Possibilities for Democracy in Iraq

My wife and I are traveling this week, and we spent much of yesterday talking with old friends in North Carolina. Along with Representative Brooks's caning of Senator Sumner, gardening, and birds, we spoke of the American adventure in Iraq. I asserted that the goal of democracy in Iraq was wrong-headed, because a democracy is based upon the ability of a political minority to become a majority, thus causing the government to change hands. When the parties are all based on ethnicity, language, tribe, or religion, the voters cannot shift freely from one to another, and so the minority parties have no realistic chance of ever becoming a majority. At that point, there is no longer much incentive for them to play the democratic game, and they might as well turn to violent insurgency, subverting the military, and other games of violence and intrigue.

This topic relates, by the way, to my post earlier this month on the purpose of political parties. A political party with minority support should, as a matter of principle, as well as of practical necessity, make every effort to obtain the support of a majority of voters. A party which is more interested in expressing some principle, or sending some message, than in winning a majority, is no longer a real political party.

The bare statement that democracy is impossible in Iraq, because the parties are not based upon voters' opinions of policy position, is, I now think, inadequate. We might better ask: Under what conditions could democracy become possible in Iraq?

The key here is a principle of games theory, one used (perhaps to excess) by President George W. Bush and the Republican Congress of his day. It is pointless, and costly, to seek more than a bare majority of support. If 50% + 1 vote is all the support one needs to carry a position, then spending more effort, money, or other resources to attract more votes is wasteful. In practice, this means that parties which have achieved super-majorities - the Democratic Party under Jackson after 1828, the Democratic Party under Roosevelt after 1932, the Democratic Party under Johnson after 1964 - break up. That is, a majority having been attained, the party no long finds it necessary to spend its capital to continue to attract some portion of its coalition which is now surplus to needs. One way to look at the Southern Strategy of the Republican Party, is to note that the Democrats, holding a good majority in Congress without the support of the Deep South, were no long willing to offer the Southerners what they would have demanded to remain with the Democratic party: Therefore, the Southerners became eligible to join the Republican coalition.

Similarly, one can look at the Shi'ite majority of the population, and note that there are divisions among them. At some point, some portion of the Shi'ite coalition won't get what they want, and they may, then, make common cause with some Sunnis and some Kurds to form a new coalition. The critical point, in my opinion, is that the issue around which the new coalition forms, or around which the Shi'ite majority splits, must be a non-religious issue - division of oil money among the provinces, tax policy, farm subsidies, or location of new industrial development, for example. In other words, the hope for democracy in Iraq depends upon the increasing salience of non-religious, non-ethnic issues in the country's politics.