As a general rule, the standardization and updating of Wikipedia’s information has been a blessing for those who want to get into the surface-level analysis of a subject without getting into the political spin of social science articles on the left or right or the dirge of subscriber-based websites that may not provide services worth the fees. This isn’t a joke meant to be ironic for the purpose of amusing the critics of Wikipedia: the standardization has provided readily available information on elections down to the local and state levels in countries that would otherwise be missed by political observers like me who would then have to just “trust me, bro” for much of the material. However, when looking at the page for the next general elections, which describes when the next national elections are being held, they piqued my interest with the inclusion of “two-party systems” and “political unrest” in their concerns for countries. Namely, how do these two factors clash with the characterizations of fairness described according to Wikipedia?
According to the concept of “unfair election” described in Wikipedia, it “encompasses all varieties of voter fraud, voter suppression or intimidation, unbalanced campaign finance rules, and imbalanced access to the media”. The phrasing of an unfair elections is further extended to violations to the “right to vote”, “right to be a candidate”, or both. When considering the surface-level analysis of two-party systems and/or political unrest, these don’t match-up the specific guidelines outlined above as meeting “unfair elections”. I’ll start with the easier to debunk notion of “two-party systems”.
One can bemoan the system of the electoral college and its historical two-party preference since the mid-1800s, but that would be to the exclusion of most first-past-the-post countries employing a practical two-party system anyway because of the tendency for the center-left and center-right to gather votes strategically to win constituencies. Even in proportional voting, the center-left and center-right are the main negotiating parties of coalition governments which aren’t as heavily criticized on the Wikipedia page in question. This also tends to exclude the fact that within large sprawling political parties can exist smaller committees, state or local parties, or other minor forces that deviate from the general philosophies of the two-party system. One can complain about there being two parties in Congress until realizing that there are in practice about six ideological divisions within those two parties that function as their own micro-parties with one larger apparatus above them. The Republican or Democratic nomenclatures are more for the individual marketing of candidates instead of being blanket expressions of every candidate on the ballot: case-and-point, Bob Good (R-VA) and Don Bacon (R-NE).
Also, while two parties can be seen as generally limiting, people usually prefer fewer choices, and they aren’t automatically inclined to support a third-option when presented just because it’s there. Japan is a fully-functioning democracy that is breaking away from its one-party system, but the ruling Liberal Democratic Party was brought down by scandal instead of general competition. The Constitutional Democratic Party (the main center-left party) was able to run candidates as were smaller parties including the Communists in their previous elections and that is unlikely to change in the next election. Just because you present different options in front of people doesn’t mean that they will choose them whole-heartedly. There has to be a reason for deviating for past decisions whether it be rational or irrational and just saying that there’s a third-party like the Libertarians or Greens doesn’t mean that most voters are going to flock toward it even in a non-electoral college system that is run in a parliamentary style.
This leads to my second major category of complaint: political unrest. What is political unrest exactly? What is considered legitimate political unrest according to the writer of the Wikipedia articles in question? Whereas I’m inclined to defend the quality of the Wikipedia standards regarding content quality, I am also more inclined to pick out instances of bias when writers choose how to describe certain figures in their Wikipedia pages. In the same way, political unrest can range from anything from over taxation which may be defended by authoritarians to historical genocide (the Armenian Genocide, for instance) which may be whitewashed depending on the writer’s interpretation of events. Thus, whereas a war requires more substantive description to assert the claim, say the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the broad range of “political unrest” is just saying things are tense in that country. I’m assuming that for the poor people in the European countries with parliamentary democracies, they are driving discount sports cars versus the high-end brands while the rest of the world starves based on this description. This is absurdist satire obviously, but is to beg the question of what specific unrest is happening that makes the grounds for democratic involvement more difficult.
These questions are to be taken seriously if Wikipedia, which has been taking strides to make their database of election and political information more expansive, is to be regarded as a starting point for individual study on a subject. By no means am I saying write a college paper using only Wikipedia, but the references section has been known to provide generally accessible information without scrolling through dozens of separate Google or Bing searches. If the pages themselves cannot establish and hold to a clear definition of “fairness”, this creates the problem of fair coverage if the website is trying to be fair and balanced. If they want to be partisans and say they want a European multi-party democracy, they should be free to pursue that too so long as they are open about their ambitions. Otherwise, it just comes off as general smugness masquerading as respectable election coverage.
Sources: Unfair election – Wikipedia
The Conservatarian Millennial 