Thomas Friedman's 'Radical Center' and the Nigerian Second Republic

In a recent NYT piece Thomas Friedman makes an argument for electoral reforms aimed at strengthening what he calls "the radical center." It's not quite clear what he thinks this "radical center" would believe in but it is clear that he thinks (probably accurately) that there is a large voting bloc of people who do not find either liberal Democrats or conservative Republicans to their liking but have no other option. So he introduces us to two ideas being put forward by Larry Diamond, a political scientist at Stanford's conservative Hoover Institute, to rectify this.

A word, first, for those who don't know, about Diamond. He has become something of a celebrity among both academics and policy wonks concerned with democracy. His early work was on Nigeria, especially the fall of the Nigerian Second Republic, about which more in a bit. In the 1990s he became the most prominent booster of the idea that there was a wave of democratization around the world and was responsible for big, cross-country research projects on this topic, became the head of the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington D.C. and founded the Journal of Democracy. In 2003 he was appointed by the Bush administration to oversee the introduction of democracy in Iraq and then, to his credit, quit and became a vocal critic of the war and postwar Iraq policy. He is big on the idea -- in keeping with the spirit of the 90s, and coming straight out of his Nigeria work -- that for democracy to survive in developing countries, governments should not control much of the economy as this would, in his view turn elections into a zero-sum game. This is especially true, in his view, in ethnically divided societies (with which his work has been mainly concerned.) More on this too. He is also, it should be said (since this policy preference is clearly not mine), sincere in his idealism about democracy (which I share) and has done more than anyone I know to promote democracy but, in my view, sometimes naive about how politics works.

The two recommendations that Diamond, via Friedman, makes to strengthen the "radical middle" in American politics are (1) (get states to) establish independent redistricting commissions like the one California just established to avoid gerrymandering and make districts more competitive (2) introduce alternate voting or AV (also known as instant runoff voting, preferential voting or ranked choice voting) which allows voters to rank order candidates rather than vote for 1. Under AV if no candidate wins a majority then (AND ONLY THEN) the lowest candidates votes get dropped and their votes are distributed to the second choice indicated by people who voted for that person, and so on until someone has 50%. Both draw on widely supported ideas among democracy scholars (most countries have independent commissions for drawing electoral districts) and have merit on their own but there is reason to wonder if they would have the desired effects in the US.

The premise behind the recommendation is the familiar argument that US politics has become polarized because, first, most Congressional districts are drawn to be lopsidedly Democrat or Republican and so there is little incentive for candidates to appeal to the middle, and second because candidates have to be chosen in party primaries where activists dominate and select less moderate candidates. The redistricting commissions would presumably fix the first, by making districts more competitive and balanced between left and right, while AV would supposedly accomplish the second by allowing moderates to run as third party candidates with a chance of actually winning by drawing second choice votes from people on the extremes. Both changes would have to occur for the fixes to work because if only redistricting occurred then party primaries would still be dominated by activists, while if only AV were implemented but districts were still gerrymandered then candidates of the left or right would win outright.


So far so good. But would the fixes actually accomplish what Friedman/Diamond want? Here are three reasons (in ascending order of importance) to think not:

1. On a purely technical level, even if the redrawn districts made it possible for moderates to deny either extreme an outright majority, this only helps moderates if they come in SECOND. (For the sake of simplicity I'm assuming only three candidates but the point holds even if there are several.) Under AV the candidate with the lowest no. of first choice votes gets knocked out even if they get ALL the second choice votes of the other candidates. Now in practice this might still moderate the views of left and right (as they have to win the second choice votes of moderates to win) but it doesnt necessarily ensure the election of moderates.

2. On a more philosophical level, is it necessarily desirable to rig a system where strongly held views do not gain representation? There are reasons to think not. Morally, this could simply result in the disenfranchisement of minorities. Practically it might lead to the frustrated groups resorting to extraparliamentary tactics (aka violence). A lot depends on whether the extremes are amenable to compromise to begin with. If they are not, this method is not going to change them, it might alienate them. Here, it is instructive that the methods being proposed by Friedman/Diamond fall in a class of measures that has been termed "integrationist" because they are designed to force poltiicians to integrate rather than divide rival groups (mainly ethnic groups). But the ultimate integrationist methods are supposed to be two-party systems and presidential systems which the US has. If moderates are not winning here, maybe it is because the underlying views are too far apart?

3. Finally, on a purely pragmatic level (and this is where I think Diamond is naive), let's say it all works and we get a lot more moderates elected out of more competitive seats. How will this change American politics? Friedman/Diamond think it will produce more reasoned centrist discourse, and sensible incremental solutions and, most importantly, a greater willingness to deal with the deficit. (Friedman identifies the difficulty of either cutting spending or raising taxes as a symptom of a broken system.) But will it? I think if anything it would produce more pork barrel politics, more influence for special interests, and more pandering. Why should this be? Well three reasons, again in ascending order of importance:

a) Electing more moderates means electing more people who essentially have no or weak ideological convictions and therefore are more likely to cut a deal for their vote (like the Cornhusker Kickback);

b) Candidates running in competitive races need more money and are more likely to be beholden to special interests;

c) Candidates running for RE-election in closely divided districts are going to have a hard time figuring out how to ensure their re-election so the safest bet will be to vote for pork barrel projects;

So which view is right? What is the evidence? Well I can only point to anecdotal evidence here but let me suggest that the experience of the US strongly suggests my view is correct. Consider, first, the Senate. Redistricting is not at issue here. There is a large no. of senators from relatively competitive states who are considered moderates. Yet it is the Senate that couldn't even agree on pay-as-you-go legislation and that introduced the most egregious special deals in the healthcare bill and yes it was the moderates who were the biggest offenders (Ben Nelson, Landrieu, Bill Nelson et al). I suspect the same could be said of House moderates tho the names would not be as familiar.

A more interesting piece of anecdotal evidence comes from Nigeria, which launched Larry Diamond's career. This is how it goes.


So way back in the 1950s Britain had an empire that it was dismantling and, after the independence of India in 1947, the largest territory it had to figure out how to screw up and leave was Nigeria. Nigeria had been governed in two parts, Northern (and predominantly Muslim) and southern (and predominantly Christian and/or native African religions) but around that time it was divided into three to match the three large ethnic groups (Hausa-Fulani in the North, Igbo in the southeast and Yoruba in the Southwest) allowing each to dominate one region to the chagrin of countless smaller ethnic groups in each one. Nigeria became independent in 1960 with a parliamentary system and a weak central government and three large parties, each one dominated by -- you guessed it -- one of the three ethnic groups, and therefore dominating, in turn, one of the regions. Through a convoluted process that actually began with a split in the Yoruba party in the Western region, this system broke down with a military coup in 1966 and a civil war in 1967 in which the eastern (Igbo-dominated and newly oil-rich) region tried to secede (as Biafra).

Once the secessionists were defeated a host of constitutional engineers tried to figure out how to avoid the same result again. They did three main things: divided up the country into many smaller states, making sure that each large ethnic group was divided into several states; replaced the parliamentary system with a presidential one; and passed a law that stated that every party had to have members in a certain number of states (enough to ensure they were multi-ethnic coalitions) and to be elected president, a candidate had to win at least 25% of the vote in at least 2/3 of the states. So this forced politicians to engage in cross-ethnic coalition-building. And sure enough, in 1979 when the first elections were held under the new Second Republic, the major parties all built cross-region and cross-ethnic coalitions and the winning candidate, Shehu Shagari, just barely cleared the 25%-in-2/3 threshold. (Actually he fell short but they worked around it.) Only one problem: how does one build a cross ethnic political party when there is no basis for cooperation? Answer: Patronage. Basically the party with the most resources to spread around got the largest number of local notables to sign up, and then once in power used Nigeria's oil revenues (courtesy of erstwhile Biafra, and newly boosted by the oil price boom following the Iranian revolution) to keep greasing the wheels. Great, until oil prices crashed, Nigeria entered went into a debt crisis and this all coincided with the second election of the Second Republic in 1983. Since there were no revenues to buy people off, the Shagari government blatantly rigged the elections and the military came back in and got rid of the civilian politicians.

So what lessons can one draw from this? One, drawn by proponents of "integrationist" electoral engineering is that, with the right incentives, it is possible to get politicians to overcome ethnic divisions in their electoral appeals. This is true. But there is a problem. Why did the same incentives make the problem of corruption so much worse so that it resulted in massive vote-rigging in just the second election? Larry Diamond's argument (building on the work of many Nigeria scholars) is that the government just had too much money or, more precisely, that it controlled too big a share of the available capital in the country. (As a side note, this might go back to colonial agricultural marketing boards which established the government as monopoly purchasers of agricultural products but in the contemporary period oil royalties have been seen as the cause.) But it seems to me this explanation begs a crucial question. If Shagari and Co. had not used massive patronage funds to build their party how could they have appealed in such a short time to areas where they had no base or ties? And having built a patronage machine to win power how could they govern without continuing to grease its wheels?

The fundamental point is this: to win elections you have to run on SOMETHING -- typically either an ideologically driven policy program, ethnic identity or simply delivering the goodies. "Pragmatic moderates" are usually those who do the last. This works great and can bridge many deep divides when there is money to fund it (as long as no one is worried about corruption) as U.S. big city political machines proved in the first half of the last century. It stops working when money dried up or people start wanting a better share of it. Now it is possible to articulate a coherent, principled vision of centrist governance. But that needs to be done if "strengthening the middle" isn't just going to become open season for pork barrel politics. And so far there is no one doing it, and there is nothing about electoral engineering that will ensure it occurs. So again, what DOES the "radical middle" stand for, besides being in the middle?