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الديمقراطيات أكثر ملاءمة لإدارة الأزمات

May 19, 2020 Shlomo Ben-Ami

تل أبيب - أضحت أزمة الفيروس التاجي الجديدة أحدث جبهة للصراع المتزايد بين الأيديولوجيات والتي أصبحت سمة أساسية للجغرافيا السياسية في السنوات الأخيرة. في الوقت الذي تواصل فيه الصين، كممثلة للنظام الاستبدادي، الترويج لإنجازات استراتيجية الإغلاق الصارمة في كبح انتشار الفيروس، فإن مستوى استجابة بعض الدول الديمقراطية يختلف كثيراً عن الدول الأخرى. يبقى السؤال المطروح الآن: ما هو النظام السياسي الأنسب لإدارة الأزمات؟

قد تكون فكرة أن الأنظمة الاستبدادية لها مزايا فكرة أكثر جاذبية. في الديمقراطيات مثل الولايات المتحدة، قد يُسيء الناس فهم حرياتهم ويمتنعون عن إتباع تدابير الحماية مثل ارتداء أقنعة الوجه، في حين يمكن للأنظمة الاستبدادية بسهولة فرض وإنفاذ قواعد مختلفة لخدمة المصلحة العامة. بالإضافة إلى ذلك، يُجادل البعض بأن الصين تستفيد من التقاليد الكونفوشيوسية، مع تركيزها على الامتثال واحترام السلطة، وهو ما يتعارض مع أفكار الدول الديمقراطية الغربية التي تعزز الاستقلال الذاتي الفردي والموافقة على السلطة.

تعمل الحكومة الصينية جاهدة لتعزيز مثل هذه السيناريوهات، بما في ذلك من خلال الاستهزاء المستمر بالاستجابة البطيئة للولايات المتحدة. صحيح أن تدابير الإغلاق الصارمة المفاجئة مثل تلك التي ساهمت في احتواء تفشي فيروس كورونا في مدينة ووهان الصينية - بؤرة الوباء الأولى - ستُثير اشمئزاز الأمريكيين. لكن هذه المقارنة ليست ضرورية عند تقييم قدرة الأنظمة السياسية على الاستجابة للأزمات.

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0 Comments on this paragraph, 7 Comments on this article

j. von Hettlingen May 21, 2020

Shlomo Ben-Ami explains how Covid-19 has created a new front in the battle of ideologies, which has “become a central feature of geopolitics in recent years.” While China has touted the success of its stringent lockdown measures in containing the spread of Covid-19 – a testament to the strength of its authoritarian system, an assorted bunch of democratic governments have made global headlines for their failure or success in managing the pandemic.
While many factors affect their performance, leadership is undoubtedly one of the most important. It should come as no surprise that astute and level-headed leaders are by far the most effective. They appeal to their citizens, convincing them with common sense rhetoric and win their trust. In times of crisis, the whole country has to come together: The public needs guidance from leaders, who rely on their citizens’ “sense of shared responsibility” to comply with government measures.
The author is not surprised that autocrats and narcissists fare so badly. “Authoritarian regimes depend on propaganda and censorship to maintain a patina of legitimacy, making lack of trust in government practically inescapable. Why would one trust China’s COVID-19 figures, when it has been widely reported that local authorities’ initial response to the outbreak was marked by suppression of information?”
During the first months of the pandemic outbreak in China Xi Jinping was entirely absent from the front lines, suggesting he wanted to command from a distance. China has been accused of hiding information about the Covid-19 outbreak, putting out false information, silencing critics and thwarting attempts to investigate its true origin. This cover-up reminds of the 2003 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), and breeds distrust of China’s official casualty figures.
Vladimir Putin, who exerts total control over Russia, is taking a backseat, delegating responsibility for tackling the pandemic to local leaders, who he said would make their own decisions on when to end the lockdown. As the deadly virus continues to ravage, Russia has gradually become the world's second most-infected country. There have been over 300.000 reported cases so far and nearly 3.000 deaths. Russian medics are 16 times more likely to die from Covid-19 than their counterparts in countries with similarly high number of cases, because healthcare system in Russia is both inefficient and inequitable.
Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro has refused to take the pandemic seriously, even though more than 17,500 Brazilians have already died from Covid-19. And the number of cases continues to grow exponentially. Boris Johnson’s first instinct was to minimise the threat COVID-19 poses, though he changed his tune after being infected and ending up in an intensive-care unit. The UK has the worst Covid-19 death toll in Europe. Trump has argued it is "a badge of honour" that the US has the world's highest number of confirmed Covid-19 cases – 1.5 million – and nearly 92,000 deaths.
The three above-mentioned leaders are all unapologetically old-fashioned machos, who want to appear tough, only to be outwitted by science and overwhelmed by a virus.
The author says Covid-19 seems have pitted two cultures – East and West – against one another, with authoritarian regimes being able to “impose and enforce rules that serve the public good. Moreover, some have argued that China benefits from the Confucian tradition, with its emphasis on conformity and deference to authority, in contrast to Western democracies’ emphasis on individual autonomy and consent to authority.”
However, democratic societies that uphold Confucian norms – such as Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan – “have managed the COVID-19 crisis at least as effectively as China.” Despite its border with China, relatively low income, and population of 95 million, Vietnam is an outlier success story in the pandemic. It has 270 confirmed cases and no deaths. It is not liberal or democratic like other widely praised nations. Three key tactics used widely by the government: temperature screening and testing, targeted lockdowns and constant communication, had contributed to Vietnam’s success.
That New Zealand’s 39-year-old Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, Germany’s Angela Merkel, Denmark’s Mette Frederiksen, Taiwan’s Tsai Ing-wen, Norway’s Erna Solberg, Iceland’s Katrín Jakobsdóttir, and Finland’s Sanna Marin have managed to contain the spread of the pandemic in their home countries and “produced similarly impressive results, without veering from democratic principles” shows that ideologies and cultures are less relevant than real, strong leadership.
Analysts attribute these female leaders’ success to the path women take to power, which is generally more demanding than that faced by men. In particular, it may be linked to the “glass cliff” phenomenon, whereby women are more likely than men to be appointed to leadership positions that are “risky and precarious.” Hence they have already had to prove themselves in tackling challenging tasks before assuming the mantle of leadership.
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Kien Choong May 20, 2020

I am not aware of any claim by China that authoritarian governments do better than democracies. Could the author please provide references?

What seems more tenable is that Western democracies do not necessarily do better than China (which actually claims to be a democracy). I suspect that is the claim that the Chinese are making. I doubt China would argue that democracies perform poorly because they are democracies.

We have reason to value democracy for its own sake, not because it performs better in protecting societies from pandemics. So I just don't understand why commentators are so sensitive about failures of democratic regimes. Such failures will inevitably arise, and not because of democracy. Rather, the failures more likely reflect authoritarian tendencies within democratic countries, a refusal to look at evidence objectively, instead holding on to ideological commitments to capitalism vs socialism, refusing to acknowledge deep poverty and racial disparities within their own countries.
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Emanuel Müller May 20, 2020

Same goes for economic threats, China has quickly recognized the necessity to develop export oriented manufacturing in order to avoid the middle income trap, while India has been initially more slow, however now every Indian seems by consensus to realize the necessity and urgency to work in export oriented manufacturing.
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twood May 19, 2020

this is a strawman argument . The fact is China has handled this epidemic far better economically and and far more humane for the elderly and poor. Whether it is applicable to other governance remains to be seen.
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vivek iyer May 19, 2020

I am old enough to remember the film 'Jaws'- which was a blockbuster some 45 years ago. The plotline had to do with the reluctance of the Local Authority to admit that a deadly shark was surfing the waters and that it was intent on eating cute girls in bikinis. Something similar happens in China where the local leadership's first instinct is to sweep bad news under the carpet. But this is a problem which is readily solved by shooting a few of them from time to time. There is a more fundamental problem that China's very fast scientific development means that there is a lot of dead-wood occupying space in its various Institutes and Advisory bodies. But, according to Jeremy Hunt, Britain's own secretive Government Scientific Advisory body was responsible for completely misunderstanding the nature of the COVID threat.

Economic theory suggests that 'transparency' has serious costs which may outweigh benefits. However, if 'experts' are cretins, then transparency is a good thing. As for Democracy- it is 'anything goes'. We forgive our leaders if they make the sort of mistakes we ourselves might make but once the Nation has united around a particular strategy we get behind it in a cheerful and cooperative manner. This means we don't need an expensive Gestapo to police our compliance. In War, this gives us the edge.

Professor Ben-Ami- an outstanding Historian who has himself been a 'witness to history'- is right that Democracy is better at implementing a consensus but if there is disagreement as to what that consensus should be then it may mismanage a Crisis in a fatal manner. Surely that is the lesson of the Spanish Civil War and the fall of France and Sudenten disaffection culminating in the Munich crisis.

Ben-ami says- 'In a democracy, a crisis is a political test: a leader must retain or strengthen the public’s trust, or risk being voted out in the next election.'
Sadly, this is not true. A crisis is an opportunity to make it appear that the leader alone is the 'man of Destiny' or 'Iron Lady' whose nostrum must be embraced for some cosmological, Manichaean, reason. In any case, as Netanyahu's career shows, you can be widely reviled as a blow-hard and a crook while yet retaining power. If Trump retains the White House, a lot of us are going to look very silly indeed.

As for autocracies, crises do not matter because legitimacy does not matter. Either the autocrat kills his rivals before they can kill him or else assassination more thoroughly terminates the leader's career than any Election result could.

Interestingly, if we look at Narendra Modi's response to this crisis- it is as though he were following Professor Ben-Ami's script to the letter! Yet, Modi does not belong to the Oxbridge elite. It seems, though at opposite ends of the social and educational spectrums, Modi and Ben-Ami arrived at the same conclusions. But both Israel and India are democratic because there is no other way they could exist at all. By contrast, the reverse may be the case for China and Russia- or even a culturally very cohesive and highly civilized nation like Egypt.

But in an autocracy, a crisis is a threat to the regime’s legitimacy, which is why the official response is so often denial.
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Godfree Roberts May 19, 2020

Obviously the author knows nothing about either US or Chinese governance, for he has reversed their categories. The USA is not and has never been a democracy. Its founding fathers hated democracy and mentioned the term nowhere in the constitutional documents. The USA is a republic, as every school child can tell you, since it is to the republic and the flag for which it stands that they pledge their allegiance each day. In China, at least, their elected representatives get to vote on presidential appointments. In America, voting on presidential appointments is done by non-elected people–as we saw with President Trump.

It's simply lazy to deny that China is a democracy just because her application of democracy is different from ours and we can't be bothered looking into it. China is far more democratic than, say, the USA, in both form and substance. Not only do more Chinese vote but voter turnout is 20% higher than America's and voter trust and satisfaction with their government is many times higher.

No matter how you slice it–constitutionally, electively, popularly, procedurally, operationally, substantively or financially–China is a democracy. In survey after survey, it's also the most trusted government in the world and its policies enjoy the highest support.

China’s Constitution stipulates, “The State organs of the People’s Republic of China apply the principle of democratic centralism. The National People’s Congress and the local people’s congresses at various levels are constituted through democratic elections. They are responsible to the people and subject to their supervision. All administrative, judicial and procuratorial organs of the State are created by the people’s congresses to which they are responsible and by which they are supervised”. America’s founders carefully omitted the word ‘democracy’ from all Constitutional documents. For at least paying lip service to democracy, we must award a point to China.

Electively, China’s bigger, more transparent elections (designed and supervised by The Carter Center) send 3,200 democratically elected Congressional representatives who must vote, almost unanimously, to approve all senior appointments and all legislation. In the U.S., wealthy, unelected people propose and fund candidates for election. An unelected Electoral College chooses the chief executive. China 2–USA 0.

Popularly, the Chinese, who still bear scars of recent governance mistakes, will tell you that it was when Mao, Deng and the Qing Emperor ignored experts that they got the country into trouble. Today, Chinese democracy resembles Proctor and Gamble more than Pericles. There are more than a thousand polling firms in China and its government spends prolifically on surveys, as author Jeff J. Brown says, “My Beijing neighborhood committee and town hall are constantly putting up announcements, inviting groups of people–renters, homeowners, over seventies, women under forty, those with or without medical insurance, retirees–to answer surveys. The CPC is the world’s biggest pollster for a reason: China’s democratic ‘dictatorship of the people’ is highly engaged at the day-to-day, citizen-on-the-street level. I know, because I live in a middle class Chinese community and I question them all the time. I find their government much more responsive and democratic than the dog-and-pony shows back home, and I mean that seriously”. Even the imperious Mao would remind colleagues, “If we don’t investigate public opinion we have no right to voice our own opinion. Public opinion is our guideline for action,” which is why Five Year Plans are the results of intensive polling. Citizens’ sixty-two percent voter participation suggests that they think their votes count. Princeton’s Gilens and Page, on the other hand, examining the causes of Americans’ fifty-two percent voter participation, found ‘the preferences of the average American appear to have a near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy’. China 3–USA 0.
Procedurally, The Chinese engineers, economists, statisticians and sociologists who develop policies practice democracy among themselves and the top seven decision makers–appointed independently of each other and with a collective 200 years governing experience–require at least six votes to send legislation to Congress. If President Xi claimed that global warming is a hoax he would be regarded as autocratic, not democratic. If he wants a new climate policy and persuades five colleagues to support it, he can push it into the trials pipeline but, without solid trial data, he can’t propose legislation and the popularly elected, unpaid congress has proven willing to delay leaders’ pet projects for decades. Data-driven democracy has steadily narrowed the gap between public expectations and government capacity, which is why Chinese support for government policies stands at 96 percent, higher than even Switzerland’s or Singapore’s and far higher than our twenty percent. China 4–USA 0.

Operationally, American presidents resemble the medieval monarchs upon whom their office was modeled, as Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of State, William Henry Seward, observed, “We elect a king for four years and give him absolute power within certain limits which, after all, he can interpret for himself”. Our presidents hire and fire all senior officials, secretly ban fifty thousand citizens from flying, order people kidnapped, tortured, imprisoned and assassinated and take the country to war. No Chinese leader, not even Mao at his peak, could do any of those things. The president cannot even choose his prime minister (always his strongest rival for the presidency), can only make decisions with 6–1 or 7–0 support from colleagues and can’t hire or fire officials, elect, assign or suspend members of Congress.

President Obama’s healthcare initiative relied on his popularity and promises whereas, as Stanford VC Robin Daverman explains, China’s initiatives rely on math: “China is a giant trial portfolio with millions of trials going on everywhere. Today, innovations in everything from healthcare to poverty reduction, education, energy, trade and transportation are being trialled in different communities. Every one of China’s 662 cities is experimenting: Shanghai with free trade zones, Guizhou with poverty reduction, twenty-three cities with education reforms, Northeastern provinces with SOE reform: pilot schools, pilot cities, pilot hospitals, pilot markets, pilot everything. Mayors and governors, the Primary Investigators, share their ‘lab results’ at the Central Party School and publish them in ‘scientific journals,’ the State-owned newspapers. Major policies undergo ‘clinical trials,’ beginning in small towns that generate and analyze test data. If the stats look good, they’ll add test sites and do long-term follow-ups. They test and tweak for 10-30 years then ask the 3,000-member People’s Congress to review the data and authorize national trials in three major provinces. If a national trial is successful the State Council [China’s Brains Trust] polishes the plan and takes it back to the 3,000 Congresspeople for a final vote. It’s very transparent and, if you have good data and I don’t, your bill gets passed and mine doesn’t. People’s Congress votes are nearly unanimous because the legislation is backed by reams of data. This allows China to accomplish a great deal in a short time: your winning solution will be quickly propagated throughout the country, you’ll be a front page hero and you’ll be invited to high-level meetings in Beijing and promoted. As you can imagine, the competition to find solutions is intense”. Operationally, data-driven legislation wins hands down. China 5–USA 0.

Substantively, China has won her battle for survival and is now militarily and economically impregnable, so authoritarian giants like Mao and Deng are no longer needed. Today, researchers, experts, media, academics, stakeholders and obstreperous citizens set the agenda. Since 2000, China has allowed foreigners to conduct surveys and publish apolitical results without submitting their questionnaires and Harvard’s Tony Saich, who’s been polling there for over a decade reports, in Governing China, that ninety-six per cent of Chinese are satisfied with their national government and, according to Edelman’s 2016 Report, almost ninety percent of Chinese trust it. World Values Surveys found that eighty-three percent say China is run for their benefit rather than for the benefit of special groups–compared to thirty-eight percent of Americans. China 6–USA 0.

Financially (we exclude financial democracy from polite conversation but the Chinese don’t), ninety-five percent of poor Chinese own their homes and land and the Chinese own, in common, the commanding heights of their economy– banks, insurers and utilities. And Inequality is being effectively addressed. In its 2017 study, Global Inequality Dynamics, America’s National Bureau of Economic Research reports that, though the bottom half of Chinese saw their share of national income fall from twenty-seven percent to fifteen percent after 1980, Americans’ share collapsed from twenty percent to twelve percent. Simultaneously, China’s top one percent captured thirteen percent of all personal income, but America’s elite grabbed twenty percent. Since those figures were compiled, China has eliminated urban poverty and, the World Bank adds, “We can reasonably expect the virtual elimination of extreme poverty in [rural] China by 2022”. Every Chinese–not just the poor–has doubled her income every ten years for the past 40 years, an extraordinary improvement in income mobility and the inverse of our experience. In the U.S., says Stanford’s Raj Chetty, “rates of absolute mobility have fallen from approximately 90% for children born in 1940 to 50% for children born in the 1980s. Absolute income mobility has fallen across the entire income distribution, with the largest declines for families in the middle class”.

80% of Chinese trust their government, the highest trust level of any national government, according to the Edelman 2016 Report, . https://www.slideshare.net/EdelmanAPAC/2016-edelman-trust-barometer-china-english?qid=c13f229d-8a8f-4a93-bce8-aeb779e8cc70&v=&b=&from_search=1 .

And "Nine in ten Chinese are happy with the direction of their country (87%), feel good about the current state of their economy (91%) and are optimistic about China’s economic future (87%)." According to the Pew Charitable Trusts http://www.pewglobal.org/database/indicator/3/.
- vivek iyer May 19, 2020
  
  You write very well. But then China- perhaps the greatest, for longest enduring, literary civilization- always attracted good writers. Sadly, rhetorical prowess is orthogonal to truth. Sophistry is divorced from Alethia. Of course, the Chinese understood this long before anyone else. Moh Tzu represents the productive, as opposed to 'mandarin', classes. His 'defensive technology' creates what in Economics is called 'Tiebout sorting'. This, coupled with Tardean mimetics, is enough for China to flourish. Deng actually knew Marxist economics. To each according to his 'contribution'. The persistence of the houkou system means that Xi- whose universalist literary paideia is unequalled among world leaders- can move to competing Tiebout models so as to depass conventional 'catch up growth' dilemmas. On the other hand, Mao- the romantic Taoist- was right about one thing. It is also the thing America has always got right. Crises are good things. To live in 'interesting times' means evolvability is greater. I admire Chinese patriots because I know that even if they seem to be engaging in self-destructive antagonomic behavior, they are increasing the robustness of their common heritage.
  
  Outsiders can but look on as this Kung Fu opera unfolds. Like the Seventeenth Century Jesuits, we may register our awe by saying 'by nature China is 'Christian' or 'Democratic' or whatever it is we believe ourselves to be. But this is a merely otiose form of intellectual homage. By contrast, as a Tambram who says 'Aiyaiyo' all the time, I direct your esteemed attention to Gong Linna's 'tante' song in which 'Aiyaiyo' can be given a philosophical, indeed soteriological, meaning in conformity with a common Indian and Chinese esoteric tradition. Do watch this sublime video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNF4siu5vAo
  
  My point is that Liberal shibboleths re. 'voting' and 'transparency' and 'equity vs efficiency' and 'limits of growth' and so forth are all wholly mischievous and only have salience in a nation of lawyers, school-marms, and universal delinquency. By contrast- as Socrates discerned on his death bed- only Music can reform the polity.
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