Our discussion with Professor Hardig’s friend and civil society activist in Lebanon gave us quite a bit of information to think about. I was most interested in his organization’s consulting work with various civil society actors. After skimming over Lebanese media outlets for stories, I was able to find an SCO that seems to be right up his alley. The Civil Campaign for Electoral Reform is a broad alliance for pro-democracy civil society associations in Lebanon. According to its website, “The Campaign aims and calls for reforming Electoral systems in general, focusing mainly on the Municipal and Parliamentary ones. Since 2006, the Civil Campaign for Electoral Reform has been able to introduce the electoral reform concept into the political life.”
On October 29, the CCER is sponsoring a “people’s parliament” session to discuss reforming Lebanon’s electoral system and the law that governs it, and will be setting up shop in Beirut’s Martyrs’ Square. They will be conducting a model parliament session called a “people’s parliament” in which they will engage in a discourse encompassing electoral reform issues such as proportional representation, an independent committee to manage and organize elections, campaign finance reform, decreasing the gender gap in Lebanese politics, lowering the voting age from 21 to 18 and the candidacy age from 25 to 22, and allowing soldiers to vote. I’d reckon there’s a fair amount of us in this class who have participated in something similar (like a Model Congress event) in high school.
Jacob - indeed, the activists you spoke to last week have been involved in the CCER. If not directly, then indirectly through the participation of Nahwa al-Muwatiniya, which was (is?) a member - you can ask them about it the next time we link up.
ReplyDeleteBut I think the CCER is more an example of the type of 'campaign network' that works within an 'evolutionary' framework, rather than part of a non-violent 'revolutionary' struggle for political reform. The question is whether fundamental reform can actually happen through such a vehicle, given our conversation last week. What kind of impact does it actually have in the end? The CCER was originally formed in order to promote a draft law developed by the Boutrous Commission, but it really had little success in the years leading up to the 2009 parliamentary election. To quote myself:
"The immediate success of the CCER can be debated –the Boutrous draft law was not adopted for the 2009 election, although features from it were included in the electoral law negotiated at Doha in 2008" (Hardig 2011).
In the end, I think the impact to-date can be described as 'partial successes':
"However, the CCER’s representative in the Ministry of Interior continued to put pressure on the authorities to bring individual issues to parliament for a vote, such as the proposal to lower the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen. In fact, a youth movement to lower the voting age had been growing since 1997, when a coalition of NGOs, political parties, and universities tried to push parliament to amend the constitution to allow voting from the age of eighteen. The efforts of the CCER bore fruit in March 2009, when parliament voted unanimously to lower the voting age. However, because it required a constitutional amendment, the changes would not take effect until the parliamentary elections of 2013" (Hardig 2011).
In the end, despite the public event you describe above, it seems to me that the CCER is more an example of the 'evolutionary' approach, rather than the type of pro-active, non-violent, 'revolutionary' social movement approach we were talking about last week.
I agree that the CCER is a an example of the evolutionary approach towards electoral reform. I wanted to follow-up with this story but I was unable to find any mention of the event in Lebanese national papers or even Beirut papers. Do you have any suggestions for where I might find coverage?
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