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Paul Collier: Pseudo-Democracies and Solutions: Foreign Exchange 522
Why are elections meaningless for the countries of the bottom billion?
Elections depend on being well conducted; they are only well-conducted when there are institutions already in place that force the politicians to stick by their honest roots; if these institutions are not in place, elections are easy to circumvent by corrupted leaders.
If the first wave of democracy is to hold elections, we will never get to institutions that are needed for effective democracy.
In our own democracies, this mean much more than just elections; there are lots of checks and balances in our systems that prevent cheating; however, we have not translated this to the nations of the bottom billion. These institutions take time to build, and governments resist building them. The only people that cheating elections fool are the west, not the citizens of the nations; ordinary citizens simply get infuriated by the entire process and blame the west for the continued failings.
There are many aspects to accountable government; the first is the amount of money that is raised; conditioning aid to policies does not work; governments need to be accountable to their own citizens, and not to donors. Aid needs to be tied to governance. The alternative to money being well spent is to further empower the crooks stealing it, creating a vicious cycle.
In low income countries, democracy is seen to be linked with an increase in societal violence. Thus, we should not abandon democracy, but we need to make security a strategic priority in addition to democracy. This can be done through security guarantees through coups and western nations guaranteeing true democracies intervention from coups. This is already happening with Australia, as can be seen with East Timor; if the Australians had guaranteed that if there was a coup the Aussies would put it down, they would not of had to actually do it a few years back. In Africa, as long as the elections were well conducted, they could be protected.
Smart power needs to be used; a small amount of hard power combined with more soft power is the necessary combination if used intelligently.
