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Nigeria's democracy is being manipulated Ekweremadu NIGERIAN TRIBUNE (press release) (blog) He decried the attack on the International Conference Centre, Abuja, the earlier announced venue of the stakeholders meeting by the security agencies, adding that such flagrant manipulation of critical institutions of democracy was not only dangerous ... APC harassing all institutions of democracy, says EkweremaduTheCable Nigeria's democratic freedom declining EkweremaduDaily Trust all 7 news articles »

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Nigeria's democracy is being manipulated Ekweremadu - NIGERIAN TRIBUNE (press release) (blog)

Democracy Can't Function Without Secrecy Wall Street Journal (subscription) Democracy Can't Function Without Secrecy. 'Loose lips sink ships,' and the leakers who sank Mike Flynn weren't acting on public-spirited principle. By. Michael B. Mukasey. Feb. 20, 2017 7:03 p.m. ET. The promiscuous release of classified information ...

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Democracy Can't Function Without Secrecy - Wall Street Journal (subscription)

Lee H. Hamilton 1:05 p.m. ET Feb. 20, 2017

Lee Hamilton(Photo: Provided)

With so much turmoil in Washington and around the country these days, its easy to get caught up in the crises of the moment. These are, indeed, worth our attention but so are longer-running developments that threaten the health of our representative democracy.

First, it has become hard to make our system work. Our country is so large, so complex and, at the moment, so polarized and divided that its tough to make progress on the challenges that beset us.

In more ways than not, Congress reflects the country that elected its members; all the contrary sentiments and manifold cross-currents that characterize our communities come to rest on Capitol Hill. Ideally, that is where they should be reconciled where discerning key facts, negotiating, and consensus-building lead to a common way forward. Congress has failed us repeatedly in this regard, but we need at least to recognize the magnitude of its challenge.

Still, this does not excuse what I consider to be Congresss chief failing: in the face of difficult problems, it has become timid. Its members dont like to make hard choices. So they dont come close to living up to their responsibility to be a co-equal branch with the presidency.

They may criticize the president, but they also defer to him to set the agenda and to make policy. From national security and foreign affairs to the nations mounting debt to entitlement reform to the long-term economic dislocation that has led so many Americans to feel forgotten, Congress has had little impact.

Which is why its not surprising that we face a third long-term crisis: people have lost confidence in the institutions of government. This has been building for at least two generations, from the war in Vietnam and the turmoil it engendered back home, through Watergate, Iran-Contra, the war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, and the inability of Congress and presidents of both parties to enact comprehensive budgets and significant domestic reforms.

Yet no matter how understandable this lack of trust might be, it is a serious problem for our government and for the democratic system it embodies. Restoring public confidence will take hard, sustained work, starting with high standards of conduct at all levels. Once public confidence is lost, it cant be regained through rhetoric, only through exemplary performance.

But this wont happen unless we address the fourth challenge: our elections system needs thoroughgoing reform. At pretty much every level, its throwing democracy off-kilter. House districts have been gerrymandered to create so many safe seats that many members need only be responsive to their base. Our voting system is fragile and in disrepair, with its patchwork of procedures, obsolete machinery, and legislative attempts to limit access to the franchise in the name of ballot security.

We need to ensure the fairness, integrity and efficiency of our voting infrastructure and procedures or risk undermining one of the cornerstones of our democracy.

Which is also threatened by our fifth challenge: the powerful and pervasive influence of money on the political process. Our system is awash in money, which is spent to influence elections and gain favorable results. Many Americans feel money is what really runs Washington as opposed to the ideas and principles we were taught in civics class.

Despite efforts at reform, the money problem is worse than ever too many Americans feel theyve become an afterthought in the political process.

My final concern is that too many of us have become disengaged from and indifferent to the political process. That may be changing at this particular moment, but as a historical trend, its unarguable. As citizens, we have to learn how to solve problems in a representative democracy. We have to learn to work with people who hold different views, forge common ground with them, and hold our representatives to account not alone for their political views, but for their ability to get things done.

To make representative democracy work, we, as citizens, have to up our game, too.

Lee Hamilton is a senior adviser for the Indiana University Center on Representative Government. He was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for 34 years.

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Threats to our democracy - Palladium-Item

Common Dreams

What Democracy Looks Like: Packed Town Halls and Demands to Be Heard Common Dreams What Democracy Looks Like: Packed Town Halls and Demands to Be Heard. 'I look out into an audience like this, I just kind of think to myself, the founding fathers would say this is what we worked so hard for,' says Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon. by. Senator Wyden: Trump's Attacks On Media Threaten DemocracyKLCC FM Public Radio all 4 news articles »

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What Democracy Looks Like: Packed Town Halls and Demands to Be Heard - Common Dreams

Were toldthat the story of Stoke and other similar working-class constituencies is the advance of Ukip; yet more important is the advance of none of the above. Turnout in by-elections is notoriously low, and Thursday will be no exception, but even at the last general election fewer than half the electorate voted in Stoke. This was not always the case. Turnout in Stoke was barely six per cent below the national average in 1987, yet in 2015 it was 16 per cent lower. This is just a weak reflection of the growing divide in political participation among people in different social classes. While differences in turnout between rich and poor were fairly minimal 30 years ago, today the middle classes are much more likely to vote than the working class. This is what has caused large falls in turnout in working-class constituencies like Stoke.

This growing class gap in turnout is not due to changing voters, but changing parties. While differences among social classes in political attitudes have remained very constant over the last fifty years to put it crudely, poorer people still want more redistribution and less immigration than richer people the parties, especially Labour, have changed enormously. Labour in the 1960s was a party with leaders who spoke about representing a working class from which the partys MPs were drawn and Labourspolicies were aimed at helping. Much of that was still the case by the end of the 1980s, but over the course of the 1990s that all changed. Labour adopted policies that were aimed at middle-class voters and started speaking not to workers but families. All parties are also now represented in Parliament by people drawn largely from middle-class professional jobs. Predictably, these changes have affected who votes for different parties. While over 60 per cent of the working class voted Labour in the 1960s, at the last election Labour actually did better among middle-class professional voters than among manual working-class voters.

Where did those working-class voters go? In recent years, some have decamped to Ukip, often via other parties in between. But many have turned their backs on democracy altogether. Up until the 1992 election, differences in turnout among social classes were fairly small a few percentage points at most. This changed rapidly between 1997 and 2001: New Labour in the 1990s may have been very effective at attracting middle-class voters, but what was attractive to the middle classes was unappealing to the working class. With no other working-class parties in view, working-class voters chose to exit the system. In fact, the proportion of 1997 Labour voters who stopped voting in 2001 was twice as great among the working class as among the middle class.

By 2001 there was a growing gap in turnout between the classes, which has now turned into achasm. In 2015, over half of people with low levels of education in working-class jobs did not vote. The comparable figure for degree educated professionals was one in five. The new party of the working class is not Ukip, but no party at all. This should be worrying because parties only care about people who vote, and people who stop voting are difficult to entice back into electoral politics. This leads to a spiral of exclusion: parties do not represent certain types of people, those people do not vote and parties become even less likely to represent those non-voting groups. No matter what the result is in Stoke on Thursday, without some radical change to the party system, which might include a more credible Ukip, this new class divide in British politics will continue.

James Tilley is a Professor of Politics at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford. He is the author of The New Politics of Class: The political exclusion of the working class

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The working-class vote is fed up with democracy - Spectator.co.uk (blog)