Verbatim Mac

Compulsory Voting Neg2020 AdvNC – Trump LosesTrump loses – prefer the only model that’s been correct every year since 1984

Gordon 20 [Allison; 8/8/20; CNN reporter; “History professor who has accurately predicted every election since 1984 says Trump will lose,” https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/07/us/allan-lichtman-trump-biden-2020-trnd/index.html]

History professor Allan Lichtman is used to being right.

He has correctly predicted the winner of each presidential race since Ronald Reagan's reelection victory in 1984 using his "13 keys" system. (It's worth mentioning that in 2000, Lichtman predicted that Al Gore would win the election. Although Gore won the popular vote, he ultimately lost the presidency to George W. Bush after the Supreme Court ruled to stop the recount for Florida's electoral votes. Lichtman stands by validity of his prediction.)

Now, Lichtman and his "13 keys" are ready to call 2020.

In an interview with CNN, Lichtman was definitive in his answer: "The keys predict that Donald Trump will lose the White House this year."

Lichtman bases his prediction on a model of "13 keys" that can be answered as either true or false for any given election. The "13 keys" in his system include factors such as the economy, incumbency, social unrest and scandals, as well as the candidates' personal charisma.

"The secret is keeping your eye on the big picture of incumbent strength and performance. And don't pay any attention to the polls, the pundits, the day-to-day ups and downs of the campaign. And that's what the keys gauge. The big picture," Lichtman explained.

After 2016, Americans have been (understandingly) wary of presidential prediction models. But "dismissing Lichtman's findings would seem like sticking your head in the proverbial sand," CNN's Editor at Large Chris Cillizza said in his political audio briefing this week.

When asked if the key model could account for something as cataclysmic as the Covid-19 pandemic, Lichtman remained confident. "Look, retrospectively and prospectively, the keys go all the way back to 1860. They are what we call a robust system. So, I don't fiddle with them. They've lasted through enormous changes in our politics, in our economy, in our democracy. Don't fiddle with the keys," he explained.

Biden’s got it in the bag

Montanaro 20 [Domenico; 8/3; NPR's senior political editor/correspondent; “2020 Electoral Map Ratings: Trump Slides, Biden Advantage Expands Over 270 Votes,” https://www.npr.org/2020/08/03/897202359/2020-electoral-map-ratings-trump-slides-biden-advantage-expands-over-270-votes]

It's hard to believe that the hole President Trump dug for himself could get deeper, but it has.

A record and widening majority of Americans disapprove of the job he's doing when it comes to handling the coronavirus pandemic; he gets poor scores on race relations; he's seen a suburban erosion despite efforts to win over suburban voters with fear; and all that has led to a worsened outlook for Trump against Democrat Joe Biden in the presidential election.

As a result, in the past month and a half, the latest NPR analysis of the Electoral College has several states shifting in Biden's favor, and he now has a 297-170 advantage over Trump with exactly three months to go until Election Day.

His advantage is significant AND growing

FT 20 [Financial Times; 8/10/20; “Biden vs Trump: who is leading the 2020 US election polls?” https://ig.ft.com/us-election-2020/]

With less than three months to go before the US presidential election, former vice-president Joe Biden, the Democratic party’s presumptive nominee, is polling ahead of incumbent Republican president Donald Trump in key battleground states. In Florida, where Covid cases have surged in recent weeks, Mr Biden leads Mr Trump by 6 percentage points. Similarly, Mr Biden has a narrow lead in Arizona, a state only one Democratic presidential candidate has won in the past 70 years. In Texas, where the difference in poll numbers between the two men is less than 5 percentage points, a few recent polls have given Mr Biden a slight advantage, suggesting a close race in November in the quintessential red state.

National polls show Mr Biden at a significant advantage. The Democrat's edge over Mr Trump has grown in recent polls, with some giving him an almost double-digit lead over the president. White seniors in particular, a group that helped propel Mr Trump to victory in 2016, have shown signs of disapproval towards the president's handling of the pandemic.

NC – No I/LNon-voters have roughly identical partisan preferences to voters – it can’t swing the election

Greenblatt 16 [Alan; February 2016; Senior Staff Writer for Governing; “What Would Happen If America Made Voting Mandatory?” https://www.governing.com/topics/elections/gov-compulsory-voting-switzerland.html]

Most academic research, however, has found that mandatory voting does not move the average voter to the left, according to Jason Brennan, a professor at Georgetown University and co-author of Compulsory Voting: For and Against. “There’s a widespread belief among Democrats that compulsory voting would deliver more states to Democrats,” he says. “It turns out that’s not true. The people who vote and the people who don’t vote are roughly the same in terms of their partisan preferences.”

That doesn’t mean the population of actual voters perfectly reflects the nation as a whole. The biggest difference between voters and nonvoters is not partisan ideology but information, suggests Brennan. “The crop of people who are not voting are less informed than the people who are voting right now.”

That alone leads to conflicting opinions, even among members of the same party. Martin Gilens, a political scientist at Princeton University, says so-called “low-information members” of the Democratic Party hold views on issues such as gay rights, military force and free trade that are the opposite of Democrats who follow policy debates more closely.

So even if partisan outcomes wouldn’t change appreciably under a mandated voting system, the political system itself would change. Supporters of compulsory voting say that would force politicians to address broader concerns, rather than appealing to narrow bases. “Ideally, a democracy will take into account the interests and views of all citizens so that its decisions represent the will of the entire people,” concludes a recent Brookings Institution paper promoting mandatory voting. “If some regularly vote while others do not, elected officials are likely to give less weight to the interests and views of nonparticipants.”

Georgetown’s Brennan is dubious that appealing to the masses will be all good, though. “Compulsory voting probably reduces the quality of government by some small amount,” he says, “because you are reducing the knowledge of the median voter.”

Democracy AdvNC – TurnCompulsory voting generates invalid ballots which erase inequality gains and undermine democratic legitimacy

Kouba and Mysicka 19 [Karel and Stanislav; 3/5/19; *Department of Politics Philosophical Faculty, University of Hradec Králové, **Department of Politics, Philosophical Faculty, University of Hradec Králové; “Should and Does Compulsory Voting Reduce Inequality?” https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2158244018817141]

Conclusion

Compulsory voting is thought to increase electoral participation and thereby contribute to equalizing the political voice across income or education groups. However, a countervailing tendency of compulsory voting is to generate large proportions of invalid ballots. As invalid voting is strongly related to income inequality and low education, we conclude that whatever benefits in terms of equal voice are associated with higher turnout under compulsory voting, these are effectively erased by the high share of socioeconomically biased invalid votes that do not count for determining political representation. We presented evidence supportive of this conjecture from Ecuadorean 2009 elections where one quarter of all votes casted were invalid and one quarter of all registered voters abstained. In other words, the fact that turnout becomes less socioeconomically biased through compulsory voting does not automatically translate into less socioeconomically biased political representation (or political voice). This finding offers different lenses to the affirmation that while compulsory voting makes turnout more egalitarian, it does not make the candidate selection more equitable due its effects on invalid ballots (Cohen, 2018). Consequently, ballot spoilage generated by compulsory voting may have negative effects on the legitimacy of elected authorities, offsetting the contribution of higher turnout.

Our findings give further support to arguments that focus on the weakened link between vote choice and political preferences under compulsory voting relative to voluntary voting. This research does not question the reductive effect of compulsory voting on socioeconomic biases in turnout, but notes that voters induced by voting compulsion are less likely to vote in accordance with their wants and needs (Selb & Lachat, 2009). Not only are wealth disparities in the electorate bridged by compulsory voting, but also electorates become more equal with respect to their levels of infomation, political knowledge, or apathy as the least informed, least knowledgeable, and most apathetic are thrown into the electoral process by voting compulsion (Singh, 2015). This problem is manifested in a number of ways, and invalid voting is but one of them. The equalizing effect of compulsory voting diminishes voter stratification based on political knowledge or education, and induces voters to favor parties further away from their own ideological positions relative to voluntary voting systems (Dassonneville et al., 2017). Similarly, compulsory voting serves to increase the share of uninterested and less knowledgeable voters whose vote is less consistent with their own preferences (Selb & Lachat, 2009). It has been shown to disproportionately attract voters who are unlikely to cast well-reasoned ballots because they are generally more disinterested, unengaged, and view elections as pointless (Singh, 2016). Votes under compulsory voting are cast randomly, and voters are less attached to political parties and ideological convictions (Singh, 2016). Because invalid votes under compulsory voting are cast exactly by such—less engaged and less interested voters (Singh, 2017)—such invalid ballots should be considered as poor reflections of voter preferences.

This empirical evidence presented here supports some of the normative arguments against compulsory voting. In general, we claimed that presenting compulsory voting as justified (either in instrumental or intrinsic way) would clash with the deep conflict of worldviews among citizens in a democratic society. Because there are no a priori reasons to think that under the system of compulsory voting, citizens will generally identify more with the duty to vote, there is a looming danger, that making voting compulsory might lead to further alienation from democratic politics.

It doesn’t socialize broader civic values but loosens legitimacy constraints on the government by making the average voter less informed

Singh 16 [Shane P; Associate Professor at the University of Georgia’s Department of International Affairs; “Politically Unengaged, Distrusting, and Disaffected Individuals Drive the Link Between Compulsory Voting and Invalid Balloting,” http://www.shanepsingh.com/uploads/8/2/7/1/82715282/singh_compulsory_voting_and_invalid_balloting_forthcoming_psrm.pdf]

About ten years ago, Blais (2006, 113) noted that “we know nothing about the microfoundations of compulsory voting.” Today, still relatively little is known about how individual-level factors interact with compulsory rules to shape outcomes. In an effort to begin filling this knowledge gap, this study examines the influence of compulsory voting on blank and spoiled balloting across both individuals and countries.

I first find that, relative to voluntary voting, compulsory voting increases the incidence of blank and spoiled ballots, especially where sanctions for abstention are routinely enforced. I then demonstrate who is responsible for such an increase—compulsory voting’s positive relationship with the propensity to cast a blank or spoiled ballot is largely due to the behavior of individuals who are politically unaware and uninterested, individuals who are negatively oriented toward the democratic process, and, especially, individuals who are untrusting of democratic actors and institutions.

Those in favor of compulsory voting may hail these results as evidence that politically unsophisticated, untrusting, or disaffected individuals make use of their “out” where their presence at the ballot box is forced, and they thus need not contribute to the social choice when they lack the desire or skills to do so. For their part, opponents of mandatory voting may instead argue that the relatively high rate of blank and spoiled balloting among politically unaware, uninterested, untrusting, and disillusioned individuals where participation is obligatory is evidence that compulsory voting does not socialize such individuals into embracing civic values and seeking out political knowledge, a dynamic the institution’s proponents have championed as one of its beneficial effects for over a century (see Barthélemy 1912; Broomall 1893; Engelen 2007, 32; Lacroix 2007, 194; Lijphart 1997, 10; Nerincx 1901; See 2007, 597). Seen from another angle, these results suggest that, even where compulsory voting boosts participation, leaders may feel free to behave unscrupulously when they perceive that the electorate is unlikely to observe such behavior and punish it at the next election. In the words of Carlin and Love (2015, 57), where “those weakly invested in politics” do not cast meaningful ballots under compulsory voting, “the potential for moral hazard among elites” will increase.

The tradeoff with other engagement cancels out any democratic benefits but compulsion creates resentment that actively undermines legitimacy

Kouba and Mysicka 19 [Karel and Stanislav; 3/5/19; *Department of Politics Philosophical Faculty, University of Hradec Králové, **Department of Politics, Philosophical Faculty, University of Hradec Králové; “Should and Does Compulsory Voting Reduce Inequality?” https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2158244018817141]

There is also significant evidence for the second association that is crucial to our argument, namely, that compulsory voting also substantially increases the rate of invalid voting. This has been the unequivocal finding of cross-national comparative studies on invalid voting (Power & Garand, 2007; Reynolds & Steenbergen, 2006; Uggla, 2008), although the relationship appears to be strongly conditioned by voter efficacy with compulsory voting exercising the strongest effects, when the stakes of the electoral competition are diminished (Kouba & Lysek, 2016). Although the strong correlation between compulsory voting and high rates of invalid ballots is rarely disputed, there is no consensus over the nature and meaning of such invalid ballots. Invalid votes could still signify a meaningful response of politically engaged voters to a deficient political offer (Driscoll & Nelson, 2014). However, there is also substantial evidence from the study based on the cross-national survey data that invalid voting induced by compulsory voting laws is driven by a lack of information and interest, political distrust and negative attitudes toward democracy (Singh, 2017). In Latin America, invalid voting is often most frequent among those with less education and levels of political knowledge (Katz & Levin, 2016). At the same time, it increases turnout among those voters who are less engaged in politics, and who are at the same time more likely to cast an invalid ballot (Cohen, 2018). This is consistent with other problematic attitudinal effects of compulsory voting identified by recent research. Although compulsory voting (substantively or slightly) increases trust in political institutions, yet at the same time, it negatively affects forms of societal engagement other than turnout, suggesting that the participatory effects of mandatory voting cancel each other out (Lundell, 2012). Concomitant evidence from subjective reactions among young British voters suggests that the introduction of compulsory voting might be counterproductive and serves to reinforce existing feelings of resentment (Henn & Oldfield, 2016). Such reinforcing effects of compulsory voting on the negative orientations toward democracy and system legitimacy are amply documented in another comparative study (Singh, 2018). We, therefore, view invalid voting as a product of compulsory voting through which politically disinterested, less educated, less informed, and unengaged voters express the lack of interest in the political choice, or the elections themselves. Moreover, self-reported invalid voting—from which such inferences are drawn—underestimates the extent of invalid votes due to voting compulsion because invalid votes are also likely to arise from an unintentional voting error, which the voter cannot communicate in surveys (Hill & Young, 2007; Kouba & Lysek, 2016; McAllister & Makkai, 1993; Power & Garand, 2007; Reynolds & Steenbergen, 2006). Such votes—that appear in the aggregate-level figures of the overall voting results, but not in individual-level survey responses—in turn are likely to be handed out by the less educated (Hill & Young, 2007; McAllister & Makkai, 1993; Power & Garand, 2007; Reynolds & Steenbergen, 2006) and less politically informed citizens. This only aggravates the problem. Invalid ballots induced by compulsory voting systems not only do not decide representation, but also generally fail to represent specific political interests.

It structurally locks in a bloc of disgruntled voters – that makes polarization and future Trumps inevitable

Polimedio 18 [Chayenne; 11/6/18; fellow with the Political Reform program at New America, former contributor to Vox; “Is voting a civic right or a civic duty?” https://www.vox.com/polyarchy/2018/11/6/18068484/voting-civic-right-civic-duty]

Compulsory voting accomplishes the basic task it sets out to do: to get the highest percentage possible of eligible voters to leave their homes on Election Day. And yet compulsory voting isn’t the solution to low voter turnout.

The simplest case against compulsory voting is that it negates the premise that while citizens ought to have the right to vote, they should also be free to choose not to vote.

Voters, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, assess the perceived costs to voting vis-à-vis its perceived gains when deciding whether or not to cast a ballot. Those costs can include, but are not limited to, issue salience, the ease with which voters are able to register to vote and to cast a ballot, a country’s electoral system, the frequency of elections, and when in the week elections are held.

Other reasons why forcing individuals to cast a ballot isn’t the solution to better democracy include the fact that people make bad choices sometimes, not because they’re evil or stupid, but because they have preferences and biases and will use shortcuts instead of deeply pondering the benefits and trade-offs of any given policy proposal.

Compulsory voting may also lead to democratic inequalities, where the burden for not voting is highest on those who can bear it least. In Brazil, for example, those tend to be voters for whom interaction with the state is unavoidable. Anyone who’s likely to rely on transactions with the government in the form of benefits, pensions, severance pay, etc., ends up paying a higher penalty for not voting.

But most importantly, voter turnout shouldn’t be the sole measure of a successful democracy. A healthy democracy depends on the quality of the governance and the candidates, too. Higher turnout doesn’t guarantee higher quality candidates or more responsiveness. More isn’t necessarily better.

University of Sydney professor Simon Jackman has argued that compulsory voting “creates a steady guaranteed supply of disgruntled voters that cannot exit the system. … Those voters are typically alienated, distracted and feel as though the major parties are not speaking to them.” Alienated and distracted voters can be, in turn, more susceptible to demagoguery and protest platforms.

That Brazil and Turkey, the two largest countries in the world with compulsory voting, are not shining stories of liberal democracy at the moment is worth noting. For a recent example of what alienated voters look like, look no further than Brazil’s presidential election results, where 9.5 percent of the electorate cast blank or spoiled ballots largely as a way to protest a system and a race they wanted no part in.

Turkey’s voting system has been deemed the most unfair in the world because if parties don’t win at least 10 percent of the seats, they must forfeit all of their seats, which are then reallocated to the larger parties. So people are required to vote, but their votes may effectively not count.

In an extensive overview of the consequences of compulsory voting, researcher Gabriela Sainati Rangel writes that “Individuals living under compulsory voting rules are also more likely to report higher rates of party attachment” which, in the American two-party system, could lead to even more polarization and winning governments with weaker governing mandates.

Rangel also finds that while compulsory voting may lead parties to move away from mobilization, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it results in outreach that’s more inclusive. In fact, with compulsory voting, “parties are likely to shift their outreach strategy from mobilization to persuasion, by reaching out to voters that are less partisan and thus can be more easily persuaded.”

Finally, Rangel writes that “Taken together, the voter turnout question seems to be the only dimension of the effects of compulsory voting that has found clear answers through empirical research.”

Still, for those who see compulsory voting as the best way to fix turnout, low levels of enforcement seem to work just as well as high levels of enforcement, without the undesired effect of harming certain segments of the voting population.

NC – Alt CauseTrump’s kleptocracy massively thumps

Beachamp 17 [Vox, How Donald Trump’s kleptocracy is undermining American democracy, July 31, https://www.vox.com/world/2017/7/31/15959970/donald-trump-authoritarian-children-corruption]

Appointing family members to powerful jobs they’re not qualified to hold. Firing officials investigating scandals. Musing about prosecuting a defeated rival. Entangling his business empire with the presidency to such a degree that he’ll literally profit from his time in the White House.

The early months of the Trump presidency don’t look like what you normally see in a democracy. But they’re everyday occurrences in corrupt, undemocratic countries like Azerbaijan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or even Vladimir Putin’s Russia. And academics who study such countries increasingly worry that President Donald Trump is governing like the leader of the kind of nation Washington has long condemned — not like a president of the United States.

“His refusal to fully divest himself from his business, the linkages between finances and the levers of power — those are the classic symptoms of kleptocracy,” Seva Gunitsky, a University of Toronto scholar who studies post-Soviet states, says. “It’s probably the greatest long-term threat — maybe even short-term threat — to American institutions.”

To Gunitsky and other experts on authoritarian states, Trump’s behavior is setting off a lot of alarm bells. That’s not just because of clear examples of petty wrongdoing, like having his daughter Ivanka sit in for him at the G20 summit of world leaders. Rather, it’s because the thinking behind such moves is far more fundamental to the early months of his administration than it would first appear.

The academics say that Trump’s instincts — like those of strongmen such as Mobutu Sese Seko and Putin — is to see the state as a personal fiefdom and a vehicle for dispensing favors to family and political allies, rather than as something that needs to follow neutral rules. They point to his appointment of son-in-law Jared Kushner to a top-level White House post despite his lack of qualifications, reports of administration threats to punish CNN and the Washington Post financially for critical coverage, and the naked attempts by foreign diplomats to buy influence by staying at the Trump Hotel in Washington.

The issue raised by these scholars is not that the US under Trump is sliding toward true authoritarianism, where elections cease to be competitive, the media is muzzled, and opponents and journalists routinely disappear. It’s vital to stress all the ways Trump isn’t governing like an authoritarian: He hasn’t done anything to formally outlaw dissent or acquire dictatorial powers for the executive branch. There is no Trump plan to stop Americans from replacing him, if they so choose, in the 2020 election.

Instead, these experts worry that Trump is normalizing a set of practices that are typically seen in authoritarian countries — and, by doing so, threatening to slowly and steadily hollow out American democracy. His actions are not a series of individual stories of petty wrongdoing, but rather an overall pattern that threatens the rule of law itself.

“What’s striking in the US is that he gets away with stuff that would have been considered completely inconceivable five years ago,” Nicolas van de Walle, an expert on authoritarianism in Africa at Cornell University, says.

Americans don’t understand the risks posed by Trump’s elevation of family and crony capitalism because they do not have a model for it in modern US history. Only when one looks abroad — to countries where corruption and plunder are the norm rather than the exception — does the danger truly become clear.

Trump has structured the executive branch along authoritarian lines

Citizens of democratic countries tend to divide the political world into two big categories: democracies like the US or Canada and autocracies like Russia and Egypt. But there are lots of ways to run states where people don’t choose their own leaders. Saudi Arabia’s theocratic monarchy is as different from Singapore’s secular one-party state as it is from the United States.

For this reason, many scholars have tried to sort authoritarian regimes into more specific categories. Van de Walle and his co-author, Michigan State University’s Michael Bratton, have focused on what they call “neopatrimonial” regimes — a type of government that flowered in Africa after the fall of colonialism. Neopatrimonialism, they argue, is defined by the centrality of corruption to ordinary politics.

“The essence of neopatrimonialism is the award by public officials of personal favors, both within the state (notably public sector jobs) and in society (for instance, licenses, contracts, and projects),” they write in an influential 1994 article. “The chief executive maintains authority through personal patronage rather than through ideology or law.”

Neopatrimonial leaders rise or fall based on their ability to plunder their own country, to staff the government with loyal operatives, and to literally buy off groups that might otherwise mount a challenge to their rule. The end goal of all of this is to allow the dictator and his favored few to live as well and securely as possible. Relatives are raised to top positions in government both so they can have secure jobs and because, in a system so thoroughly corrupt, the only people the leader feels like he can truly trust is his family members and close friends.

Van de Walle sees real similarities between the neopatrimonial African regimes he studies — like Mobutu Sese Seko’s 32-year reign in what’s now the Democratic Republic of Congo, in which he spent about $400 million worth of state money building a personal palace that served champagne on conveyor belts — and Trump’s lack of interest in keeping government affairs and personal interests separate.

“There’s a [neopatrimonial] dimension to the current president, a kind of monarchical instinct,” Van de Walle tells me in an interview.

Perhaps the most nakedly neopatrimonial regimes in the world today are clustered together in Eurasia. Many former Soviet republics were expected to transition to democracy after communism’s fall in the 1990s — but have, instead, been taken over by a coterie of strongmen who see the country they rule as a combination of a piggybank and playground.

Uzbekistan’s longtime dictator, Islam Karimov, was actually elected in 1991 — but consolidated power and ran the Uzbek government as a fiefdom: his daughter Gulnara was reportedly able to extract $114 million in bribes from a single telecom company in exchange for granting them licenses to operate in the country.

When Karimov died in 2016, one of his cronies — Shavkat Mirziyoyev — took over the presidency. Mirziyoyev won a sham “reelection” vote in December with 88.6 percent of the vote.

Uzbekistan is by no means unique among post-Soviet states. Azerbaijan, an oil-producing country on the Caspian Sea, is another good example: Its current president, Ilham Aliyev, is the son of its last president, Heydar Aliyev. The Aliyevs run it very much like a family business.

“Azerbaijan is the clearest template you get,” Gunitsky says. “You have this guy Aliyev as the president; his wife is the vice president. You can’t get any more government-as-a-family-business than that.”

Like these neopatrimonial leaders, Trump has long seen fit to elevate family members to top positions. During his time in Atlantic City in the 1980s, for example, Trump hired his then-wife, Ivana, to run the Trump Castle casino even though her business experience was largely limited to working as a model. He hired his brother Robert to develop the Trump Taj Mahal, then the largest casino in the world, despite Robert’s complete lack of experience building casinos. It went bankrupt.

When a president applies the same approach to staffing political organizations, you get Ivanka Trump in the White House, Middle East envoy Jared Kushner, and top campaign adviser Donald Trump Jr. (all elevated to positions that exceed their experience or qualifications).

Presidents have elevated family members in the past: JFK famously appointed his brother Robert to be attorney general. But that move was controversial at the time, and the degree to which Trump relies on family members reminds American experts on Central Asia more of the countries they study than of their homeland.

“We shouldn’t overblow the comparison,” says Alexander Cooley, a professor at Barnard College in New York. “But I do think that the inclination Trump seems to show is to trust family members in matters in which they might not actually have expertise or advanced education.”

Trump’s crony capitalism is straight out of the authoritarian playbook

Trump, of course, can’t be as flamboyantly nepotistic as an actual dictator. The legal and political climate in the United States simply makes it impossible for Trump to loot the state coffers in the style of a Mobutu or replace Vice President Mike Pence with Vice President Melania Trump. He also isn’t killing dissidents or shuttering opposition newspapers as these leaders do — nor does he show the slightest interest in doing so.

The issue, instead, is the appearance of a particular type of mindset between Trump and these authoritarian leaders when it comes to the relationship between state and ruler. They both seem to have no problem with blurring the lines between personal and policy affairs, using the power and the prestige of their position for their own financial and political gain.

“All of this gets back to not having walls of separation between the family business or businesses and their role in government, ” Cooley says. “It’s a mode of governing.”

The consequences of this kind of politics can be quite severe.

Authoritarians can’t rely solely on family members to maintain control, much as they’d like to; there just aren’t enough of them. So many of these leaders use their control over the state to manufacture loyalty — disbursing funds in such a way to make it in the interests of as many powerful factions as possible to support the regime.

In modern Russia, Putin maintains his own power by privileging friendly oligarchs and security service officials, basically linking the interests of Russia’s elite with the survival of Putin’s government. The 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi had a budget of $50 billion; more than half of that went to paying off various different Putin allies, according to Russia scholar Karen Dawisha.

This sort of corruption goes hand in hand with the more intimate kind: looting state coffers for your own benefit and that of your friends and family. Mobutu’s family used the country’s state-owned industries and central bank as personal checking accounts, taking $71 million from the national bank for personal use in 1977 alone. The famous Panama Papers revealed that Putin and his close associates have more than $2 billion squirreled away in offshore accounts, much of which was taken from state coffers in the form of impossibly low-interest loans from state-owned banks.

The United States is very far from that level of systemic corruption. But Trump shares the same basic way of thinking about the US government’s relationship to his personal interests. He has no issue with the many ways in which his administration has already entangled state power and his own personal financial/political interests, and in fact seems to want to expand it.

“What is really striking is how strong these patrimonial instincts can be [in an American leader],” Van de Walle says.

The most obvious example is Trump’s refusal to seriously divest from his private interests. When Jimmy Carter won the presidency in 1976, he gave his family’s small peanut farm and warehouse to an independent trustee to avoid even the appearance of impropriety. The Trump Organization — a multibillion-dollar corporation whose profits are far from peanuts — is currently run by Trump’s adult sons, Donald Jr. and Eric.

This is the opposite of a blind trust: Trump cannot avoid talking to his children, making it impossible to believe he’s truly separated from the business. Moreover, Trump promised that his company wouldn’t make any new foreign deals in office, but the way he travels around the world and meets with foreign leaders makes it exceptionally easy for them to offer his organization a lucrative deal in exchange for favors in a private meeting (as it would be with any president whose family ran their business).

This blending of the personal and the political extends to the way he manages the state’s relationship with corporations.

To show that he was serious about keeping jobs in America, Trump offered the Carrier corporation $7 million in tax breaks in exchange for keeping a manufacturing plant in Indiana open rather than moving it Mexico. The deal was announced, with great public fanfare, in December. Since then, it has become clear that Carrier will move nearly half of the jobs to Mexico anyway. But since Trump already got his PR stunt, it seemed not to matter: Carrier kept its tax breaks.

When companies cross Trump, by contrast, they risk being punished financially. Time Warner, which owns CNN, is currently trying to work out a merger with AT&T. The New York Times’s Michael Grynbaum reports that the Trump administration is thinking about blocking the merger if CNN’s coverage continues to be critical.

“This is such a clear blending of political motives and economic institutions that is totally inappropriate in a rule-governed society,” Gunitsky says. “This is the kind of thing you see in broken states.”

Whether Trump follows through on his merger threat is an open question. But the fact that the White House would even consider punishing a media organization using the federal government’s regulatory powers testifies to the degree to which the state’s role in the economy is seen as a tool for securing the president’s personal interests.

In the long run, these experts warn, this kind of politically motivated crony capitalism is a serious threat to the health of American society.

When nobody stops leaders from doing these kinds of things, they start to become normal, routine. If Trump gets away with staffing the White House with his children, using tax breaks to reward corporations that do him a solid, and creating systemic conflicts of interests, then the incentives for how to act, for both politicians and large corporations, becomes badly distorted. Politicians feel free to act in a pettily corrupt fashion; corporations learn to succeed by flattering the president and getting handouts from the federal government as a result.

“These kinds of erosions of institutions happens in a subtle way,” Gunitsky says. “There’s no takeover of a TV station with guards. There’s no crackdown and curfew. It’s the steady, gradual erosion of the almost invisible lines of separation between institutions that are supposed to independent.”

The consequences are impossible to predict in any detail, because developed countries almost never see anything like this systemic level of personalistic behavior in their leaders. But they could be wide-ranging: When the president sees the powers of the state as something he can manipulate for his personal benefit, then the possibilities for abuse are practically limitless.

In late July, for example, Trump gave a speech at a Navy ceremony where he urged the assembled sailors to “call that congressman and call that senator” about health care and other Trump-backed legislation. It sounded a lot like the president using his power to order the military to gin up support for his political agenda — a no-no in any advanced democracy.

“Trump’s verbal command in Norfolk, Virginia, incites the assembled troops to discard centuries of U.S. military ethics and break long-standing military rules,” Phillip Carter, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, writes at Slate. “This is what leaders do in banana republics: Instruct the people with guns to join the political fray.”

The issue isn’t just that what we’re seeing is bad. It’s that things could get a whole lot worse.

It makes credible leadership wholly impossible

Maas 17 [has written about war, media, and national security for The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and The Washington Post. He reported on both civilians and combatants during the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is the author of Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War, an award-winning memoir about the conflict in Bosnia, and he wrote Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil. Peter was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2012. He has taught writing at Princeton and Columbia universities, and had fellowships at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard and the American Academy in Berlin. He is on the advisory boards of the Solutions Journalism Network, and the Program for Narrative and Documentary Practice at Tufts University, HOW DONALD TRUMP COULD DESTROY THE GLOBAL FIGHT AGAINST KLEPTOCRACY, https://theintercept.com/2017/06/30/trump-obiang-corruption-kleptocracy-equatorial-guinea-teodorin/]

AN INCREDIBLE EVENT is taking place in Paris. The playboy son of a wealthy dictator is on trial for stealing more than $100 million from his oil-rich and poverty-plagued homeland.

Authorities in Europe have already seized a glitzy assortment of the allegedly ill-gotten possessions of Teodorin Obiang, whose father is nearing four decades of dictatorial rule in Equatorial Guinea. Gone is Obiang’s 250-foot yacht with a helipad and jacuzzi, as well as nine of his luxury cars (two Bugattis, two Bentleys, a Ferrari, Rolls Royce, Maserati, Porsche Carrerra, and Mercedes Maybach), 300 bottles of Chateau Petrus (at more than $2,500 a bottle, one of the world’s most expensive wines), an art collection that includes works by Degas and Rodin, and his 101-room mansion on Avenue Foch in Paris.

Two dynamics make this trial remarkable. The first is that, while it is not unusual for ousted kleptocrats and their children to face trial for corruption, it is nearly unprecedented for a ruling family to be hauled before a court. Teodorin Obiang currently bears the title of vice president of Equatorial Guinea, and his father, Teodoro, is the unloved president who, in the six times he has organized facsimiles of elections since taking power in a 1979 coup, never received less than 93 percent of the votes. The trial came about due to an unusual facet of French law: Civic groups can file criminal complaints against foreign officials. Prosecutors were all but forced to take the case.

Another layer of remarkableness — this one the opposite of encouraging — is that we might not see another spectacle of this sort for a long time. That’s because the Trump family, which has shown a limited regard for separating politics from business, has fully installed itself and its ethics in the White House. The consequences reach beyond American shores. A foundation for the trial in France was laid many years ago in the United States by activist organizations, congressional investigators, and, later on, federal law enforcement. In 2011 Barack Obama’s Department of Justice filed its own civil charges against Teodorin Obiang under its Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative, and Obiang settled that case by forfeiting his $30 million Malibu mansion, a Ferrari, and several items of Michael Jackson memorabilia.

But what are the odds that President Donald Trump and his family will criticize, let alone prosecute, a style of rule they emulate? What standing does the United States have to argue against nepotism and kleptocracy when its own government has the aroma of both?

Last week, the pre-eminent anti-corruption group Global Witness issued a remarkably blunt statement that zeroed in on the Trump problem. “The importance of continuing this fight against kleptocracy around the world cannot be overstated,” said Zorka Milin, a senior legal adviser to Global Witness. She went on:

America has long played a leading role in this global fight, but the future of that leadership is now coming into question, as the Trump administration disengages from a number of important international initiatives and works with Congress to dismantle critical transparency and public interest regulations at an unprecedented pace. Moreover, the moral authority of the U.S. to lead this fight is also in question, as President Trump continues to be plagued by allegations of violating an anti-corruption provision of the U.S. Constitution through his business dealings with foreign governments.

NC – AT: DPTReject democratic peace – 52 years of analysis and newest models.

Grabmeier ’15 (Jeff; 9/3/15; Senior Director of Research and Innovation at Ohio State University, citing a 52-year study; Phys.org, “'Democratic peace' may not prevent international conflict,” https://phys.org/news/2015-09-democratic-peace-international-conflict.html)

Using a new technique to analyze 52 years of international conflict, researchers suggest that there may be no such thing as a "democratic peace." In addition, a model developed with this new technique was found to predict international conflict five and even ten years in the future better than any existing model. Democratic peace is the widely held theory that democracies are less likely to go to war against each other than countries with other types of government. In the new study, researchers found that economic trade relationships and participation in international governmental organizations play a strong role in keeping the peace among countries. But democracy? Not so much. "That's a startling finding because the value of joint democracy in preventing war is what we thought was the closest thing to a law in international politics," said Skyler Cranmer, lead author of the study and The Carter Phillips and Sue Henry Associate Professor of Political Science at The Ohio State University. "There's been empirical research supporting this theory for the past 50 years. Even U.S. presidents have touted the value of a democratic peace, but it doesn't seem to hold up, at least the way we looked at it." The study appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Cranmer's co-authors are Elizabeth Menninga, assistant professor of political science at the University of Iowa and recent Ph.D. graduate in political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and Peter Mucha, professor of mathematics in the College of Arts and Sciences at UNC-Chapel Hill. Along with casting doubt on democratic peace theory, the study also developed a new way to predict levels of international conflict that is more accurate than any previous model. The researchers used a new technique to examine all violent conflicts between countries during the period of 1948 to 2000. The result was a model of international conflict that was 47 percent better than the standard model at predicting the level of worldwide conflict five and even 10 years into the future. "The Department of Defense needs to know at least that far in advance what the world situation is going to be like, because it can't react in a year to changes in levels of conflict due to bureaucratic inertia and its longer funding cycle," Cranmer said. "Being able to have a sense of the global climate in five or 10 years would be extremely helpful from a policy and planning perspective." The researchers started the study with a famous idea posed by the philosopher Immanuel Kant back in 1795: that the world could enjoy a "perpetual peace" if countries would become more interconnected in three ways. The modern interpretation of those three ways is: Through the spread of democratic states, more economic interdependence through trade, and more joint membership in international governmental organizations, or IGOs. (Modern examples range from regional agricultural organizations to the European Union and NATO.) Many studies have looked at how these three elements, either together or separately, affect conflict between countries. But even when they were considered together, the impact of the three individual factors were considered additively. What makes this study unique is that the researchers were the first to use a new statistical measure developed by Mucha - called multislice community detection—to analyze all three of these components collectively. They were able to examine, for the first time, how each component was related to each other. For example, how membership in IGOs affected trade agreements between counties, and vice versa. "When we looked at these networks holistically, we found communities of countries that are similar not only in terms of their IGO memberships, or trade agreements, or in their democratic governments, but in terms of all these three elements together," Cranmer said. The separation between such communities in the world is what the researchers called "Kantian Fractionalization." "You might think of it as the number of cliques the world is split up into and how easy it is to isolate those cliques from one another," Cranmer said. But the deeper the separation between communities or cliques there are in the world at one time, the more dangerous the world becomes. By measuring these communities in the world at one specific time, the researchers could predict with better accuracy than ever before how many violent conflicts would occur in one, 5 or 10 years in the future. This study had a broad definition of conflict: any military skirmish where one country deliberately kills a member of another country. Many of the conflicts in this study were relatively small, but it also includes major wars. Predicting one year into the future, this new model was 13 percent better than the standard model at predicting levels of worldwide conflict. But it was 47 percent better at predicting conflict 5 and 10 years into the future. "We measured how fragile these networks are to breaking up into communities," Mucha said. "Remarkably, that fragility in a mathematical sense has a clear political consequence in terms of increased conflict." The linear relationship between higher levels of Kantian fractionalization and more future conflict was so strong that Cranmer couldn't believe it at first. "I threw up my hands in frustration when I first saw the results. I thought we surely must have made a mistake because you almost never see the kind of clean, linear relationship that we found outside of textbooks," Cranmer said. "But we confirmed that there is this strong relationship."

Robust empirical data.

Rosato ’12 (Sebastian; September 30, 2012; Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago, Assistant Professor of Politica Science at the University of Notre Dame; Publication, The Handbook on the Political Economy of War by Christopher J. Coyne, Rachel L. Mathers, Chapter 15, “On the democratic peace,” p. 287-290)

Democratic wars There is considerable evidence that the absence of war claim is incorrect. As Christopher Layne (2001, p. 801) notes, 'The most damning indictment of democratic peace theory, is that it happens not to be true: democratic states have gone to war with one another." For example, categorizing a state as democratic if it achieves a democracy score of six or more in the Polity dataset on regime type - as several analysts do - yields three inter-democratic wars: the American Civil War, the Spanish American War and the Boer War. This is something defenders of the theory readily admit - adopting relatively inclusive definitions of democracy, they themselves generate anywhere between a dozen and three dozen cases of inter-democratic war. In order to exclude these anomalies and thereby preserve the absence of war claim, the theory's defenders restrict their definitions of democracy. In the most compelling analysis to date, Ray (1993, pp. 256-9, 269) argues that no two democracies have gone to war with one another as long as a democracy is defined as follows: the members of the executive and legislative branches arc determined in fair and competitive elections, which is to say that at least two independent parties contest the election, half of the adult population is eligible to vole and the possibility that the governing party can lose has been established by historical precedent. Similarly, Doyle (1983a, pp. 216-17) rescues the claim by arguing that states" domestic and foreign policies must both be subject to the control of the citizenry if they are to be considered liberal. Russett, meanwhile, argues that his no war claim rests on defining democracy as a stale wilh a voting franchise for a substantial fraction of the population, a government brought to power in elections involving two or more legally recognized parties, a popularly elected executive or one responsible to an elected legislature, requirements for civil liberties including free speech and demonstrated longevity of at least three years (Russett 1993, pp. 14-16). Despite imposing these definitional restrictions, proponents of the democratic peace cannot exclude up to five major wars, a figure which, if confirmed, would invalidate the democratic peace by their own admission (Ray 1995, p. 27). The first is the War of 1812 between Britain and the United States. Ray argues that it does not contradict the claim because Britain does not meet bis suffrage requirement. Yet this does not make Britain any less democratic than the United States at the time where less than half the adult population was eligible to vote. In fact, as Laync (2001, p. 801) notes, "the United States was not appreciably more democratic than un re formed Britain." This poses a problem for the democratic peace; if the United States was a democracy, and Ray believes it was, then Britain was also a democracy and the War of 1812 was an inter-democratic war. The second case is the American Civil War. Democratic peace theorists believe the United States was a democracy in 1861, but exclude the case on the grounds that it was a civil rather than interstate war (Russett 1993, pp. 16-17). However, a plausible argument can be made that the United Stales was not a state but a union of states, and that this was therefore a war between states rather than within one. Note, for example, that the term "United States" was plural rather than singular at the time and the conflict was known as the "War Between the States."7 This being the case, the Civil War also contradicts the claim.8 The Spanish-American and Boer wars constitute two further exceptions to the rule. Ray excludes the former because half of the members of Spain's upper house held their positions through hereditary succession or royal appointment. Yet this made Spain little different to Britain, which he classifies as a democracy at the time, thereby leading to the conclusion that the Spanish-American War was a war between democracies. Similarly, it is hard to accept his claim that the Orange Free State was not a democracy during the Boer War because black Africans were not allowed to vote when he is content to classify the United States as a democracy in the second half of the nineteenth century (Ray 1993. pp. 265, 267; Layne 2001. p. 802). In short, defenders of the democratic peace can only rescue their core claim through the selective application of highly restrictive criteria. Perhaps the most important exception is World War I, which, by virtue of the fact that Germany fought against Britain, France, Italy, Belgium and the United States, would count as five instances of war between liberal states in most analyses of the democratic peace.9 As Ido Oren (1995, pp. 178-9) has shown. Germany was widely considered lo be a liberal state prior to World War I: "Germany was a member of a select group of the most politically advanced countries, far more advanced than some of the nations that arc currently coded as having been "liberal' during that period." In fact, Germany was consistently placed toward the top of that group, "either as second only to the United States ... or as positioned below England and above France." Moreover, Doyle’s assertion that the case ought to be excluded because Germany was liberal domestically, but not in foreign affairs, does not stand up to scrutiny. As Layne (1994, p. 42) points out. foreign policy was "insulated from parliamentary control" in both France and Britain, two purportedly liberal states (see also Mcarshcimcr 1990, p. 51, fn. 77; Layne 2001, pp. 803 807). Thus it is difficult to classify Germany as non-liberal and World War I constitutes an imporiant exception to Ihe finding. Small numbers Even if restrictive definitions of democracy enable democratic peace theorists to uphold their claim, they render it unsurprising by reducing the number of democracies in any analysis. As several scholars have noted, there were only a dozen or so democracies in the world prior to World War I, and even fewer in a position to fight one another. Therefore, since war is a rare event for any pair of states, the fact that democracies did not fight one another should occasion little surprise (Mearsheimer 1990, p. 50; Cohen 1994, pp. 214, 216; Layne 1994, p. 39; Henderson 1999, p. 212).10 It should be a source of even less surprise as the number of democracies and the potential for conflict among them falls, something that is bound to happen as the democratic bar rises. Ray*s suffrage criterion, for example, eliminates two great powers - Britain and the United States - from the democratic ranks before World War I. thereby making the absence of war between democracies eminently predictable." A simple numerical example should serve to illustrate the point. Using a Polity score of six or more to designate a state as a democracy yields 716 purely democratic dyads out of a total 23240 politically relevant dyads between 1816 and 1913. Assuming that wars arc distributed according to the proportion of democratic dyads in the population and knowing that there were 86 dyads at war during this period, we should expect to observe three democratic-democratic wars between the Congress of Vienna and World War I. If we actually observed no wars between democracies, the democratic peace phenomenon might be worth investigating further even though the difference between three and zero wars is barely statistically significant." Increasing the score required for a state to be coded as a democracy to eight - a score that would make Britain democratic from 1901 onwards only and eliminate states like Spain and the Orange Free State from the ranks of the democracies - makes a dramatic difference. The number of democratic dyads falls to 171. and the expected number of wars is now between zero and one. Now the absence of war finding is to be expected. In short, by adopting restrictive definitions of democracy, proponents of the democratic peace render their central claim wholly unexceptional. In sum, proponents of the democratic peace have unsuccessfully attempted to tread a fine line in order to substantiate their claim that democracies have rarely if ever waged war against one another. On the one hand, they admit that inter-democratic war is not an unusual phenomenon if they adopt relatively inclusive definitions of democracy. On the other hand, in their attempts to restrict the definition of democracy and thereby save the finding they inadvertently make the absence of war between democracies trivial.

It’s methodologically and empirically bankrupt — democracies aren’t inherently peaceful.

Layne 7 — Christopher Layne, University Distinguished Professor, Robert M. Gates Chair in National Security, and Professor of International Affairs at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, Research Fellow with the Center on Peace and Liberty at The Independent Institute, holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California-Berkeley, 2007 (“Liberal Ideology and U.S. Grand Strategy,” The Peace of Illusions: American Grand Strategy from 1940 to the Present, Published by Cornell University Press, ISBN 0801474116, p. 121-122)

As a theory of international politics, the democratic peace theory carries little weight.20 It rests on dubious grounds methodologically.21 More importantly, it is not valid empirically. Democratic states have gone to war with other democracies, and in crises democracies are just as prone to making military threats against other democracies as they are against nondemocracies.22 However, democratic peace theory has a lot of clout in policymaking because it plays to the Wilsonian predispositions of U.S. strategists and provides the United States a handy pretext for intervening in the internal affairs of regimes it considers troublemakers. Thus, far from being a theory of peace, democratic peace theory causes the United States to act like a "crusader state."23 America's crusader mentality springs directly from liberalism's intolerance of competing ideologies and the concomitant belief that—merely by existing—nondemocratic states threaten America's security and the safety of liberalism at home. According to Wilsonian precepts, the best way to deal [end page 121] with such states is to use American power to bring about regime change.24 The belief that the United States can only be safe in a world of liberal democracies creates real, and often otherwise avoidable, friction between the United States and nondemocratic states.

Other factors (like trade, deterrence, and good relations) outweigh.

Rosato ’11 – associate professor of Political science at the University of Notre Dame (Sebastian | Edward Elgar Publishing, “ The Handbook on the Political Economy of War”| The Handbook on the Political Economy of War| http://lennep.eu/library/download/asin=0857934015&type=full| DOA: 7/7/17| KG)

Small numbers Even if restrictive definitions of democracy enable democratic peace theorists to uphold their claim, they render it unsurprising by reducing the number of democracies in any analysis. As several scholars have noted, there were only a dozen or so democracies in the world prior to World War I, and even fewer in a position to fi ght one another. Therefore, since war is a rare event for any pair of states, the fact that democracies did not fi ght one another should occasion little surprise (Mearsheimer 1990, p. 50; Cohen 1994, pp. 214, 216; Layne 1994, p. 39; Henderson 1999, p. 212).10 It should be a source of even less surprise as the number of democracies and the potential for confl ict among them falls, something that is bound to happen as the democratic bar rises. Ray’s suff rage criterion, for example, eliminates two great powers – Britain and the United States – from the democratic ranks before World War I, thereby making the absence of war between democracies eminently predictable.11 A simple numerical example should serve to illustrate the point. Using a Polity score of six or more to designate a state as a democracy yields 716 purely democratic dyads out of a total 23 240 politically relevant dyads between 1816 and 1913. Assuming that wars are distributed according to the proportion of democratic dyads in the population and knowing that there were 86 dyads at war during this period, we should expect to observe three democratic–democratic wars between the Congress of Vienna and World War I.12 If we actually observed no wars between democracies, the democratic peace phenomenon might be worth investigating further even though the diff erence between three and zero wars is barely statistically signifi cant.13 Increasing the score required for a state to be coded as a democracy to eight – a score that would make Britain democratic from 1901 onwards only and eliminate states like Spain and the Orange Free State from the ranks of the democracies – makes a dramatic diff erence. The number of democratic dyads falls to 171, and the expected number of wars is now between zero and one. Now the absence of war finding is M2471 - COYNE PRINT.indd 289 2471 - COYNE PRINT.indd 289 14/01/2011 15:22 4/01/2011 15:22 290 The handbook on the political economy of war to be expected. In short, by adopting restrictive defi nitions of democracy, proponents of the democratic peace render their central claim wholly unexceptional. In sum, proponents of the democratic peace have unsuccessfully attempted to tread a fine line in order to substantiate their claim that democracies have rarely if ever waged war against one another. On the one hand, they admit that inter- democratic war is not an unusual phenomenon if they adopt relatively inclusive defi nitions of democracy. On the other hand, in their attempts to restrict the defi nition of democracy and thereby save the finding they inadvertently make the absence of war between democracies trivial. 15.3.2 Militarized Disputes. There are at least two reasons to doubt the claim that pairs of democracies are less prone to confl ict than other pairs of states. First, despite their assertions, it is not clear that democratic peace theorists have established the existence of a powerful association between joint democracy and peace. Second, there is good evidence that factors other than democracy – many of them consistent with realist expectations – account for the peace among democratic states.14 Significance Democratic peace theorists have yet to provide clearcut evidence that there is a signifi cant relationship between their independent and dependent variables, joint democracy and peace. It is now clear, for example, that Maoz and Russett’s analysis of the Cold War period, which claims to establish the existence of a joint, separate peace, does not in fact do so. In a reassessment of that analysis, which follows the original as closely as possible save for the addition of a control for economic interdependence, Oneal et al. (1996) find that a continuous measure of democracy is not significantly correlated with peace. Moreover, a supplementary analysis of contiguous dyads – those that experience most of the confl icts – also finds no signifi - cant relationship between a continuous measure of joint democracy and peace whether a control for economic interdependence is included or not. This finding is particularly damaging because democratic peace theorists argue that “most theoretical explanations of the separate peace imply a continuous eff ect: the more democratic a pair of states, the less likely they are to become involved in confl ict” (Oneal and Ray 1997, p. 752). Oneal and Ray (1997, pp. 756–7) conclude that the original Maoz and Russett fi nding does not survive reanalysis because it is based on a joint democracy variable that, although widely used, is poorly calculated and M2471 - COYNE PRINT.indd 290 2471 - COYNE PRINT.indd 290 14/01/2011 15:22 4/01/2011 15:22 On the democratic peace 291 constructed, and they therefore propose a new democracy measure that they claim does achieve statistical significance. Their new measure of joint democracy uses the democracy score of the less democratic state in a dyad on the assumption that conflict is a function of the regime type of the less constrained of two interacting states. This “weak link” specification appears to provide powerful support for the democratic peace finding: “As the less democratic state becomes more democratic, the likelihood of confl ict declines. This is clear evidence of the pacific benefits of democracy.” The new variable provides “corroboration of the democratic peace” (Oneal and Ray 1997, pp. 764–5). Oneal and Russett concur with this conclusion in a separate analysis that also uses the weak link assumption. An increase in democracy in the state that is “freer to resort to violence, reduces the likelihood of dyadic confl ict” (Oneal and Russett 1997, p. 279). Although the weak link measure is widely accepted as the gold standard in studies of the relationship between democracy and a variety of international outcomes, it does not provide evidence that joint democracy is signifi cantly related to peace. Even as they developed it, Oneal and Ray admitted that the weak link was not a pure measure of joint democracy. What it really revealed was that the probability of confl ict was “a function of the average level of democracy in a dyad . . . [and] also the political distance separating the states along the democracy–autocracy continuum” (1997, p. 768, emphasis added). The problem, of course, is that the logics advanced to explain the democratic peace refer to the eff ects of democracy on state behavior; none refer to the eff ects of political similarity. Thus fi ndings generated using the weak link specifi cation – which is to say all the major assessments of the democratic peace – may not actually support the central democratic peace claim that it is something about the norms and institutions of democracies that enables them to remain at peace. This is precisely the conclusion that Errol Henderson reaches in his compelling assessment of Oneal and Russett’s work. His analysis replicates theirs precisely with two minor modifi cations: he includes only the fi rst year of any dispute because democratic peace theory is about the incidence of disputes, not their duration, and he introduces a political similarity variable in order to disentangle the eff ects of joint democracy and political distance on confl ict. His central result is striking: democracy “is not signifi cantly associated with the probability of dispute onset.” “What is apparent from the results,” he concludes, “is that in the light of quite reasonable, modest, and straightforward modifi cations of Oneal and Russett’s . . . research design, there is no statistically signifi cant relationship between joint democracy and a decreased likelihood of militarized interstate confl ict” (Henderson 2002, pp. 37–9). Mark Souva (2004) reaches essentially the same conclusion in an analysis of the relationship M2471 - COYNE PRINT.indd 291 2471 - COYNE PRINT.indd 291 14/01/2011 15:22 4/01/2011 15:22 292 The handbook on the political economy of war between domestic institutions and interstate confl ict using the weak link specifi cation. In a model that includes variables for political and economic institutional similarity, both of which are signifi cantly associated with peace, there is no signifi cant relationship between joint democracy and the absence of confl ict.

It’s correlation, not causation.

Pazienza ’14 (Toni Ann Pazienza University of South Florida, “Challenging the Democratic Peace Theory - The Role of US-China Relationship” March 2014 . Graduate Theses and Dissertations. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/5098) GG

Despite these many data sets, many realists have declared the democratic peace a fantasy. Permanent peace between mutually recognized liberal democracies, they argue, is not possible. Liberal states, like all others, must base foreign policy on the imperatives of power politics. Some realists argue that there is no theoretically compelling causal mechanism that could explain democratic peace. If neither democratic structures nor norms alone can explain the democratic peace, then there is no democratic peace (Layne 11). If there was a democratic peace, then liberal states would not make threats against each other. Christopher Layne, for instance, argues that in the case of the Union and the Confederacy, the characteristics at the heart of the democratic peace theory- remain suspect. If a democracy is tightly knit politically, economically and culturally, as the United States was in 1861, and could still split into two waning successor states, we should have little confidence that democracy will prevent great power conflicts in international polities (41). Nonetheless, realism seeks to explain power politics. It is an approach that is centered upon four propositions: anarchic international system, sovereignty, states are ration and the most important actors. States purse their own self interest and groups strive to attain as many resources as possible with a primary concern of survival. While there are no universal principles with which all states may guide their actions, a state must instead always be aware of the actions of the states around it and must use a pragmatic approach to resolve problems as they arise. As Machiavelli put it in Discourses on Livy “… it is necessary for anyone who organizes a republic and establishes laws in it to take for granted that all men are evil and that they will always act according to the wickedness of their nature whenever they have the opportunity….” (28). Moreover, Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651), provides three very simple assumptions: men are equal, they interact in anarchy and the are motivated by competition, diffidence and glory (88). Hobbes’s emphasis on anarchy, or what he called “a war of all against all”, only focused on the domestic level. The international context would be developed by Edward Carr in his book, The Twenty Years’ Crisis (1939), which addressed the dichotomies of realism and utopianism (idealism). Carr, in short, felt strongly that the problems of war could be avoided if states exercised the proper restrain or responded to the relative constrains of the international system. In Steve Chan’s research, constraints play an important role in assessing when one will or not attack another. Chan questions Rummel in his choice of conflicts with battles that had to have battle deaths exceeding 1,000. Here he defines a conflict with the appropriate measure being by the total amount of casualty and property destruction, not just by the number of soldiers killed (624). Chan further questions the exclusion of imperialist and colonial wars (625). He also argues that a foreign attack will move the officials of a free country to a state of war. The attack can present a unifying cause that change, at least initially, the normally fragmented and contending nature of politics. Also, it would be expected that an attack against an ally of a democracy would have the same effect (Dec. 1984:637). Further, Layne, asks whether the democratic peace theory or realism is a better predictor of international outcomes” (157). In the end he concludes that it is realist factors that reduce or avoid war (159). He, like Chan, also disagrees with Rummel’s sampling set of wars in that “…several important cases of wars between democratic states are not counted for reasons that are not very persuasive” and this coincides with Chan’s research (38). He argues that the case of the Union and the Confederacy, the characteristics at the heart of the democratic peace theory failed conspicuously. If a democracy, such as the United States in 1861, could split into two warring successor states, we would have little confidence, he asserts, that democracy will prevent great power conflicts in international politics (Layne, 41). In supporting this point, Errol Henderson (1999) in “Neoidealism and the Democratic Peace”, argues that it is his neoidealists perception that it is “… a combination of factors, including bi-polarity, nuclear deterrence, alliance aggregation, and trade links…” which allowed for the formation of an international security regime (204). Henderson maintains that it is this formation, and not joint democracy, that allowed for post war joint democracy. Neoidealists argue that the actions between states with problems of market failure leads to the construction of international regimes to facilitate agreements, institutionalize rules, and provide norms for interstate reaction in a specific issue area (211). Henderson’s core tenet of neoidealism is that norms emerge from international regimes that are external to states and not beholden to political regime type. While this notion of neoidealism suggests, is that although democracies rarely fight each other they are more frequently allied in war-more than four times as frequently as the average pair of democracies, according to Nils Peters Gleditsch and Havard Hegre (1997). For example, many wars have been initiated by democracies engaged in colonial conquest. In the post-World War II period there appear to have been many more military interventions abroad conducted by democratic (Western) states than by the Soviet Union and its allies. Some interventions appear to have been justified with reference to stopping domestic violence or promoting democracy, but others are more commonly interpreted as power politics. Zeev Maoz is clear in his statement that in the real world peace exists. As he states, “Overall, there is little to support the proposition that democracies’ international relations are especially peaceful, but only that their relations with each other are relatively very peaceful” (78). This conclusion is also supported by Sebastian Rosato, who in his work The Flawed Logic of Democratic Peace Theory finds that the logics underpinning the democratic peace theory are flawed. He claims that peace is not caused by the democratic nature of states. But, causal logic or democratic norms (accountability and public constraint) combined with trust and respect is what stops conflict between democratic states, which falls in line with Russett and Oneal’s position on norms and culture. Democratic leaders will use the “norm” of diplomacy and peaceful conflict negotiation, but only if they trust and respect the other state because the other state, whether democratic or not, will respond more peacefully. It is Rosato’s position that the causal logics that underpin democratic peace theory cannot explain why democracies remain at peace with one another because the mechanisms that make up these logics do not operate as stipulated (593). In the case of normative logic, liberal democracies do not reliably externalize their domestic norms of conflict resolution and do not treat one another with trust and respect when their interests clash. With institutional logic, democracies are not especially accountable to peaceful loving publics or pacific interest groups. Democracies are not slow to mobilize or incapable of surprise attacks, and open political competition does not guarantee that a democracy will reveal information about is levels of “resolve”. Democratic peace theorists, then, fail to take stock of the underlying forces conflict that can undermine the stability of democratic norms. Samuel Huntington, in his book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996) claims “clashes of civilizations are the greatest threat to world peace” (321). He theorizes that the clash between civilizations will dominate global politics and describes the geo-political shift in conflict and international relations in the post-Cold War era. In this New Order, the sovereign countries of the world from East and West are assembling into regional blocs based on shared cultures and values. According to Huntington, the next major cause of conflict will not be entwined with either any particular ideology (i.e. capitalism or communism) but from differences and competitions between cultures of civilizations. Summarizing: The realist criticism of the normative and structural models of the democratic peace is two-fold: First, it questions the validity of the normative and structural explanations. Second, it argues that the factors that prevent wars between states in general, including wars between democracies, are realist in nature, particularly with respect to power balances and interests.

Incentives CPNC – CPThe United States federal government ought implement automatic voter registration, Election Day registration, and ranked choice voting.

It’s more effective at driving turnout than punitive measures – the aff eventually causes alienation

Polimedio 18 [Chayenne; 11/6/18; fellow with the Political Reform program at New America, former contributor to Vox; “Is voting a civic right or a civic duty?” https://www.vox.com/polyarchy/2018/11/6/18068484/voting-civic-right-civic-duty]

There are better ways to get people to vote than fining them for not voting

The solution to low turnout is to create advantages to voting that surpass any disadvantages of doing so, without punishing voters. Reforms such as Election Day registration and automatic voter registration are proven to have a positive effect on turnout and could be a start.

Other proposals, like proportional representation and ranked choice voting, can elevate voters’ perception of political efficacy. As my colleague Lee Drutman has pointed out, “because more parties are competing for voters; because voters are more likely to feel like their voters matter; and because voters are more likely to have the chance to vote for a candidate they are excited about, proportional representation systems tend to have higher voter turnout — without the force of a compulsory voting system.”

Rob Richie of FairVote writes that ranked-choice-voting in U.S. localities has already led to higher turnout, since it allows voters to choose their number one candidate, while also allowing them not to “waste their vote” by choosing a secondary preference for someone from among the more viable candidates.

Compulsory voting isn’t the surefire way of fixing the problem of turnout in the U.S. that many deem it to be. Its proponents should take into account the indirect effects that this reform would have on electoral politics, individuals’ sense of liberty, and their overall sense that government works for them and not the other way around.

There are other reforms that could also lead to more demographically and ideologically diverse pools of candidates, and a representative and inclusive government that doesn’t involve forcing people to cast a ballot.

Liberty NCNC – ContentionI contend that compulsory voting violates an individual’s right not to participate in the political system

Abstention is a legitimate form of political expression that must be respected in a democracy.

Hill 02 [LISA HILL. University of Adelaide. “Compulsory Voting: Residual Problems and Potential Solutions.” Australian Journal of Political Science, Vol. 37, No. 3, pp. 437–455. 2002. Carfax Publishing, Taylor and Francis Group] AJ

First, one of my key arguments for compulsory voting rests on its capacity to keep political apathy at bay. The general trend in democratic systems worldwide over the last three decades has been one of demobilisation politically as well as socially and civically.23 Voting participation has decreased steadily in non-compul- sory systems. Compulsion provides a stable buffer against a degenerative pattern that affects some social groups more acutely than others. It is a reliable way of preventing politically marginal or ‘politically shy’ populations from losing contact with civic life.24 But people with strong conscientious objections are not apathetic in this way, and do not appear to be in any real danger of dropping off the political map. Neither are conscientious objectors anti-political; in fact they demonstrate a deeper than usual commitment to politics by publicly offering political reasons for their abstention upon which they are more than willing to act. In a sense, then, their objections and their preparedness to defend them are a form of hyper-politics, and to dismiss their concerns is to miss the whole point of democracy. But I should like to make clear here that I am not so much interested in the speci c content of any of these arguments (even those with which I happen to agree) as in the types of arguments that the would-be abstainers are making; that is to say, in whether or not the argument is politically principled in character. For example, the argument that compulsion violates individual autonomy might be an acceptable reason for being excused not because it is true, but because it potentially quali es as a political objection.25

Open avenues of dissent are necessary to respect the freedoms of citizens.

Lawrence B. Solum [Professor of Law and William M. Rains Fellow, Loyola Law School. “Book Review The Value of Dissent.” 85 Cornell L. Rev. 859-881 (2000) (reviewing Steven H. Shiffrin, Dissent, Injustice, and the Meanings of America (1999))] AJ

What is the relevance of pluralism and the burdens of judgment to our question about the value of dissent? If we are committed to the liberty of conscience and the freedom of discussion, then dissent is inevitable with respect to the normative evaluation of social practice: "customs, habits, traditions, institutions, or authorities."" 4 Citizens who disagree about fundamental matters, such as religion and the na-ture of the good, will evaluate social practices. Inevitably, some citizens will dissent on almost any question of public policy or social mores." 5 Given this fact, it follows that respect for the political autonomy of citizens requires the toleration of dissent. From the perspec-tive of political liberalism, dissent is not the price to be paid for liberty of conscience and freedom of discussion. Rather, dissent is to be celebrated as one of the great benefits of such freedom. Dissent [it] is the product of human reason operating under conditions of freedom. Moreover, as Mill teaches us, dissent on contestable matters of "morals, religion, politics, social relations, and the business of life"" 6 is properly seen as a great benefit by those who disagree with the dissenters.

!T – Democracy BadNC – TurnPursuit of democracy under Trump causes nuclear war with China, Russia, and Iran. Even if democratic peace is true, Trump alters international calculus.

Miller ’17 (Benjamin; 4/27/17; Professor of International Relations at the School of Political Sciences, The University of Haifa; The International Security Studies Forum; “Policy Series: Will Trumpism increase the Danger of War in the International System?: IR Theory and the Illiberal Turn in World Politics”; https://issforum.org/roundtables/policy/1-5ag-war; DOA: 12/6/17)

Some realists might, however, not see these recent developments as necessarily leading to more conflict, although they may not see them as leading to stable peace either.[22] In the eyes of these realists, the seemingly unconditional U.S. security umbrella for America’s allies has allowed them to ‘free-ride’ on the U.S. commitment and to avoid allocating the necessary resources for their own national defense.[23] Moreover, some of the allies have been provocative toward their opponents, while relying on the U.S. security umbrella. This could cause unnecessary conflict. Especially provocative toward Russia, for example, was the enlargement of NATO to the east and the EU economic agreement with Ukraine in 2014. Such anti-Russian expansionist Western moves, in the realist view, compelled Moscow to behave more assertively and to annex Crimea and to intervene in Eastern Ukraine.[24] Somewhat similarly, it seems less costly for American allies in East Asia to engage in maritime conflicts with China so long they are under the U.S. protective shield. Realists believe that moving away from such ever-growing commitments will stabilize the international system, or at the very least reduce the likelihood of a great-power conflict. The realists are especially concerned about the American policies to shape the domestic character of other states, particularly by advancing democracy-promotion, “nation-building,” and the universal protection of human rights.[25] In this context they highlight what they see as disastrous American military interventions, notably, in Iraq in 2003 and in Libya in 2011 and also the continuously costly intervention in Afghanistan since 2001. In their eyes such military interventions are not necessary for the protection of American national interests. Moreover, such military engagements are unlikely to succeed and in many cases are de-stabilizing and are causing unnecessary conflicts. Such interventions simply increase the perceived threat posed by the U.S. to some other countries. Thus, lessening—if not completely abandoning—the U.S. commitment to advance these liberal values is likely, in realist eyes, to stabilize the international system and to serve well the American national security interests. Even though liberals see trade as a major pacifying mechanism, realists view trade—and economic interdependence more broadly—as potential sources for conflict.[26] They highlight the earlier U.S. trade conflicts with Japan and currently with Mexico and China. Thus, moving away from free trade might diffuse conflicts rather than accelerate them. Moreover, there is a growing populist opposition in the West to globalization. In this sense, it cannot work as a useful recipe for the promotion of peace. Similarly, despite the high levels of economic interdependence between Japan and China, for example, such interdependence does not prevent conflict between them and definitely does not result in stable peace even if it might have helped to prevent a shooting war between them, at least thus far. Realists are also skeptical about the ability of international institutions to advance stable peace.[27] Such institutions are not independent actors, which can influence the behavior of the member-states in important ways. International institutions just reflect the balance of power among states. States follow their national interests, and even more so in this age of rising nationalism. Thus we cannot expect much from the ability of international institutions to pacify intense conflicts, especially among the great powers. Even the most remarkable of international intuitions—the EU—has recently failed in advancing cooperation among its members with regard to the key issues of immigration, terrorism and the Euro financial crisis. Realists might be a bit skeptical about a potential reconcilia