One of the most obvious threats to democracy is that elections will cease to matter. A far less obvious, but no less real, danger is that elections will matter too much. The more that politicians have to lose in an election, the less likely they will be to risk losing it at all. As the stakes of an election rise, so do the chances that politicians might not play by the rules.
In most long surviving democracies, those in power know that if they lose an election they will have to spend several years out of power watching their opponents make undesirable policy changes. But they also know that in the next election they will have the chance to compete for a return to power. If they win, they will have the chance to repair the damage done by the other side. Hence, political leaders allow elections to proceed according to established rules and schedules and they are willing to leave power if they lose. They also realize that any attempt to change the rules in their favor may lead to similar steps by their opponents in the future. For this reason, ruling majorities are often willing to accept significant limitations on what they can do in office if they know it enhances the promise of fair competition in the long run. They do this--not because they are naive or nice--but because they see that it's in their best interest.
The matter is not so simple in new democracies. In these countries, the risks for losers can be a great deal higher than merely a few years out of power. Where there is no tradition of democracy and the rules are new and ambiguous, losers face the possibility that the winners will change the very rules of the political game to their own advantage. In this case, the loss of an election could potentially lead to permanent exile from government. The ability to prejudice the rules of the game while in office raises the stakes of an election and intensifies political competition. If the stakes become high enough, elections can become zero-sum games of governed by the wartime logic of "us or them." Under such conditions, even the strongest supporters of democracy can fall into the wartime trap of using non-democratic means to achieve justified ends.
Compare this to Slovak democracy today. The good news is that Slovakia retains robust democratic institutions. Most of its dominant political players, moreover, are apparently still dedicated to free and fair electoral competition. The bad news is that institutional stability is weakening. In the run-up to the September elections, Slovak leaders of all parties have proposed a bewildering variety of changes in Slovakia's institutional architecture. Many proposed changes, especially many of those offered by the ruling coalition, appear designed to provide unfair partisan advantage in future political competition. Instead of institutions limiting political competition, it is political competition which determines the shape of institutions.
Government threats to change the electoral law has increasingly led to doubt that Slovak political institutions might fail to guarantee free and openly contested elections next September. By contrast, a number of opposition proposals seek to restore the democratic nature of Slovak institutions, but the effects of these changes are not easily predictable.
Perhaps as important is the troublesome fact that the Slovak electorate is ill-equipped to evaluate these competing proposals. Polling data indicates that well-over a quarter of the Slovak population believe that a democracy begins and ends with the election of a set of rulers. These voters fail to understand that a key component of democracy is the set of institutional checks that prevent easy institutional change in between elections. Such confusion is understandable. In many cases, it is difficult even for experts to anticipate what a particular institutional change will mean for democratic stability. Nevertheless it is possible to apply certain general rules:
Democracy is often described as rule of the majority. But no established democracy permits any one political institution to rule without constraint. Most democracies posses a variety of political institutions that cannot be easily controlled by any other institutions. These include independent executives, constitutional courts, elected regional and local governments, and a legally protected civil service. These institutional checks prevent the victors from making extreme changes in policy or in the rules of the political game. This is the institutional balance of power.
Slovakia's institutional balance of power has never been particularly strong, and what checks do exist are currently endangered. The most significant weakness is that virtually every political institution depends either directly or independently on a simple majority of a single parliamentary chamber. As a result, the current governing majority has been able to exert virtually unchallenged control in almost every sphere under its influence. This includes control of all executive ministries as well as, through supervisory boards, control of privatization and state broadcasting. Parliamentary control even influences budgeting at the local municipal level.
Worse the institutional imbalance of power looks ready to grow in the near future. Recently, coalition powers have expanded to include most presidential responsibilities. And in just two years, a simple parliamentary majority will also become responsible for reappointing nearly the entire constitutional court. If democracy in Slovakia is to continue to have any meaning, further erosion of these institutional balances must stop and new barriers must be put in place.
A number of new barriers have already been proposed: the lengthening or staggering of terms for constitutional court judges, setting up elected regional bodies with independent sources of revenue, and the enactment of a civil service law. These are all strongly democratic measures because they balance the power of the parliamentary majority. Any other changes should be evaluated by how they affect the distribution of power. Political leaders must ask themselves, "Will this change distribute political power more widely? Or, will it concentrate power into fewer hands?"
This question is actually more challenging than it sounds. It requires those with an electoral mandate to rule to think about restricting their own power and distributing power to others--including those who have different goals. Yet such considerations might balanced by the certain knowledge that those who benefit from concentrated power now may suffer from it in the future.
Everyone has their own opinions about which politicians are corrupt and which ones are not. When designing institutions, however, it is safest to assume that voters will have difficulty screening corruptible candidates from the electoral process. If all politicians are potentially corruptible, then institutions must be made less so. One way to reduce the corruptibility of institutions is to make their actions more visible to those outside or to bring the outsiders in.
Giving the opposition greater powers of review--or even allowing them to participate in decision making--is a good way of ensuring that technical rather than political or clientelist criteria are more likely to applied in decision making. When decision-making is subject to outside review or an internal opposition veto, decision-makers will be more likely to try to at least create the appearance of fairness. Of course, such efforts cannot eliminate corruption, but they can limit it.
The existing model of the electoral commission for counting votes offers a good example of the stabilizing role of transparency. Even if electoral commissions are staffed with inherently corrupt citizens who would go to great and even undemocratic lengths to see their own party win, the open scrutiny of other commission members prevents most tampering. Without the option of corruption, the best that commission members can hope for is the fair counting of their prospective parties' votes. Thus, under most circumstances, the electoral commission works even if those who staff it are committed more to winning than they are to democratic principles. Oddly, this system works because it incorporates, rather than excludes, political conflict.
Transparency offers advantages even when it does not work perfectly. For example, in a privatization decision in which a corrupt official knows he is under review, he might still find a way to rule in favor of a friend of the party in power, or the entrepreneur with the fattest white envelope. But the pressure of outside review will force him to at least make sure that the winning bid meets some minimal technical criteria. This is not true for the bureaucrat who enjoys isolation from review. To use the terminology of one Slovak entrepreneur who has privatized under both sets of conditions, this is the difference between "20 percent corruption" and "100 percent corruption."
For transparency to work, institutions require meaningful representation of leaders from all sides and from other independent bodies. The overnight parliamentary sessions of November 1994 removed transparency from many of the most important political institutions in Slovakia. Despite some changes, these bodies still contain only token opposition representation and need reform. In undertaking this task institutional reformers, whether they are in power now or anticipating a return to power, must ask, "Will this cast public light on the mechanisms and criteria of decision-making? Or, will it limit insight into the process to those in power?
It is easy for a party to insist on transparency while it is out of power. The real test arrives when this same party actually gains power and must decide whether it wishes to allow its own decisions to be equally transparent. To strengthen its resolve, such a party must remember its own election promises. And it must anticipate a future date when it will once again return into opposition. For these reasons, it should choose to subject itself to the rigors of transparency. In return, it will establish stronger legal precedents and at least a basis for future trust, both among leaders and in the society as a whole.
For democracy to work, politicians and voters must be confident that even if they end up on the losing side today they will have the chance to win in the future. They must feel that democracy will eventually reward them with another chance. If, by contrast, politicians believe that losing will lead to institutional shifts that preclude or prejudice their future claims to power, they will fight harder. And they may be willing to break the rules.
Building institutional balance helps prevent abrupt changes to the rules of the political game and thereby decreases anxiety that the next election will be the last. But politicians also need to take a realistic look into the future. Unless the leaders of the current governing coalition expect to remain in power indefinitely (and even the the previous regime could not have clung to such an expectation without the backing of Soviet tanks), they must understand that every expedient institutional change that they implement now will make it that much easier for its future successors to take the same steps later in revenge. The current opposition should likewise note the need to take a long-term view. Promises to prosecute coalition members and confiscate their ill-gained property--however just such steps might be--may be forcing some members and associates of the current coalition to look no further than the next election. It will of course be for the courts to decide where crimes have been committed, but a degree of moderation and conciliation might allow some supporters of the coalition to look more easily to the long term. If they know they will be in a position to win again in the 2002 election or sooner, they may be less likely to resort to extreme measures to prevent a loss in 1998.
The fact that democracy requires long-term thinking thus provides another standard for evaluating institutional change. Institutional changes must lengthen, not shorten, the time horizons of voters and politicians, causing them to look beyond present-day opportunities for gain and loss. Thus, when evaluating how proposals affect time horizons, leaders must ask: "Will this change lower the costs of losing an election? Or, does it raise the stakes and potentially alienate influential political formations from the democratic process?" Again, the question is not as simple as it looks because it requires politicians to look at the consequences of their proposals beyond the next election and to realize that what looks like a promising step in the short run may backfire in the long run.
If the current opposition parties should take power after the coming election, they will face the powerful temptation to make full use of their newly gained powers. This is precisely what they must not do. They will need to make some changes to strengthen the current system, but they should take not steps that undermine the stability of the institutions under their control. Indeed, in Slovakia as in any new democracy, institutional reformers must ask: "Will this change make increase stability? Or, will it make future changes more likely?
Ruling parties in new democracies must impose institutional restraints on their own power. In practice, this means forgoing changes that make it easier for them to govern but weaken the stability of the system. The disadvantages of their own restraint will be compensated when these parties once again find themselves out of power and the restrictions they left in place apply to the new governing coalition. For greater security, parties in power should consider making difficult compromises with opposition parties that would allow the passage of institutional changes at the level of constitutional law. While such compromises may result in weaker legislation at the outset, the increased constitutional majority will prevent a subsequent majority from simply reversing all previous efforts.
The practice of self-imposed limits on institutional change would benefit Slovakia even in the very short term. The current treatment of every political institution like a political football destroys voters' confidence in the system as a whole. The manipulation of institutions for immediate gain also threatens Slovakia's international image. However hypocritical some nations might be in their statements about Slovakia, their opinions are nevertheless often important. International integrating organizations such as NATO and the EU evaluate prospective members by looking at the stability of their democratic political institutions. The citizens of Slovakia may or may not wish to be part of NATO or the EU, but they should at least have the opportunity to make the decision. The current institutional games are a large part of the reason that NATO and the EU have proven unwilling to leave the choice up to Slovaks themselves. The "open door" heralded by both of these organizations appears more open to countries where institutional arrangements are not always in flux.
With demands for institutional change coming from all sides, it seems clear that whoever wins the coming election will face major incentives to change current political institutions quickly and in ways which benefit their side. If they give into this pressure--no matter who makes the alterations--it could prove disastrous for Slovakia's democracy. Changes that promotes the partisan advantage of electoral winners are bound to weaken checks on executive power, shorten the time horizons of potential electoral losers, and increase the likelihood that similar steps will be taken by their opponents should they fall out of power.
Some institutional changes must indeed be made after the coming election, but they must be made in a way that enhances Slovakia's democratic prospects. Therefore, we urge Slovak politicians to move slowly, deliberately, and with certain questions always in mind when making institutional decision. Above all they need to ask whether the change will distribute--rather than concentrate--power; whether it will limit corruption by through outsider participation or review in decisions; whether it will lower the short term costs of losing an election; and finally whether it will make future institutional manipulation more difficult.
Today's opposition parties would be right to argue that the current coalition government has frequently disregard each of the institutional principles discussed here. But the behavior of the coalition is not sufficient reason for other parties to follow in its footsteps. If democracy is to endure in Slovakia, its governing coalitions must limit themselves far more tightly than the current one has done.
It is a sign of the polarization of Slovak politics today that politicians from all political camps are likely to argue that given the untrustworthy nature of politicians from "the other side," the practices discussed here would make Slovakia vulnerable to their unscrupulous influence. To this we would respond be restating that unless they plan on remaining in power indefinitely, the best response to their "untrustworthy" opponents is more trustworthy institutions.
If applied carefully and with forethought, practices of institutional balance, transparency, long-term thinking, and self-limitation will help all sides. But most of all, it will help Slovakia. The current opposition parties, if they are fortunate enough to get into power, will benefit from a more secure framework for their own future existence. The current coalition, while losing a good deal of its current autonomy, would gain the security that its own tactics will not be used against it. And Slovakia would gain immeasurably from a political elite that could translate their newfound institutional security into sustainable and constructive domestic politics.