America. It’s a great country. It has a long and proud tradition of democracy stretching back to 1965, when steep barriers to prevent some African Americans from voting were abolished. We hit benchmarks, predating Australia, Chile, Switzerland, Portugal and Bahrain by more than one year. Not to mention Brazil, Taiwan, South Africa, and Spain.
But New Zealand is a great country as well: they were the first to allow all adults, regardless of gender or ethnicity, to vote - they did so in 1893. Finland followed the following decade and Norway, Denmark, Austria, Luxembourg and the Netherlands did so the decade after that. The British didn’t achieve universal sufferage until 1928. So New Zealand is pretty great.
Russia and the Czechs achieved universal sufferage in 1917-1918, but later fell to tryanny and conquest. That’s not so great. Wyoming enfranchised all women in 1869, as did all other western states in the US by 1916 and never passed Jim Crow laws. Pretty good. But then again, most African Americans lived in the South at the time and were denied representation starting with laws passed in 1888, 23 years after the Civil War ended. It was a fight, and advocates of democracy lost. Also, the northeast was slow to grant the vote to women, who would receive national guarantees in 1920.
Yup! The US is routinely referred to as the World’s Oldest Democracy, a position that I contest here, I hope without being overly sour. Criticizing the founding fathers for not having 20th century democratic mores seems out of place. So I’m trying to craft a positive message, or at least a pseudo-positive message, that looks at our history squarely.
Maoris could only vote for a few seats in Parliament specifically reserved for Maoris, which meant that Maoris were underrepresented, and a Maori vote counted for less than a White vote.
While some have seen the establishment of Māori electorates as an example of progressive legislation, the effect did not always prove as satisfactory as expected. While the seats did increase Māori participation in politics, the relative size of the Māori population of the time vis à vis Pākehā would have warranted approximately 15 seats, not four. Because Māori could vote only in Māori electorates, and the number of Māori electorates remained fixed for over a century, Māori stayed effectively locked into under-representation for decades.
It seems that there’s still a separate Maori voter’s roll, to this day.
TheCuse: Yeah, this post was in part inspired by playing with the table in my wiki link on universal suffrage. Sorting by date is interesting.
GreenWyvern: Come back to me in 100 years when there’s a table in wikipedia outlining the date when various countries banned gerrymandering and adopted some form of proportional representation. (Or better yet, keep pushing this POV, as it’s an interesting one. You are correct that the OP doesn’t consider under-representation at all, largely because I didn’t consider it. It did cross my mind that treatment of various Indigenous People’s vastly complicates this story. In practice, this would involve a deep dive into the NZ situation. I hypothesize that since 1867 or 1893 Maori interests have not been as curb-stomped as those who reside in the District of Colombia for example. IOW I hypothesize that under-representation is qualitatively different in practice than no representation.)
This thread will probably turn into an endless no-true-Scotsman. America’s been voting for longer than New Zealand, but then it all boils down to what is a true democracy and what isn’t.
“How can we define ‘democracy’ such that USA is number one?”
My answer to the question “what’s the world’s oldest democracy?” has always been New Zealand. But now I am curious to know how the 1893 settlement included Maoris.
I’m pretty sure that the Roman Republic was voting for longer than the US has. But nobody calls it a “democracy”, because of who was voting.
At some point, you have to draw a line somewhere and say “This amount of enfranchisement is a democracy, but this amount isn’t”. Different people will draw that line in different places, for different purposes.
I agree that a democracy that doesn’t run under proportional representation can be a Real DemocracyTM, but my friend from 2221 strongly disagrees. More seriously, there are lots of democratic systems, and some are more fairly representative than others. In the US Senate, the voting power of a Wyoming citizen has 67 times the voting power as Californian voter. That vastly exceeds the imbalance reported the Maori example. Yet I wouldn’t say that this prevents the US from being a democracy: for one thing you have to look at the system taken as a whole.
So what is a democracy? That’s a matter of debate among political scientists. A practical definition might involve a government that remains responsive to the problems faced by its populace. That doesn’t mean anybody will win every battle: indeed it implies the opposite. I argue that the curb-stomping of African American civil rights up to the 1960s precludes us from accurately characterizing the US up to that point as a democracy. All governments manage conflict in some way, what distinguishes democratic governance for autocracy is the tyrant’s habit of booting certain people or interests from formal negotiation. (I’m adapting this framework from Schattschneider’s The semisovereign people: a realist’s view of democracy in America.) Cite: The semisovereign people by E. E. Schattschneider | Open Library
Maoris: From the wiki link, emphasis added:
I argue that Maori opposition to reform of the system implies that system was in practice and in fact responsive to their concerns.
Does the fact that New Zealand continued to prohibit women from serving in parliament (while Finland did not) change your view? Or is a “True Democracy” one that allows any citizen (subject still to age discrimination) to vote for an appropriate male candidate?
Although a lot of people call Athens a democracy, despite of who was voting.
Nice post. Underlying all this is that we have a number of democratic forms of government (as linked upthread by GreenWyvern) with a continuity of outcomes systematically measured by no scholar or organization that I am aware of. Athens certainly innovated a democratic form of conflict resolution, but it wasn’t close to a democratic society, because majorities were prohibited from having a say at the table.
As for NZ, I don’t know enough to answer that. Because what makes a society democratic is a matter of observation - I would need to know the extent to which women’s interests were curb-stomped after 1893, or whether the system was in practice responsive to their concerns. Or so I argue. It’s not sufficient to look at whether women were barred from office, though obviously that’s a piece of evidence that needs to be weighed, especially as the 20th century wore on. You need to cut innovators a little slack.
PS: For those interested in the emergence of democratic forms of government in Ancient Greece, I would recommend the graphic novel Democracy by Papadatos, Kawa, and Di Donna. It’s a fun romp.
Oddly, meanwhile, I don’t think that the US ever officially barred women from holding office, and in fact the first women elected to high office in the US weren’t allowed to vote in their own elections.
I don’t know anything about New Zealand, but if the definition of democracy looks to whether the system of government is adequately responsive to the concerns of all majority and minority groups, I wonder if we still aren’t waiting for our first democracy.
Who do you have in mind? Jeanette Rankin (the first woman elected to Congress) ought to have be eligible to vote in her election. Same with Hattie Carraway (the first elected female senator). The first elected female governor was Nellie Ross or Miriam Ferguson (both of whom should have been eligible to vote).
