When “secular communions” become contested.

I may have said this on previous occasions, but the Chilean sociologist Eugenio Tironi remarked about the foundational election after Pinochet was voted out of the presidency by referendum in 1989 that democratic elections were a type of “secular communion” between the people and political leaders of a nation. Elections are both a ritual and an agent of change or reaffirmation as well as an indicator of public satisfaction with current political policy and socioeconomic affairs. In 1989 Chileans voted to say enough of the military dictatorship and welcome to a democratic government led by a Christian Democrat, Patricio Alwyn.

If Tironi’s remark is true, then I have been lucky to have received communion twice in recent weeks. Last Friday I received notification that my ballot was accepted by the Palm Beach County Board of Elections for the November 3 US midterms. Today my wife and I went down to our son’s soccer club, which doubles as a polling station, and voted in NZ’s general election. In both cases I voted for progress, enlightenment and fairness over the forces of darkness, division and evil.

In Europe, Hungary and Serbia have undergone electoral shifts to the Left after years of rightwing, increasingly authoritarian rule. Brazil re-elected left-leaning Lula in the face of overt interference by Trump, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk in favour of the neo-imperialist son of a seditionist former president with ties to organised crime. In NZ the race is tight between a Labour/Green-led coalition and the incumbent MAGA mini-me’s. Tomorrow Israel votes on whether Netanyahu and his genocidal cohort should stay or go. And then a week from today the US decides whether the MAGA experiment is working or not in making “America Great Again.”

I don’t know about you, but I sense that change is in the air.

Because of that, for the first time in a while I feel pleased about participating in these secular communion rituals. I sure do hope that they make a positive difference this time around.

Casting my NZ vote today also gave me pause to reflect more broadly.

Generally speaking, there are two types of democratic elections: 1) the tension-release model; and 2) the contention model. In stable democracies and historically in the West, the tension-release model predominated: campaigns built up voter enthusiasm, elections were held, results were announced, people accepted them and returned to their routines. Institutional continuity prevailed and political stability ensued.

In contrast, many recent democratic elections have been of the contested sort: campaigns are divisive and polarising, elections are viewed with suspicion and bitterly disputed, results are not accepted in defeat. Institutional legitimacy and continuity are challenged and political stability is threatened.

This leans closer to civil war than stable governance, something that should be of concern to all of us. Ironically, both of these models derive from historical analyses of social revolutions (a scholar by the name of Charles Tilly in particular), so draw your own conclusions about what the move from one to the other implies.

Remember that the hallmark of democratic elections is that all contenders agree to play by the same set of rules and losers accept defeat in exchange for getting to “play” again at specified, institutionally guaranteed intervals. Once that basic premise is disputed, then the very procedures of democracy (as supposedly neutral arbiters of electoral competition) are undermined. Once those are undermined, then, as I mentioned in the previous post, the threshold of mass contingent consent may be crossed, with the latter withdrawn and the political future made more uncertain than what is already embedded in any electoral contest.

At that point Tilly’s original analyses comes into play.