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The American Philosophical Association (APA) has announced the results of its recent elections.
The new office holders are listed below:
Member-at-Large
Gwen Bradford (Rice University)
Vice President
Robert Pasnau (University of Colorado Boulder)
Executive Committee Member-at-Large
Julia Staffel (University of Colorado Boulder)
Nominating Committee Members
Anthony Kelley (Louisiana State University)
Eileen Nutting (University of Kansas)
Sarah Robins (University of Kansas)
Raul Saucedo (University of Colorado Boulder)
Vice President
Michele Moody-Adams (Columbia University)
Executive Committee Members-at-Large
Lucy Allais (Johns Hopkins University and the University of the Witwatersrand)
Ned Hall (Harvard University)
Quill R Kukla (Georgetown University) (elected to a two-year term, 2023–2025, filling a seat on the committee that is currently vacant)
Nominating Committee Members
Ásta (Duke University)
Jennifer Saul (University of Waterloo)
Vice President
Amy Kind (Claremont McKenna College)
Executive Committee Member-at-Large
José Jorge Mendoza (University of Washington)
Board Representative
Clair Morrissey (Occidental College)
Aatif Abbas (Syracuse University), 2023–2025
Rachel Keith (University of Southern California), 2023–2025
The terms of most of these positions begin July 1st.
The post APA Election Results first appeared on Daily Nous.
We need to make the House of Representatives bigger!
Now I know what some might be thinking: “Make the government bigger?” Well, technically yes. But that’s missing the point. We need to expand the House to make the government work better, and be more responsive to our needs.
Put simply: The House of Representatives does not have enough members to adequately represent all 334 million of us.
Now, the House hasn’t always had 435 members and it was never intended to stay the same size forever. For the first 140 years of America’s existence, a growing House of Reps was actually the norm.
It wasn’t until 1929 that Congress arbitrarily decided to cap the size of the House at 435 members. Back then, each House member represented roughly 200,000 people.
But since then, the population of the United States has more than tripled, bringing the average number of constituents up to roughly 760,000.
Compared to other democracies, we are one of the worst in terms of how many constituents a single legislator is supposed to represent. Only in India does the average representative have more constituents.
And as America continues to grow it’s only going to get worse.
Think your representative doesn’t listen to you now? Just wait.
Not surprisingly, research shows that representatives from more populous House districts tend to be less accessible to their constituents, and less popular.
Thankfully, the solution is simple: allow the House to grow.
Increasing the number of representatives should be a no brainer for at least four reasons:
First, logically, more representatives would mean fewer people in each congressional district — improving the quality of representation.
Second, a larger House would be more diverse. Despite recent progress, today’s House is still overwhelmingly male, white, and middle-aged. More representatives means more opportunities for young people, people of color, and women to run for office — and win.
Third, this reduces the power of Big Money. Running an election in a smaller district would be less expensive, increasing the likelihood that people elect representatives that respond to their interests rather than big corporations and the wealthy.
Fourth, this would help reduce the Electoral College’s bias toward small states in presidential elections. As more heavily populated states gain more representatives in Congress — they also gain more electoral votes.
Now, some might say that a larger House of Representatives would be unwieldy and unmanageable.
Well, Japan, Germany, France, and the UK — countries with smaller populations than us — all have larger legislatures — and they manage just fine.
Others might say that it would be too difficult — or expensive — to accommodate more representatives in the Capitol. “Are there even enough chairs???”
Seriously?
Look, we’ve done it before. The current Capitol has been expanded to accommodate more members several times — and it can be again. A building should not be an obstacle to a more representative democracy.
Increasing the size of the House is an achievable goal.
We don’t even need a constitutional amendment. Congress only needs to pass a law to expand the number of representatives, which it’s done numerous times.
And as it happens, there is a bill — two in fact!
Each would add more than 130 seats to the House and lower the number of constituents a typical representative serves from 761,000 to a little over 570,000. Plus, there is a mechanism for adding new members down the line.
These bills are our best chance to restore the tradition of a House that grows in representation as America grows.
It’s time for us to think big — and make the People’s House live up to its name.
Chicago mayoral candidates Brandon Johnson and Paul Vallas. The race will end with a fiercely contested runoff election on April 4.
Guest post by Kevin Gatter
On the night of October 30, 1995, Canadians held their collective breath as the votes in Quebec’s independence referendum were counted. In the end, the pro-independence camp lost the referendum by a figurative eyelash: 49.42 percent of voters supported independence, while 50.58 percent voted to remain part of Canada. Quebec’s political status continued to be a delicate issue in the years following the referendum.
In March 2022, I was in Quebec City, a hotbed of Québécois nationalism in the 1990s. But apart from the omnipresent blue-and-white Fleurdelisé (flag of Quebec), I saw little evidence that this had been the center of a passionate pro-independence movement just a few decades prior. On the train to Montreal, I asked my seatmate, a student in their 20s, about Quebec independence. The response was a confused “Quoi?” and then a timid, “Oh, that’s not really a thing anymore.”
The case of Quebec illustrates a challenge facing many secessionist movements, which seek to detach a region from a country and make a new country out of that region. These movements often ebb and flow: they go through periods where they are more active and others where they recede into the background. The secessionist movements in the headlines have varied quite a bit over the past few decades: it was the Basques in the 1980s, Quebec in the 1990s, and Scotland in the 2010s.
Some of these movements are currently on the downswing, like in Quebec. The Parti Québécois—the main party advocating independence—currently holds 3 out of 125 seats in Quebec’s National Assembly. In Catalonia, a region in eastern Spain, the independence movement has held massive rallies since 2010. But while the pro-independence Estelada flag is still a common sight on the balconies of Barcelona, opinion polls have shown a decline in support for independence since 2018.
In other regions, secessionist movements are gaining momentum. The pro-independence Scottish National Party has had the majority in Scotland’s parliament since 2011. Since 2014, when 45 percent of voters backed independence in a referendum, support for independence has climbed to 54 percent. And in nearby Wales, 10,000 people marched in Cardiff in support of independence in October 2022.
Why do these movements go through periods of higher and lower activity? There are a variety of reasons that can account for these swings. Sometimes a violent government response to calls for secession intimidates would-be supporters. In Catalonia, the Spanish government’s jailing of pro-independence leaders and violence against participants in the 2017 referendum created a sense of apprehension. Catalan nationalist organizations have since complained of government surveillance and harassment. In other cases, would-be supporters feel they have received satisfactory concessions. In Quebec, the younger generation has come of age in a time in which French speakers can manage companies, there are laws strengthening the public use of French, and immigrants are required to enroll their children in French-speaking schools. The French language in Quebec is in a more secure position than it was a few decades ago, alleviating a major concern of independence supporters.
But government actions can also fuel secessionism. The Brexit vote played a major role in strengthening the independence movement in Scotland and, to a lesser degree, in Wales. Many people in both regions believe that independence would allow them to rejoin the EU. For many people in Scotland in particular, the Brexit vote was taken as evidence of the difference in values between Scotland and the rest of the UK. Recently, the UK government has indicated that it will block Scotland’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill, further contributing to the deadlock between Scotland and Westminster.
Even the COVID-19 pandemic has played a role in secessionism. In Wales and Scotland, there is a sense that the governments of these regions handled the pandemic better than the UK government in London did. This has given people a sense of confidence in the ability of the Scottish and Welsh to manage their own affairs, leading to a reevaluation of these regions’ ability to govern themselves as independent nations.
It is hard to predict what the future will hold for secessionist movements. Movements that seem unstoppable at one point can suddenly go stagnant, as in Quebec. Independence might have the upper hand in Scotland, but the movement risks becoming divided over disagreements on how to react to the UK government’s refusal to sanction a second independence referendum. In Wales, traditionally anything but a hotbed of secessionist activity, support for independence is rapidly growing. As we continue to grapple with a pandemic, the war in Ukraine, challenges to democracy around the world, and the climate crisis, we will have to see how secessionist movements adapt to these new realities.
Kevin Gatter is a Ph.D. candidate at UC Los Angeles’ Department of Political Science. He is also a dissertation fellow at the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation.
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Guest post by Oren Samet and Susan Hyde
Western governments today spend billions on international democracy promotion programming, from election support to civic education initiatives. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, this aid was associated with significant democratic development around the world. But the winds have since shifted.
Not only has backsliding among established democracies become a concern, but dictators have gotten better at resisting the forces of democratization and keeping themselves in power, including by erecting barriers to democracy assistance. Democracy promoters have had to adapt to this new reality, increasingly embracing non-confrontational programming that avoids challenging regimes directly.
Many such programs, particularly those that focus on civic education and participation, are designed to operate in contexts that are already democratizing or at least where regimes are genuinely open to reform. When applied to more entrenched authoritarian systems, however, these programs face a potential dilemma. Recognizing the legitimizing value of democratic processes both at home and abroad, dictators may try to leverage the presence of democracy promotion to bolster their own position, using it to provide a veneer of democratic legitimacy to undermine public demand for genuine democratization.
In this new environment, as barriers to programming increase and democratic progress slows, can traditional tools of democracy assistance be effective? And as authoritarian regimes entrench themselves globally and seek to burnish their “democratic” credentials, could democracy promotion efforts be doing more harm than good?
In a recently published article, we suggest that there may be hope yet for democracy promotion—but it’s important to dial back expectations. Citizen-focused initiatives—even in autocracies—can still impart important building blocks of democratic culture, including civic knowledge and demands for accountability. Democracy promotion efforts no longer possess as much promise of bringing down dictators or forging pathways to rapid democratization—arguably, they never did. But the effects on individual citizens are still beneficial. Perhaps even more importantly, we find little evidence of democracy promotion’s potential to be coopted by regimes.
Our study examined the effects of a real-world town hall-style initiative by a major international democracy promotion organization, which brought members of parliament to meet with their constituents in rural Cambodia. The goal was to empower citizens with knowledge and awareness to demand greater responsiveness from their elected representatives. It was similar to programming run in many countries, but Cambodia’s political context made it especially tricky.
Cambodia is an electoral authoritarian regime where the head of government, Prime Minister Hun Sen, has been in power for decades. Billed as an international post-conflict success story in the 1990s, by the early 2000s, Cambodia’s democratic progress had stalled, and recent years have seen the solidification of a durable dictatorship. Hun Sen and his Cambodian People’s Party repeatedly went after the political opposition and limited space for free expression. All the while, the regime sought to emphasize its democratic bona fides by focusing on the procedurally democratic aspects of the system—elections, parliamentary processes, and legal codes—despite the fact that these institutions are far from democratic in practice.
In such an environment, it’s reasonable to have concerns that democracy promotion may be manipulated to serve autocratic interests. But our findings suggest that—at least with respect to the domestic public—this may be more difficult than it sounds. Although the program we studied increased interest and willingness to engage with the existing system, citizens who participated were not swayed into believing that Cambodia was a functioning democracy. Instead, they maintained a healthy skepticism about the regime’s authoritarian nature, while gaining an appreciation for the value of opposition parties and professing an increased willingness to take actions like signing a petition or contacting elected officials.
Our results echo findings from studies of similar initiatives in other countries, including fragile emerging democracies and post-conflict settings like Mali, Liberia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Many of these programs were found to foster greater public knowledge, political efficacy, and demands for accountability. But the fact that such programming can have similar effects in a place like Cambodia, even amidst the added hurdle of more authoritarian constraints, is noteworthy.
Since the program we examined was carried out, the Cambodian regime has taken a sharp turn further from democracy, dissolving the country’s main opposition party and expelling prominent democracy promotion organizations in 2017. It’s tempting, given these developments, to suggest that the resources devoted to democracy promotion were wasted. But such an assessment ignores effects on individual citizens. While democracy promotion programs were not able to deter the regime from anti-democratic moves, political change can be hard to predict. Should a democratic opening re-emerge in the future, citizens will be more equipped to take advantage of it.
Our findings suggest that—despite the difficulties of working in autocratic environments and the broader challenges democracy faces globally—democracy promotion is still both possible and beneficial in electoral authoritarian regimes. When carried out effectively, its ability to foster a more engaged and informed citizenry does not necessarily come at the expense of a public blind to the autocratic nature of its government or the need for democratic change. This represents a potentially hopeful sign for policymakers and practitioners.
In a 2021 speech, USAID Administrator Samantha Power highlighted the need to “reinvent” the playbook on democracy promotion globally. But while a rethink is certainly in order given worldwide shifts, traditional tools, including programs designed to promote civic awareness and engagement, remain useful components of the toolbox.
Oren Samet is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of California, Berkeley, and a dissertation fellow at the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. Susan D. Hyde is Robson Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, and a research affiliate with the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation Future of Democracy initiative.
Election observation is at a turning point. Roughly 80-85% of elections around the world are subject to election observation. The majority of these are in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. While international election observation is important for democracy promotion and electoral integrity, it has undermined the agency of those being observed. A growing push for domestic observers highlights the importance of local involvement, expertise and accountability during the electoral process.
My research is particularly interested in how African international organizations use election observation for two purposes: encouraging democracy efforts in their members states and exercising African agency.
International election observation is defined as the unbiased evaluation of a country’s electoral process. Observers are tasked with providing an objective assessment of the electoral process. In this way, election observers differ from election monitors, who are mandated to address electoral irregularities—including discrepancies in voter registration, vote buying, voter disenfranchisement and intimidation, miscounting of votes, ballot rigging and other forms of electoral fraud—as they arise. Election observation is an important aspect of democracy assistance.
Sometimes, observation goes well. For instance, in Ghana, international observer presence has been found to “deter overt acts of electoral fraud, violence, chicanery and corruption during elections.” Where observers are in place, incumbents cannot manipulate the ballot box as easily due to fears of the repercussions of being caught by foreign observers.
Election observers are also credited with the improvement of voter registries, implementation of reforms to bolster election processes, and training of domestic observer groups. Their presence is also said to encourage participation in the polling process as well as boost public confidence in the credibility of elections.
But it can also go wrong. There are two central critiques.
First, critics find election observation to be “an exercise in futility.”
On February 3, 2020, after the Malawian Constitutional Court nullified the results of Malawi’s election held on May 21, 2019, opposition leaders voiced serious concerns with election observation. As current Vice President Chilima stated, “For international observers, if what they are going to continue to do is election tourism, we should scrap it. It is no better than a cartel protecting each other. But if we want to continue with them, let’s redefine their role. It should not be a tick-the-box exercise.” Chilima’s position echoes that of Khabele Matlosa, former Director for AU Political Affairs, who argues that “election observation in Africa is in crisis.”
In this vein, election observers have been accused of applying lower standards to African elections and tolerating flawed elections if they mark an improvement from the last.
Second, election observation missions have largely been deployed by Western organizations like the European Union and the Carter Center. Leading political stakeholders on the continent have labeled election observation as an imperialist endeavor.
Voters reacted similarly after the nullification of Kenya’s election in 2017. Following this election, citizens expressed serious doubts as to the credibility and aims of election observers, accusing the observers of being “neo-colonial” and “having big names” but nothing to offer.
Instead, some stakeholders call for a shift toward continental and regional observers, rather than observers from the West. Leaders like former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo and Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa have questioned the need for non-African election missions.
Recent years have seen a surge in observers from the regions that have been most subject to observation. In response to this surge, my research focuses on African international election observers.
African observer missions bring a regional dimension to international election observation. My fieldwork has shown that African observers feel an affinity towards member states through a shared African identity, culture, language, and history. Similarly, Malawian citizens interviewed found value in observation by their peers.
Further, organizations like the African Union are mandated to support stability and encourage democratic development in their member states. Its position on this issue is enshrined in multiple legal documents: its Constitutive Act (2000), the Lomé Declaration (2000), the Declaration of the Principles Governing Democratic Elections in Africa (2002), and the African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance (2007).
African election observation is an exercise in African agency. Agency is defined as “the ability of states, intergovernmental organizations, civil society, and individual actors to exert influence in their interactions with foreign entities to maximize their utilities and achieve a set of goals”. African actors exert agency in the establishment of international security norms, diplomatic negotiations through the Common African Positions, bilateral agreements, and health policies, amongst others.
While a shift to African observers would increase agency, there are potential downsides as well. African organizations may have a stake in the outcome of a member state’s election, which can limit their capacity and provide incentives to not be as transparent.
These organizations may not be ready to take over election observation. And not all Africans agree with their involvement. For example, prior to Angola’s August 24th election, which remains disputed, the opposition expressed concerns with being monitored only by “African cousins of political and ideological proximity.”
Still, the increased presence of African observers is notable.
In the case of Malawi, I have previously noted that while international election observation is important, domestic observers are essential. If anything, domestic observers are underutilized partners in strengthening electoral processes in Africa. In both the 2019 and 2020 Malawian elections, the robust presence of domestic observers played an important role in safeguarding Malawi’s democracy.
An IPOR survey showed that party monitors followed by domestic observers were the most important in ensuring the integrity of upcoming elections, while international observers were seen as least important. Unlike international observers, domestic observers have more at stake as to how state institutions evolve. The fact that Malawians challenged what was unfair highlights the strength of civil society and the power of Malawian institutions.
If election observation is to ever get out of its current “crisis,” a more concerted effort by those involved in the process must be made. International actors influence how citizens trust in the electoral process. That civilian confidence is necessary if international election observation is to remain relevant.
FreshRSS 
