el ámbito intelectual y político latinoamericano, y, por su rigor y erudición y la originalidad de sus análisis, un aporte valiosísimo para entender la actualidad y las perspectivas inmediatas de ese continente que creíamos de las oportunidades perdidas pero que, según la tesis más polémica de Krauze, ya no lo es más, pues ha entrado por fin, en medio del tumulto que es todavía su fachada, en un rumbo de verdadero progreso.

El optimismo que transpira el libro no peca de ingenuo, está fundado en datos, indicios y razonamientos persuasivos. Debo confesar que, en mi caso, ha servido para derribar desconfianzas y escepticismos que alentaba hacia algunos países, sumidos en problemas que me parecían obstáculos insalvables para que en ellos echaran raíces en un futuro próximo instituciones y costumbres democráticas sobre bases estables. Desde luego, Krauze es muy consciente de la enorme diversidad existente entre la veintena de países de América Latina y de la imposibilidad de que todos ellos progresen al mismo ritmo y de la misma manera. Es también muy lúcido sobre los desafíos mayores para la democratización que representan el narcotráfico y su inmenso poderío económico y el crecimiento desaforado de la delincuencia y la corrupción que en gran parte es su consecuencia. Lo que señala es una tendencia general a la que, unos más rápido y otros con retardo, todos se van sumando, algunos con entusiasmo y lucidez y los demás a regañadientes y hasta sin darse cuenta cabal del proceso modernizador en el que están inmersos.

Según Krauze no es casual que en la América Latina de nuestros días no haya sino una sola dictadura de tipo clásico, la de la Cuba castrista, una semidictadura demagógica y corrupta, la Venezuela de Hugo Chávez, y un par de democracias populistas y secuestradas por caudillos como la Bolivia de Evo Morales y la Nicaragua de Daniel Ortega, en tanto que todos los otros países, no importa cuán imperfectas sean todavía sus instituciones, parecen haber optado de manera resuelta por Estados de derecho basados en la democracia política y economías de mercado. Más importante todavía: el modelo socialista autoritario que en los años sesenta y setenta reclutaba a todas las vanguardias políticas del continente y era el santo y seña de sus juventudes, está hoy prácticamente en ruinas, condenado a una marginalidad que se sigue encogiendo y que alientan apenas grupos y grupúsculos huérfanos de calor popular, en tanto que una nueva izquierda, como la que gobernó en Chile con la Unidad Popular y que gobierna ahora en países como Brasil, Uruguay, El Salvador y Perú, ha dejado atrás sus viejos sueños colectivistas y estatistas y optado por el pragmatismo democrático y de economías abiertas de la social democracia europea.

El camino para llegar hasta aquí -a la modernidad y el realismo políticos- ha sido largo, sangriento, de confusión y delirio ideológicos, sueños utópicos de redención social a través de la violencia, la guerra civil, dictaduras atroces, democracias paralizadas por la ineptitud y la venalidad de sus líderes, burócratas y parlamentarios, y Enrique Krauze lo traza en síntesis brillantes y elocuentes a través de los perfiles biográficos. Por momentos, como en las páginas dedicadas a José Vasconcelos, a Evita Perón, al Che Guevara y al subcomandante Marcos, el libro alcanza vuelos épicos, relata deslumbrantes peripecias aventureras que parecen provenir más de las fantasías locas del realismo mágico que de una realidad documentada. Los repetidos fracasos, las enormes desigualdades económicas y sociales, el sufrimiento que las repetidas desventuras políticas han ido sembrando por todo el continente, poco a poco han ido empujando a las sociedades latinoamericanas hacia el realismo, es decir, hacia los consensos democráticos, el primero, el de coexistir en la diversidad política sin entrematarse, acatando los veredictos electorales, la renovación periódica de los Gobiernos, el respeto a la libertad de expresión y al derecho de crítica, la aceptación de la propiedad, de la empresa privada y del mercado como mecanismos indispensables del desarrollo económico. Todo ello ha ido imponiéndose poco a poco, por la fuerza de las cosas, a través de la evolución de una derecha y una izquierda que, no sin reticencias y traspiés, han ido renunciando a sus viejas obsesiones excluyentes y violentistas, y cambiando de métodos.

Desde luego que nada de esto es irreversible. Enrique Krauze no cree que la historia tenga leyes inflexibles a las que los pueblos estén sometidos como los astros a la ley de gravedad, sino que aquella fluctúa, avanza o retrocede y a veces gira sobre sí misma de manera tautológica. Pero las conclusiones de su libro son elocuentes y estimulantes: comparada, no con el ideal, sino con su pasado mediato e inmediato, América Latina ha progresado de manera notable. Si sus economías van creciendo y han resistido mejor la crisis financiera que causa estragos en Estados Unidos y en Europa es porque ahora es más libre que en el pasado y porque la cultura de la libertad ha ido impregnando tanto su realidad política como la social y la económica. Nada indica que en el futuro inmediato esta tendencia vaya a cambiar. Todo lo contrario. Habría que ser ciego porfiado en materias ideológicas para creer que todavía la Cuba totalitaria, donde siguen muriendo los disidentes perseguidos por la policía política, o la Venezuela arruinada y enconada por las malas artes de Hugo Chávez, pudieran ser el modelo hacia el cual se encamina el resto del continente. Es evidente que esos regímenes representan anacronismos en proceso de desintegración -muy lenta, por desgracia- en un contexto en el que lo que se va imponiendo de manera inequívoca es el modelo democrático liberal.

Como soy uno de los 12 protagonistas de Redentores, y Krauze me dedica un generoso ensayo, he tenido dudas hamletianas antes de reseñarlo. Sé de sobra las suspicacias que este artículo puede despertar. Pero lo hago porque, como todavía las ideas que su autor defiende tienen tanta dificultad para ser reconocidas y aceptadas en el medio intelectual latinoamericano -paradójicamente más retrógrado que el político y el económico-, me temo que no tenga la difusión que se merece y sea víctima de la discriminación y censura que aún practica el establishment cultural, controlado por un progresismo de pacotilla. Krauze tiene el coraje de proclamarse un liberal en un medio donde todavía esta parece una mala palabra, asociada a las ideas de explotación y egoísmo capitalista, y otro de los grandes méritos de su ensayo es devolver a aquella su prístino sentido de defensor y amante de la libertad como valor supremo, pero de ninguna manera disociada de la justicia y de la convicción de que ésta, en el dominio social, sólo puede significar la creación de una sociedad donde haya igualdad de oportunidades para todos. En este sentido, tiene muchísima razón cuando sostiene que el liberalismo está más cerca de la socialdemocracia que del conservadurismo, y que, buena parte del proceso de modernización de América Latina se debe a que, sin que nadie lo quisiera ni advirtiera, ambas tendencias se han ido acercando y confundiendo en la realidad, empujando de este modo la civilización y haciendo retroceder la barbarie. Su libro es un hito decisivo en este proceso civilizador.

© Derechos mundiales de prensa en todas las lenguas reservados a Ediciones EL PAÍS, SL, 2012. © Mario Vargas Llosa, 2012.

From google translation.

The ideas and chaos

The last book by Enrique Krauze explains the present and prospects for Latin America. No longer is the continent of lost opportunities, but has entered a path of progress

29/01/2012 Mario Vargas Llosa




Those who believe that the history of Latin America is a masterpiece of injustice, a product of instinct and brute force, should read the recent book by the Mexican historian Enrique Krauze, Redeemers. Ideas and Power in Latin America (Debate, 2011). This ambitious and audacious essay wants to show, through biographical profiles of 12 different vocations-Latin American politicians, revolutionaries, writers, dictators-that the evolution of Latin America is not chaos, resulting from unbridled passions and appetites, but a complex scheme moved by ideas and beliefs which, though often hidden behind rudeness, bullying and bombast and empty rhetoric, that give meaning, coherence and rationality.



It is a key work of our day, one of the boldest intellectual endeavors

As the authors of the two major works that serve as a model, Russian Thinkers, by Isaiah Berlin, and To the Finland Station, Edmund Wilson, Enrique Krauze firmly believes that ideas are always the story and explain all the great events-nasty or admirable, generous or stingy, liberating or enslaving, which constitute the future of all societies and nations.

Although strictly stick together, the chapters of the book are varied in size and depth and between the rich and comprehensive dedicated to Octavio Paz, a book within a book, in truth, and the shortest and shallow enshrined, for example, José Martí and Eva Peron, there are marked differences. But all are written with ease, cleverness and happiness and are read with the expectation and excitement of the best novels. Redeemer is a key work of our day, one of the boldest intellectual enterprises conceived in the intellectual and Latin American politics and, for its rigor and erudition and the originality of his analysis, an invaluable contribution to understanding the present and the immediate prospects of that continent we thought of missed opportunities but, according to the most controversial thesis Krauze, no more so, as it has come at last, amid the turmoil that is still its facade, in a direction of true progress.

The book exudes optimism without being naive, is based on data, evidence and persuasive argument. I must confess that in my case, it has served to break down my mistrust and skepticism about some countries, mired in problems that seemed insurmountable obstacles that they take root in the near future democratic institutions and practices on stable foundation. Of course, Krauze is well aware of the enormous diversity among the twenty countries of Latin America and the impossibility that they all progress at the same pace and in the same way. It is also very clear about the major challenges for democratization that represent the drug and its immense economic power and the unbridled growth of crime and corruption is largely a consequence. What you said is a general trend that a faster and others delayed, they all add up, some with enthusiasm and clarity and to other reluctantly and without fully realizing the modernization process in which they are immersed.

According to Krauze is no accident that in Latin America of today there is but one classic style dictatorship, that of Castro's Cuba, a semi-dictatorship demagogic and corrupt, the Venezuela of Hugo Chavez, and a couple of populist democracies hijacked by leaders like Bolivia's Evo Morales and Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega, while all other countries, no matter how imperfect are still institutions seem to have opted resolutely for rule of law based on political democracy and market economies . More important: the authoritarian socialist model in the sixties and seventies recruited all political vanguards of the continent and was the watchword of their youth, is now largely in ruins, condemned to marginality that is still shrinking and encouraging groups and factions just heat orphans popular, while a new left, as that ruled Chile with the UP and now governs in countries like Brazil, Uruguay, El Salvador and Peru, has left behind his old collectivist dream chosen statist and democratic pragmatism and open economies of the European social democracy.

The road to get here, to modernity and political realism, has been a long, bloody, confusion and delirium ideological, utopian dreams of social redemption through violence, civil war, cruel dictatorships, democracies paralyzed by ineptitude and venality of their leaders, bureaucrats and parliamentarians, and Enrique Krauze trace the brilliant and eloquent synthesis through biographical profiles. At times, as in the pages dedicated to José Vasconcelos, Evita Peron, Che Guevara and Subcomandante Marcos, the book reaches epic flight, tells adventurous dazzling adventures that seem to come more than mad fantasies of magical realism than a documented fact . The repeated failures, huge economic and social inequalities, suffering repeated political misadventures that have been spreading across the continent, have gradually been pushing Latin American societies toward realism, ie, to the democratic consensus, the first The diversity coexist in politics without entrematarse, accepting the electoral verdicts, regular renewal of governments, respect for freedom of expression and the right of criticism, the acceptance of property, private enterprise and the market as key mechanisms of economic development. This has been gradually imposing itself by force of things, through the evolution of a right and left, not without hesitation and missteps, have been giving up their old obsessions exclusionary and violent, and changing methods .

Of course none of this is irreversible. Enrique Krauze does not believe that history has the inflexible laws that people like the stars are subject to the law of gravity, but this fluctuates, forward or backward and sometimes turns on itself in a tautological. But the conclusions of his book are eloquent and stimulants compared, not ideal, but with its mediate and immediate past, Latin America has made remarkable progress. If their economies are growing and have better resisted the financial crisis wreaks havoc in the U.S. and Europe is because it is now freer than in the past and because the culture of freedom has been permeating both its political and the social reality and economy. Nothing indicates that in the near future this trend will change. Quite the contrary. Would have to be stubborn in matters ideological blind to believe that even totalitarian Cuba, where dissidents still die pursued by the political police, or Venezuela and bitter ruined by the evil arts of Hugo Chavez, could be the model towards which is directed the rest of the continent. Clearly, these regimes represent anachronisms in the process of slow disintegration, unfortunately, in a context in which what is unequivocally imposing the liberal democratic model.

As I am one of the 12 stars of the Redeemer, and gives me a generous Krauze essay, I had doubts Before outlining Hamlet. I know plenty of suspicions that this article be aroused. But I do it because, as even the author defends his ideas are so difficult to be recognized and accepted in the Latin American intellectual milieu paradoxically the most retrograde political and economic, I'm afraid you do not have the publicity it deserves and victim of discrimination and censorship that still practices the cultural establishment, controlled by a shoddy progressivism. Krauze has the courage to proclaim himself a liberal in an environment where this still seems a dirty word, associated with the ideas of capitalist exploitation and selfishness, and one of the great merits of his essay is returned to its pristine sense that advocate and lover freedom as the supreme value, but by no means divorced from justice and the conviction that this, in the social domain, can only mean the creation of a society where equality of opportunity for all. In this sense, is very right when he argues that liberalism is closer to the social conservatism, and that much of the process of modernization in Latin America is that, without anyone even want to warn both trends have been approaching and confusing in reality, thus pushing and pushing back civilization to barbarism. His book is a milestone in this civilizing process.