Columnistas invitados/Guest columnists

Democratic voting does not always produce good governments. Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in the final free election of the Weimar Republic, and Hugo Chavez’s election in Venezuela are just two salient examples. Thus, understanding voting behavior has become one of the most studied subjects in the social sciences straddling the disciplines of economics, political science, psychology, and sociology.

Joining this effort social scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels explore, “why elections do not produce responsive government” with their book Democracy for Realists. Here, I borrow from their work to overview some concepts of voting behavior.

In our traditional understanding of democracy, we, as voters, have preferences about what the government should do, and we elect leaders that vow to enact policies in-line with our preferences. This future-looking romantic theory of democracy assumes that engaged citizens can inform themselves on the many issues a nation faces and can master the policy intricacies to judge intelligently. The romantic theory of democracy also posits that voters can assess the qualifications of competing candidates and then vote for the candidate that best matches their own political values.

However, contemporary political science has found little evidence that voters fit this idealistic profile. This raises questions as to whether citizens can properly perform the role required of them by the romantic theory of democracy. Scholars of public opinion tell us that, notwithstanding the dramatic increase in the variety of mass media, the citizenry’s level of political knowledge remains very low.

 El asalto a la democracia liberal se ha convertido en un fenómeno global y, uno a uno, los países de diferentes partes del mundo han sido víctimas del fenómeno.

Israel y su sociedad han sido las últimas víctimas de esta agresión a la democracia. Sin embargo, la experiencia israelí puede quizá enseñarnos algo sobre cómo lidiar con las tendencias autoritarias de movimiento lento.

La Ley Fundamental de Hungría iniciada por el gobierno de Viktor Orbán, la cual fue aprobada en solo nueve días sin mucho debate nacional público, redujo la edad de jubilación de los jueces de 70 a 62 años, obligando a casi 300 jueces a jubilarse. Con una mayoría parlamentaria, Orbán pudo llenar la corte con jueces leales.

El sistema húngaro de tribunales constitucionales se estableció en 1990 después del colapso del comunismo. Por tres décadas estas instituciones interpretaron las leyes y derechos de acuerdo con principios constitucionales apegados al espíritu de la Unión Europea. La Ley Fundamental introducida por el partido FIDESZ liderado por Orbán anuló sentencias que contribuyeron a definir y proteger derechos fundamentales.

En Polonia, el gobernante Partido Ley y Justicia (PiS) atacó a los tribunales polacos alegando que estos representan a una élite cuyas sentencias no se alinean con la voluntad de la mayoría.

When they were working together some years ago at the Ukrainian Catholic University — the only Catholic institution of higher learning in the former Soviet space — Father Borys Gudziak and Father Sviatoslav Shevchuk did not imagine themselves occupying their present positions. Nor could they imagine that they would be at the center of epic historical events in 2022-2023, defending order and decency in world politics amidst a brutal war. In that wholly unanticipated circumstance, however, and from their current positions of responsibility in the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Major-Archbishop Shevchuk (the UGCC’s head) and Archbishop Gudziak (the archeparch of Philadelphia for Ukrainian Greek Catholics) have borne a powerful global witness to the truths of Catholic faith amidst a moral monster’s genocidal assault on the people of Ukraine.

When I first met Borys Gudziak at the home of mutual friends during a post-christening reception, he was a doctoral student at Harvard. And I hadn’t the faintest idea that I would eventually pass the dissertation he was writing (which had subsequently become an important book) to John Paul II over the papal dinner table. But on that Sunday afternoon in the mid-1980s, I did have the sense that this was someone with whom I would be in conversation for the rest of my life — and so it has been.

We do not have democracy, but rather contaminated elections, the product of a perverted electoral political system, with a myriad of parties that act as vulgar electoral companies for individual and group profit, which are not electoral for the proper functioning of an authentic democracy. for the benefit of the collective interest, which is, with very few exceptions, true mafias to put it bluntly as we, unfortunately, have to verify daily, made up of filibusters who have no democratic principles or values, or any other, but only the purpose of assaulting the treasury public in different modalities.

In short, what we have is a false democracy as a substrate for the compromise and the concert to defraud the state, and the same people who are crowing are sovereign in a so-called participatory democracy, where they have no power to reform and give themselves a different destiny to the corruption that emanates as a biblical plague from the so-called political organizations, which care about everything except cultivating the art of good government for the benefit of the society that elects and re-elects them for positions of political representation. This is a result of manipulation and clientelism and of course the corruption that finances the spurious election of rulers so that this bunch of parties without a political compass illegally profits from public funds.