Electoral Parodies

I've been reading a lot about various dictators this summer. And again and again I am struck by the existence of what one might call “electoral parodies” in many dictatorships: abuses of electoral rules and standards so blatant and obvious that they cannot be interpreted as anything other than mockery. Here is a good example, from the Dominican Republic:

In 1941, as the new ally of the United States against the Axis Powers, Trujillo felt obliged to extend the democratic facade by creating an opposition party, and so the Trujillo party was formed. But Trujillo was the presidential candidate of both the new creation and his old official party. Under the Trujillo Party banner, he received 190,229 votes and as the candidate of the Dominican Party he polled 391,708; the total of both parties, 581,937, meant that Trujillo had again received 100 per cent of the vote (Wiarda, Dictatorship and Development: The Methods of Control in the Dominican Republic, p. 66.)

Others include such things as releasing the results of the election before it takes place, receiving 100% of the vote from more than 100% of the voters (another Trujillo specialty), declaring victory while failing to announce any vote totals, and so on. But my all-time favorite is this story, from Haiti. François “Papa Doc” Duvalier had been first elected to the Presidency in 1957 for a six year term in a rigged but reasonably competitive election, and had since consolidated his power. On 30 April 1961, there was a scheduled congressional election. Although Duvalier was not supposed to be on the ballot,

[f]ew voters considered it unusual that the name Dr François Duvalier was printed at the bottom of each and every ballot … Late that evening rumour spread that Duvalier – with two years to go on his current term – had declared himself reelected for an additional six years because his name had appeared on the ballot. On 4 May Attorney General Max Duplessis declared to the Electoral Board – called the Census Committee – that Duvalier indeed had been voted another term in office. Crowds were organized to collect before the palace and applaud this view. … … In three days the Census Committee convened, agreed, declared President Duvalier re-elected, and announced that he received more than 1.3 million votes … … The new legislature ratified the election (14 May 1961), and Duvalier responded: ’I accept the people’s will because being a revolutionary I do not have the right [not? sic] to hear the people’s voice (Diederich and Burt, Papa Doc: Haiti and its Dictator, pp. 169-170)

The sheer chutzpah of this “election” is a thing of beauty. Voters voted Duvalier into office without realizing that they had done so! He wasn’t supposed to even be up for election!

I’ve written before about elections without choice, but this stuff still fascinates me. Clearly, much of what is going on in these “elections” is about signaling – showing who is boss by doing something outrageous and getting away with it – but I am struck by the degree to which people who should know better still interpret them as somehow “legitimating” performances. There is something like a “third person effect” going on here, as if analysts thought that electoral parodies must have a greater impact on gullible others than they do on themselves. Yet electoral parodies are not “democratic facades” that legitimate regimes in the eyes of ill-informed citizens or commentators from abroad, but “democratic burlesques” that ridicule any possible standards of democracy, and are clearly experienced as such by most citizens and international audiences.

The Duvalier case is especially interesting, since it is so absurdly brazen, and if anything contributed to the “delegitimation” of the Duvalier regime in the eyes of international audiences. Unlike in the Trujillo case noted earlier, the “re-election” of Duvalier did not come about because of pressure from abroad; in fact the US did not know it was going to happen, and made it clear through its ambassador (the aptly-named Robert Newbegin, who was supposed to inaugurate a new era of Haitian-American relations after the expulsion of the previous American Ambassador, Gerald Drew, in 1960) that it considered it illegal. As the end of Duvalier’s original term approached in 1963, the US even put out the message that it would welcome a military coup to oust him, since it considered Duvalier’s legal term to be over. (Though various ineptly planned coup attempts and a number of poorly executed invasions from the Dominican Republic did take place over the next few years, Duvalier survived them all. The man was lucky, and his opposition was almost comically disorganized.) Most other nations in the Organization of American States, though generally reluctant to intervene in Haiti, agreed that Duvalier was an embarrassment, and his “re-election” a sham.

Worse, not only did Duvalier further strain his (already strained) relations with the US by insisting on his “re-election,” but he did not even gain any of the benefits of normally rigged elections, like (biased) estimates of opposition or government strength, or the ability to make a more or less plausible claim of popular support, since nobody knew that he was going to be on the ballot; it wasn’t supposed to be a presidential election! From the point of view of contemporary analysts, it looked like an unforced error; why couldn’t Duvalier just have waited for two years to steal the next scheduled presidential election in a proper way? It’s not as if Duvalier had no genuine supporters; the “quiet doctor,” underestimated by the traditional Haitian elite at every turn, appears to have skillfully appropriated the noiriste and populist mantle of Estimé, and could count on at least some genuine support in the countryside. And he could play the nationalism card to perfection, presenting Haiti as the injured victim of US racism and imperialism while extorting large amounts of aid by playing on US fear of communism. (He would occasionally invite the Polish or Czechoslovak legations for a chat, or let communist student unions stage the odd protest, just to show the Americans the dangers of not agreeing to his demands; the man had a singular talent for blackmail). But the “election” actually endangered the flow of aid (which, it should go without saying, was in large measure used for pure patronage purposes or simply stolen). It seemed to be more like an impulsive f*** you than a rational attempt to retain power.

My best "rationalistic" guess for why Duvalier nevertheless staged this electoral parody is that given the totally uninstitutionalized Haitian political context he might have thought that waiting two more years to steal an election might provide his enemies with too many opportunities to overthrow him; better to flush them out by an unexpected, enraging move like this than to give them time to prepare. And it certainly changed the political opportunity structure, since it entailed the cancellation of the scheduled presidential election of 1963, and thus foreclosed the option to battle Duvalier on an electoral terrain, however uneven; perhaps by forcing the opposition to adopt the techniques of the underground, he was moving the fight to a place where he had greater advantages, though this was a high-risk gamble. 

And yet all actors involved were forced to speak, with a straight face, the language of legitimacy, laws, rights, and popular sovereignty. Here, for example, is a bit Diederich and Burt quote from the Attorney General’s ruling, a masterpiece of this nonsensical rhetoric:

It is essential that immediately, even before counting the votes obtained by the candidates, we insist upon the principle which, far from being new, constitutes the very essence of national sovereignty. This principle can be defined: the members of the electorate, when presented with an electoral decree or law which looks to them incomplete, have the right to fully manifest their will to complete the law or decree and to designate a civil servant or a group of civil servants whose election was not foreseen. The intangibility of the principle once established, it will be easy for us to understand the the electorate of Port-au-Prince Arrondisement (used to establish legal precedent) has acted within its full sovereign power by designating François Duvalier for a new term under the title of President of the Republic. (Diederich and Burt, Papa Doc: Haiti and its Dictator, p. 169)

The language of legitimacy coordinates expectations even as it is being obviously flouted. Hypocrisy may be the tribute that vice pays to virtue, but this is not even hypocrisy; it’s more like trolling.

The Varieties of Electoral Experience

(Some commentary on recent elections in North Korea, and on electoral rituals generally)

As many readers will know, North Korea just had an election for the Supreme People’s Assembly. In these elections – held more or less every five years, previously in 2009 – voters are presented with only one candidate per district, all of them belonging to the Korean Workers’ Party, and expected to vote “yes.” (Though technically they could mark “no” on their ballot papers, voting is not genuinely secret, and North Korean defectors report feeling that the risks of voting “no” are so large that practically no one does it). Even if voters had a choice, however, the offices they are voting for have no real power; as in the old Soviet joke, we might say that citizens in North Korea pretend to vote and deputies pretend to rule. (Some cynically-minded readers might say this idea applies far more widely).

One might think this would be reason enough for voters to sit out the election, but participation is not optional; though apparently some hardship dispensations are available, failure to show up to vote appears to carry severe risks, since the elections function as a political census, providing information about people who might have left the country, military personnel gone AWOL, and other undesirables that can then be used against non-voters and/or their families. New Focus International (a website run by North Korean defectors) reports:

At any other point in the year, family members of missing persons can get away with lying or bribing surveillance agents, saying that the person they are looking for is trading in another district’s market. But it is during an election period that a North Korean individual’s escape to China or South Korea becomes exposed.

There is much more to this election, which takes place once every five years, than politics or propaganda: it is the occasion on which the North Korean state conducts a comprehensive crackdown on missing individuals.

The number of ‘missing’ persons began to snowball around 20 years ago. During the ‘Arduous March’ of the mid 90s, when North Koreans suffered mass famine, many living in inland provinces escaped from their designated residential areas to seek survival opportunities elsewhere. The exact number of those who starved to death during this time is difficult to establish, not least because it was impossible to identify the dead bodies that constantly piled up near train stations and rivers.

As the North Korean state collected the bodies in trucks and transported them to the hills to bury en masse, it exacerbated the confusion of surveillance and security agents in their record-keeping. Although agents continued to receive daily reports from residential surveillance officers, sometimes not even the family members of the missing persons themselves could confirm whether their loved one was dead or alive.

Moreover, those who know that someone in their family has safely made it to China will keep the knowledge secret, because anyone who leaves North Korea is labeled as “a traitor of the people” by the ruling Party. Even when surveillance agents drop in on the homes of missing persons and interrogate family members about their whereabouts, they will stand up to the agents and hold their ground, maintaining that they are out to trade and have not yet returned.

In the mid-2000s, state surveillance and security agents turned to tactics of persuasion rather than confrontation alone. They requested families to give up information about missing persons by saying that they knew the person was in China, but that if he or she returned to North Korea to vote in the next election, all would be forgiven by the Workers’ Party. There were threats too: if the missing person did not return for the election, the treacherous penalty of abandoning the homeland would be paid by the remaining family members.

Still, it is curious that the regime insists on associating this surveillance operation with a periodic electoral ritual, rather than merely announcing a census, which would presumably serve the same purpose. At any rate it is clear that the regime takes the electoral ritual seriously in some ways. Candidate posters are printed, agitators give talks in workplaces about the importance of the elections, and a festive atmosphere is created; and after the election is over, North Korean news agencies dutifully report turnouts above 99%, with 100% support for the KWP and its leader. (The Korean Central News Agency’s report on the results of the 2009 election and its report on the 2014 election are nearly identical). Incidentally, the reason the turnout numbers do not reach 100% is the fact that “[e]lectors on foreign tours or working in oceans could not take part in the election;” KCNA even helpfully notes that electors too old or ill to go to the polls “cast their ballots into mobile ballot boxes” which, if true, appears to show a remarkable degree of commitment on the part of the state to produce a foreordained result, when it could simply cast their ballots for them.

A state powerful enough to produce these outcomes can clearly dispense with elections: the Chinese state does not hold direct elections for its highest legislative bodies, for example, despite claiming to be just as democratic as the North Korean state. Yet North Korea, like almost every other state in the world, prefers to retain public electoral rituals (and has retained them for more than fifty years; NELDA indicates that there have been 10 such elections since 1962, mostly at regular five year intervals, though with one 8 year gap between the 1990 and 1998 elections). But why bother?

One answer I’ve seen in a couple of places seems tempting, but incorrect: that these elections are meant to “legitimate” the regime by providing a “veneer” of democracy (see, e.g., here). The problem is that there is no evidence that anyone is fooled who did not already want to be fooled, and certainly not anyone with any genuine influence in the regime: not the international community (which appears to feel at best amused, at worst trolled, by the whole thing), not the leaders being “elected” (who presumably are well informed about who has real power in the regime, and know it’s not the voters), and not the voters, who “generally have no interest in who their candidate is as many already live their lives apart from the state, and don’t bother to find out the name of the person they have just ‘voted’ into office,” and who have apparently occasionally engaged in iconoclastic destruction of candidate posters and other election-related vandalism under cover of darkness. The “veneer” of democracy that North Korean elections provide is too thin to do any genuine work producing political support for the regime.

Moreover, when we look at the KCNA dispatches that talk about the feelings of voters and the meaning of the event, we find that they do not emphasize the opportunity for popular participation provided by the election, or its democratic character, but the ways in which the ritual shows the people’s unity, loyalty, and gratitude; to the extent that the elections “legitimate” the regime (or better, produce emotional attachments and normative support for the regime), not even the regime thinks that they do so by convincing them that they live in a democracy. (Even in “real” democracies people complain about the lack of choice; why would North Koreans be any different? We must have a very poor opinion of people’s political competence to believe that they can be tricked in this way.)

Though we know very little about voter behavior in North Korea, we do have some knowledge about single party elections in the Soviet Union and various Eastern European states under communist rule, and we have some more robust theories about the purpose of periodic elections and the motivations of voters in settings with some token opposition, like Mexico under the PRI from 1929 until at least 1994, Egypt under Mubarak, or Russia today. This literature suggests that elections do not serve a single purpose for all regimes, and voters behave differently across authoritarian contexts (and in turn behave differently in such contexts than in democratic contexts): the varieties of electoral experience are many. Regimes may stage overwhelming victories to send a signal of invincibility and thus to deter opposition among elites; they may encourage electoral competition to distribute spoils to elites that have some degree of social support, thus coopting these into the regime; they may use elections to determine the competence of officials in mobilizing the population, and/or to observe incipient opposition if actual turnout does not match expected turnout; and they may stage them periodically to produce an orderly circulation of elites, or as a way of managing succession problems. At the same time, voters may vote even while knowing that their vote cannot affect the composition of the government in order to receive election-day goods or to avoid potentially negative consequences; to express support or dissatisfaction (expressive voting is not confined to more democratic contexts); or even because they think it is the right thing to do. But the idea that elections serve to give “legitimacy” to the government plays almost no role in any of these theories.

Soviet elections, which are perhaps most comparable to those in North Korea, are an especially interesting case. (I draw here on a piece by Rasma Karklins from 1986). The Soviet Union spent enormous resources on electoral rituals, which were frequent (more so than in North Korea, on average one per year) and regular. There were “campaigns,” and the day of voting was a festive occasion, sometimes including ceremonies where first time voters were presented with flowers or other gifts. As in North Korea, the voter could only choose to vote “yes” or “no,” but voting “no” entailed some risk and could not be properly done secretly. As in North Korea, the regime enlisted party cadres and ordinary citizens as “agitators” to produce maximum turnout (agitators were made responsible for bringing 20-30 voters to the polls), and there was enormous social pressure to vote. All of this meant that elections always resulted in nearly unanimous verdicts – over 99% support for the party in most cases, with turnouts similarly over 97%. The efforts the regime put on achieving unanimity are remarkable, and the language used to report the results shows striking similarities to the language KCNA uses today (minus the reference to the democratic character of the Soviet Union):

The results of the elections to the USSR Supreme Soviet and the unanimous election to the country’s supreme body of state power of the candidates of the indestructible bloc of Communists and non-Party people provide striking new evidence of the monolithic unity of the Party and the people and of the working people’s full support for the domestic and foreign policy of the CPSU [Communist Party of the Soviet Union] and the Soviet state. The elections have convincingly shown the thoroughly democratic nature of the world’s first society of developed socialism and the working people’s firm resolve to persistently strive for new successes in all sectors of communist construction. (Pravda, 7 March 1979, as quoted in Karklins, p. 451)

Yet these 99% turnouts are not the whole story. The turnout numbers excluded people who were not properly registered to vote, as well as (most?) prisoners, migrants without residence permits, and people who requested absentee ballots but did not actually vote. In a number of cases, people cast voters for other people, a practice that low-level people serving in electoral commissions seem to have encouraged in order to avoid trouble with their superiors. For example, Karklins reports a funny story about how “an Estonian biologist working at Tartu State University voted not only for his wife, but also for 30 of his students, apparently because the student turnout was only around 70%, and he simply took it upon himself to take care of the”problem“.” (p. 453). Actual voter turnout seems to have been closer to 90% than to 100%, and in some of the major cities like Moscow may have reached as low at 75% in some elections; and among those who voted between 1% and 5% made use of their right to enter an election booth to cast a negative vote or to write something on the ballot. Moreover, though voters expressed fear that not voting, or voting no, would lead to trouble, actual penalties seem to have been rare, more a reflection of the generalized fear produced by earlier decades of terror than of the actual incidence of punishment for not performing their assigned roles. (Karklins reports one 1971 case in which an anti-Soviet comment in a ballot led to “an arrest and a five-year sentence in a Soviet labor camp,” though this seems to have been exceptional, not the rule; and I vaguely remember something from I think Gulag Archipielago in which a single spoiled ballot during the Great Terror led to a huge search and numerous arrests). Nevertheless, these small risks meant that non-voters (and people who actually voted no) were among the more educated and politically aware USSR citizens, those most likely to dissent or emigrate; non-voting was one of the “weapons of the weak.” So when I read the North Korean numbers I wonder about the actual incidence of non-voting, especially given the fact that many North Koreans have in fact begun to live their lives “away from the state” since the famine of the 1990s; and I wonder about the actual numbers of “no” voters (are there no North Koreans who take advantage of their right to strike a candidate as a political act? Is the North Korean state so efficient at repression that it always pursues such people?); but I suspect that if the North Korean state knows such numbers, it keeps them very much secret, as they are more useful indicators of its actual support levels.

More importantly, Soviet elections seem to have produced in the long run not legitimacy, but alienation. If politics involves everywhere the mobilization of emotion through ritual, the dominant emotions such rituals produced and amplified seem to have been closer to resignation rather than enthusiasm; the regime ritually triumphed over the citizens by forcing them to participate in a mass charade, boasting of its ability to get citizens to approve of it even when everybody knew of the falsity of these claims. A Soviet election in the 1970s and 80s, at least, was thus a ritual designed to lower the emotional energy of the citizens, and increase that of its rulers, though it is plausible to imagine that the ritual aspects of the elections served to produce enthusiasm in citizens early on – a Soviet election, like an election almost everywhere, was first and foremost a big party, where the symbols of the regime were the key objects of attention, and where emotional commitments to these symbols (including political parties and candidates) can be amplified and preserved (or lost and reversed). It is in this sense that an election can “legitimate” a regime (though in competitive contexts, it always does so at the expense of producing negative emotions among partisans of the losing parties, something that is never properly emphasized in accounts of how democratic elections “legitimate” states). Yet the “legitimation” involved in Soviet elections as the regime wore on was less that granted by citizens on rulers (through enthusiastic emotional attachment to regime symbols, including the party and its candidates) than a kind of self-legitimation by rulers on themselves, more and more dependent on the ability of the regime to “triumph” over its citizens by making them passive and acquiescent rather than enthusiastic and committed.

Today, I suspect that North Korean elections are similarly alienating to North Korean citizens: the people who are emotionally elevated by participation in them are more likely to be the rulers than the citizens. There is evidence that the “hidden transcript” in North Korea is different from the public narrative; that many North Koreans, like people everywhere, mock the symbols of oppressive power whenever they think can get away with it. Where voters endorse the elect, and officials elect the people they desire, the people is likely to become more and more emotionally distanced from these officials as time wears on. Yet the triumphalist ritual of such elections is still useful to rulers committed to remaining in power; the appearance of power, is power.

Update 3/13/2014: edited one passage for clarity, fixed a typo.