Opinion

Tuesday, March 19, 2024 | Daily Newspaper published by GPPC Doha, Qatar.

Opinion


Former US President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a Buckeye Values PAC Rally in Vandalia, Ohio, on Saturday. (AFP)

In US, dumbing down of political parties

Among her final acts as chair of the Republican National Committee, Ronna McDaniel requested that her colleagues endorse the two people handpicked by Donald Trump to replace her. Following loud cheering, she announced that she would not even bother to ask if there were any “nays.” It was a telling moment: procedures meant to ensure a democratic process within the party were entirely replaced by acclamation.Trump is hardly the only far-right populist leader to have subjugated a political party to his will. The hijacking of a party’s machinery is a common pattern among populists and would-be autocrats, and history shows that it can have truly dire consequences for a democratic political system. After all, turning your party into an autocracy is a logical first step toward turning your country into one.True, appeals for democracy and pluralism within political parties can sound like idealism. Endless, exhausting, pedantic debates usually result in a “victory” for the most eloquent party hack – or perhaps for the person with no childcare responsibilities the next morning. Moreover, internal democracy – like primary elections in the United States – may be structurally favourable to ideological purists who prefer extreme candidates, or it may elevate people who treat politics like a hobby and prioritise the process over the results.But internal debates do often yield better policy ideas. At a minimum, the winners will have a stronger sense of the opposing arguments and the evidence for them. They also will be more likely to respect the legitimacy of the losers in any given intraparty debate. Since fellow partisans are supposed to share the same basic political principles, their differences usually come down to how those principles are interpreted and how policies based on them should be implemented. When the losers feel that they have gotten a fair hearing, they will be less likely to quit the party.By respecting legitimate opposition within their own party, politicians demonstrate their commitment to the basic rules of the democratic game. When internal contests are close, the winners will continue to face off against other party heavyweights, who in turn may provide a check against them if they stray too far from the party’s core commitments – not least the commitment to democracy itself. Such heavyweights have credibility with party members and must be taken seriously.But Trump has transformed the Republican Party into something like a personality cult. Those criticising him have been cast out and vilified (and often personally threatened with violence). Rather than treating Nikki Haley as a worthy adversary in what political theorist Nancy Rosenblum calls a democratic “regulated rivalry,” Trump denied her any standing in the party.“She’s essentially a Democrat,” he said. “I think she should probably switch parties.” Never mind that Trump himself appointed Haley as the US ambassador to the United Nations during his term as president.Equally telling, the Republican Party no longer even bothers to offer anything like a proper campaign programme.Before the 2020 election, it simply reissued its 2016 programme and pledged total fealty to Trump. A party with a real programme can bear an election loss and simply redouble its efforts to bring voters over to its side the next time. It would have a much longer time horizon, rather than adopting the short-term perspective of an individual – a change that makes every loss seem existential.Some politicians deal with this challenge by installing relatives as successors, thus turning a party into a quasi-dynasty or a political family business. That is what the Gandhi family did to the Indian National Congress, to the detriment of the party and Indian democracy alike. In France, Marine Le Pen leads the far-right party founded by her father; and Trump, of course, has just enthroned his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, as co-chair of the RNC, making the party also something like a family business.Cult leaders can command their followers in ways that even the most charismatic politician cannot. A proper party would have found a way to stop Trump and his fanatical fans before the insurrection of January 6, 2021. And even after that, Republicans could have shown courage and some commitment to their own professed principles by impeaching Trump in February 2021. Instead, they have spoken out only behind closed doors or after leaving politics. As a result, the party is now dominated by a leader with deeply authoritarian instincts, who is patently unfit for office. In America’s two-party system, one of the parties is turning against democracy itself.It is not just Trump, though. At one point while he was in office, former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro had no political party at all, and thus no check on his power from somewhat like-minded politicians. Other far-right populists do have parties, but they run them in a highly autocratic fashion. Examples range from Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Jarosław Kaczynski, who had such a grip on Poland’s Law and Justice (PiS) party when it was in power that he scarcely bothered to take a government post to rule the country.Strengthening party regulations might help. In The Netherlands, the party of far-right populist Geert Wilders has only two members: Wilders and a foundation with one member, who just so happens to be Wilders. Such one-man rule (literally) would not be legal in neighbouring Germany, where the country’s Basic Law affirms that parties’ “internal organisation must conform to democratic principles.”Yes, there is a limit to internal party democracy: it can tip into factionalism, which can turn off voters; and it can provoke unproductive or esoteric debates that make parties seem overly sectarian. But the Republican Party’s transformation into an authoritarian tool shows why such risks are worth taking. — Project SyndicateJan-Werner Mueller, Professor of Politics at Princeton University, is the author, most recently, of Democracy Rules.

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Give women with disabilities a chance

It is well known that women in developing economies have fewer educational and employment opportunities than their male counterparts, leading to higher rates of poverty. In Ghana, for example, men have higher employment rates and incomes than women, and are less likely to be engaged in vulnerable jobs. Less widely recognised is that, by some metrics, the gap is not narrowing quickly enough: women in developing economies continue to account for a significant share of the economically disadvantaged. Add disability to the mix, and the challenges facing women are even greater.There are over 1bn people living with disabilities worldwide, some 80% of whom reside in developing countries. While there are many models for measuring disability, some conclusions are indisputable: disability is more prevalent among women (19%) than men (12%); people with disabilities face high barriers to education and employment, leading to higher rates of lifelong poverty; and outcomes for women with disabilities are even worse than those for their male counterparts.Ghana’s experience is a case in point. Women are disproportionately represented among the 8% of the population who face functional limitations related to sight, hearing, mobility, cognition, self-care, and/or communication. And, as the chart shows, 68% of men with disabilities are in vulnerable employment, compared to 80% of women with disabilities, while 40% of men with disabilities have attained secondary and post-secondary education, compared to just 31% of women with disabilities.These poor outcomes partly reflect social biases. Expectations of the capabilities of people with disabilities tend to be low, so households are often unwilling to spend limited resources on educating and training family members with disabilities, and employers tend to be reluctant to hire them. Since women and girls are more often underestimated than men and boys – nearly 90% of people worldwide hold fundamental biases against women – they are more likely to be left behind.Though legal protections for people with disabilities are in place – Ghana ratified its Persons with Disability Act (Act 715) in 2012, and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities has been in force since 2008 – they have been insufficient to counteract entrenched biases. A key reason may well be the lack of comprehensive data on disability-related issues, particularly in Africa. Such data is essential to design and implement more effective policies. The first step toward addressing discrimination against persons (especially women) with disabilities is thus to ensure adequate collection of relevant information, especially labour-market data, not least by emphasising more inclusive sampling. This would facilitate disability-disaggregated research and enable robust evidence-based policymaking.Strengthening disability laws requires the use of sufficiently precise language – and implementation of supportive policies – to ensure that people can take advantage of the opportunities to which their right is guaranteed. For example, Ghana’s Persons with Disability Act 715 guarantees persons with disabilities a free education, but fails to clarify until which level, let alone establish relevant supportive structures. The consequences of these failings are far-reaching: a comprehensive, high-quality education is vital to lift people with disabilities out of poverty, vulnerability, and exclusion. So is access to quality employment. But here, too, laws in many countries – including Ghana – are lacking. Since the public sector can provide only so many jobs, governments must encourage private employers to ensure that (suitably qualified) persons with disabilities account for a certain share of their workers. Both “carrots” (like tax rebates) and “sticks” (repercussions for non-compliance) can be used. In Ghana, the Disability Common Fund – a social-protection programme aimed at alleviating poverty among people with disabilities – should also be scaled up.But economic empowerment is just the beginning. Women with disabilities in Ghana and elsewhere grapple with reduced access to healthcare and higher risks of sexual exploitation. Policymakers must therefore devise laws ensuring that all people have equal access to healthcare and other social services, including domestic-violence shelters.All such efforts must recognise and account for the diverse challenges faced by people with different kinds of disabilities, as well as the reality that women face even greater discrimination than men. For example, while healthcare access must be improved for all people with disabilities, special attention must be paid to the provision of sexual- and reproductive-health services – including breast-cancer screenings and family-planning services – for women with disabilities.Furthermore, organisations working to protect persons with disabilities must design programmes tailored for different groups. And relevant NGOs should promote participatory approaches to the development of interventions aimed at supporting vulnerable groups, including those with disabilities.But all the policies and programmes in the world cannot ensure full social and economic inclusion for people with disabilities. Campaigns are also needed to reduce the social stigma that contributes significantly to the marginalisation faced by people with disabilities.The fact is that disability is both a cause and a consequence of poverty. If the world is to have any hope of achieving the Sustainable Development Goals – especially eliminating poverty, achieving gender equality, and enhancing social and economic inclusion – the needs of people with disabilities must be fully considered. – Project SyndicateNkechi S. Owoo, a health and demographic economist at the University of Ghana, is a non-resident research fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington, DC, and at the Partnership for Economic Policy in Nairobi, Kenya.

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