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Learning Democracy Citizen Engagement and Electoral Choice in Nicaragua, 1990-2001
By Leslie E. Anderson Lawrence C. Dodd The University of Chicago Press Copyright © 2005 The University of Chicago
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-226-01972-7
Chapter One The Democratic Experiment in Nicaragua: An Introduction
In 1989 the politics of the world changed. In the future we may compare that year to 1789, 1848, 1917, or 1939 in the effect it had on world politics and democratic development. The changes that have come since 1989-the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War, the demise of Soviet Europe, democratization there and worldwide-are so enormous that we are still struggling to understand their full magnitude. The threat of another and final war was reduced. The Cold War division that had shaped the world for most of the twentieth century suddenly ended, allowing considerations about political democracy and human rights to assume an importance they had long been denied. The contours of Europe changed.
Yet the story of 1989 is not just a story of Europe. The animosity between the two world systems had generated repercussions in every corner of the world. Cold War perceptions, the intense hostilities between communism and capitalism, and local desires to emulate or divorce from one system or the other had shaped politics in Asia, Africa, and the Americas from 1917 onward, particularly after World War II. Now the implications of the new configuration reverberated globally, threatening to disturb domestic politics everywhere.
One place where the new international developments seemed most immediately relevant was Central America, where Cold War politics had dominated the scene throughout the postwar years. The right-wing dictatorship of the Somoza family in Nicaragua gave an authoritarian cast to regional politics and received strong U.S. support in part because of the dictator's Cold War loyalties to the United States. Then in the 1970s a social revolution in Nicaragua looked to Cuba and the USSR for assistance and inspired official U.S. hostility. Now, as if to dare fate, the socialist Sandinistas who had led the revolution and then sought popular support at the polls launched their second electoral campaign in November 1989.
The Sandinistas asked the electorate to choose socialism again precisely when much of the world was rushing away from it. Yet it was not an unreasonable request. Unlike other socialist regimes, the Sandinistas had already won an election in 1984, becoming the first socialist regime ever to hold revolutionary and electoral legitimacy. They won that election after instituting popular social reforms in one of the world's poorest nations, including land redistribution and improvements in health, education, welfare, and employment. Now, seeking support to continue these reforms, they were the first socialist regime ever to stand for reelection.
Despite continuing conflict with the United States and its debilitating domestic consequences, the Sandinistas fully expected the citizens to stand with them again. In defeating the violent Somoza dictatorship, in surviving a decade, in defying the United States, the Sandinistas had won unlikely victories before. If defeatism had been their motto, they would never have achieved as much as they had. Undaunted, they launched an electoral campaign to reelect Daniel Ortega as president, again offering a socialist polity and semisocialist economy. Nor did most observers think the Sandinista quest for reelection unreasonable. Both supporters and opponents expected the Sandinistas to win. Scholars, revolutionaries, and counterrevolutionaries alike were surprised by an electoral choice in which voters selected the nonsocialist Violeta Chamorro and her offer of a new regime committed to democratic conservatism.
The first goal of this book is to explain the 1990 electoral decision. In our effort to do so we describe the 1990 campaign and its election outcome in detail. We then ask why voters made the decision they did, whether it was a deliberate move or some accidental or reactive misstep that failed to convey their true sentiments. We also consider why so few visible observers, regardless of political color, anticipated the 1990 Sandinista defeat. Our investigation of these queries takes us into the academic literature on vote choice and requires us to modify the arguments of that literature to fit the reality of new democracies in contemporary third world settings. Guided by our modifications, we provide an in-depth analysis of survey data on the 1990 election. Parts I and II present our resulting answers.
In focusing on 1990, we are forced to consider whether the electoral outcome that year was a product of such unique circumstances that such a focus distorts our understanding of Nicaraguan politics. To address this issue we examine Nicaragua's subsequent experience with democratic conservatism and analyze the decision processes citizens employed in the 1996 and 2001 national elections. We ask whether the basic political perceptions and reasoning processes that characterized citizens in 1990 were reaffirmed by them in 1996 and 2001. Our concern is to explain why citizens have stayed the course with democratic conservatism and to highlight the issues and conditions that might lead them to reconsider their support of it. This analysis is found in part III.
Our second goal is to understand the democratization process in Nicaragua. As we step back from the elections to view Nicaraguan history across the past quarter century, we conclude that a democratic transition is under way there. Moreover, this is true in a context where history and theory conclude that the odds were and are definitively against democracy and democratic development. Nicaragua possesses none of the classic requisites of democracy stressed by theorists, such as affluence, a cohesive elite guiding it to democracy, a long-standing civic culture, or a history of gradualist evolution in liberal institutions and free market economics. Instead, its modern history is overshadowed by severe poverty and widespread illiteracy, violent clashes among elites, regime repression of civic engagement, and a social revolution seeking to rectify the nation's dire straits through rapid political transformation and socialist restructuring.
The classic requisites of democracy are said to be essential in large part because they provide citizens with vital preparation for democratic citizenship. Without such preparation citizens lack the capacity to comprehend the nature and value of democratic elections, to reason and choose among contending parties and regimes in a responsible and sensible manner, and to honor the outcomes. Yet Nicaragua not only lacked such requisites; it seemed decades if not centuries away from their realization, with a citizenry so poor and poorly educated as to appear incapable of meaningful democratic participation according to the classic literature on democracy. Why then were the citizens of Nicaragua able to participate in the "high stakes" elections of the contemporary era, abide by their outcomes, and embrace a process of regime change and democratization?
Nicaragua's quarter-century journey from right-wing dictatorship to socialist revolutionary government to electoral democracy-all amidst extreme poverty and limited education-is one of the more extraordinary and puzzling developments in a remarkable era of global change and democratization. And it is made even more remarkable by the success of the Sandinistas in capturing control of most major municipalities in the 2000 local elections, while conservatives maintained control over the national government then and even after 2001. The movement from extensive human rights violations and political repression in the 1970s to competitive democratic elections and partisan power sharing today clearly constitutes an improved way of doing politics. It points toward the possibility that Nicaraguans are learning to engage in democratic politics and to use such politics in skillful and nuanced ways. But if democracy is developing and Nicaraguans are learning to resolve political differences democratically, how did they get there from so unlikely a start? And what might the answer to this question tell us about the citizen capacity for democratic learning and political participation elsewhere?
To answer these questions we look closely at the ways Nicaraguan history prepared citizens to engage in electoral politics despite their adverse circumstances. We then utilize this experience and the democratization process it fostered to reassess much of the classic literature on democratic requisites. Our historical argument is presented in chapter 2, and our reassessment of the requisites of democratization is developed most fully in chapter 9. The remainder of this introduction elaborates on the two questions that lie at the heart of the book: why the sudden and unforeseen vote against the Sandinistas, followed by its subsequent electoral reiteration, and why the transition to democracy in so unlikely a setting?
Why the Electoral Revolution?
Students of Nicaraguan politics, focused on the nation's extreme poverty and the Sandinista efforts to alleviate it, had viewed the 1990 electoral result as a virtual impossibility. They saw citizens of Nicaragua as remarkably courageous, cognizant of the social ills of their nation, and prepared to take the steps necessary to address them. Citizens who had risked their lives and lost loved ones to institute social revolution would now stand with Ortega and the Sandinistas to protect it. Certainly they would not embrace Chamorro's offer of democratic conservatism, replacing hard-earned social reform and mass political mobilization with austere conservative policies and procedural democracy. Similarly, there were widespread expectations that voters would reembrace Ortega in 1996 and in 2001 to redress the deteriorating social conditions that came with austerity.
From this perspective, the voters' sustained embrace of democratic conservatism has deeply puzzled observers. How could such a disconcerting realignment in the partisan attachments of citizens occur, generating "electoral revolution"? Why would citizens who had supported the Sandinistas in social revolution, reaffirmed them in 1984, and appeared as revolutionary loyalists vote them out of office in 1990 and then reiterate that vote in 1996 and 2001? Why did social revolutionaries vote like conservatives?
Scholarly literature and journalistic observations suggest five answers: (1) it was an accident resulting from voter confusion; (2) it was a pent-up, overdue repudiation of Sandinismo by a population that had never really supported the socialist revolution; (3) it was a paradoxical choice of the right (to bring peace, reconciliation, and national reconstruction) by a population that preferred leftist social policies on many everyday matters; (4) it was a miscalculation by a cynical but leftist electorate who overestimated Sandinista strength and voted against them to restrain them, not to defeat them; or (5) it was a capitulation by Nicaraguans to U.S. policies, a decision simply to give up the revolution and accept external domination. A plausible argument exists for each scenario.
An Accident
The first answer explains the electoral outcome as an accident born of Nicaragua's historic poverty and authoritarianism. In this view, citizens were so poor, uneducated, and inexperienced with democracy that they did not understand what they were doing when they went to the polls. This possibility draws upon research in established democracies suggesting that even privileged citizens have only modest levels of refined knowledge about politics and a limited grasp of issues and vote consequences. They demonstrate disconcerting fluidity in attitudes and contradictions between beliefs and behavior across or within elections. They even can misread ballots and elect the wrong candidates. While electoral politics in older democracies reflect considerable order and stability anyway, such patterns result from enduring partisan structures supported by ingrained social alignments, from a professionalized political elite committed to democracy, and from economic affluence that induces citizen satisfaction rather than from sophisticated voters.
If limited sophistication prevails among literate publics, how much more would that be true among less-educated, inexperienced Nicaraguans? If citizens in older democracies can be misled by easy promises and well-polished candidates, could not Nicaraguans be led even further astray, embracing candidates and a new regime based on a glitzy campaign and misleading slogans rather than comprehension of the real issues? Such an interpretation suggests that the 1990 outcome was a random result made even more problematic by public incomprehension of political reality. The public might even have misunderstood the meaning of Chamorro's candidacy. Perhaps they did not realize that Violeta Chamorro, widow of the courageous newspaper editor Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, whose assassination in 1978 helped spark the final insurrection against Somoza, was now a candidate of the conservative UNO coalition including some former Somoza supporters.
While genuinely supporting the Sandinistas, citizens inexperienced in electoral democracy may have voted in a confused manner, showing little pattern or reason and inadvertently removing Ortega from office. This first interpretation suggests that the 1990 vote was simply a fluke resulting from misunderstanding of the electoral process by a naive electorate willing to die for the Sandinistas but unable to grasp the relationship between electoral choice and governing power.
A Repudiation
A second and opposing explanation is that the vast majority of the public had never supported Sandinista socialism and now repudiated it at the first true opportunity. This interpretation is consistent with the view that the 1979 rebellion against Somoza was spontaneous and momentary, broadly supported by all segments of society, rather than an organized, coordinated revolution in which Sandinista activists provided the necessary leadership and ideals and received deep popular support. In this view the Sandinistas merely exploited the vacuum created by Somoza's fall and used military force to gain power and impose themselves in government. Instead of being courageous heroes and patriots, they were usurpers of the true revolution in behalf of freedom, not socialism. Instead of caring about the people, they were power aggrandizers seeking personal privilege and control. This view challenges the belief among academics and observers that the Sandinistas had extensive popular support. It suggests that the revolution was a romantic illusion of the left unsupported by data on popular attitudes.
This second interpretation accepts Ronald Reagan's view that the 1984 election lacked legitimacy and that the Sandinistas had governed by intimidation ever since. It sees the public as intelligent and informed but highly strategic, secretive, and self-protective. It suggests that most citizens knew what the election was about and understood what they were doing as they voted. They were anxious to end the indefensible conscription of their sons to fight the Contra War that Ortega's hostility to the United States had provoked, exhausted by the economic devastation his reckless socialist experiments had generated, and desirous of a freer daily life less dominated by the controlling arm of the Sandinista state. They felt little confusion or ambivalence but bided their time, keeping their true beliefs and vote intentions to themselves until it became clear that international conditions would force the Sandinistas to honor a negative vote.
With the Cold War ending and Soviet support for the Sandinistas waning, and with international attention focused on the elections, the timing finally seemed right. The public then delivered an "unexpected" defeat that was, in fact, a foregone conclusion once international events and domestic developments together assured the popular will would be honored.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Learning Democracy by Leslie E. Anderson Lawrence C. Dodd Copyright © 2005 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission.
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