10 Steps Toward Democracy

Juan Cole has a piece on 10 Ways Arab Democracies Can Avoid American Mistakes. Here they are in brief.

1. Contemporary political campaigns in the US depend heavily on television commercials. In the UK these ads are restricted, and in Norway they are banned. Consider banning them.

2. Do not hold your elections on work days. America’s robber barons put elections on Tuesdays in order to discourage workers, including the working poor, from voting.

3. Have compulsory, government-run voter registration at age 18 or whatever the voting age is. … Compulsory voter registration is correlated with high electoral turnout.

4. About 32 countries in the world have enforced compulsory voting. In Australia, for instance, you have to pay a small fine if you do not vote in certain elections.

5. Make a bill of rights central to your new constitutions, and be specific about what rights people have and what actions infringe against those rights. Include electronic rights to privacy, such as freedom from snooping in private emails or warrantless GPS tracking.

6. Put separation of religion and state in your national constitutions and make it hard to amend the constitution. … If we did not have our First Amendment, our fundamentalists would long since have passed blasphemy and other laws and deprived us of freedom of speech (which they consider a ‘provocation’ just as your fundamentalists do).

7. Keep your defense ministry spending as low as possible consistent with being able to defend your borders. Tunisia, you get this one right.

8. Avoid allowing your judiciaries to become politicized. Having party-dominated executives and legislatures approve judicial appointments has real drawbacks. … Never, ever, ever recognize your corporations as persons under the law.

9. Protect your workers’ unions. Make it illegal to fire workers for trying to unionize. Remove obstacles to unionization.

10. Find a way to fight monopoly practices with strong antitrust legislation and enforcement. … Laws against legislators and regulators being hired by the companies they used to regulate would help tell against the entrenchment of the monopolies.