The New York Times, among other news outlets, reports that, shockingly, Vladimir Putin's "United Russia" party swept elections yesterday. These are not elections in the sense that we talk about in true democracies. Putin and the Kremlin bureaucracy worked very efficiently to hobble the opposition parties, denying them access to media, and arresting the odd challenger. While Putin has declared the elections a vote of support for him and his policies, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, limited to 330 election monitors (for the largest state by land mass in the world) to cover 100,000 polling stations by Kremlin stonewalling, has characterized the elections as deeply flawed. From the BBC:
The election "was not fair and failed to meet many OSCE and Council of Europe commitments and standards for democratic elections," the observers from the OSCE's Parliamentary Assembly and the Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly told a news conference in Moscow.
The statement criticised "abuse of administrative resources" and "media coverage strongly in favour of the ruling party".
The polls "took place in an atmosphere which seriously limited political competition" and "there was not a level political playing field", it said.
Why does this matter? Putin says democracy, Europe and the US say not. The operation of democracy is dependent on the cultural norms and practices of any given country. So maybe Russian democracy looks fundamentally different than European democracy? This type of argument cannot fly, and here is why. While it is true that the nature of democracy does vary from country to country, there must be a core aspect of the definition that needs to be defended, and publicly. There are two reasons for this:
First, democracy is a concept that has meaning. When the US or the United Kingdom or France or the UN praises the development of democracy in some country, that praise needs to have meaning. Putin, by appealing to the standard of democracy, is showing that the concept has normative power. Leaders who want to be seen as responsible and legitimate claim democratic mandate. Leaders who are clearly not part of a democratic system are delegitimized in the international system. Obviously, this is a matter of degree depending on other issues (country x has a lot of oil, therefore we care a little bit less about their democratic credentials). If we allow the concept of democracy to become so wide that almost anything that vaguely looks like an election in to the democratic club, the concept loses its normative power.
Second, identity is important. It acts a signaling mechanism to other states regarding the basic rules that a given state plays by. The labels we use...democracy, communist, totalitarian, fascist, etc, are important for communicating a set of assumptions about behavior and values. The international system is a social system, not a physical system (e.g. electrons in orbit around an atom nucleus), and these assumptions about behavior and norms are important. The leader of one state cannot know the thoughts of another leader on any given issue, and the fundamental assumptions that leaders have when they view their mutual relationship is incredibly important. It can even be so simple as predisposing a leader to think the other side will be reasonable or not, and that has significant ramifications for cooperation and conflict.
