How to spread democracy

I think we are probably all in agreement that democracy is a really good thing.
Of course there are the obvious freedoms and pleasantries affixed to this governing style, such as greater individual liberty, political stability, freedom from governmental violence and enhanced quality of life relative to non-democracies.

Amartya Sen, the winner of the 1998 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, has pointed out that “no famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy.”

Additionally, I think we all know by now that, statistically speaking, stable democracies are less likely to war with one another. Furthermore, democracies in general enhance long-term economic performance.

So I think we can all agree that democracy is, say, better than an authoritarian regime. However, empirically we have found that actually implementing and spreading democracy is much easier said than done.

President Bush’s simply-remove-the-tyrant method, as seen applied to Iraq, has certainly left something to be desired. Merely holding elections is not the solution for developing democracies, which tend to be rather unstable and produce election results that indicate if pushed too soon people will vote only according to their established ethnic, religious or racial identities.

The internal structure of democracy, including institutions of law, a civil society and a bureaucratic framework, need time to develop. The Magna Carta, which first established limits on governmental power, actually preceded universal adult suffrage in Britain by about 800 years.

As Newsweek writer Fareed Zakaria argues in a recent column, foreign aid, too, has had its failings.

More aid does not necessarily correlate to better governance and often its good intentions end in massive corruption. Indeed, the aid programs did not produce early and successful democratic transitions of countries like Taiwan, South Korea and Chile.

Unless loans, grants and forms of debt relief are properly structured, they can actually be detrimental, lending foreign aid a bad rap.

What the implementation of democracy necessitates in most cases is land reform. The benefits of widely distributed land and the idea that private land ownership results in freedom are exhibited by our own Homestead Act of 1862, in which the United States government gave away 10 percent of public lands to anyone willing to pay a small filling fee.

Hernando de Soto, a highly-regarded Peruvian economist, has argued that the principal impediment to development in the Third World is the aversion of feudal elites and governments to give fully-fledged property rights to their tenants and farmers.
 Land is the largest asset in most societies and land reform, contrary to the belief that this is a socialist process, actually places land that was first acquired centuries ago by non-market means into the marketplace for the first time.

The reforms are crucial to converting a backward peasant society into a modern capitalist one. It is this process that lays the groundwork for successful democracy.