I would say that a government which fixes an election by stuffing the ballot box, by disregarding votes that don’t produce the desired outcome, or that only allow pre-screened candidates to appear on the ballot cannot, by any reasonable meaning of the term, be called "popular’. That would assume that every country on earth had a “popular” government unless there was an actual revolution or civil war in progress.
You are still claiming it’s “an accurate argument”. I offer this thread for you to reconsider and make your case, because people are still responding to your hijack in that original thread even as I post now.
The fact that a government successfully maintains itself in power isn’t positive evidence that it’s popular. But the fact that it fixes an election, or only allows pre-screened candidates to appear on the ballot, etc. isn’t positive evidence that it isn’t popular, either. Leaving aside what ‘popular’ even means (i.e. is a government with 80% of the people mildly in favour of it, and 20% violently opposed, more or less popular than one where 30% of people think the leader is the second coming of Christ, 40% are passively acquiescent, and 30% are violently opposed? Breadth of support and intensity of support are two different things).
There are a lot of reasons a genuinely popular regime might not allow competitive elections. Maybe they’re ideologically opposed to liberal democracy, maybe they simply loathe the opposition and want to crush and/or taunt them, maybe they don’t want to give their opponents any political space, maybe they just prefer the idea of winning 99% of the vote than winning 60%. There are no shortage of regimes and leaders out there which were by all accounts widely popular, but never chose to allow competitive elections. I certainly wouldn’t, if I were running a country, however popular I knew myself to be.
The lack of competitive elections doesn’t mean a regime is unpopular, it just means that you can’t use election returns to determine their popularity.
Yes. I haven’t come across a good theory of revolution, but I do have the sense that it is by no means automatic. My take is that governments only fall when they are either conquered militarily or the ruling class loses its nerve or its self-confidence. Examples I have in mind include the fall of the Brits in India, the fate of the Soviet Union after the incompetence of Chernobyl and the Armenian earthquake and the decadence of France immediately before its revolution. But that’s hardly the final word.
I once came across a paper that had a chaotic theory of revolutions. In this paper 20% diehard supporters and 80% opponents would be sufficient to keep a regime in power. But if you had a situation where, say, 10% would oppose only if the 70% were opposing the regime, 20% would oppose only if 60% were opposing the regime, etc., then the mildest shock could make people look around and opt for a velvet revolution. Despite the fact that the median citizen was irked but very much not fanatical on the subject. You only needed the 10% next to the core 10% to give things a nudge.
I agree, and I know (Salvadoran here), I did live through a few ballot stuffed elections and indeed those governments with “former” military men were not popular; but one should point out that they did not fall right away back then because those thugs had the support of past American administrations.
In the context of this discussion, which is about an election, “popular” means “gets more than 50% of the votes”. Go back and read the whole beginning of that thread.
What do you think the meaning of “popular” is in this sentence: The U.S. itself has had at least four Presidential elections in which the loser of the popular vote was elected President, the most recent in 2000.
I’ll step in for Frank for a moment. The word, “Dictator” implies one guy rules the country and everyone toes the line. That view is misleading. All regimes have a constituency. It doesn’t have to be a majority. But generally speaking, some share of the populace has to at least be bought out in some way. Think about Saddam and Sunnis (a minority in Iraq) or Assad and the Alawites and various other minority sects. Or Pinochet and about 1/3 of the country belonging to that conservative party.
Govts that have to fix elections to maintain power are, by definition, unpopular. Otherwise they would not have to fix elections.
A govts ability to fix elections has no definitional relationship with its popularity. If it is successful it likely has a small group of loyals conducting the elections. And, perhaps more importantly, it has a loyal media to legitimize its victory.
A lot of governments don’t have to fix elections, but they fix them anyway. Maybe they think it looks better to win 95% of the vote than 55%. I can’t say I disagree with them.
It can be a pretty small constituency. Dictators can rule by a sort of balance or terror. If the army think the secret police are loyal to you, they may not dare rebel, and will make a show of loyalty. The secret police may not actually be all that loyal, but if they think the army is loyal, they may not dare move against you … and then there is the regular police, and various other groups, that you can play off one against the other.
I doubt whether may people really liked Pappa Doc Duvalier of Haiti, after he had been in power for a while, still less Bebé Doc, but they hung onto power for decades. Everyone was terrified of the Tonton Macoute, and the members of the Tonton Macoute were terrified of each other.
I have heard that Deng Xiaoping’s power, toward the end of his life, was based almost entirely on the fact that (as the last of the old guard, the Long March leadership, left alive) he knew the structure of the Chinese government and Party apparatus so much better than anybody else, was owed favors all over the place, and (unlike anybody else still living), knew exactly who to contact and what favors to call in to get anything done (including, of course, the slapping down of anyone who showed signs of getting out of line). In his final years, when he was old and sick, he resigned all his official positions except for President of the All China Bridge Club. Other people were nominally in charge of the Party, the Red Army (his original power base), and the government, but, still, until everybody was quite sure that he was actually dead, nothing of significance was done in China without his approval. (Of course, he was probably fairly popular by then too, considering what most of his predecessors had inflicted on the country, but that was not the real basis of his power. The real basis was his intimate knowledge of the bureaucratic machines of state and party, and his personal relationships with the individuals - not always the nominal top dogs - who had control over its various parts.)