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With such a staggering death toll and hundreds of thousands left homeless, one might expect Turkish voters to turn out en masse against the government on May 14. But so far, at least, there is little evidence that the media and civil society are eager to hold national and municipal politicians accountable

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By Daron Acemoglu and Cihat Tokgz

Published: Sun 2 Apr 2023, 9:47 PM

The devastating earthquakes that killed more than 50,000 people in Turkey (and at least 7,000 in northern Syria) in February have exposed deep-rooted problems in the run-up to potentially epochal presidential and parliamentary elections on May 14. Turkey, it is now clear, needs more than a change of government; it needs a fundamental transformation of its politics and economy. That means confronting the hugely powerful construction lobby and attempting to rebuild the countrys flailing democracy.

Though the earthquakes were acts of nature, the devastation they caused was the result of corruption within the construction industry and beyond. But this did not stop Turkeys strongman president, Recep Tayyip Erdoan, from blaming the huge death toll on nature, even as he admitted that the authorities were caught off guard. The Turkish people have been asked to believe that everything is now under control, and that Erdoan should be trusted with the post-disaster reconstruction.

Yet it is worth recalling that when Turkey suffered a major earthquake (7.6 on the Richter scale) in 1999, near the city of zmit, the large death toll at the time (around 18,000) was rightly attributed to shoddy construction and poor urban planning. The government responded by adopting state-of-the-art building codes and regulations to prevent new construction in the highest-risk areas.

So why then did the latest earthquakes destroy more than 18,000 buildings and fatally damage another 280,000? The short answer is that building codes were not followed. Many of the recently decimated buildings were erected after 1999, but they were still unsafe (with weak foundations that did not use the minimum required amount of cement), because municipal governments and inspectors had given developers a pass.

Corruption is just one facet in the broader rise of Turkeys construction lobby over the last two decades. The construction industry now accounts for over 40 per cent of total fixed-capital investment, and its political influence is even greater than these numbers would suggest. Construction companies are among the leading donors to all major political parties, and they maintain inappropriately close links with all municipal governments, regardless of which party is in control.

While construction-industry corruption is a major problem in many other countries as well, it is particularly pernicious in Turkey. Not only is the industry disproportionately large relative to the economy, but it is exploiting democratic institutions that have been severely weakened after two decades of Erdoans autocratic rule.

The Erdoan governments bizarre 2018 building amnesty illustrates the construction lobbys power. The amnesty allowed owners to avoid having to demolish or retrofit buildings that were not up to code simply by paying an additional tax, even in the case of structures that had been erected along fault lines, wetlands, basins, and other high-risk areas.

In the ten provinces that suffered the worst devastation in the recent earthquakes, a staggering 294,000 buildings had received amnesty. While there currently are no definitive data with which to assess the lethality of amnesty, it is safe to assume that many of these buildings were among those that collapsed and killed their inhabitants. Turkeys 1999 earthquake tax, which was increased by presidential decree in 2021, was supposed to finance improvements to strengthen buildings resilience against seismic events. But there is considerable uncertainty about where these funds went.

With such a staggering death toll and hundreds of thousands left homeless, one might expect Turkish voters to turn out en masse against the government on May 14. But so far, at least, there is little evidence that the media and civil society are eager to hold national and municipal politicians accountable. Unlike in 1999, when most media outlets described the damage from the earthquake as a failure of governance, the near-total consensus in Turkish media today is that it was an act of God, implying that Erdoan and his government are blameless.

This type of coverage is no surprise, given that Erdoan has gradually assumed almost direct control over all national media outlets, including TV channels and high-circulation newspapers. Open dissent has become increasingly dangerous: journalists are routinely jailed for critical reporting, and websites and social-media platforms have been closed for challenging Erdoan.

Mounting repression had unintended consequences in February. Four months earlier, in October 2022, the parliament enacted a censorship law that significantly deepened online censorship. Using the new law, the government blocked access to social-media sites in the immediate aftermath of the earthquakes inadvertently complicating rescue efforts.

This astonishing level of media control and the polarisation it has engendered has left opposition parties and politicians struggling to get their message out to voters, especially when they try to highlight endemic corruption and government incompetence.

But even if a coalition of opposition parties can win, replacing the government will not fix Turkeys problems. The countrys institutions need to be rebuilt, and that process cannot be completed unless the construction lobby is cut down to size.

While the odds of achieving transformational change may appear low, Erdoans control over the media and state institutions does not guarantee his re-election. There is a palpable desire for change among the electorate, even if it is not reflected in the media. One place to find it is in soccer stadiums. At recent matches for two of the countrys most widely followed teams, thousands of fans chanted, Lies, cheating, its been 20 years, resign.

Of course, this story was underplayed by Turkish media, and pro-Erdoan officials and journalists have tried to smear such dissent as terrorism. The clubs themselves have faced fines, and many of their fans have been barred from attending away games. Nonetheless, these views are not going away, and they could well be echoed widely at the ballot box.

Demands for political change can emerge from unexpected places, and when they do, they can offer hope to millions of others. That, more than a new government, is what true change requires. To rebuild Turkish democracy, Turks will need to remove Erdoan, confront the construction lobby, and then get to work restoring essential institutions perhaps starting with the news media. Project Syndicate

(Daron Acemoglu, Professor of Economics at MIT, is a co-author of the forthcoming Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity. Cihat Tokgz, a former senior investment banker in global financial institutions, is an author and analyst on Turkish economy and financial markets.)

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Rebuilding democracy: Deconstructing how Turkey needs to be reconstructed - wknd.

Its easy to be a democracy doomsayer these days.

The hard part is deciding what the biggest peril is. Otherwise, the hand-wringing becomes pointless finger-wagging.

Consider these three pillars as we ponder how to shore up the foundations of Canadian democracy.

At the recent DemocracyXChange Summit, I moderated a panel of three big thinkers who set the table for a broader debate by activists and academics at the event: What is to be done?

Democracy is about choosing making an informed decision not just about rival ideologies, but competing ecosystems that threaten our own system.

Click to expand

Mia Gaviola explained how disinformation took root in her native Philippines and is now infecting all democracies. A longtime collaborator with the Manila-based journalist and Nobel laureate Maria Ressa, she argued that misinformation has multiplied because social media technology moves at warp speed.

The problem is the new breed of information gatekeepers, which are algorithms, she told the audience. Algorithms and policies implemented by social media platforms play a critical role in shaping where we place our attention, the values by which we define ourselves.

While mainstream media are still the main sources of news for Canadians, the pandemic opened up new vectors not only for viruses, but viral news that upended reality, she added. Conspiracies are us even in Canada.

I reminded the audience of an Abacus Data poll last year that found one in three Canadians believe Microsoft founder Bill Gates is monitoring people with microchips implanted in COVID-19 vaccines, or they think its possible, or theyre just not sure but cant rule it out.

Faulty information rapidly erodes faith in our institutions and trust is core to democracy, said longtime public servant Matthew Mendelsohn. Trust is what allows people to move beyond family ties to clans, tribes, and finally nation states that work together and govern themselves across regions that span thousands of kilometres and millions of people.

It is foundational. But fragile.

Authoritarians are targeting our belief in the integrity of our democratic institutions, and our trust in one another this is clearly part of the authoritarian strategy.

Mendelsohn pointed out that trust doesnt mean uncritical belief. You can trust someone as a good-faith politician or journalist who gets it wrong, as opposed to a person of bad faith who wilfully deceives and corrupts.

He used me as an example.

I dont know Martin that well, but I trust Martin, he argued. (Full disclosure: weve both been visiting professors at Toronto Metropolitan University and, it turns out, attended the same Montreal high school, but didnt cross paths until a few years ago.) Sometimes I disagree with Martin, but I dont think he is writing as an agent of a hidden interest, or a foreign power.

He is like the other panellists, and like the other people in this room, and I hope me: A good-faith actor who sometimes makes mistakes and with whom we can disagree, with whom we can dialogue.

Thats a point worth bearing in mind amid our ideological politics and polarizing battles. We can hold opposing views while sharing similar democratic beliefs.

Beyond misinformation and mistrust, however, the enduring fault line in Canada is inequality, according to economist Armine Yalnizyan (who also writes a fortnightly column in the Stars business section).

The search for economic and social justice, and reducing inequality, is at the core of our democratic project, she said.

The inequities are increasingly entrenched because workers and activists lack clout and focus: The workforce is extremely atomized, we dont have strong unions, we dont have a strong collective voice. We are much more into identity politics than we are into class politics.

Yalnizyan argued that Canadians are competing in the Olympics of victimization Im worse off than you are; youre worse off; well look at me, Im even worse off; and that process of not finding common ground and common things to fight for makes it very difficult to gain advantage.

Like the other panellists, Yalnizyan stressed the need for reliable rules and institutions but argued they need shaking up. With overseas supply chains fraying, the old globalization is dead, to be replaced by a fragile new globalization based on co-operation on climate change and other shared threats.

All that said, I wonder if voter preoccupations with both identity and affordability have upended the collective fight for fairness: Affordability is the new inequality, which means politicians spend more time talking up tax cuts, and less time guarding against cuts to social programs.

Todays pocketbook politics, starting in America but increasingly in Canada, is less transformational and more transactional than ever. Just ask Premier Doug Ford.

That, too, is democracy. If you dont like it, you need to make it better.

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Want to save democracy? Focus on these three things - Toronto Star

BENGALURU: Expecting an effective dialogue on various issues in the run-up to the assembly polls scheduled next month, 38 different civil society organisations came together under the banner of Civil Society Forum and invited the main political parties in the state for a hearing in Bengaluru on Saturday. However, no big leader from any of the major political parties showed up.Undeterred, Civil Society Forum members brought out a manifesto for the assembly elections. Historian Ramachandra Guha, who released the document that was a compilation of around 30 demands, said it was a step towards realising the true meaning of democracy."Democracy is not just a once-in-a-five-year exercise. It entails continuous expression of non-violent criticism of elected representatives," Guha said, adding: "But we have become an 'election-only' democracy. There is no continuous interaction, dialogue or accountability in the way in which the founders wanted it -- be it [Mahatma] Gandhi or [BR] Ambedkar.""All of us must cast our vote on May 10, but once results are announced on May 13, we should not forget that we continue to be citizens," he said.

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We have become an 'election-only' democracy: Ramachandra Guha in Bengaluru - Times of India

On Sunday night, the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, fired his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, a reserve major general whose mother had been a Polish refugee on the S.S. Exodus. His offense was patriotism. The night before, Gallant had appeared on prime-time national television, calling for a dialogue on the fate of the Israeli judiciary and a temporary halt to the legislative process that is, in effect, assaulting it. The growing rift in our society is penetrating the I.D.F. and security agencies. This poses a clear, immediate, and tangible threat to the security of the state. I will not lend my hand to it, he said. A source close to Netanyahu, changing the subject, said that Gallant was fired for his feeble and weak response to the rapidly growing number of reserve officers who, in protest, are refusing to appear for service.

The response from the street was anything but feeble. Overnight, mass demonstrationsof tens of thousands of mostly young peopleerupted across the country, building on what have become regular Saturday-night events in the major cities. (During the rest of the week, some show up for improvised, digital teach-ins and spontaneous strategy sessions in towns and neighborhoods.) Protesters were especially focussed on Tel Aviv, where police used water cannons to clear the vital Ayalon expressway. People lit bonfires and chanted, Democracy or revolt! and, Youve taken on the wrong generationand, increasingly, Bibi, go home.

On Monday morning, all universities suspended classes to protest the legislation, which they described as undermining Israels democratic foundations; key hospitals curtailed medical services; and the Histadrut labor federation, which represents most public-sector employees and in which Netanyahus Likud is assumed to be very influential, joined with business leaders to call for a general strike. Ben Gurion Airport partially shut down. Banks closed after 1 P.M. One of Netanyahus criminal lawyers reportedly said that, if the judicial package went ahead, he would cease representing him. Ehud Barak, the former Prime Minister and chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, who had been both Netanyahus commander and a champion of Gallants rise, told a TV interviewer, Pausing the [judicial] overhaul wont stop the protests. Weve passed the point of no return.

By midday, Netanyahu, who had previously dismissed the demonstrators as anarchists, was reportedly planning to capitulate. And key members of his cabinetincluding his justice minister, Yariv Levin, who has spearheaded the assaultwere walking back their threat to resign if he did capitulate; they were considering, instead, how to hold on to power and buy time, with the religious zealots Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich insisting on eventual passage. Then, during the evening, without mentioning Gallant, or restoring him to his post, Netanyahu finally did precisely what his defense minister had asked for: he suspended the effort to bring more elements of the judicial package to a vote in this session of the Knesset and agreed to a period of dialogue with members of the opposition, though he stressed that he reserved the right to reintroduce the package in subsequent sessions. One way or another, we will enact a reform that will restore the balance between the authorities, he said.

Even before Netanyahu acted, the Israeli President, Isaac Herzog, and the opposition leaders Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid had welcomed an opportunity for a real dialogue; in fact, Herzog had presented his own formula for judicial reform earlier in the month. Yet both Herzog and Lapid committed to enshrine protections for equality and individual liberty in lawwhich, arguably, some of Netanyahus theocratic allies could never accept. Dialogue, in that case, only delays the inevitable collision. Indeed, it is no longer clear that reappointing Gallant, or even merely suspending the judicial assault, will calm down the streets. (Dialogue with a threat of the packages reintroduction hanging over the talks would be, Barak had said, between the wolf and the lamb, about what to eat for dinner.)

Shikma Bressler, a forty-two-year-old physicist at the Weizmann Institute, has emerged as a leader of the protests. On Monday, she addressed a crowd of some hundred thousand protesters that surrounded the Knesset. She said that the government must abandon the package altogether and agree only to changes that are arrived at by broad agreement. Meanwhile, the far-right La Familia group, which is centered in Jerusalem and has a history of violence, announced that it was also planning to go to the area around the Knesset on Monday night, to protest in favor of the judicial overhaul. The hard rights demonstrations proved small by comparison, but nobody who has witnessed its yearly marches on Jerusalem Day would doubt that they could grow. Israelis, like Californians, live on a geological fault line and try not to think about the big one. But they have also lived on a political fault line, and many now fear that this may, indeed, be the big one.

It is hard now to see how demonstrators will trust Benjamin Netanyahus government remaining in power, irrespective of the suspension of his partys judicial package.

The eruption began last Thursday morning. Netanyahus coalition passed an amendment to what is known as the Basic Law: Governmentbasic laws are pieces of Israels jigsaw constitutionrestricting the terms by which a Prime Minister can be required to take a leave of absence owing to medical incapacity, and so, in effect, prohibiting the High Court of Justice from ruling, as it might have before the new law, on whether Netanyahu could be forced to take a leave if the exercise of executive authority entailed a manifest conflict of interest.

This, all knew, was a premptive strike: Netanyahu is on trial for fraud, bribery, and breach of trustall of which he has deniedand yet he heads a government that is famously aiming to reform, as he puts it, the very judiciary that is trying him. (A complementary bill, not yet enacted, would allow politicians to pocket money donated for their own medical and legal expenses; it might let Netanyahu keep more than quarter of a million dollars that he had received from a relative to use to cover his legal expenses, while potentially inviting all politicians to engage in, well, fraud, bribery, and breach of trust.)

The amendment was also Netanyahus opening gambit, the first law in a legislative package that menaces the judiciary more seriouslya package that Yariv Levin and the chairman of the Knesset Justice Committee, Simcha Rothman, were rushing through serial Knesset votes. The package would, among other things, empower a simple Knesset majority to pass or reverse Basic Laws, forbid the High Court to rule on them, and override the High Courts abrogation of any subsequent law. It would also turn ministerial legal advisersnow legal watchdogs of the (still) independent attorney generalinto the political appointees of ministers.

Most immediately menacing, as it was scheduled for a vote this week, was an amendment to the Basic Law: Judiciary, which would give the coalition control over the method for appointing High Court justices and other judges. (Currently, the nine-person appointments committee includes two ministers, two Knesset membersone or more of whom is from the coalitionthree High Court justices, and two representatives of the Israel Bar Association; seven votes are needed, which accords the governments members a veto.) Pass the law on appointments and you dont need the rest of the package, Suzie Navot, the vice-president for research of the Israel Democracy Institute, told me, because the High Court is the only institution that can limit the power of the majority.

Netanyahu, for his part, claims that it is the High Court that has been roiling the country, promiscuously overturning Knesset legislation that expresses the right of the majority to have its way. On Thursday night, he called for unity but then proceeded to advance six common smears of the Court. (The next night, Danny Kushmaro, a news anchor on Channel 12, Israels main television station, took the unprecedented step of debunking those smears, one by one.) Over the weekend, in London, where he met Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, Netanyahu described himself to Piers Morgan as a classical liberal aiming to achieve balance.

The problem, however, has never been an activist Court that doesnt know its limits but, rather, a quasi-theocratic state apparatus that, from the start, has only partially observed liberal-democratic boundariesallowing rabbinic control over marriage and divorce, or separate state-supported school systems, for exampleand left other civil rights unprotected. Netanyahus theocratic allies, to whom hes made himself hostage, see themselves as custodians of the general will, which is, they believe, divine. Democracy is the decision of the majority, the decision of the people, Simcha Rothman said, in 2021, noting that, for himself, the term means doing what the Holy One, blessed be He, says.

Original post:
Has Benjamin Netanyahu's Assault on Israeli Democracy Been Stopped? - The New Yorker

Contributing columnist|AddFollow

March 28, 2023 at 8:52 a.m. EDT

Comment

We all know that democracy is about words and law, oratory and policy. But democracy is also about math. This is one of its most interesting features.

First, thats because you have to count the people. While many ancient societies counted people for taxation, we get the word census from the ancient Romans. Part of their government was based on a popular sovereignty principle. In addition to using the numbers for purposes of taxation, they also used the census to organize voters. The modern census appeared with the American invention of constitutional democracy and the constitutional requirement for a decennial census. It is now a fixture of modern political and policy administration. Over time, the census became the basis for much of the work in social statistics that provides the foundation for modern policymaking.

Democracy is also about math because you use math for decision-making. Which decisions will be decided by a simple majority vote by 50 percent plus one? Which will require a supermajority? And should that supermajority be a two-thirds or a three-quarters threshold?

The general idea is that you use a simple majority for matters of ordinary, passing and contingent concern. Supermajorities should be reserved for matters that rise to a constitutional level. (Here this, O ye Senate: Your filibuster does not accord with centuries of best practice in democratic design.)

And democracy is about math because of the principle of one person, one vote.

But even here matters can get complicated. For instance, humans arent spread out over geographical space in mathematically neat ways. The original design of the House of Representative aimed for a ratio of 30,000 constituents per representative. But state populations dont come in neat multiples of 30,000, or any other number. There is always a remainder, and what do you do with that? Round up and allocate an extra seat, or round down and increase the number of constituents per representative in that state?

Originally, using a rounding-down method, congressional districts had a ratio of constituents to representative ranging from 33,159 (New York) to 55,540 (Delaware), according to independent scholar Michael Rosin. This was the plan developed by Thomas Jefferson. Alexander Hamilton, rounding up, proposed a more representative plan with ratios ranging from 27,770 (Delaware) to 35,418 (Georgia). But the Jefferson approach won out. These plans were as close as the designers could get to 30,000 constituents per representative given population distribution.

Now, however, with the growing population and the House frozen at 435 seats, the spread runs from about 500,000 constituents for each of Rhode Island and Montanas members and 580,000 constituents for Wyomings single member, to 755,000 for each of Californias 52 representatives and 778,000 for each of Floridas 28.

As I explained in my previous column, the Founders never envisioned districts so large, and their gradual expansion over a century is a major reason our politics have become so dysfunctional.

To get our politics working again, we need a system that delivers energy (the ability for the government to get things done), republican safety (protection of our basic rights), popular sovereignty (adaptive responsiveness to the will of the people) and inclusion (all voices should be synthesized in the national voice of our House of Representatives). Real proximity of representatives to their constituents is necessary for delivering on all those design principles. For that, we need a bigger, and continuously growing, House of Representatives. We need smaller districts and fairer representation between more- and less-populous places.

But how big should the House be? That is also to ask how small should a district be. And based on what math? And on what principle of growth?

Scholars and advocates have been working on this question for decades. There are seven basic options, all compiled in a report on enlarging the House by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences commission on the state of our democracy, which I co-chaired. Those options would increase the size of Congress from 435 to between 572 to 9,400. They are as follows:

The Wyoming Rule. Peg the size of a district to the population of the least-populous state, which is currently Wyoming (with about 580,000 people). Thats 180,000 fewer constituents than todays average of 762,000 and would yield a House of 572 members. The difficulty with this rule, though, is that it could cause the number of members to fluctuate dramatically depending on the growth patterns of the smallest states. One way to address that would be to pick the current number (580,000) as a stable ratio going forward. But that would lead to speedy growth in the size of the House over time.

The Deferred Maintenance Rule. When the size of the House was capped in 1929, new seats could shift to growing areas only by taking them away from other areas. The number of seats lost by particular states since 1929 through this method is 149. If we restored those seats and added one more to keep the total an odd number, then reallocated to achieve even districts, we would have a new base of 585 seats. This method is clean and yields districts slightly smaller than the current population of Wyoming. However, we would still need to figure out a principle of growth under this method. Would we take district sizes after such a reform as the standard ratio, and simply let the House grow in relation to it? This, too, would result in relatively fast growth.

The Cube Root Law. This method was developed to ensure that growth is slow and steady. Instead of picking a fixed number of House seats and establishing it as the target ratio for constituents to representatives, we would use the cube root of the national population to establish the number of legislators, then apportion across the states in proportion to state populations. Whenever the national population grows, so too would the number of representatives, but slowly compared with the other options. At our current population, this rule would give us 692 seats.

Here is a chart laying out the number of representatives you would have over time on three different growth principles, given population increases:

The U.S. population is projected to cross the 400 million mark in 2058. This means the pressure to add seats to the House will only increase and slow, steady upward movement is probably better than fast. It would also be better than making a one-time move, only inevitably to face the same problem very soon thereafter.

When one recognizes the implications of projected population growth, the cube-root method comes to seem the simplest, soundest method for managing growth over time.

Its biggest problem is that its initially hard to understand, because most of us dont have intuitions about cube roots. It sounds like a bad dental experience. So advocates worry that it would be hard to sell to the American public. But, hey, America! Can we handle the math, or what?

The Least Variation in District Size Rule. From 2010 to 2020, Rhode Island had two representatives and Montana had one, even though Rhode Islands population was only slightly larger. This method would address that by prioritizing districts that are roughly the same size across the country. At our current population, this rule would produce a House of between 909 and 1,014 seats, as per the American Academy of Arts and Sciences report.

Restore the 1913 Ratio. Another option would be to use the fixed ratio that characterized the House when the 435-seat number was established in 1913. At that time, there were 211,000 constituents per member. If we returned to that today, we would have a House of 1,572.

The James Madison Rule. Or we could be even more ambitious and use an even older aspirational ratio. In an amendment to the Bill of Rights as originally proposed, Madison sought a ratio of no more than 50,000 constituents per representative. His amendment is still out there, available for ratification. This would give us a House of roughly 6,500 members.

Restore the Original Ratio. Or we could be even more ambitious than that and restore the first actual ratio used: 35,000 constituents per representative. That would give us about 9,400 members. (If we wanted to add an eighth option, we could opt for George Washingtons rule of no more than 30,000 constituents per representative. That would yield 11,000 members.)

As I wrote in my last column, two current representatives have introduced bills to increase the size of the House. Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill.) has introduced a bill using the Wyoming Rule. Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) has offered one employing the deferred maintenance rule.

Of those, Id go with Blumenauers bill out of concern for the instability of the denominator used to create the ratio for the Wyoming bill. But the Blumenauer bill provides only a one-off solution. It doesnt give us a smooth way to resize the House over time. For that reason, and given the anticipated scaling up of our population, I do think the cube-root rule is best.

Perhaps it would be good for our collective math skills, too.

Which of the options do you think makes the most sense and why? Can you come up with something better? Id love to know your thoughts in the comments below.

Danielle Allen on renovating democracy

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Opinion | How big should the House of Representatives be? Here's the right size. - The Washington Post