New Zealand is the world's oldest continuous democracy

Great Debates
21

Did they allow 18yo to vote? (I see that no, it was 21). Were there property restrictions?

I read in Washing of the Spears that (Pre Zulu war) all races were allowed to vote, as long as you owned a permanent home worth at least 25#- which of course the natives almost never did.

You are defining “democracy” as allowing all “adults” to vote, a very strained definition indeed.

That does not mean that NZ does not get Kudos for being the first to allow Universal Suffrage.

However, that wiki article is pretty biased as it does not count the USA until 1965, due to poll taxes. In general “Universal Suffrage” is taken to mean allowing Blacks, etc and especially Women to vote.

In NZ, for example, prisoners could not vote, and that is a issue to this day. In America, most felons can not vote. Do we extend “Universal Suffrage” to all citizens over 18?

Universal suffrage (also called universal franchise , general suffrage , and common suffrage of the common man ) gives the right to vote to all adult citizens, regardless of wealth, income, gender, social status, race, ethnicity, political stance, or any other restriction, subject only to relatively minor exceptions

Prisoners could be considered a minor exception, but so could a Poll tax.

However in The Cuse’s link- Countries are classified as democracies if they meet the following conditions:

** Executive:*
The executive is directly or indirectly elected in popular elections and is responsible either directly to voters or to a legislature.
** Legislature:*
The legislature (or the executive if elected directly) is chosen in free and fair elections.
** Voting:*
A majority of adult men has the right to vote.

Democracies also have to be continuous in order to count.

22

The word “adequately” does some heavy lifting there. Since that word is subject to existing standards, I’m not convinced that this definition of democracy will ever be arrived at, nor am I particularly disappointed.

What Schattschneider did was criticize the definition of democracy as a government that represented the people. Because he thought that polling showed that the US government represented elite opinion. So he lowered the bar of what a democracy was: he just mumbled a little about responsiveness. The problem as I see it is that you could argue that Singapore or heck coastal China in 2020 are responsive to their people’s concerns, but they aren’t democracies. So I think I’m more vulnerable at my other flank. My definition isn’t too demanding: it’s not demanding enough.

23

Yeah, that’s sort of my issue with this definition. Universal suffrage is a relatively recent thing and I think it is improper not to call a nation a “democracy” simply because of the lack of universal suffrage. New Zealand doesn’t allow 12 year olds to vote. Not a democracy?

24

Yeah, I agree. I think that unless a society allows every single man, woman, and child to vote, someone could come up with a “not a democracy” claim on its face, but it wouldn’t meet any historical definition of “not a democracy.” Clearly not allowing women and minorities to vote simply because of that status was a historical wrong and it is much more apparent to us in 2021 than even in 1921. But I would argue that any definition that says that the US was not a democracy at all (not just one that had many injustices) until 1965 is pretty farcical on its face.

Maybe future generations will argue that until the passage of the 37th Amendment allowing 10 year olds to vote in 2121 was the date that we really became a democracy but maybe not because some of those 6 year olds are pretty smart.

Note that I am not saying that denying children the right to vote is the same as denying the vote to women or minorities, but future generations may see it differently. To say that a society is not a “true” democracy when each new injustice is uncovered is just turtles all the way down.

25

My friend from 2221 tells me that NZ is definitely not a democracy, because it allows no representation for rivers and streams. He doesn’t mind the 12 year old thing- don’t be ridiculous he says! (Then again my friend from 2321 disagrees and notes that Matt Yglassias proposed the voting age to be reduced to 7.)

More seriously UltraVires, I’m not starting with certain things democracies should have and working backwards. I’m observing the results of not extending the franchise to African Americans, starting in 1888, and saying that the resulting civil rights violations reek of anti-democratic behavior. Now maybe there are certain reforms that we’d expect if the voting age were dropped to 12. But I think not: when the voting age was lowered from 21 to 18, there weren’t the sort of radical changes you get than when you bar ethnic groups from voting.

My goal here though is a positive story. In Ancient Athens and in 18th century Philadelphia, the forms of democracy were invented in the first case and extended to a nation-state in the second. That’s no small accomplishment. But neither had a democratic society and in both cases, I doubt whether their ambitions were that high. We almost achieved a democratic society with the passage of the 14th amendment. If the election of 1876 had gone a little differently the US could have been number 1 - though there’s the matter of woman’s suffrage to contend with in my alt-history.

It’s not a matter of uncovering injustices. African Americans had the vote and held office in the south prior to 1878. Afterwards their rights were snatched away. This isn’t one age imposing its values on another. This is simply noting that there was a fight during late 1800 and the opponents of democratization and universal franchise won.

“There’s nothing automatic about being a city on a hill. You have to climb that hill and you have to build that city.” - Timothy Snyder

26

Let’s talk about language. It is fitting and proper to use modern definitions when conversing with a modern audience, even when history is the topic. We don’t break out into 18th century ye olde language and speling when we discuss George Washington. There’s no issue with using modern medical terminology, even if none of Washington’s contemporaries would understand what tuberculosis was (or what miasma was not).

Similarly, it makes sense to use modern and ordinary definitions of democracy with a contemporary audience. For clarity. Your typical corporation may have democratic voting procedures among shareholders and within the board of directors, but nobody sensible calls the corporation a democracy. Nor would we characterize a country as a democracy that only extended the federal vote to adult males, and left most human rights issues to be settled in the provinces. The tricky part is not to needlessly show disrespect to democratic innovators, mindlessly apply modern mores in the distant past-- or blithely maintain that the most backward elements of past societies represented the social standards of the day, when if fact they did not.

The emergence of an ethic of human rights was a fight every step of the way. Some were for its advancement, others opted for the whip. It is ahistorical to suggest otherwise.

27

Please forgive my ignorance, but exactly which 1965 event are you referring to?

28

I have gone days at a time without hearing anyone pontificating on how America is the world’s oldest democracy.

Round these parts we’ve generally settled on Iceland being the oldest, but it’s hard to get decent barbecue there.*

As for New Zealand, it shares with the U.S. the dubious honor of being the only countries to allow direct-to-consumer prescription drug advertising.

*although flaming lobster cooked over hot lava sounds interesting.

29

I’m referring to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which secured the right to vote for minorities, particularly those in the South. It also was listed in Wikipedia’s table comparing universal suffrage dates for various countries.

While I’m here though, I’d like to give a shout-out to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which desegregated education and public facilities, and outlawed discrimination in public accommodations. Less famous is the Civil Rights Act of 1968, aka the Fair Housing Act, permitting the federal government to enforce laws against housing discrimination based on race, sex, or religion.

30

Thanks. I figured you were referring to those laws; I’m just not so familiar with their timeline and exactly which was in 1965.

31

To be honest, I just constructed the timeline today. More generally, I’ve been rethinking US history over the past four years or so. Still a work in progress.

32

A post was merged into an existing topic: Grundig Posts

33

Ok, Grundig helpfully supplies some context. I would request that anybody who wants to debate or elaborate on that point to take it to another thread. Further commentary would be a hijack of this thread, IMHO, and we’re only on post 33. (I am not a moderator, and my junior badge has expired.)

34

Grundig kindly started an offshoot thread: New Zealand is an evil colonial country.

In it, he makes an argument that I thought I might reply to here:

You can be an old democracy and still have a colonial past. New Zealand became a democracy in 1893 for example, after European colonization of the island starting in earnest in the early 1800s. The US became a democracy in 1965: colonization started in the early 1600s. You can be a democratic society but still fight wars and have all manner of bad and deadly policy. Representative democracy doesn’t imply that everything is happiness and light.

35

There’s two large islands that make up New Zealand (imaginatively called North Island and South Island), plus Stewart Island and the smaller Chatham Islands (I’m not counting the uninhabited Antarctic/offshore islands). It’s not some island city-state like Singapore.

36

The North Island was named after Joseph North of London, the position relative to the other island was coincidental. After North died, his ashes were placed in an urn and sunk in the middle of Lake Taupo. That is why the island may sometimes be referred to as the “Northurn” island.

:neutral_face:

37

The West Coast was of course named after John West, the famous tuna fisherman.

:lying_face:

38

The majority of current residents of New Zealand were, in fact, born there.

39

I’m not sure where this definition comes from that democracy requires universal suffrage. I’ve never seen that equivalence before. I’m all for universal suffrage; it was unjust for us not to have it. But why does that mean “not a democracy”?

40

I think there’s a good case to be made for having an evolving standard for what a democracy looks like, but the USA failed spectacularly even by its own adopted standards at the time. Parts of it have remained democratic for much longer than the country was a whole, but the failures of the 1876-1965 period were so huge and widespread that I think they were fatal to the idea of the USA having been a democracy at the national level. The Jim Crow South wasn’t some tiny unmanageable province in the hinterland, it was a huge swathe of the country that could be seen from the steps of the Capitol.