A surprising number of autocracies and dictatorships go through the cosmetic act of appearing to hold elections. Sometimes the cosmetic nature of the vote is obvious, as, for example, when opposition parties are banned, or campaigning is constrained, or the press is not free, or the count is falsified. There are, of course, plenty of other anti-democratic manipulations, and the list of possible taints to the democratic process is nearly endless.
I learned a bit of a useful lesson about such things nearly thirty years ago, when I had agreed to take on a task of getting a major university re-opened in the capital of an African nation which was, fairly obviously, a fake democracy. The university had been closed by order of the country’s president following a bit of a dispute between the government and the university leadership, and, as the closure dragged on, the situation had become static and dangerous, as the institution was the nation’s primary source of highly qualified personnel. At the time, Canada was still a significant donor nation, and the minister for higher education in that nation’s cabinet had asked the Canadian High Commissioner to try to find someone who might be able to break the deadlock, and I was sent to Africa to see what I could do. It took me a while to get everyone calmed down, and to get both sides to agree to my proposed framework for re-opening, and for the parties to implement it, but a key piece of wisdom that I learned whilst doing that work was from our High Commissioner there. The HC had said to me, “In my experience, in dictatorships clothed in the superficial machinery of a democracy, the real opposition party is usually the major university in the capital city”. Would that all diplomats were so wise.
But democracy is not a binary concept. It’s not that you have it or you don’t, but rather a continuum that stretches from “absolutely not” to “fully democratic”.
A number of published indices try to assess the health of democracy in the nations of the world, though they vary in their criteria, and indeed, in the elements that they consider essential to democracy, as well as the weight they give to the many factors, the scoring system they use, and their methods of data collection.
There are three particularly well-known published indices, They are the Freedom in the World report, produced by the US-based Freedom House non-profit, the Democracy Index, published by the Economist Intelligence Unit, the research arm of the UK-based Economist Group, and the Varieties of Democracy report produced by the Varieties of Democracy Institute based in the political science department of the University of Gothenburg, in Sweden. The Democracy Index may be the most widely quoted. But all three are complex, with their various transparencies, but also their opacities. An outstanding 2024 paper entitled “Measuring Democracy”, by Zachariah Black and BJ Siekierski covers these three, especially as they apply to Canada, and is Library of Parliament publication No, 2024-03-E.
The important takeaway is that, broadly speaking, all three indices produce similar (though by no means identical) patterns, even though they vary with respect to the weight given to the machinery of democracy, or to social justice factors, for example. Despite some modest biases, a good case can be made that they all more or less track the extent to which any given national government is really an expression of the will of the people or not.
But the complexity of these indices makes them a bit awkward if we want to use them to understand the infelicities in our own system, or the systems which we are accustomed to compare to our own, and to use those comparisons to understand where we ought to push, in terms of both legislation and political culture.
For a non-specialized observer like me, it seems easier to use a series of relatively straightforward questions to explore the spectrum between dictatorship and full democracy, and to take note of where we might lie, compared to others. These questions cover the electoral process, money, the rule of law, the extent of the incumbent advantage, and some questions about political culture, traditions, and expectations of behaviour. The following list of 13 questions is certainly not exhaustive (though possibly exhausting), but it does cover some key concerns.
1. Is there an independent, non-political entity that is entrusted with the technical aspects of the elections, or do political parties and factions also operate the technical machinery of the electoral process?
2. How much politically motivated redrawing of voting district boundaries (gerrymandering) occurs, and how flagrant is it?
3. Are there any issues about it being difficult to vote, or about who is eligible to vote, and is the franchise broad enough?
4. How much variation is there in the weight given to individual votes, either due to geography or other electoral design factors?
5. What limits are there on spending on political campaigns, and on donation to political parties and candidates?
6. Is political office routinely a route to personal enrichment?
7. Are the courts sufficiently insulated from political interference? Have the courts been drawn into serving the political objectives of those in power, or is their autonomy adequately protected?
8. Are the courts sufficiently courageous to make findings that displease those in power, especially when those in power overstep?
9. Does public office confer any degree of legal immunity, and, if so, how much?
10. What are the consequences for political figures who break laws?
11. Are there any other obvious aspects of the structure of government that particularly favour the incumbent during elections?
12. What are the consequences for political figures if they are found to have lied?
13. Are the internal processes of the major political parties transparent, and are they generally fair?
All aspects of Canadian federal elections are overseen by Elections Canada, which, in effect began on July 1, 1920 with the creation of a Chief Electoral Officer who was independent of government. Most Canadians hold to the view that Elections Canada, the independent non-partisan agency of Parliament that oversees our national election processes, does an excellent job of safeguarding the fairness and probity of our elections. And they would be right. Many of us, however, then uncritically assume that the only way to achieve fair and honest elections is for a nation to have some independent entity like Elections Canada run the elections. This isn’t always true.
Strangely, there are many nations whose elections we would view as fair where nonetheless their elections are managed directly by government. Conversely, there is quite a crop of nations that use nominally independent bodies, but which have never experienced a free and fair election. By way of example, while our initial hypothesis about the great advantages of independent electoral management bodies is confirmed by noting that Australia, NZ and Austria have them too, we might be shocked to learn that independent election management entities also exist for elections in Russia and Belarus, which are about as far from fair as possible. On the other hand, there are some nations where we usually believe that election processes are fair, but where those processes are run by the government itself, including the UK, all the Scandinavian countries, Switzerland and Belgium.
The key lesson here, I think, is that political culture and customary expectations both count for quite a lot. An independent election management agency is a good start, but it isn’t the whole story. Canadians tend to be a bit smug when we compare our processes to those of the United States (which tends to be our go-to comparator). But the mayhem, gerrymandering and the whole range of legal but partisan electoral management manoeuvers that we see in the US stem from more than just the absence of an independent election management system. Broadly, the US problems stem from two facts. The first is that there is very little opprobrium attached to partisan electoral management moves, because that is the political culture, and they are broadly accepted as part of “politics” as understood there. Secondly, the national elections are overseen in each of 50 states by the state government, not the federal government, so not only are biases on full display, but it is a chaotic and inconsistent set of biases from state to state. It is axiomatic that fairness is bound to fail if consistency fails, because consistency is one of the necessary (but not sufficient) conditions for perception of fairness.
Data on how elections are managed worldwide are available from the Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA).
Now to gerrymandering. Most redrawing of the boundaries of electoral districts is not gerrymandering. Gerrymandering means the manipulation of an electoral constituency’s boundaries so as to favour one party or class. Its origin is quite colourful. Quoting from Wikipedia:
“The term gerrymandering is a portmanteau of a salamander and Elbridge Gerry, Vice President of the US until his death, who, as governor of Massachusetts in 1812, signed a bill that created a partisan district in the Boston area that was compared to the shape of a mythological salamander. The term has negative connotations, and gerrymandering is almost always considered a corruption of the democratic process.”
To my knowledge, we have experienced only minor use of “gerrymandering” in Canada, and none in recent years. In the US it is rampant and overt, but studies show that, in the end, while it does shift a number of legislative seats towards those who utilize it, the numbers of seats that it swings would not be enough to counter a serious groundswell of change. It is enough, nonetheless, to taint the perception of fairness and throw the electoral process into some disrepute. Furthermore, the history of its past use for racist purposes makes it even more unsavory.
However, in the present time, while it is an inherently undemocratic practice, its impact upon national level outcomes is less than the issues addressed in many of the other 12 questions.
Turning now to voting. The broadening of the franchise has been a multi-century process in most democracies, and not all the changes were in the distant past. And there are still many countries where the franchise is too narrow.
But for modern anti-democratic conspirators, the techniques of making it difficult for certain classes of voters to register to vote or to cast a ballot are viewed as far more effective than trying to formally limit the franchise. Hence the campaigning by right-wing politicians in the US against postal ballots, with a view to diminishing voter turnout by those who lack transportation, or who cannot easily have time off from work or other obligations to vote. These campaigns may also be partly rooted in residual racism, as a kind of chipping away at the protections of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
In Canada, racist restrictions on voting by immigrants ended in 1947, when immigrants of Chinese and South Asian origin who had become citizens got the vote in BC. The history of granting the franchise to indigenous peoples is more complicated. The Macdonald government did so (with some limitations) in 1885, but the Laurier government withdrew those franchise rights in 1898. Complete opening of the franchise to indigenous peoples came much later, with Inuit gaining the full franchise in 1950, and the last being those First Nations members who still resided on reserve lands, who gained it in 1960.
In many countries around the globe that lie somewhere on the spectrum between autocracy and democracy, restriction of the franchise and/or restricting the ease of voting for certain groups is a widespread technique to manipulate the machinery of democracy for a non-democratic purpose. A related stunt is to undermine the secrecy of the ballot, and to use fear of having one’s ballot choice become know as a tool to compel endorsement of those in power.
Fortunately, so far in both Canada and the US, the secrecy of the individual ballot seems to be well respected. But some votes count for more than others (pun intended).
I have commented before in this magazine on the matter of the variation in the weight given to individual votes, depending on where they are cast. That piece can be found by clicking here.
To reprise key details, however, with respect to the US, it is not surprising, given that the US is a collection of federated states, that geographic representation remains important. But the archaic arrangements thereof yield some truly bizarre asymmetries, most of which currently tilt the playing field heavily in favour of the Republican party. By way of example, a vote cast in an election for the US senate, if cast in the very Republican state of Wyoming carries 69 times the weight of a vote cast for the US senate if that voter resides in the very Democratic state of California. And even the presidential election has similar but less extreme biases, in which a vote by a Wyoming resident for a presidential candidate carries 3.8 times the weight of a vote cast by a Californian. A quick perusal of these ratios across all states explains why no Democrat can reasonably expect to win the presidency without garnering at least some 3-4 million votes more than the Republican candidate, but a Republican can very probably win the presidency with 2-3 million votes less than their Democratic opponent.
Furthermore, only two US states do any dividing of their electoral college vote by district, while all the rest use a winner-takes-all approach. That would be roughly equivalent to selecting a Canadian PM by treating each province as a single riding, with the winning party naming all the MPs for that province.
A colleague of mine has pointed out that the US asymmetries were part of the founding deal of the US. However, the asymmetries have grown in a striking fashion in the past 236 years, At the time of the creation of the US Senate in 1789, a vote for a senator in Delaware would equal 9.2 votes in Virginia. Given that the greatest state-to-state asymmetry today is 69, the situation has worsened by a factor of 7.5 since the system of elections for the Senate in the US was created.
Canada, like the US, is a large, geographically diverse country, and so the importance of geographic representation is substantial. Furthermore, Westminster-style parliamentary systems stand heavily upon the bedrock of the idea that a local MP known to the community will sort out a whole host of minor administrative problems for individual constituents. But given the vagaries of geography, it is not possible for all constituencies to contain the same number of electors. Fortunately, Canada is largely free of the very fancy gerrymandering of local and state electoral district boundaries that has been carried out in part of the US with the express intention of disenfranchising certain groups, but nonetheless, we do have considerable variation in constituency population. There are 338 parliamentary constituencies in Canada, and eight of them have fewer than 30,000 voters. However, in four cases that can be explained by the vast territory the MP must cover, as those four seats are Yukon, Nunavut, the Northwest Territories and Labrador. The other four somewhat underpopulated seats are the four in PEI, which is the residuum of the founding constitutional deal. For all the remaining 330 seats, they each contain 50,000 to 100,000 electors. Examining the remaining 330 seats, the greatest disparity by province would be between Saskatchewan and Quebec, with one vote in Saskatchewan having the weight of 1.52 votes in Quebec. Not a completely level playing field, but a far cry from the imbalances in voter weights in the US.
No election campaign can be run without some money. In Canada in 2025, no person may give more than $1,750 to a political party during that calendar year, and that single limit includes all donations to the campaigns of any of that party’s candidates and the party itself. Corporations may not donate to political parties. On the other hand, there is considerable tax relief for having made a donation within that limit, and, furthermore, after an election a party can claim and be reimbursed by the government for roughly 50-60% of approved campaign expenses. This very sanitized system largely prevents very wealthy individuals or enterprises from swamping the process with money and implicitly buying future favours.
In the United States, the 2010 Citizens United decision removed all restrictions on independent political spending by corporations and unions, because of the court’s view that such restrictions would violate the First Amendment’s free speech protection. The resulting tsunami of money, via political action committees controlled by candidates and parties, has polluted the electoral process ever since. Thus, in the US today, a successful election campaign is, of necessity, hugely expensive. Hence, any elected person who wants to stay in office must constantly seek these significant pools of funds, either from donors, or from the national party organization (who got it from donors).
And, in the US there are very good reasons for wanting to stay in office. Data on US legislators show that election to the Senate (and to a lesser extent to the House of Representatives) is routinely a route to substantial personal enrichment. The publicly acknowledged wealth of such people tends to vastly exceed that of other individuals with the same occupation or profession that the senator had before entering politics. That gives them a strong incentive to wish to remain in office, which also means that they are quite unlikely to contradict the party leader, as the leader controls much of the campaign funding that the members need to stay in office.
In Canada, there may be somewhat less drive to stay in office. Being an MP in Canada is not anywhere near as effective a way to become wealthy as the equivalent role in the US. In fact, a substantial number of members of the House of Commons earn less in that role than they were earning in their prior occupations. That may be a good thing, for two reasons. First, it means that many or most of them have a genuine interest in public service. And secondly, they are likely to be less easily silenced if they disagree with the party leadership on some matter, because there is no spectre of being removed from some route to vast personal enrichment.
One hallmark of a true democracy ought to be that the rule of law applies to all and is administered in a fair and even-handed way. How well that is achieved by a nation’s courts depends on many factors, including how judges are selected, how secure their tenure is, and how great or grave the consequences are for making rulings that displease those in power. The hugely political process for making judicial appointments in the US invariably tests the limits, though, interestingly, the courts in the US, including the Supreme Court, have their own culture. So, despite the overt politicisation of judicial appointments, once appointed, many (but not all) US jurists have tended over time to move from their original stances towards some sort of imagined centre.
In Canada, it would be disastrous for figures in the political milieu to try to interfere with or influence the courts. I have political friends who would describe that as “a third rail political move”. (That term derives from electrified railways and subways, where the third rail carries the electric current, so stepping on it is a thoroughly bad idea.)
World-wide, the courts of most nations have been able to remain independent only where other measures of democracy are still in relatively good health. Generally speaking, if a nation state fails the democracy tests for some of the items higher on the list earlier in this article, the courts are very unlikely to be able to right the ship, though they may be able to temper some of the worst decisions and provide a fig leaf of legitimacy.
A bad sign in the democracy sweepstakes would be for anyone to be immune from criminal charges or civil liability. The current conviction and legal difficulties of the former President of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, is, in a way, comforting about the state of democracy in France. In the United States, the Supreme Court has been trying to have its cake and eat it too, as it continues to temporize over its task of parsing what aspects of the President’s actions are official or personal, having confirmed that he immune for any “official” action he takes. Fortunately, in Canada neither the Prime Minister nor any other member of parliament or government official has any degree of immunity from criminal prosecution or civil liability for any actions.
In many countries where democracy is strained, partial, or in doubt, immunity of those in power is not formalized, but just sort of “happens”. Whether there are political consequences seems to hinge on things like freedom of the press and other forms of news dissemination, and political culture.
The person in the highest elected office is always vastly more visible and better known than the leader of the leading opposition party, and this publicity, with name recognition and myriad photo-ops doing good things and giving away money, confers an obvious electoral advantage. Many liberal democracies reduce the incumbent advantage somewhat by separating the roles of head of state and head of government. In a constitutional monarchy, the monarch (or representative thereof) gets the fancy ceremonial roles, and the prime minister gets to be a distinguished spectator. Some republics solve the problem with a ceremonial president who is expected to be relatively apolitical, even if elected, while the prime minister runs the government. This is a bit riskier than the constitutional monarchy approach, because sometimes the connection between the two offices is too close, or one becomes the other, as occurred in Erdogan’s constitutional manoeuvre in Turkey.
In the US, where the two top offices are combined, the incumbent advantage has historically been so powerful that, following the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the 22nd Amendment to the US constitution was passed, mandating a two-term limit for president, which prior to Roosevelt had been customary anyhow. Next February 27th that rule will have been in force for 75 years. Because a sitting president has the huge incumbent advantage of the combined visibility of the two top offices, the effective term of a US president is not really four years. It is effectively eight years, with a four-year off-ramp for those who appear to have severely underperformed. (Only Grover Cleveland and Donald Trump have been elected to two non-consecutive terms).
The incumbent advantage in Canada, however, while less than in many other places, is non-trivial.
The Harper government did make an attempt to reduce the incumbent advantage by passing a parliamentary resolution on fixed election dates. The western Conservatives particularly had long held strongly to the belief that the ability of a sitting PM to decide the timing of an election conferred an undue advantage on the party in power, which could opt to go to the polls when it was experiencing a period of popularity. Unfortunately, the shift to fixed election dates seems to have backfired. A careful examination of the past suggests that, while the ability of the PM to trigger an election at will should have been quite advantageous, it was not, and sitting PM’s had guessed wrong with frightening regularity as to optimal election timing. But what the old rule had done was to guarantee short periods of election campaigning, because the date could not be anticipated until the writ was dropped, or perhaps just before, given the power of rumors. The new fixed election date rule has, in effect, greatly lengthened the informal election campaigns that precede the official campaigns, and consequently greatly lengthened the period prior to an election during which the incumbent advantage is thrust in the face of the people.
The incumbent advantage always exists, with the only question being how large it is. In less democratic nations, where the incumbent has extensive influence over the flow of information to the electorate, the incumbent advantage is even more exaggerated.
In the end, it is the political culture that determines whether there is opprobrium attached to lying, and to whether the political parties themselves have genuinely democratic structures and practices, and adequate transparency, so that tests of probity can be applied, and the public can know what they are getting.
At the moment, the political culture in Canada punishes lying and usually, but not always, rewards transparency. The communications revolution has somewhat muddied the waters, as it has in most other places.
The current situation in the United States is so very different. Last June I explored some aspects of it in “Why the US is in Such a Mess: An Outsider’s View” in this magazine.
As a scientist, I am certainly discomfited by the newly popular American term, “Alternative Facts”, evidently coined by Kellyanne Conway.
And it is often unclear, even in Canada, that political parties are always accurately reflecting the views and priorities of their members.
But our favorite comparator, the US, while suffering from some flaws that we have escaped, is far from the worst on the continuum of democracy. If the test of democracy is whether it generates governments that really are an expression the will of the people, rather than a distortion, then it is in a sort of middle ground.
Let me conclude by citing the most recent ratings of the Democracy Index for some of the nations mentioned in this article. The score is out of 10. Canada scores well at 8.69, but Switzerland does better at 9.32. The UK and Australia land at 8.34 and 8.28 respectively. These are all rated as “Full Democracies”, with scores of 8 or above.
Nations below 8 are not rated as “Full Democracies”, so the US, at 7.85, France at 7.99, Belgium at 7.64 and Hungary at 6.51 are all rated as “Flawed Democracies”.
Turkey, at 4.26, is a “Hybrid Regime”, and Russia, at 2.03 and Belarus, at 1.99, are classed as “Authoritarian”,
And they all have elections (or sort of). Welcome to the pretendocracy spectrum.
