The Hidden Costs of Clean Election Reform

5. Civic Educators: Disciplinary Reaction

125 Election watchdog groups,public-minded corporations,government election bodies, reformist political parties, and other civic educators sometimes try to clean up dirty electoral practices by teaching ordinary voters to change their behavior. The goal of this education, typically, is to convince people to obey existing election laws, whether it be to vote secretly, to refrain from selling their votes, or to resist the temptation of voting more than once. To the extent that civic educators wish to train voters to act “correctly,” their efforts have a disciplinary component. This reality suggests a need to understand how people who are the target of educational reform experience and react to these disciplinary efforts. Whether voters spurn, absorb, ignore, or misunderstand specific educational messages will have significant implications not only for the effectiveness of the education campaign but also for the quality of the resulting democracy. Rarely has civic education been studied as a disciplinary project, so empirical data on such reactions are scarce. For this chapter, I thus found it necessary to gather evidence on the ground. Among countries instituting clean election reforms,the Philippines stood out as a promising research site since civic education is a major component of reform there. In this chapter, then, I examine in some depth the case of the Philippines,drawing on mass surveys as well as openended interviews I conducted or supervised with ordinary voters, politicians, civic educators, and advertising executives. As we shall see, unanticipated reactions to civic education campaigns in the Philippines resulted in iatrogenic harm, alienation in particular. Before turning to this analysis, however, a few words are in order to put the Philippine experience in its proper comparative context. 5 Civic Educators Disciplinary Reaction 126 The Hidden Costs of Clean Election Reform Education Campaigns around the World Among the behaviors that civic educators around the world single out for reform,vote buying appears to be the most common,perhaps because educators believe it to be particularly amenable to change and perhaps,too,because it is so widespread. Credible reports of vote buying have come from all corners of the world, and in many countries the scale of this practice has been huge (Schaffer 2007, 2–4). In trying to convince voters to refrain from selling their votes, many civic educators have kept the message simple and palatable: accept the money, but vote your conscience. In Bulgaria, the party representing the Roma told their supporters to “eat their meatballs,but vote with your heart”(Pinto-Duschinsky 2002, 74). Civil society groups in Zambia urged voters to “eat widely but vote wisely” (Gwenani 2001, 9). Jaime Cardinal Sin, archbishop of Manila during the twilight years of Marcos, advised voters to “take the bait but not the hook” (Youngblood 1993, 199). Other civic educators have taken other tacks,perhaps realizing that this kind of message may encourage voters to ask for money. Prior to elections in 1989, reformers in Taiwan produced stickers with the message “My family doesn’t sell votes” and asked voters to display them on their houses (Rigger 2002, 5). In Brazil, the slogan of a national ad campaign was “Votes don’t have a price, they have consequences” (Desposato 2003). In Mexico, Catholic bishops distributed pamphlets informing parishioners, “Your vote is free...it cannot be bought or sold.”1 Radio spots broadcast in Guinea told voters, “Your voice is sacred, so no material goods should influence your choice” (NDI 1999b). Civic educators in South Africa advised, “Do not vote for a party which offers money or food for exchange for your vote. One who tries this is corrupt” (NDI 1995). How have voters responded to these educational campaigns? Empirical data are scattered and thin, but what we do know is not encouraging. A researcher in Taiwan discovered that not everyone reacted to the “My family doesn’t sell votes” sticker as civic educators had anticipated: In 1991 I interviewed an opposition party activist in a southern Taiwanese village who said she wouldn’t dream of using the sticker, which she found embarrassingly self-righteous. She gave me the sticker as an example of how out of touch activists in Taipei were with conditions in the countryside. (Rigger 2002, 5) 1. “Mexican Church Urges Catholics to Vote Their Conscience,” Associated Press, May 4, 2000. Civic Educators 127 In Thailand, voter education campaigns also produced unintended consequences . During the 1995 election, for instance, public service ads...