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Yekaterina Duntsova barred from running against Putin in election

Mark Trevelyan 12/23/23 Reuters

His (Putin's) best-known opponent, Alexei Navalny, is serving prison sentences totalling more than 30 years and his supporters say they do not even know where he is, after they were told he had been moved from his previous penal colony earlier this month. Lawyers last had access to him on Dec. 6.
"Any sane person taking this step would be afraid - but fear must not win," she told Reuters in an interview in November in which she called for the release of political prisoners and said Russians were "very tired" of the conflict in Ukraine.
Putin's critics said the decision showed that no one with genuine opposition views would be allowed to stand against him next March in the first presidential election since the start of the 22-month war. They see it as a fake process with only one possible outcome.

Despite backlash, Masha Gessen says comparing Gaza to a Nazi-era ghetto is necessary

Rachel Treisman, Leila Fadel 12/22/23 NPR

Gessen, who is Jewish and whose family lost loved ones in the Holocaust, has been criticized for a New Yorker essay published earlier this month in which they likened the Gaza Strip to the WWII-era ghettos that Nazis developed to segregate and control Jewish people in occupied Europe.
Gessen argues in the essay that treating the Holocaust as a "singular event," unlike anything that has occurred before or after in history, not only is incorrect but makes it impossible to learn lessons from the Holocaust that are needed to prevent future genocides.
Gessen notes there are key differences between the two: The Nazi claim that ghettos were necessary to protect non-Jews from disease "had no basis in reality," while Israel's stance that the isolation of Gaza is necessary to protect against Palestinian terrorist attacks "stems from actual and repeated acts of violence."

All politicians “game” the system. The question is how?

by Lee Drutman 14/5/18 Vox

There’s too much news and too little context. At Vox, we’ll help you understand what really matters. We report urgently on the most important stories shaping our world, but we also spend time on issues the rest of the media neglects.

Lebanese candidates push for change in a corrupt electoral system

by Arezou Rezvani 14/05/2022 NPR

Lebanon is going through one of the worst economic crises in recent history. Food and fuel prices are way up. Certain medicines are hard to find. Power outages sometimes drag on for days. Tomorrow, voters have a chance to hold the ruling establishment to account in parliamentary elections. But NPR's Arezou Rezvani in Beirut explains, it won't be easy for new candidates to break through a system that's built to keep the same usual parties in charge.

Making elephants dance - a guide to Germany's electoral system

by Thomas Escritt 23/9/21 Reuters

BERLIN (Reuters) - Sixty million voters, casting twice as many votes for 47 parties, leading to a parliament that could have anywhere from 700 to as much as 1,000 legislators - the German electoral system is baffling even to Germans. 

by Arezou Rezvani 14/5/22 npr

Lebanon is going through one of the worst economic crises in recent history. Food and fuel prices are way up. Certain medicines are hard to find. Power outages sometimes drag on for days. Tomorrow, voters have a chance to hold the ruling establishment to account in parliamentary elections. But NPR's Arezou Rezvani in Beirut explains, it won't be easy for new candidates to break through a system that's built to keep the same usual parties in charge.

AN ISRAELI ELECTORAL SYSTEM THAT FRUSTRATED EVEN BEN-GURION

by The New York Times Archives THE NEW YORK TIMES

This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.

How does the UK's voting system affect smaller parties?

by Chas Geiger 1/7/24 BBC

Winning a healthy share of votes in Thursday's election does not necessarily mean securing a similar proportion of seats in Parliament, smaller parties have complained.

Is Lebanon’s New Electoral System a Path Out of Sectarianism?

by Elias Muhanna 29/6/17 THE NEW YORKER

On Friday, June 16th, Lebanon quietly ended one of the longest stretches of government paralysis in post-Second World War history. The parliament met to ratify a new electoral law that will govern national elections next year, nearly a decade after the last parliamentary polls were held. The law’s proponents claim that it will improve representation for the many sects that compose the country’s religiously diverse population.

Public support for electoral reform: The role of electoral system experience

by Abigail L. Heller 8/21 Science Direct

What affects citizen preferences about electoral rules and under what conditions will they support changes to those rules? These questions are critical because in established democracies, citizens increasingly directly influence electoral rules through initiatives or referenda. For example, in New Zealand in 1993, voters overrode the preferences of political elites in two referenda, leading to the introduction of a mixed member proportional (MMP) system for national legislative elections (Vowles 2005).

Democratic electoral systems around the world, 1946–2000

by Matt Golder 1/3/05 Science Direct

This article describes a new data set that covers the electoral institutions used in all of the democratic legislative and presidential elections in 199 countries between 1946 (or independence) and 2000. A clear and consistent classification of the electoral institutions used in these elections is followed by a concise geographical and temporal analysis. The worldwide focus of the data set reveals several striking patterns. For example, there have been almost as many elections under dictatorship as there have been under democracy. Other patterns include the fact that presidential regimes nearly always employ proportional electoral formulas, absolute majority rule has become the worldwide norm for electing presidents, and non-majoritarian systems have become more complex due to the increasing use of multiple tiers and mixed electoral formulas.

Who controls the wealth? Electoral system design and ethnic war in resource-rich countries

by Natasha S. Neudorfer 9/14 ScienceDirect

Given that both natural resource wealth and electoral system design are frequently investigated factors in the civil wars literature (see e.g. Fearon and Laitin, 2003, Fjelde, 2009, Horowitz, 2002, Reilly, 2001), it is surprising that there is no well-known study which explicitly considers the interaction effect between these two factors on the risk of violent ethnic conflict. We seek to fill this gap in the academic debate by highlighting the impact of electoral systems for the legislature on the risk of ethnic civil war in resource-rich countries

The best of both worlds? The Danish electoral system 1915–20 in a comparative perspective

by Jorgen Elklit 3/9/92 ScienceDirect

The Danish 1915–1920 Lower House electoral system combined a traditional plurality system and a PR system with multi-stage compensatory seats in two provincial regions, and closed party list PR in the third, metropolitan, region. This complex system is presented and its effects on the distribution of seats in the Folketing are analysed. It was an early—and now neglected—case of personalized PR which calls for comparisons with later cases of this kind of electoral system, notably the post-1949 German electoral system and the 1990 electoral systems in Hungary and Bulgaria. In order to assess if such comparisons are appropriate, the paper also asks if these four electoral systems are genuine ‘mixed’ systems or PR systems in disguise.

The political consequences of the electoral system in Ireland

by Michael Gallagher 12/86 ScienceDirect

The single transferable vote electoral system, popular with many electoral reformers, has been used for parliamentary elections in the Republic of Ireland since 1922. Examination of its impact shows that it has delivered as high a degree of proportionality as most PR systems despite the unavoidable use of relatively small district magnitudes. It has not produced either a fragmented party system or unstable governments. Critics have blamed it for contributing to a weak parliament, but these criticisms remain unproven. Suggestions are made for the wider use of STV, especially in countries currently employing preferential list systems.

Elusive indeed – The mechanical versus psychological effects of electoral rules at the district level

by Philipp Harfst 6/18 ScienceDirect

While electoral research has become one of political science’s most fertile areas, to date no empirical contribution has addressed the three mechanisms of the electoral chain – strategic entry, strategic voting, and the electoral system’s mechanical effect – in a unified analytical framework. This paper addresses this shortcoming by analysing the effect of electoral systems on party system size, accounting for all three mechanisms. Our study yields three major findings drawing on constituency-level data covering 462 electoral districts in Finland and Portugal between 1962 and 2011.

The Electoral Sweet Spot: Low-Magnitude Proportional Electoral Systems

[https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1540-5907.2010.00495.x by John M Carey 1/2/11 AJPS

A glance at the electoral systems of new democracies, or reforms to electoral systems in established democracies, suggests that electoral engineers regularly seek to soften the representation-accountability trade-off and achieve both objectives. For example, some electoral systems have small multimember districts, others have high legal thresholds below which parties cannot win seats, while others have “parallel” mixed-member systems, where the PR seats do not compensate for disproportional outcomes in the single-member seats. These types of systems sacrifice pure proportionality for the specific purpose of increasing accountability.

Women’s representation in politics: The effect of electoral systems

by Martin Gonzalez 6/21 ScienceDirect

Women are underrepresented in politics. For example, they hold only 25% of legislative seats in national assemblies.1 This situation has attracted much attention in the media and in the academic literature. Perhaps the most important reason behind this interest is that having women in public office may have an impact on policy.2 In addition, women in public office may serve as role models, improving women’s self-confidence and affecting attitudes towards them both within politics and in society at large (Beaman et al., 2009, Beaman et al., 2012).

Proportionality, disproportionality and electoral systems

by Michael Gallagher 3/91 ScienceDirect

Different PR methods should be seen not as being more proportional or less proportional than each other but as embodying different ideas as to what maximizing proportionality means and, by extension, what minimizing disproportionality means. Each of the main methods of PR (d'Hondt, Sainte-Laguë, largest remainders) generates its own index of proportionality and, thus, its own way of measuring disproportionality. Applying these indices to competitive elections of the period 1979–1989 shows a high correlation between the rankings produced by the various methods, but the ordering of countries is sufficiently different to require a choice to be made between the indices.

Models of electoral system change

by Kenneth Benoit 9/04 ScienceDirect

Electoral systems are commonly treated as exogenous determinants of political party systems, yet our theoretical understanding remains limited as to how these institutions themselves are determined. Part of the problem lies with the subject matter itself: electoral system change is frequently idiosyncratic, often occurring during episodes of exceptional political change. Yet another aspect of the problem is that explanations of electoral system change frequently occur piecemeal in application to specific cases, without systematic or comparative development.

‘People were repressed into silence’: the Spanish artist creating a visual memory of fascism’s horrors

by Sam Jones 5/6/25 The Guardian

Roca, whose comics have explored such varied themes as Francoist reprisals, the exiled Spanish republicans who helped liberate Paris from the Nazis, family histories and the depredations of Alzheimer’s, is the subject of a new show at the Instituto Cervantes called Memory: An Emotional Journey Through the Comics of Paco Roca.

Mass Protests Force South Korean President to Revoke Shocking Martial Law Declaration After 6 Hours

by Amy Goodman 12/04/2024 Democracy Now

And I think what’s extraordinary is that a lot of ordinary people came out. I think I’ve heard that people were saying that there were delivery people that just stopped working. And when they heard the news, they just like rushed to the National Assembly. There were people that were at home just relaxing, and then they rushed.
And a lot of the people, when they gathered, they were able to block and prevent the armored trucks from entering the grounds of the National Assembly. They were able — a lot of them were chanting to abolish the martial law and to — and, yeah, basically, abolish martial law and to — down with the dictatorship.

Ivan Ilyin The obscure 'Russian Christian Fascist' philosopher motivating Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine

Dartagnan March 09, 2022 The DailyKos

Little known in the West and largely forgotten in Russia until the early 2000s, Ilyin (1883-1954) had actually been expelled by the Bolshevik state shortly after the Revolution. His early writings, relying on a novel interpretation of the Biblical creation myth, demonstrated antipathy to secular human society and held that all efforts by mankind to impose a pluralistic political order were simply deepening man’s estrangement from God, and that this estrangement could only be corrected by the intervention of a unifying political leader. The means such a leader employed to “unify” the sinful, impure secular world were beside the point, as the end goal (generally speaking) was reunification with the original Divine plan. Since nothing could possibly be more important than that, any means to achieve it were permissible (including, presumably, violence, murder, and genocide).

Global democracy has a very bad year

The Economist Feb 2 2021

GLOBAL DEMOCRACY continued its decline in 2020, according to the latest edition of the Democracy Index from our sister company, The Economist Intelligence Unit. The annual survey, which rates the state of democracy across 167 countries based on five measures—electoral process and pluralism, the functioning of government, political participation, democratic political culture and civil liberties—finds that just 8.4% of the world’s population live in a full democracy while more than a third live under authoritarian rule. The global score of 5.37 out of ten is the lowest recorded since the index began in 2006.

Democracy 2024

Our World Data by Anna Lührmann, Marcus Tannenberg and Staffan Lindberg.

Interactive map rating all the world's political systems.

Can The Forces Unleashed By Trump's Big Election Lie Be Undone?

NPR 1/18/21 MELISSA BLOCK

As for where big lies lead, Snyder writes: "Post-truth is pre-fascism, and Trump has been our post-truth president."
"When I say pre-fascism, I mean when you take away facts, you're opening the way for something else," Snyder tells NPR. "You're opening the way for someone who says 'I am the truth. I am your voice,' to quote Mr. Trump — which is something that fascists said, as a matter of fact. The three-word chants, the idea that the press are the enemy of the people: These are all fascist concepts."
"It doesn't mean that Trump is quite a fascist himself," Snyder adds. "Imagine what comes after that, right? Imagine if the big lie continues. Imagine if there's someone who's more skillful in using it than he is. Then we're starting to move into clearly fascist territory."

It may seem Putin controls the Russian state personally. The reality is more dangerous

Yana Gorokhovskaia Tue 25 Aug 2020 09.41 EDT [1]

Popular narratives about Russia are infused with the idea that Putin sits atop a highly centralised system that he controls manually. While Putin is certainly Russia’s most important decision-maker, the political system is not his personal well-oiled machine. Instead, the system has a set of operating principles – chief among them a lack of the rule of law – and perverse accountability, which sometimes produce outcomes that are less than optimal for the Kremlin.

We often see evidence of this during elections when some regions in Russia report official results that strain credulity as local poll workers strive to please superiors with a good showing for pro-regime candidates. The problem, of course, is that while these results get the job done, they cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election and provide ammunition for critics.

Russian democracy is a farce. Putin wants the same fate for America

[2] Opinion by Garry Kasparov

Along with the fear-mongering and violence, Putin exploited the legitimate grievances of the Russian people for his own gain. His themes were familiar ones: security, cultural preservation, ethnic tension. Twitter didn't exist then, but if it had, Putin would have been tweeting "Law & order!" in Russian. Those of us in the Russian pro-democracy movement had the dual challenge of protesting Putin's crackdowns while acknowledging the other problems the country faced.
I watched as Putin destroyed our fragile democracy by focusing only on his own power and wealth while mouthing nationalist rhetoric and attacking the free press. Now I'm watching Trump use many of the same techniques to chip away at democracy in my new home, although I cannot complain of exile when some of my Russian colleagues have been jailed or killed.

Ballot Fraud Gave Russia's Putin 22 Million Extra Votes, Says Expert

[3]

Examining 88 million votes, he shared graphs of his findings on Facebook, telling Forbes Russia he believed abnormalities suggested that up to 22 million votes may have been fraudulently cast in favor of the changes Putin had backed.
"There has been no manipulation of votes in Russian elections on this scale in the recent past. In absolute terms, this is unprecedented," he told the publication.
"In relative terms, a similar situation was seen at the 2016 State Duma elections," Shpilkin said, referring to elections for Russia's lower house of parliament.