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People living under freely elected governments have been more responsive to lockdown measures

Jun 6th 2020

MANY PEOPLE would look at the covid-19 pandemic and conclude that democracies are bad at tackling infectious diseases. America and the EU had months to prepare after China sounded the alarm in January. Both have subsequently suffered more than 300 confirmed deaths per 1m people. Chinas Communist Party reports an official death rate that is 99% lower, and has trumpeted its apparent success in containing the outbreak domestically.

Yet most data suggest that political freedom can be a tonic against disease. The Economist has analysed epidemics from 1960 to 2019. Though these outbreaks varied in contagiousness and lethality, a clear correlation emerged. Among countries with similar wealth, the lowest death rates tend to be in places where most people can vote in free and fair elections. Other definitions of democracy give similar results.

We cannot replicate this analysis for covid-19 yet, as it is still spreading at different rates around the world. Western democracies were hit early, in big cities with large flows of people from abroad. Daily deaths are now declining in these places but rising in developing countries, which tend to be less connected and more autocratic.

Existing data are also patchy. Countries that do little testing have few official cases. Even among confirmed cases, governments might be tweaking the number of deaths. Countries with a free press, according to Freedom House, a think-tank, have 60 deaths per 1,000 cases on average. Suspiciously, the average in places that lack media freedom is less than half that. A rate of 15 deaths per 1,000 cases is plausible in New Zealand, which has contained the virus, but less so in Russia, which has not.

One consistent measure that is available in most countries, but not China, is Googles index of mobility via smartphone apps. Researchers at Oxford University reckon that, after adjusting for a countrys wealth and other characteristics, democracies saw a 35% larger reduction in movement in response to lockdown policies. The drop in New Zealand, for example, was twice that in autocratic Bahrain.

People who praise China for its handling of covid-19 would do better to look at Taiwan, a neighbouring democracy. China wasted valuable time in December by intimidating doctors who warned of a lethal virus. Taiwan swiftly launched tracing measures in Januaryand has suffered only seven deaths.

Sources: Frey et al. (working paper); Google mobility reports; Boix et al. (2015); Maddison Project; World Bank; Em-Dat; Freedom House; Hale et al. (2020)

This article appeared in the Graphic detail section of the print edition under the headline "Out in the open"

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Out in the open - Democracies contain epidemics most effectively | Graphic detail - The Economist

A week of escalating and violent protest against racial injustice has prompted democracy reform groups to start uniting behind a message that resonates with their own goals.

Responding to the wave of demonstrations against the deaths of black people killed by police, many of these organizations are reaching out to declare unequivocal support for the marchers. But their statements, which grew in volume Monday, are also seeking to connect the furious urgency of the moment to the pursuit of their sometimes more esoteric sounding agenda.

Achieving racial justice and fixing all that's broken with governance and politics are two sides of the same pursuit, they say. Giving all Americans an equal standing is a prerequisite to securing a democracy that works for all voters, but reducing the current imbalance in democratic power is at the same time a prerequisite for giving all voices a chance to be heard.

"Democracy is our common cause. And, we can't have a true democracy when Black and Brown people are denied their rights to justice or victimized by abuse, racial profiling, and police brutality," Common Cause President Karen Hobart Flynn said Monday in an email to supporters of one of the country's original good-governance groups.

To achieve a better democracy, Flynn wrote, "we must acknowledge racism that has been an integral part of this nation's past and present and fight systemic racism wherever we find it, whether it be in our streets, at the ballot box, or in our justice system."

Roughly 1,000 people are shot and killed by police each year. Despite making up only 13 percent of the national population, black Americans are killed at a rate more than twice as high as white people.

"The numbers are disturbingly consistent from year to year," Robert Weissman, the president of another prominent progressive group, Public Citizen, told its supporters. "But they are not a fact of nature. They can change with policy."

The groups run by Flynn and Weissman, and more than 400 other good-government and civil rights organizations, unveiled a letter asking Congress to reform the country's law enforcement agencies. Their recommendations include setting a federal standard to make use of force by officers a last resort, prohibiting racial profiling and developing a national database to track police misconduct.

The manifesto issued Monday did not include any discussion of voting rights or other top items on the democracy reform agenda.

The groups magnified their voices as 140 or more cities from coast to coast prepared for a seventh consecutive night of peaceful demonstrations pockmarked by bursts of theft, vandalism and attacks on police in response to the death of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police and after President Trump threatened to send in the military to restore order if governors didn't act quickly. He turned up that pressure Tuesday, demanding New York call up the National Guard to stop the "lowlifes and losers."

The reason for the protests is not new, the groups say in the letter, but are a response to decades of violence and racism against black people and "a cry for action to public officials for structural change, writ large."

Issue One, which emphasizes its bipartisan approach to democracy reform, issued those sentiments in its own statement. (The organization operates but is journalistically independent of The Fulcrum.)

"Now more than ever, we need to be able to trust in our democratic system and its institutions," said the group's CEO, Nick Penniman. "Yet, for many, the political system exists to keep powerless people powerless."

American Promise, which advocates almost exclusively for tighter regulation of money in politics, said in a message to supporters that it needs to get better educated on racial injustices so it can continue to pursue a more equitable and representative democracy.

"This is not a 'distraction' from our goal; this is our goal: an America where we do not abuse power to lock out, silence and destroy our fellow Americans," said the group's president, Jeff Clements.

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Hladick is the policy manager at Unite America, which promotes an array of electoral reforms and helps finance other advocacy organizations, and political candidates, with a commitment to cross-partisanship. (It is a donor to The Fulcrum.)

Unprecedented and unforeseen disruptions to democratic processes the coronavirus pandemic is only the most recent and profound require innovative problem-solving. This is especially true of political party conventions, which serve the important role of congregating parties in-person, but are hard to carry out traditionally while practicing social distancing.

Republicans and Democrats in Utah didn't let the spread of Covid-19 delay their conventions at the end of April. Instead, both parties convened their first-ever virtual conventions and then used mobile apps and ranked-choice voting (also referred to as the "instant runoff" system) to award nominations for governor, Congress and state attorney general.

Under Utah's unusual rules, both major parties emphasize a pre-election endorsement process in picking their nominees. Candidates advance directly to the November general election ballot if they receive 60 percent support at a party convention. If no candidate reaches that threshold, the top two face off on the primary ballot. Candidates who choose to forgo the convention process may still get on primary ballots by gathering petition signatures.

This time, ranked-choice voting meant delegates could rank multiple candidates in order of preference on one ballot. Ballots were counted in rounds. When no candidate was ranked first by three-fifths of the delegates, the least popular candidate was eliminated. Whenever the eliminated candidate was a delegate's favorite, the second choice on that ballot was counted in the next round and so on.

The instant runoffs ended when one candidate cleared the 60 percent support threshold, or else the top two finishers were identified.

Valuing the full range of voter preferences is important, especially when there are more than two candidates in the race. Typically during a Utah convention, delegates sit through rounds of voting and counting ballots, which can take hours.

With delegates scattered across the state, using their phones or laptops for ranked-choice voting, the process was simplified and shortened considerably this spring. Candidates' speeches were uploaded to online platforms for delegates to watch, and mobile voting platforms such as Voatz and ElectionBuddy were made available for voting virtually.

Eight GOP contests required multiple rounds of counting, but all preferences were expressed on a single ballot. The most competitive race featured a dozen candidates vying for the nomination in the 1st congressional district. (GOP incumbent Rob Bishop is retiring after 18 years.) No candidate commanded 60 percent support, but 11 rounds of counting produced the two who will now square off in a June 30 primary.

Though most races at the virtual Democratic convention determined a winner after the first round of counting, the contest for the 1st District also yielded a pair of solid finishers now headed to the primary.

This wasn't the first time either party had used so-called RCV, but the all-virtual convention was new. Despite the process change, turnout skyrocketed and set new records for both parties: 93 percent of Republican delegates and 85 percent of Democratic delegates participated.

In a poll of 1,100 delegates by the state GOP, nearly 90 percent said they were very satisfied or satisfied with the online format while 72 percent said they liked the instant runoff better than multiple rounds of repeated voting. More than half said they'd prefer an online convention in the future, or a new hybrid combination of an in-person and online system.

Utah uses ranked-choice voting in other elections, too. A state law, enacted with bipartisan support two years ago, allows municipalities to pilot RCV systems through 2026. Election officials in two cities that experimented last fall said the system saved taxpayers money, contributed to a more positive campaign atmosphere and was received favorably by the electorate.

RCV is gaining significant traction in other local and state elections, and was used in presidential primaries for the first time this year. Combined with voting by mail or early and in-person, Democratic primary turnout doubled in Alaska, Nevada and Wyoming and just about tripled in Kansas.

The alternative election format helped Republicans and Democrats alike to innovate this primary season while keeping candidates and voters safe. In addition to being nonpartisan, it has the added benefit of being a commonsense and effective solution in the middle of a global pandemic.

Balancing health and democracy for the rest of this election year will require continued creativity from party and election officials. Utah proved that RCV is worth being central to the solution.

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As protests continue to erupt in our cities and the coronavirus persists, a profound soul searching is taking place across our exhausted land. It first seizes us as confusion and anger, underscored with pain and mourning. Then it emerges as an understanding that the path forward cannot look like the one behind us, but it is unclear how to pave the new path. What is clear is that we are all aching to begin anew. It is time for a great reset.

But how does that reset start? Where do we begin rebuilding the nation? How do we include everyone in the process? When a house is collapsing, the first thing to do is shore up the floor joists, upon which everything rests. In our country, those joists are our democracy, the political system by which people have power, and policy is made on their behalf.

Indeed, those joists have been mercilessly hacked at in the last three decades. We have all seen it happen, and much of it has been intentional. The gerrymandering, which carves people, and often communities of color, out of districts so that those in power can continue to hoard it. The overwhelming dominance of money in politics, which hands the policy process to the wealthiest and leaves almost everyone else behind.

The intentional disenfranchisement of black and brown voters through dirty tricks and crafty laws that echo Jim Crow. The autocratic control of both chambers of Congress by the House speaker and the Senate majority leader. The executive branch aggregating power as the legislative branch loses its limbs. The decline of civic learning and the loss of our sense of common purpose as fellow Americans. The creation of two very different narratives about current events through the tribalization of the media.

The result, of course, is the situation we have all come to hate today. It is one marked by gridlock, division, resentment, and legislation crafted by special interests sailing through the legislative process while the public interest drowns in the wake. As hard as it might be to imagine today, there is a venn diagram overlap between certain supporters of President Trump and all those marching in the streets to protest on behalf of Black Lives Matter, a political system that keeps powerless people powerless.

Unless our leaders begin the process of reconstructing and reinventing that political system, we should not expect anything to fundamentally change in the coming years. That is why democracy reform is the most important precondition for national progress at this point in history.

Reverend William Barber, one of the great civil rights leaders of our time, spoke of the death of George Floyd over the weekend. Barber addressed not just the direct physical violence that had killed him, and kills so many like him every year, but also the violence of policy that undermines poor communities across the nation every day. They face a lack of health care, decent incomes, and affordable housing. Unless we fix the violence of policy, Barber said, then we will continue to be a divided and a deadly and a distorted society. Unless we fix the violence that has been done to our democracy, the violence of bad policies will not end.

About a year ago, the Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz was asked what it will take to rebuild the middle class in the country. He said, If we are going to actually achieve the kinds of changes that we need, we are going to have better politics. A concern which I raise is that we have been engaged in processes which entail disenfranchisement, weakening the power of ordinary individuals in the political process, both through gerrymandering and through the power of money, and then weakening some of those systems of checks and balances.

What makes our nation great is, in large part, our grand experiment in government by the people. Getting that experiment right in a way that brings all to the table is the first step on the path to national recovery. It requires the passage of laws that strengthen voting rights, reduce the influence of political money on the policy process, end gerrymandering, and rebuild the institution of Congress. Skipping such an important step means we are bound to stumble with the subsequent ones.

The repercussion of stumbling again could be as high as the cost of losing our country to the darkest undercurrents of human history. But if we can muster the strength and the camaraderie to apply ourselves to the task of reforming and reinventing our democracy, we will have the tools needed as a people to begin fixing the many other problems we face.

Nick Penniman is the founder and chief executive officer of Issue One.

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America has to rebuild democracy amid recovery from national crisis | TheHill - The Hill

On the surface, the coronavirus pandemic seems to have driven already-divided Americans even further apart.

Police brutality has triggered violent protests in dozens of cities. In a split that's been dubbed the "lockdown left" versus the "reopen right," Democrats are bickering with Republicans over whether public health or the economy should come first. In the House, GOP lawmakers have sued Democrats for permitting proxy voting during the pandemic. And President Trump is stoking all these divisions as the defining strategy of his reelection campaign.

"The unity that was created during and after world wars for America lasted years, the unity after 9/11 lasted months and the unity during this Covid crisis might be days," says former Rep. Tim Roemer, an Indiana Democrat who helped spearhead a recent bipartisan letter signed by 110 former lawmakers, top government officials and governors urging Congress to respond with more strength, unity and cooperation.

But the rancor and bad blood roiling government officials are not the whole story.

Americans are also reporting heightened public unity and trust as communities draw together in the crisis. A survey last month by More in Common found 90 percent saying "we're all in it together," compared to only 63 percent in 2018. The number who described the country as unified jumped eightfold in the same period.

The Trump administration's chaotic response to the crisis has created a leadership vacuum that all sorts of smaller players have stepped in to fill state and local leaders, nonprofits, foundations, CEOs, small businesses, neighbors helping neighbors. The pandemic has intensified inequities and political divisions around the globe, say scholars at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. But it's also created the kind of disruption, or major shock, that can lead to new political alignments, as happened in Japan following the 2011 nuclear disaster at Fukushima.

But the public health emergency in the United States has added energy and urgency to several "centers of gravity" in the movement to revive democracy and civil society, argues Kristin Hansen, executive director of the Civic Health Project, which promotes reducing polarization.

These include organizers working to bridge ideological divides at the individual and community level what Hansen calls the "social aspect" of civic health and activists seeking structural democracy reforms, from bolstered voting rights to more regulated campaign financing. The latter have coalesced around a broadly bipartisan movement to save the election, principally by greatly expanded mail-in voting.

A rallying cry for the "bridging divides" camp is to counter the prevailing social media and cable news narrative that Americans are hopelessly divided, with a more positive message about the caring and connections that are bringing communities together. Two powerhouse groups in the "bridging divides" movement the Aspen Institute's Weave: The Social Fabric Project, and the Listen First Project recently teamed up to form a Weaving Community initiative to build unity amid the pandemic.

"I think a lot of the power and importance of this campaign is that we are serving up a counter narrative to the dominant narrative that America is likely to experience over the next six months as we head into a critical election," says Hansen.

The Weaving Community initiative has drawn a long list of influential partners and sponsors, and describes its goal as ensuring that "the pandemic drives us together, rather than apart."

The "structural reform" camp of the democracy movement continues to wage legal and policy battles on multiple fronts, but the mandate to protect mail-in balloting during the pandemic has taken center stage. Its latest alliance is a new cross-partisan coalition, dubbed VoteSafe, led by one prominent former governor from each party, Republican Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania and Democrat Jennifer Granholm of Michigan. VoteSafe is promoting both access to absentee ballots and public health at polling places, and has partnered with such leading groups as RepresentUs and the League of Women Voters.

The divisions pitting Americans against one another rage on, of course. Governors under pressure to open non-essential businesses with little federal guidance have faced ugly protests by armed extremists. Congress passed three economic relief bills in the early stages but lost little time bogging down yet again. The pandemic could spell years of economic and political instability, both at home and abroad.

Yet even on Capitol Hill, some see rays of hope. The recent letter to Congress that Roemer helped organize spotlighted the work of the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress, which has worked across party lines to recommend dozens of institutional reforms to modernize and strengthen the House. These include measures to make the House more transparent, efficient and accessible, and in the long run more capable of working across partisan differences.

"You can't fix things on the economy or on our health pandemic without a functioning legislative branch, and a branch that can solve problems," says Roemer, who was ambassador to India after leaving Congress.

For now, average Americans appear to be doing a better job coming together than federal officials. But at all levels, the pandemic is simultaneously pushing Americans apart and drawing them together. For advocates of restoring a functioning democracy and bolstering civic health, the question is whether these disruptive forces will lead to more chaos and division, or create an opening for greater unity and change.

Carney is a contributing writer.

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