Explaining
Fair Elections-(Somaliland)
by: Dr.
Shacabi, California, USA
It should never be forgotten that Somaliland
unity was founded on the principle of Truth and Justice for all Somalilanders
and to defend those who were discriminated and disfranchised. Before now, we
have one government system without competing parties. Now we know things have
changed and we have several political parties for the first time in our country.
Although the government party-(UDUB) is
also one of the parties, it shows that this party has the strength and the
resources that the other parties are not have at this moment. Therefore, let us
ask ourselves,when the smoke clears and the dust settles, we are left with this:
Voters reward (punish) incumbents if they believe that those candidates are
likely to do well (poor) in the up-coming elections, in terms of economic
future, although voters look to the past to make much of that judgment and focus
much more on the performance of the national economy than the region and the
districts of their own personal finances.
These are by no means findings without
significance , but they do not take us (our Voters') much furtherthan our
forecasting steps in understanding the political events of the last ten years
and how they may be related to the radically different social and economy of the
past era. Indeed, the timeless and classless nature of these findings
intrinsically limits their utility in explaining substantive political change in
Somaliland. All they can tell us is that the incumbent benefits at the margin
from voters' positive economic assessments- a tendency that tells us nothing
about the difference b/w the politics in Abdirahman Tures' era and, say, the
Egals' time. And yet both politics and economics have changed profoundly since
then. Surely, a contemporary economics of voting needs to reflect and help
explain theses changes. What to do? One approach is to split samples in the
individual years by a measure of class. Then steps can be separately estimated
on the split samples and coefficients on economic assessment variables
compared.
This method produces some positive results
and represents an improvement over the classless nature of standard economic
voting samples. A key problem remains, however, by focusing on one election at a
time, this approach is not well suited to explaining political changes over
time, and the relationship of economic shifts to these changes. Yet this, as I
have argued, is perhaps the crucial lacuna within the economic voting
literature.
One method that potentially solves this
problem is the pooling of survey data across several different elections to
examine changes in Bill of Rights and fair electoral voting methods. The first
set that needs to look at the vote is the incumbent party in presidential
elections and follows up on the work of several political parties cited
earlier.
We need to start by examining the class
comparisons attempted for individual years (described above) to see if the
evidence of a class difference in reactions to economic assessments could be
detected in a pooled model. All the news is not bad, People have the capacity to
learn, and attitudes can change. Although those who are forming the different
types of political parties learned to distrust the current government and avoid
collective action. Surveys indicate that education is positively correlated with
support for democracy and smooth transition, The challenge is convince
somalilanders that political participation will be rewarded.
Training a new generation of political
leaders who are responsive to public opinion is a crucial tool for changing
popular attitudes toward their political system. Leadership training is not
likely to have immediate effects at the top levels of the political system
(Presidents and his cabinets), nor is it likely to bring cure to the ill-feeling
of other major political parties and Somaliland political cultures. Rather, it
will have its greatest impact on the civil societies of new democracies. I
believe strongly, by improving the skills of political leaders and political
parties in new democracies will increase the prospects that democratic system
will survive and enhance the quality of our people and our country.
Best Regards, Dr. Shacabi
- Sanbuur2003@aol.com
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