AHS Comparative Government

On Sunday, Germans elected a new Bundestag (the lower house of the German federal parliament). No party received more than 26% of the second (proportional representation) vote; lengthy negotiations over the composition and program of a coalition government thus appear inevitable.

The center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), led by Olaf Scholz, won slightly more votes and seats in the Bundestag than any other party, and will have the first chance to try to form a government. The SPD won 25.7% of the second vote, and picked up 206 of the 735 seats in the Bundestag. The center-right Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU) of retiring Chancellor Angela Merkel won 24.1% of the second vote and 196 of the seats in the Bundestag. The SPD and the CDU/CSU are currently in a "Grand Coalition;" indeed, they have governed together for 12 of the past 16 years. The result has been a dramatic fall-off in support for both parties and there is little enthusiasm in either party for renewing the Grand Coalition, this time under SPD leadership.

That means, however, that either the SPD's Scholz, or the leader of CDU/CSU, Armin Laschet, will have to persuade both the Green Party and the Free Democratic Party (FDP) to join them in a three-party coalition government. Both parties profited in Sunday's election from increased support from voters under 30. The Greens won 14.8% of the second vote and 118 seats in the Bundestag. The classically liberal, pro-business Free Democrats earned 11.5% of the vote and gained 92 seats in the Bundestag. Broadly speaking, the Greens are a party of the left and the Free Democrats are a party of the center-right. It will thus be difficult for Scholz to negotiate a "traffic light coalition" (named for the red that symbolizes the SDP, the yellow that represents the FDP and the green of the Greens). It will be equally tricky for Laschet to negotiate a "Jamaica coalition" (named for the black, yellow and green of the Jamaican flag, black being the color that symbolizes the CDU/CSU).

Two other parties won blocks of seats in Sunday's Bundestag election; neither won enough seats to play a role in coalition negotiations. The far-right, anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) gained 10.3% of second votes and 83 seats in the Bundestag. (The AfD is shunned by Germany's other political parties, and both the SDP and the CDU/CSU have stated that they will under no circumstances form a coalition with it). The Left, which is the heir to the Marxist ruling party of the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany), and also includes progressives who left the SDP twenty years ago in frustration with its moderation, won 4.9% of second votes and gained 39 seats in the Bundestag.

Coalition negotiations are expected to last for the rest of 2021. In the meantime, Merkel will stay on as the head of a caretaker government.

Chinese President Xi Jinping pledged this week that his government would stop financing the construction of coal-burning power plants in other countries. President Xi's statement followed similar promises made earlier this year by the leaders of Japan and South Korea. Since 2013, these three countries have provided 95% of foreign financing for coal-fired power plant construction. President Xi's pledge thus marks a significant step toward reducing global greenhouse gas emissions.

On the other hand, China still relies heavily on burning coal to produce electricity. Indeed, the country continues to open, on average, one new coal-burning power plant each week. While the Chinese government has promised to begin reducing carbon emissions in 2030 (and to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060), this timetable isn't sufficiently ambitious if the worst climate change scenarios are to be avoided. What China does matters: it is far and away the world's largest producer of greenhouse gasses. 

In November, the UN is holding a major climate summit in Glasgow. Let's hope that China agrees to more ambitious targets for reducing its greenhouse gas emissions, and that other countries (in particular the United States, which is the world's second biggest producer of greenhouse gasses and which produces more greenhouse gasses per capita than China) encourage it to do so by committing to more ambitious cuts of their own:

https://www.economist.com/china/china-promises-to-stop-backing-new-coal-power-projects-overseas/21804956

This week, The Economist examines the measures that the Chinese government has taken to control Chinese-language media outside China. These measures include building a worldwide television network, buying print news outlets, and encouraging the use of WeChat (a Chinese social network that removes material that might displease the Chinese Communist Party) by people in other countries who can read Chinese. The Chinese government uses more sinister methods as well, reportedly threatening critical overseas journalists with reprisals against family members who live in China:

https://www.economist.com/china/2021/09/23/in-the-west-china-holds-growing-sway-over-chinese-language-media

As expected, Russian President Vladimir Putin's United Russia party emerged victorious in last weekend's elections for the State Duma, the lower house of the country's Federal Assembly. United Russia won 198 of the 225 State Duma seats elected in single-member districts. It also picked up 126 of the 225 State Duma seats chosen by nationwide proportional representation; United Russia won just under half of the votes cast in that election. (Most polls predicted that United Russia would win between 42% and 46% of the party list vote, and exit polls suggested that United Russia would win roughly 45% of that vote). The combined results gave United Russia 324 of the 450 seats in the State Duma. While this is a loss of 19 seats, United Russia still has more than a two-thirds State Duma majority.

The irregularities that often tarnish Russian elections took a new form this year. Early results had opposition candidates winning in several districts in Moscow, which in recent years has become a center of opposition to United Russia. Then, after a delay, votes cast in a new online voting system were added to the results, and the United Russia candidate in each district surged ahead. This irregularity drew criticism from Alexei Navalny, Russia's best known dissident; Gennady Zyuganov, the head of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (which came second in the proportional representation balloting and which narrowly lost several of the disputed Moscow seats); and Roman Udot, a leader of the country's leading election monitoring group:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/20/world/europe/russia-election-putin-navalny.html

At the time of the Brexit referendum, over 1.8 million people from countries in Eastern Europe lived in the United Kingdom; nearly all of the Eastern European immigrants had arrived after 2004, when eight Eastern European countries joined the European Union. More than any other factor, anti-immigrant sentiment -- particularly among older, less well-educated voters in England and Wales -- led to the victory of the "Leave" side in the Brexit referendum; those voters correctly determined that once Britain left the EU, citizens of EU countries (other than Ireland) would no longer have the automatic right to live and work in the UK.

Recent polling data suggest that the Brexit referendum served as a catharsis for anti-immigrant sentiment in the UK. Since the referendum, the proportion of Britons who favor decreased immigration has fallen, from 69% to 50%. ("Bending Point." The Economist. The Economist Newspaper, Ltd., 18 Sept. 2021, https://www.economist.com/britain/2021/09/18/british-people-have-become-startlingly-less-xenophobic. Accessed 19 Sept. 2021.)

If British attitudes toward immigration have softened, it is perhaps just as well. While immigration to the UK from EU countries has fallen dramatically since 2016, net migration to the UK from non-EU countries has risen to record levels.

Today is the third and final day of voting in Russia's State Duma elections. President Vladimir Putin's United Russia Party is expected to do well: half of the State Duma's deputies are elected by plurality in single-member districts, and United Russia is better organized nationally than any other political party (see Blog post of 22 August). To counteract this advantage, allies of Russia's jailed opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, have developed an app that allows voters to determine which opposition party candidate has the best chance of defeating the United Russia candidate in their district. Voters opposed to United Russia who use the app are thus able to vote tactically and avoid wasting their vote on a candidate who has no chance of winning. Last week, however, the Russian government announced that the app is illegal. It then forced both Apple and Google to remove the app from their online stores by threatening to prosecute employees of those companies who work in Russia:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/17/world/europe/russia-navalny-app-election.html

The Russian government has taken other steps to ensure United Russia's electoral success. Russian opposition leaders contend that they have been silenced on the country's social media platforms and have reported significant irregularities in this weekend's balloting. Moreover, the country's independent voting monitor, Golos, was officially classified a "foreign agent" in August; the move effectively prevents it from monitoring the election.

Iran's new hardline President, Ebrahim Raisi, has named his cabinet and the other key members of his administration. Not surprisingly, those chosen are principlists drawn from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iran's religious foundations and the country's clerical establishment. The Economist reports, however, that the new administration includes men (there are no women in important positions) with a wide variety of views on economic policy:

https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2021/09/11/iranians-worry-that-their-new-government-is-inept

The Economist reports this week on a recent study that concluded that countries in which women are treated badly tend to be more violent and less stable than countries in which women are treated relatively well. The authors of the study reportedly found that societies that exhibit a high degree of what they term "patrilineal/fraternal syndrome" (which includes, among other things, son preference, early marriage for girls, the use of bride prices, polygamy, prevalent violence against women, and the formal disadvantage of women in family and property law) tend to suffer from more violent instability than societies that exhibit a lower degree of the syndrome. The relationship held up across broad cultural categories (e.g., Muslim, Hindu, Western) and when the authors controlled for such factors as the presence of ethnic and religious conflict.

The authors also found that countries with high levels of "patrilineal/fraternal syndrome" tend to be less food secure and to have lower levels of human development (as measured by the United Nations Development Programme) than countries with low levels of the syndrome. This suggests that the mistreatment of women inhibits a country's economic development and the improvement of its living, health and educational standards. The study, however, was a statistical correlation study; as such it is not clear from the study which way causation runs. One might just as easily conclude that poverty and a general lack of human development produce conditions that allow the mistreatment of women to persist. Alternatively, one might conclude that causation runs in both directions, i.e., that poverty, the lack of education, and the mistreatment of women are scourges that reinforce each other:

https://www.economist.com/international/2021/09/11/societies-that-treat-women-badly-are-poorer-and-less-stable

Britain's Conservative government announced this week that it intends to increase National Insurance Contributions, essentially a tax on employer payrolls and employee earnings, from 12% to 13.25%. The Government will also increase its tax on stock dividends by 1.25 percentage points. The additional revenues will be used to increase funding for the National Health Service (which faces a significant backlog in patient treatment, as many procedures were deferred during the past 18 months to allow hospitals to treat Covid-19 patients) and to fund improved long-term care services for the elderly.

The British government is also planning to raise taxes on corporate profits, from 19% (a low rate by international standards) to 25%. As a result, taxes in the UK -- as a share of Gross Domestic Product -- will be the highest they have been since the postwar Labour government of Clement Attlee. The Conservative Party is traditionally the party of business and the affluent, and a sizable increase in taxes would once have been unthinkable with a Conservative government in power. But many observers argue that, under British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, the Conservative Party is "no longer the party of business:"

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/sep/08/johnson-tories-are-no-longer-the-party-of-business

On Tuesday, the Mexican Supreme Court struck down the country's laws criminalizing abortion. Prior to the decision, 29 Mexican states had prohibited abortion, allowing the procedure only in limited circumstances. The ruling marks the victory of a campaign to expand abortion rights in Mexico that enjoyed its first success in 2007, when Mexico City adopted a law permitting abortions within the first twelve weeks of pregnancy. Abortion remains politically controversial in Mexico, with slightly over half of the public opposed to legalization:

https://www.economist.com/the-americas/mexicos-supreme-court-decriminalises-abortion/21804387

The Nigerian armed forces reported yesterday that nearly 6000 Boko Haram fighters and their families have surrendered in recent weeks. The surrender of the Boko Haram fighters appears to result, not from the counter-insurgency campaign conducted by Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad and Niger, but from the death of Boko Haram's leader, Abubakar Shekau. Most of Boko Haram's fighters joined Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) following Shekau's death; the fighters who are surrendering are those who chose not to join ISWAP (and face ISWAP death sentences for failing to join). ISWAP broke away from Boko Haram in 2016 and is regarded as a more disciplined fighting force:

https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/analysis/2021/8/12/why-boko-haram-fighters-are-surrendering

The success of the fight to minimize climate change depends on the ability of governments in wealthy countries to persuade their citizens to change both the goods and services they consume and how they produce those goods and services. The success of that struggle also depends on the ability of governments in newly-industrialized countries not to make the same mistakes made by wealthy countries when they industrialized. 

China is a case in point. China currently produces and consumes far more coal than any other country. Although China leads the world in solar power technology, the country significantly increased the number of coal-burning power plants it operates in 2020, opening the equivalent of one new plant each week. In recent years, moreover, China has helped finance the construction of coal-burning power plants in other countries, in order to create export markets for its coal. Fortunately, China has pledged to start reducing its carbon dioxide emissions from coal burning by 2025, and has reduced its support for coal-burning power plant construction in other countries:

https://www.economist.com/china/2021/09/04/america-wants-china-to-end-support-for-coal-projects-abroad

The Russian government is cracking down on dissent in Russian high schools and universities by shutting down student media, arresting students and replacing liberal university administrators. Recent legislation, moreover, places all educational activity, including student clubs, under state control:

https://www.economist.com/europe/vladimir-putins-henchmen-target-russias-universities-and-students/21804162

The Chinese government is also tightening its control over the society it governs. Alarmed by the popularity among young Chinese people of celebrities who do not conform to traditional gender stereotypes, the government has banned effeminate men from Chinese television. The government has also banned minors from playing online games on school days, and for more than three hours each week:

https://www.npr.org/2021/09/02/1033687586/china-ban-effeminate-men-tv-official-morality