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October 29, 2013
Phantoms and frauds: the history of spirit photography
The last time President Abraham Lincoln and First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln sat for a portrait photograph together was in the early 1870s, five years or more after the president’s death and burial. The president, filmy and translucent, tenderly placed his see-through hands on his wife’s shoulders as she looked into the camera. Or so the photographs of William H. Mumler would have you believe.
Mumler, the first documented spirit photographer, set up shop in Boston in 1860. He charged between five and ten dollars—a huge fee at the time—for cartes-de-visite featuring the customer in a family-portrait pose alongside spirits of his or her deceased loved ones. The pictures undoubtedly comforted sitters, who might be treated to the sight of long-gone mothers or lost children. Mumler claimed that this extraordinary effect flowed from his powers as a medium. He and other spirit photographers assured customers that while they might not be able to see the ghosts around them, the camera could.
William H. Mumler, Mrs. French of Boston with her son’s spirit. Carte de visite (albumen print), c. 1868-70. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
According to Louis Kaplan’s Grove Art Online entry on Mumler, “spirit photography must be understood in relation to the growth of Spiritualism,” a religious movement that had been gaining ground in North America and Europe since the late 1840s. Spiritualists, who usually considered their beliefs to be in accordance with Christian teachings, posited that it was possible for a soul to exist without a body. Additionally, these spirits could communicate with the living by making tapping noises, moving objects around, or controlling mediums’ speech.
Media historian Jeffrey Sconce has suggested recently that new communication technologies in the 19th century, like the telegraph and the camera, further separated messages from the bodies of their senders, thereby either inspiring or providing support for Spiritualist beliefs. As the stop-motion experiments of Eadweard Muybridge later showed, scientists and artists were still figuring out the ways in which photographs differed from human sight. It’s not far-fetched that many people took seriously the question of whether or not cameras could see spirits, even though the average human eye could not.
Eadweard Muybridge, The Horse in Motion. Automatic electro-photograph, 1878. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division via Wikimedia Commons.
Others in the 19th and early 20th centuries found the idea preposterous and heretical, loudly condemning spirit photography as an elaborate swindle. At least a few of Mumler’s images are known fakes. He lost much of his credibility in Boston after a customer recognized the “spirit” in his portrait as a living resident of the city (to which he responded that he couldn’t help how the spirits chose to present themselves), and eventually relocated to New York.
One might wonder why, if Mumler was repurposing the images of previous sitters as ghosts, more customers didn’t notice that the transparent figures accompanying them in their portraits weren’t their departed husbands, sisters, or children. During the American Civil War, thousands of portrait photographs were made, due in part to the separation of families and soldiers’ risk of death on the battlefield. Formats included the reproducible cartes-de-visite that Mumler used, as well as unique positives such as daguerreotypes and tintypes. But it’s still the case that most people in the mid-19th century weren’t ever photographed. All that the customers of spirit photographers had to rely on for comparison, then, were their memories and hopes. If a customer shared enough information with the photographer, and if the selected face was faint and blurry enough, the resulting “spirit” could convince a person who wanted to be convinced.
Nonetheless, Mumler was accused of fraud and arrested mere months after moving to New York. Witnesses appearing at the highly-publicized hearing included prominent Spiritualists as well as skeptical photographers, who identified nine possible methods by which “spirits” could be imitated, including double exposure and combination printing. Constructing admittedly fake spirit photographs had already become a source of fun for some photographers, and witness Abraham Bogardus submitted one of his own as evidence. Taken at the request of showman P.T. Barnum, the image featured Barnum with the somber “ghost” of President Lincoln. Barnum was called to the witness stand as well, as an expert on “humbuggery.” He had previously railed against Mumler in his own writings, pointing out how some of Mumler’s ghosts were awfully fashionably dressed for having been dead so long.
Mumler’s career declined, but spirit photography lived on in the work of other practitioners, whose work varied greatly in style and effect. Several writers have noted that the Civil War’s death toll likely fueled sustained interest in the subject. Another particularly productive period for mediums and spirit photographers encompassed the years during and after the First World War. Their focus, though, shifted away from portrait images of ghosts, which had attracted a great deal of skeptical baggage, and toward images of mediums in action.
Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, Photograph of Eva C. showing fraud ectoplasm made from a Paris newspaper, Le Miroir. 1912. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
The invention of the magnesium flash in 1899 allowed photographers to capture images of mediums at work. Since most séances occurred in the dark, this had been all but impossible before. A common occurrence at these meetings was the emanation and retreat of viscous, veil-like “materializations” from the medium’s mouth, nose, or other orifices. Some photographs of emanations have a haunting beauty to them, whereas others blatantly reveal fraud, such as one of Albert von Schrenck-Notzing’s images of the medium Eva C. Andreas Fischer suggests that photography did more to discredit these phenomena than to support their authenticity; when frozen in photographs, the materializations tended to look suspiciously like rumpled cheesecloth. The Hungarian medium Ladislaus Lazlo confirmed as much in 1923, when he admitted that the ectoplasm gushing from his mouth and nose in pictures was actually “cotton wool smeared with goose fat.”
However, the world may be as full of believers as it is of skeptics. More than one Spiritualist pointed out that just because some spirit photographs were fakes, that didn’t mean that the rest of them were. Others believed that there was more than enough evidence against the genre. The friendship between illusionist Harry Houdini and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle fell apart in the 1920s when Houdini made public statements deriding spirit photographs as farcical. Doyle, an ardent Spiritualist who had written a book in support of spirit photography, was crushed. The possibility of contacting his dead spouse and children was too great a comfort to him, as it had been to Mary Todd Lincoln fifty years earlier. Lincoln supposedly wept upon receiving William Mumler’s pictures of herself next to her husband. It was to the relief of some and the consternation of many that Mumler’s case never went to trial. Though the judge at his hearing plainly voiced skepticism about the matter, he also admitted that no one had actually figured out how Mumler caused his “spirits” to appear. To this day, his methods have remained a mystery.
Kate Scott is a contributor to the Benezit Dictionary of Artists and a doctoral candidate in the Rutgers University Department of Art History, specializing in American art and the history of photography. Her blog, Images from American History, mines the artistic and visual culture of the United States for objects that shed light on the varying identities of the nation and its people.
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October 28, 2013
In memoriam: Lou Reed
I heard about Lou Reed’s death in the most modern of ways. He had taken over my Twitter feed, which on Sunday was suddenly filled with links to Rolling Stone’s obituary, often preceded by shock-induced expletives or followed by links to a video of a favorite song. Senator Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) encouraged Reed to “Fly, fly away.” The Pixies, a band so monumental that everything they tweet is in all caps, called him “A LEGEND.” Rock critic Will Hermes, author of Love Goes to Buildings on Fire, called Reed “Rock’s Baudelaire.” Roseanne Cash said simply, “Magic and Loss.” Musicology professors vowed to give him a moment of silence in their classes this week. Bands promised to add some Velvet Underground songs to their performances. “Thank you, Lou Reed,” said the band Low, “Eternal White Light. You did good and we thank you.”
Click here to view the embedded video.
As Sunday rolled on, the links to recordings piled up in my feed. “White Light White Heat.” “Sweet Jane.” Metal Machine Music, an entire album of guitar feedback that was as influential as it is unlistenable. An unreleased demo tape from 1970. The online magazine devoted to Americana music, No Depression, posted the appropriately morbid, “See that My Grave is Kept Clean.” Dozens lamented that Lulu, Reed’s collaboration with Metallica would be his last album, considering it to be an ignominious end to an illustrious career. And over and over again, the song that defined him to so many was posted: “Take a Walk on the Wild Side.”
Click here to view the embedded video.
Like several generations of teenagers, I discovered the music of Lou Reed in high school, on a friend’s turntable in the back of a smoke-filled room via someone’s parents’ copy of the iconic 1967 LP, The Velvet Underground and Nico. The album came out before any of us in the room were born, but we all knew about Andy Warhol and the band and the banana and Lou. In college, it was Reed’s second solo album from 1972, Transformer, that we played incessantly, especially “Walk on the Wild Side,” which was just obscure enough in the late 80s to make us feel cool, but well known enough to make it feel relevant with just enough inappropriate language to make us feel like we were getting away with something and that saxophone to make us feel, well, like a saxophone. I can’t imagine my teenage years without Lou Reed. He was, no doubt, a lousy role model in many respects, but he taught us what it was like to listen to rock and feel like a better, less inhibited, more creative version of yourself. I’m not sure I would have survived those years without him.
Click here to view the embedded video.
A few months ago, while we were picking out pictures for the second edition of The Grove Dictionary of American Music, we considered one of Lou Reed and his wife, the performance artist Laurie Anderson, riding in the back of a wicker rickshaw as king and queen of the 2010 Coney Island Mermaid Parade, a worthy coronation of the closest thing to musical royalty we have in New York City. Anderson is elegant, beaming from under her tiara and blue parasol. She looks like she’s having the time of her life. Reed’s royal headgear is a white baseball cap from Coney Island pizza joint Totonno’s. He looks grouchy. As Village Voice blogger Rob Harvilla put it, “Lou himself seemed so nonplussed, though of course nonplussed is his thing.” It is his thing, but we thought more of him. In the end we couldn’t find a picture that captured what he stood for.
Click here to view the embedded video.
“Everybody fucking loves Lou Reed,” tweeted British composer Justin Capps on Sunday. We certainly did.
Click here to view the embedded video.
Lou Reed
2 March 1942 – 27 October 2013
Anna-Lise Santella is the Editor of Grove Music/Oxford Music Online. Her article, “Modeling Music: Early Organizational Structures of American Women’s Orchestras” was recently published in >American Orchestras in the Nineteenth Century, edited by John Spitzer (U. Chicago, 2012) and you can also read her recent article on the American women’s orchestra movement on University Press Scholarship Online. When she’s not reading Grove articles or writing about women’s orchestras, you can find her on twitter as @annalisep.
Image credit: Lou Reed performing at the Hop Farm Music Festival on Saturday the 2nd of July 2011. Photo by Man Alive! Creative Commons License via Wikimedia Commons.
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“Woo woo versus doo doo”
The relationship between reason and spirituality has been part of our cultural conversation since the advent of modernity. In recent times, we’ve seen this conversation play out in public debates over creationism and arguments between religious leaders and representatives of a “new atheism.” Meanwhile, ordinary people are engaging this subject on their own terms and in their own daily lives.
One evening, for example, college professor Ron Miller was speaking at Common Ground, a Chicago-area center for interfaith spiritual education. He told his students, “Our culture doesn’t support what we do. We all know a lot of people who absolutely think we’re crazy for doing what we’re doing here today.” A Common Ground participant agreed, saying,
“When I tell people about Common Ground, they think it’s all froo froo and crystals. So I tell them how smart people are, how well-educated the people are, the teachers are people with PhDs, it’s like a lecture. We should talk about this in Common Ground—how to explain Common Ground without sounding froo froo.”
A few suburbs over, Gregg Levoy, author of Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life, was leading a weekend workshop about the challenges and rewards of following a calling—an inner pull to, for example, become a singer or artist, take up a social cause, or explore an interest in spirituality. At one point, Gregg asked participants what they thought other people would say if they decided to follow their calling. Participants responded:
“I always knew there was something flaky about her.”
“I always thought you were crazy.”
“That’s too woo woo for business.”
Gregg chimed in with his mother’s reaction to his book:
“’Where did you come up with the notion of God, coming from the family you came from?’ She was astonished that I had a spiritual life. I heard it as, a spiritual life is so anti-intellectual, so intellectually creepy, so intellectually tacky.”
“Crazy.” “Flaky.” “Woo woo.” “Tacky.” These are the prejudices of a rationalized society confronted with spirituality. Viewed from a narrowly rationalistic perspective, spirituality comes off as fuzzy, illogical, impractical, and above all, irrational. So to make major life decisions based on an intuited spiritual calling rather than on logic and practical reason, as the Callings workshop participants were thinking of doing, means risking one’s status as a reasonable, responsible, sane person. Pursuing an interest in spirituality, especially outside of a recognized church, as the Common Ground participants were doing, requires a defensive strategy that includes PhDs, college-style classroom dynamics, and reassurance about intelligence.
Which creates something of a dilemma for educated spiritual seekers, who value both reason and spirituality and see the two as partners, not antagonists, in the search for meaning. A century ago, sociologist Max Weber described rationalized society as “disenchanted” — lacking a sense of deeper meaning, existential purpose, or transcendent possibility. Educated spiritual seekers value reason, but they’re frustrated with disenchantment, and they suspect that spirituality is not only important, but also valid.
Later on in the Callings workshop, a participant succinctly voiced the dilemma that many educated spiritual seekers believe they face. Following up on his previous question, Gregg asked participants what payoffs they might expect if they chose to follow their calling. Ruth, who earlier had said, “That’s too woo woo for business,” again raised her hand. This conversation ensued:
Ruth: I surprised myself: I wrote the word “transcendence” as a benefit—becoming something larger, or connecting with something larger. It surprised me that I wrote that.
Gregg: Because it’s too woo woo for business?
Ruth: No, I just never thought of myself as transcendent.
Patty: Most business is full of woo woo; they don’t realize it — they’re pretending. Full of –
Jason: Shit.
Patty: Thank you.
Gregg: Oh! I took “woo woo” to mean spiritual things.
Lynn: Yeah — business will put up with crap but not woo woo.
Richard: So it’s the dilemma of woo woo versus doo doo.
“Woo woo versus doo doo.” On one hand, when educated spiritual seekers look out at modern society, they see it as preoccupied with the basest functions of humanity; they see it as a wasteland. On the other hand, they fear that their efforts to introduce some sense of larger meaning and purpose into that society would be dismissed as “woo woo”—too weird, too flaky, and too irrational.
Philosopher Paul Ricoeur once wrote that if we are to bring meaning back into modern society, we need to “deconstruct… the assurances of modern man” and “struggle with the believable and unbelievable of our time in order to make a place for intelligent discourse.” Some educated seekers are trying to do just that. On a different day, Ron Miller introduced the word “transrational” to Common Ground participants:
“There are three levels: the prerational, the rational, and the transrational. The rational is very important — as a college teacher, most of our task is getting students from the prerational level, where they just have opinions, to the rational. But in our culture, we stop there. We stop with the rational. Other cultures affirm the third step, the level of the transrational, the things that can’t be understood in rational language. Our culture doesn’t affirm that.”
Just because something is nonrational, Ron is saying, doesn’t mean that it’s irrational. In other words, for educated spiritual seekers, reason is only one way of knowing, and a meaningful modern society requires both the rational and the spiritual.
Kelly Besecke is the author of You Can’t Put God in a Box: Thoughtful Spirituality in a Rational Age. Formerly a professor of sociology at Colorado College and Kenyon College, she is now a writer and editor in Austin, Texas. Connect with her on Facebook or through her author website or her editing website.
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Image credit: Balance. A construction from a pebble. It is isolated on a white background. © galdzer via iStockphoto.
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Place of the Year 2013: Behind the longlist
The 2013 Oxford Place of the Year (POTY) process is now in full swing. The longlist poll closes this Thursday, so be sure to get your votes in! (Scroll to the bottom of this page to vote.) The POTY shortlist will be announced on Monday, 4 November 2013.
The 2013 longlist is packed with strong contenders. Syria, long embroiled in a civil war, is at the center of an international diplomatic crisis this year, while the Egyptian Islamist movement has gravitated to Cairo’s Tahrir Square to voice their grievances against the new government. Meanwhile, Dennis Rodman acted as an unofficial ambassador to North Korea, attending basketball games with Kim Jong-un.
Russia has spent much of the year in the headlines for sheltering the leaker Edward Snowden, playing a major role in the Syria negotiations, and arresting activists. North American environmental activists continue to rail against the exploitation of Canada’s tar sands via hydrofracking and opposed the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline to transport fracked oil. Lake Baikal, the world’s oldest and deepest freshwater lake, presents a serene riposte to these candidates.
Looking east from Madison Avenue at recently filled station on the north side of 53rd Street on a cloudy midday. Photo by Jim Henderson, 25 May 2013. Creative Commons License via Wikimedia Commons.
In May 2013, New York City found itself peppered with Citibike stands as bike-sharing programs continued their global spread. Brooklyn, meanwhile, continued its takeover of the world, as themed restaurants appeared in the world’s metropolitan centers (and the New York Times published a series of much-derided pieces about the borough).
Colorado was hit with serious wildfires and flooding this year, shortly after amending its constitution to legalize marijuana usage. Nearby in Utah, the National Security Agency was constructing a data center — revealed in the Snowden leaks — to gather massive quantities of information on people across the world. Boston, Massachusetts was hit by a terrorist bombing during the annual Boston Marathon.
The growing metropolis of Rio De Janeiro was periodically wracked with strikes and protests, while conflict and a refugee crisis spread in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Scientists discovered a massive trench buried beneath ice, which has come to be known as Greenland’s Grand Canyon; at nearly 500 miles, it is the world’s longest canyon. Delhi saw the beginning of the “Pink Sari Revolution,” a movement in protest of violence against women. The G8 summit was held in Northern Ireland, while longtime President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela passed away, leaving the country at a political crossroads.
Grand Central Terminal celebrated its centennial this year, while the US Supreme Court played host to critical decisions on the charged topics of voting rights and same-sex marriage. And finally, Benghazi, Libya was the site of ongoing political unrest, including the abduction of the Prime Minister.
As always, your input will help us narrow the list down to a shortlist, to be announced on Monday, 4 November 2013. Following another round of voting from the public, and input from our committee of geographers and experts, the Place of the Year will be announced on 2 December 2013. In the meantime, we’ll be posting here regularly with insights and explorations on geography, cartography, and the POTY contenders.
What should be Place of the Year 2013?
Moscow, RussiaSyriaTahrir Square, EgyptPyongyang, North KoreaCanada’s Tar SandsLake BaikalA Citibike StandRio de Janeiro, BrazilDemocratic Republic of the CongoColorado, USAThe NSA Data Center in UtahBoston, MABrooklyn, NYGreenland’s Grand CanyonDelhi, IndiaNorthern IrelandVenezuelaGrand Central TerminalThe United States Supreme CourtBenghazi, Libya
View Result
Total voters: 87Total votes: 104Moscow, Russia (4 votes, 4%)Syria (16 votes, 15%)Tahrir Square, Egypt (13 votes, 13%)Pyongyang, North Korea (1 votes, 1%)Canada’s Tar Sands (2 votes, 2%)Lake Baikal (2 votes, 2%)A Citibike Stand (3 votes, 3%)Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (7 votes, 7%)Democratic Republic of the Congo (3 votes, 3%)Colorado, USA (4 votes, 4%)The NSA Data Center in Utah (18 votes, 17%)Boston, MA (6 votes, 6%)Brooklyn, NY (2 votes, 2%)Greenland’s Grand Canyon (7 votes, 7%)Delhi, India (5 votes, 5%)Northern Ireland (4 votes, 4%)Venezuela (2 votes, 2%)Grand Central Terminal (0 votes, 0%)The United States Supreme Court (2 votes, 2%)Benghazi, Libya (3 votes, 1%)
Vote
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´Operation: Last Chance´, dilemmas of justice, and lessons for international criminal tribunals
In late July 2013, the Guardian reported that the Simon Wiesenthal Centre (SWC), a global Jewish NGO, had launched a poster campaign in Germany requesting the public to assist in identifying and bringing to justice the last surviving alleged perpetrators of crimes under the Nazi regime. Two thousand posters were hung in the streets, featuring a sinister black-and-white image of the most horrific dead-end the modern-era humankind has seen: the snow-covered rail tracks approaching the gate of the Auschwitz II-Birkenau extermination camp. The inscription underneath the photo reads, in German:
‘Late but not too late. Millions of innocents were murdered by Nazi war criminals. Some of the perpetrators are free and alive! Help us take them to court.’
In our information age, news about this publicity campaign was quickly overflown by the deluge of stirring updates from the hectic world of international criminal justice, preoccupied with events far more recent than the Nazi crimes. But the campaign should give us a reason for retrospection.
International Criminal Law (ICL) enforcement finds itself at the turn of institutional generations and in the throes of a ‘mid-life crisis’. Twenty years into the project’s renaissance, the tribunals continue to experience a daunting reality: the accomplishment of their mandate to achieve limited accountability for (some) international crimes is held hostage to the vagaries of politics, which demarcate the playing field. To an even greater extent than its United Nations Security Council (UNSC)-sponsored predecessors, the International Criminal Court (ICC) depends on the bona fide cooperation of states for evidence and arrests. This cooperation is in many situations faltering or not forthcoming for exactly the same reasons why the Court becomes seized with a matter in the first place: inaction by states or their unwillingness or inability to genuinely investigate and prosecute crimes themselves. In Kenya and elsewhere, the Court is struggling to do its job amid clamorous accusations of illegitimacy and a sharp decline in political support. This state of affairs does not project bright prospects for the effectiveness and viability of the system, and its less patient proponents may soon be pushed to feel disillusioned, cynical, or even demoralized.
There are striking similarities in some of the practical hurdles and conceptual questions the ‘Nazi hunters’ and modern international criminal justice institutions have been facing. How is one to measure success on the winding road to accountability? What can the unwavering commitment to justice accomplish in the long term or, perhaps more importantly, what can it not in the short term? The movement towards ensuring justice for Nazi crimes offers an instructive moral story for the ICC and other courts.
In the aftermath of Nuremberg, the road towards accountability has been a thorny one. But in the span of 70 years, much has been accomplished to ensure that Holocaust atrocities crimes are paid for. Private initiative and advocacy deserve considerable credit for this success, partial as it were, for persistently urging the governments to effect legislative and policy changes necessary to remove any remaining obstacles in the prosecution effort, for conducting historical research and preserving information that would have otherwise been lost, and for raising public awareness about the painful past in the countries where the crimes had been committed. The work of Wiesenthal and other ‘Nazi-hunters’ has made a difference in cases too numerous to list here. They located whereabouts of suspects, collected testimonials of camp survivors, and provided investigative leads to national law-enforcement agencies. They uncompromisingly called for prosecutions and trials when the political will and capacity to deal with these cases in a devastated Europe, divided by the Iron Curtain, were at their lowest. Their activities have been fraught with controversy and gone against the tide, and they continue to do so. Despite best efforts to seize every ‘last chance’ that presents itself, total accountability has remained an impossible dream.
Bringing alleged war criminals to justice is not a simple undertaking and this task only becomes more complicated with the passage of time. As reported by the SWC, some governments — e.g. Germany, Italy, and the United States — have a better record while others are lukewarm or openly reluctant to deal with the crimes of distant past. Such cases invariably entail scrutiny of issues of political and legal responsibility of governments. As the proceedings in France against Klaus Barbie and Maurice Papon have amply demonstrated, even stable democracies may not be prepared to reopen embarrassing chapters of their history and allow an inquiry into circumstances which might upset consolatory myths or taint the ‘national identity’ of their people. Domestic legal obstacles to such cases are legion: material and temporal jurisdiction constraints, non-retroactivity of penal laws, statutes of limitations, and defences (e.g. superior orders) which, even if formally unavailable, still inform prosecutorial choices. From a prosecutorial perspective, a limited prospect of obtaining a conviction may militate against spending scarce resources on a war crimes case which could rather be allocated to other cases (of which there are enough in overburdened criminal justice systems). Next to that, even if it is decided to proceed, there are intractable practical hurdles inherent in such cases whose inhibiting effect should not be underestimated. Inevitable difficulties with collecting authentic documents and reliable witness evidence dozens of years after the events in question are exacerbated by governments with vested interests to withhold or fabricate evidence. The risk of a show trial based on quasi-evidence is always in the wings of adjudication on politically and historically contentious events.
Over and above the obstacles mentioned, there are questions about the very point of justice and moral dilemmas posed by its uncompromising pursuit in every case. Misconceived manners of attracting attention to the problem of impunity have also made their way into the ICL enterprise. Words such as operation when used next to justice and hunt when referring to human beings, even those suspected of the worst atrocities imaginable, are disagreeable—and demeaning.
In addition, some observers share a feeling of unease when contemplating the ‘justice being done’ to a 90-year old person in extremely poor health. A person who, despite being found fit to stand trial, sits or lies through it in a wheelchair instead, being able to endure no more than a couple of hours of hearings per day, until the moment he doesn’t rise from the deathbed.
Of course, age limitations are legally irrelevant. But as one watches the proceedings in the case of the two surviving former Khmer Rouge leaders before the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), Khieu Samphan (82) and Nuon Chea (87) — in the ECCC custody since 2007 and on trial since 2011 — a blasphemous question arises: are we doing the right thing? Is it seemly ‘to fire on hearses and those who are about to die’? (The charge provocatively thrown at the ECCC bench by late Jacques Vergès.) The justice effort is racing against time, and the inevitability of the ‘biological solution’ invites one to rethink the limits of human judgment in trying to discern the point at which it should step back before human compassion. Although our competence to question justice may be challenged, it has not become any clearer whose compassion matters and in whom the ‘moral imperative’ of the ICL resides: victims, institutions, their mandate-sponsors, or perhaps in each of us? Whilst the legitimacy of the project tends instinctively be drawn from the victim constituency, it has proven possible to mold the supposed ‘interests’ and ‘needs’ of victims into the constraints of the legal and institutional framework available, thus effectively turning such interests and needs into a rhetorical fetish and object of manipulation.
Those who believe in retributive justice tend to agree that we are doing ‘the right thing’ by going to great lengths to put aged Nazi (or Khmer Rouge) cadres on trial. Everyone who commits atrocities must pay for them, sooner or later. Still, this does not invalidate the question of whether we are doing the ‘right thing’ in the ‘right way’. Where there is no visible prospect that the trial will be completed, the verdict rendered, and, in case of conviction, that a single day of the penalty will be served, we may in fact be justifying the prosecution effort by the special hardships it brings to the men in the dock at their age. If so, the criminal process is being utilized as a tool of punishment — an ‘advance payment’ of sorts before the verdict which we don’t believe will come. This conflicts not only with principles of retribution, including the presumption of innocence, but also with the utilitarian and expressive rationales, as such practice inevitably raises doubts in the minds of those who are supposed to benefit from its ‘didactic effects’.
The determination to proceed in the way we are used to — and because we don’t know how else we could do it — is an unpersuasive and debilitating justification which does not help legitimacy. Over and above fair and a fortiori expeditious proceedings, the cases of senior-aged accused call for creative procedural solutions and flexible approaches. For instance, the ECCC’s current framework may be ill-suited in this respect because confessions and agreements on facts are not apt to result in significantly shorter trials, let alone in trial-avoidance. By contrast, a few cases of terminally ill defendants at the ad hoc tribunals (e.g. Milan Simić at the ICTY and Joseph Serugendo at the ICTR) were processed through (negotiated) guilty pleas. This arguably struck the fine balance between judgment and compassion. In the narrowest of circumstances, consensual or negotiated dispositions may be optimal for both moral and policy grounds, and such legal option should be available. This is not a panacea but only underscores that doing justice is all about how one does it.
Another parallel with international criminal justice ‘operations’ conjured up by the Nazi-hunters’ movement is that both are susceptible to the perennial selectivity objection. One class of alleged war criminals is pursued systematically and forever so that the respective class of victims is vindicated. But other possible perpetrators of comparable atrocities are not being ‘hunted’ down, or not to the same extent, because their crimes happen to have been committed in the context of a humanitarian crisis which is deemed ‘less relevant’ to international law-enforcers or has been brought about by those holding sufficient political power to evade prosecution. This objection to the legitimacy of pursuing justice in individual cases is, however, difficult to accept. The inequality of enforcement flowing from its non-universality and derivative constraints, does not remove the righteousness of the claim to justice. If it is true that ‘injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere’, then ‘justice anywhere is a chance for justice everywhere’ is the flipside of the same coin. The flowers of justice sprout in wicked places; suggesting that they should be uprooted because they have grown amid the weeds of injustice is an absurdity.
Last, what can be learnt from longstanding efforts to achieve individual criminal accountability for the Holocaust in the past seven decades may be this: justice is always inconvenient, liable to denunciation, and susceptible to interference. As any human enterprise, it is a fragile affair and regardless of how strong the institutions, it hinges on insistence, perseverance, and frantic efforts by individuals and (international) civil society — and often on pure chance. The ebbs of misalignment and tides of endorsement by its tactical supporters should not make the ICC lose its sense of mission and its proponents their moral compass. Like with the post-WWII quest for accountability, they ought to accept the melancholy fact that the business of justice is never finished and seek comfort in doing whatever is possible and necessary. Ultimately, the point is in the process itself, in its fairness that falls to them to ensure, and in precedents and discourses it generates — not in specific outcomes such as could be measured by a number of cases, types of verdicts, or by the length of sentences that are handed down.
Sergey Vasiliev is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Criminal Law and Criminology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU) and a fellow at the VU Center for International Criminal Justice (Twitter: @CICJ_VU). He is an author and co-editor of several publications on international and comparative criminal law and procedure, including volumes International Criminal Procedure: Towards a Coherent Body of Law (Cameron May, 2009), International Criminal Procedure: Principles and Rules (OUP, 2013), and the forthcoming Pluralism in International Criminal Law (with Elies van Sliedregt). (Twitter: @sevslv).
Oxford University Press is a leading publisher in international law, including the Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law, latest titles from thought leaders in the field, and a wide range of law journals and online products. We publish original works across key areas of study, from humanitarian to international economic to environmental law, developing outstanding resources to support students, scholars, and practitioners worldwide. For the latest news, commentary, and insights follow the International Law team on Twitter @OUPIntLaw.
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A Hallowe’en reading list from Oxford World’s Classics
By Lizzie Shannon-Little
What better way to send shivers down your spine this Halloween than to curl up with a spooky tale? These Classics have been putting the frighteners on people for quite some time, and we’ve got the collywobbles just thinking about them. What have we missed? Let us know in the comments.
Collected Ghost Stories by M R James
Some of these tales are just downright terrifying, partly because they tell of the supernatural that lurks in everyday events. There are cloaked figures at crossroads, haunted dolls’ houses, venomous spiders, and things with teeth under pillows. We recommend sleeping with the light on after reading these.
Dracula by Bram Stoker
You can’t really move for the various incarnations of vampires these days: Twilight, The Vampire Diaries, Being Human, True Blood, not to mention The Lost Boys (personal favourite), Blade, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and – who can forget – Sesame Street’s Count von Count. But it’s the work that spawned the myth that wins out for us. Now, this is a horror story.
The Monk by Matthew Lewis.jpg)
Written by Lewis in just ten weeks when he was nineteen years old, this work both celebrates and parodies the romantic horror. An intricate tale of murder, seduction, rape, temptation, and witchcraft, the violent and scandalous plot makes it a must-read for fans of the Gothic genre.
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
A governess hired to care for two children at the house of their disinterested uncle sees ghostly apparitions that threaten her charges. It is the ambiguity of the story that makes this such a spine-chilling tale. Is the narrator slowly going insane? Just how malevolent are the children? And what is the nature of the evil the ghosts represent?
Selected Tales by Edgar Allan Poe
These creepy (and sometimes weird) stories deal perfectly with the misconceptions that can lead to the mysterious, achieved through the balance of detective and horror fiction in the work. Stories that include the dead returning from their graves, the appearance of death at a masquerade, and a murderous orang-utan have got to be worth a read.
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
No list would be complete without this work of a crazed scientist and his misunderstood monster. Shelly’s creation is often hailed as the first science fiction novel. This, coupled with how the work deftly tackles big themes like forgiveness, human hubris, and revenge, make it a truly great piece of literature as well as a real horror classic.
The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole
This story has it all: a haunted castle, an ancient prophecy, a dastardly protagonist, and a beautiful heroine. Precursor to the Gothic novel, this melodramatic work is a wonderful read. By turns entertaining and scary, it is packed full of catastrophes, romantic entanglements, and ghostly goings-on. Something for everyone there.
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
Billed as the first (and greatest) ‘Sensation Novel’, this detective-esque tale of mystery and suspense gets the hairs on the back of your neck tingling from the very beginning, with Walter Hartright’s eerie encounter with a woman in white. It’s gothic and creepy, and perfect for our list.
The Italian by Ann Radcliffe
Although it has nothing in the way of ghosts or ghouls, The Italian is definitely a sinister read. Dark and mysterious, this work depicts the shadowy interwoven worlds of religion and criminality, playing out the story of the imprisonment of a girl in a nunnery, an assassin priest, and the workings of the Inquisition.
If you want your flesh to creep and toes to curl, this collection of Victorian tales will definitely tick the boxes. It includes horror stories from the pens of some of the greats of the time: Oscar Wilde, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, and Jean Lorrain, to name a few.
Lizzie Shannon-Little is a Community Manager at Oxford University Press and is totally petrified by horror movies.
For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter, Facebook, or here on the OUPblog. Subscribe to only Oxford World’s Classics articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
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Image credit: Frankenstein’s Monster, as played by Boris Karloff. By Universal Studios [public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
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October 27, 2013
How medical researchers become morally entangled
A huge amount of ethical angst swirls around the topic of informed consent. Can lay people who are considering signing up as subjects in a medical study really be made to understand the risks they are facing? Can information about these risks be communicated across cultural and educational gulfs? What degree of informed understanding should we expect subjects to have, anyway?
Underlying the process of informed consent, though, is a simpler and more fundamental issue. The one-sided focus of the medical-research ethics establishment on preventing harms and abuses has obscured this core function from view. We need to remember why consent is needed for participation in medical research in the first place. It is needed because the researchers need the subjects’ permission to do things that otherwise would be wrong to do. It is wrong to examine and touch people’s naked bodies in the ways researchers need to do, to collect samples of their blood, urine, and feces, and to collect detailed information on their medical histories without getting their permission. Their permission, or consent, is needed for a study to go on in a way that does not violate their rights not to be viewed or touched, not to have their tissue samples collected, and not to have detailed information about their medical histories shared without their permission. For short, we can call all of these “privacy” rights. These privacy rights are “don’t intrude” rights, not “don’t spill my secrets” rights. The latter, confidentiality rights, apply only after the bodies have been probed and assessed, the tissue samples have been examined and tested, and the medical histories stored.
Medical researchers are often not the personal physicians of their research subjects. To them, their research subjects are not their patients. Such medical researchers thus presumably do not owe the full set of moral responsibilities to their subjects that physicians do to their patients. Nonetheless, by asking their research subjects for special permission to touch or probe them, to collect tissue or fluid samples from them, or to elicit and transcribe their medical histories, medical researchers become morally entangled in the lives and needs of their subjects. This happens because they have asked these people to waive some of their privacy rights – their “don’t intrude” rights — and these people have complied with this request.
We can think of a moral entanglement as an obligation that arises unintentionally from a morally innocent or blameless transaction. A moral entanglement is the opposite of a promise. When I make a promise, I think out carefully in advance what I want to obligate myself to do. Then I say to another, “I promise that I will do X,” and the other says “OK.” Moral entanglements we stumble into even if no one intends it. We’re familiar with this phenomenon from everyday life. You start chatting with a stranger on a plane or a bus stop. Suddenly, you’re finding out facts about this person that reveal an urgent need – one the other might not be aware of, but that you are able to recognize and to address. Sometimes, one can break away with a clear conscience. Sometimes not.
We are particularly prone to becoming morally entangled with others’ needs when we invite them to waive some of their rights. When I successfully ask a friend to let me borrow his car, two things are going on. The fundamental one is that I get some limited permission to use the car. The other, more hidden layer is that I also get some special responsibility to take care of the car. It is hard to say exactly what the boundaries of that special responsibility are. They will depend on the context. Perhaps, if your friend’s car gets dinged while you’ve left it in a parking lot, you have a special responsibility to spend some time on the phone with the person who (hopefully) left a note with their insurance information.
When medical researchers successfully solicit waivers of privacy rights from prospective research subjects, they too take on special responsibilities. These special responsibilities center on the purpose and matter of those rights waivers. These researchers probe bodies and collecting samples and medical histories in order to extract information. The subjects’ waivers of their privacy rights thus conveys, not merely a simple permission to touch, probe, and collect, but also a special responsibility with regard to how the researchers treat this information. These special responsibilities ties back to the needs and interests of the people who gave them the special permissions that enable them to carry on with their research. This is the central explanation of why medical researchers get morally entangled with the lives and needs of their subjects.
The result is that medical researchers have special obligations of beneficence towards their research subjects — obligations that they do not have to similarly needy people who are not their research subjects. At an intuitive level, most medical researchers seem to feel that they do have special obligations towards their research subjects. This story about privacy-based moral entanglements explains why.
Concretely, these special obligations center on the information researchers glean by carrying out study procedures — by viewing and proving the subjects’ bodies, collecting samples from them, and eliciting their medical histories. This is the central reason why medical researchers have obligations to address their subjects’ need for ancillary care – medical care that their research subjects need but that is not necessary to conducting worthwhile and sound research in a safe manner. These special obligations are not the only basis of ancillary care duties. Some urgent needs are well-supported by a general duty of rescue that we each owe to every other person. Medical researchers’ special ancillary care obligations go beyond that. They cannot reasonably be viewed as covering all of the ancillary care needs that study procedures uncover, but how to articulate these reasonable limits in a concrete and practically useful way is a topic for another day.
Henry S. Richardson is a Professor of Philosophy, Georgetown University. He is the author of Moral Entanglements: The Ancillary-Care Obligations of Medical Researchers and Democratic Autonomy. Read his previous article on the OUPblog.
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Image credit: Closeup of doctor writing medical records form. © syazwanted via iStockphoto.
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New York City goes underground
Service on the first route of the New York City subway system began 109 years ago today, on 27 October 1904. The occasion was marked by ceremonies in City Hall, led by George A. McClellan and representatives of the Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT), the operators of that line. Mayor McClellan saw the opening of the subway as the beginning of a new era for the greater city.
“We have met here to-day for the purpose of turning over a page in the history of our city; for the purpose of marking the advent of a new epoch in her development. If this new underground railroad which we are about to open proves as popular and as successful as I confidently expect it to be it will only be the first of many more which must ultimately result in giving us an almost perfect system of interborough communication.
“When that day arrives, borough boundaries will be remembered only for administrative purposes, and New Yorkers, forgetting from what part of the city they come and only conscious of the fact that they are the sons of the mightiest metropolis if the world has ever seen, will be activated by a common hope and united in a common destiny” (New York Times, 28 October 1904).
Mayor McClellan himself operated the A train that left the City Hall Station at 2:35 p.m., enjoying the trip, although he complained about the posting of advertising in the stations. It arrived at the northern terminal at 145th Street and Broadway at 3:01 p.m. The subway was opened to the public, and by midnight 127,381 riders had made use of the subway. Before the end of 1904, the subway had extended further to the north in Manhattan and into the Bronx; in less than a year, it had extended south to the Battery, and work was underway to construct a link to Brooklyn.
Subway construction, August 25, 1908. Courtesy of the New York Public Library.
This was only the start of the construction of New York’s subway system. By 1920, that one line became all or parts of three routes, the Lexington-4th Avenue, Broadway-7th Avenue and 42nd Street Shuttle lines. Those lines were part of the first major rapid transit capital program, the Dual System Contracts. Many of the lines operated by the IRT and the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company (later the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Corporation). The Dual System Contracts were followed in the 1920s and beyond by the second capital program, which led to the opening of the Independent City-Owned Subway System (IND).
Mayor McClellan’s vision of the growth of the city was already coming true as service was beginning on the first subway line. The subways accelerated the growth and expansion of the city’s population and employment centers that began with the construction of the first elevated railroads in Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Edward Everett McCall (1863-1924), Chairman of the New York (State) Public Service Commission, with shovel, breaking ground for a subway in New York City. October 13, 1914. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
The subways and elevated lines would extend out through farmland and undeveloped regions far away from the downtown areas of each borough. Rural areas in the city were now well within reach. Real estate developers and the population would follow.
The developers obtained, divided, marketed, and sold tracts of land on the basis that the subway expansion programs were coming their way. People bought property based on that hope. Largely rural areas like Washington Heights, Flatbush, and Flushing became urbanized communities. Street grids extended outwards; villages grew and became larger communities.
The subway system could have extended ever further over the years that followed the opening of the first subway system 109 years ago. But the system is still growing, with the extension of the Flushing line to the Far West Side underway and the completion of the first phase of the 2nd Avenue Subway approaching. Even now, the opening of a subway line is viewed as being a positive step towards the growth and development of New York City as a whole.
Joseph B. Raskin is an independent scholar and the author of Routes Not Taken: A Trip Through New York City’s Unbuilt Subway System, a Fordham University Press publication. He is widely regarded as an authority on unbuilt subway systems, on which he has been interviewed by the New York Times. He is Assistant Director of Government and Community Relations for MTA New York City Transit.
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Gridlock and The Federalist
In the The Federalist, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay offer us urgent lessons for coping with the kind of gridlock that grips American government today. They were defending a plan intended to replace a failing national government. The proposed Constitution aimed to break a government stalemate that threatened the survival of the infant American republic. Politics could wreck the nation. They insist that politics had to save it.
Title page of the first printing of the Federalist Papers, 1788. From Rare Books and Special Collections Division in Madison’s Treasures. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
(1) Politics inevitably drives government. The Federalist argues that politics had to be accepted as inherent in any republican government. Madison’s Federalist 10 cautions that political factions are fixed in human nature. His Federalist 49 insists that legislatures always demonstrate the “enterprising ambition” for power. In Federalist 51, Madison emphasizes that government is “greatest of all reflections on human nature” — a stunning declaration in an Enlightenment world filling with splendid art, music, literature, and invention.
Madison, Hamilton, and Jay knew that no Constitution could eliminate politics, because they were politicians too — not in today’s derogatory sense, but in an older sense of people who saw government was a vocation and a civic opportunity. The Federalist authors were intimately familiar with the kind of politician disdained today: those who try to manipulate government for wealth, power, or other malevolent goals. Madison and Hamilton, though both in their thirties, already were experienced national political leaders. These ambitious young men considered the construction of a new national government the chance of a political lifetime. The framers were not angels, philosophers, or professors. They were politicians who wrote a Constitution for a variety of politicians to use.
(2) The Constitution aimed to control politics by deliberately making it hard to use the government. Because politics are inherent in human nature, their governments must make a virtue of necessity. The mere “parchment barriers” of a written constitution do not enforce themselves against inevitable maelstroms caused by political ambition. The Constitution accepts and nurtures ambitions by forcing ambitions to collide so that republican government can endure. As Madison puts it in Federalist 51, “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” This strategy “of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public.” The separation of powers is not a philosophical principle, but a contrivance, one of the preeminent “inventions of prudence.” The Federalist encourages even more political ambition by arguing that the national government should extend broadly, to embrace even more conflicting political interests to make it even more difficult for them to coalesce.
The Constitutional Convention had itself reinforced the necessity of using politics. Ingeniously, the Convention delegates used their political skills of compromise, deal-making, invention, and evasion to negotiate the Constitution. They settled difficult disputes simply by splitting the difference (Congress), delaying action (the slave trade), and deliberately papering over conflicts with ambiguous wording (“general welfare,” “necessary and proper,” “direct taxes”).
(3) Only negotiation and compromise can make the government work. The framers built a government that constantly puts such political skills to the test. Negotiation and compromise are required by the Constitution; they are its central nervous system. Majorities would rule, but it would be hard to construct majorities without negotiation. In this government, writes Madison in Federalist 62, “No law. . . can now be passed without the concurrence, first, of a majority of the people” as represented in the House of Representatives, “and then, of a majority of the States” as represented in the Senate. In Federalist 72, Hamilton points out that the president’s veto power did not prevent a bill from becoming law, but it did require a law to enjoy a broader consensus among an extraordinarily large majority of the people’s representatives.
(4) The breakdown of this political compromise threatens republican government. The Federalist authors condemned the moribund Confederation government because it made compromise and negotiation too difficult. Hamilton recognizes In Federalist 22 that “upon some occasions things will not admit of accommodation; and then the measures of government must be injuriously suspended, or fatally defeated. It is often, by the impracticability of obtaining the concurrence of the necessary number of votes, kept in a state of inaction. Its situation must always savor of weakness, sometimes border upon anarchy.” Madison concedes that, even in the new government, the separation of legislative power “may in some instances be injurious as well as beneficial . . .” (Federalist 62).
The National World War II Memorial closed during the United States federal government shutdown of 2013. Photo by reivax. CC 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
In 1787, it was urgent to fix the deteriorating Confederation government. Today, it is urgent for Americans to prevent the same fate from befalling the government that replaced it. Like the framers and Federalist authors, Americans must understand that it is necessary to embrace politics, because politics must break the gridlock that threatens their future.
David Brian Robertson is Curators’ Teaching Professor at the University of Missouri – St. Louis. He is the author of seven books, including The Original Compromise: What the Constitution’s Framers Were Really Thinking (Oxford University Press, 2013). A frequent commentator on current politics, he is the political analyst for KSDK-TV (NBC).
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October 26, 2013
Argentina’s elections: A Q&A
In anticipation of Argentina’s mid-term elections to be held on Sunday, 27 October 2013, Political Analysis co-editor R. Michael Alvarez (Caltech) discussed some of the most important things that we need to know about this contest with Francisco Cantu (University of Houston) and Sebastian Saiegh (UCSD), authors of “Fraudulent Democracy? An Analysis of Argentina’s Infamous Decade Using Supervised Machine Learning.”
Paper ballots used in Argentina’s 2011 Presidential Elections. Image by Banfield via Wikimedia Commons.
Your paper uses Argentina as a laboratory for studying whether social scientists can detect election fraud. Why Argentina?
During the decade of 1930s in Argentina, elections were marked by two patterns. First, despite no significant differences in turnout rates, elections in that period showed dramatic shifts in electoral support for the Radical and Conservative parties. Second, the period has a checkered history of electoral fraud, which identified this period in Argentine politics as the “infamous decade.” The motivation for our article was to provide empirical evidence for the manipulation allegations made by the opposition at that time and to identify the specific elections contaminated by fraud.
What are the implications of your paper for the upcoming elections in Argentina?
As Alston and Gallo (2010) argue, the widespread fraud during the “infamous decade” in Argentina marked the precedent for the current party system and the lack of checks and balances in the country. Regarding the specific implication of our paper, we provide evidence for a specific type of fraud that the opposition denounced: the informal disenfranchisement of opposition voters by brute force and intimidation and the replacement of those votes with ballots supporting the incumbent. Given the modern conditions to monitor elections and that modern malpractices in competitive elections appear in a decentralized and scattered way, such as the municipal elections in Japan or the gubernatorial elections in Mexico, that type of blatant manipulation is unlikely to appear nowadays. However, as long as it is possible to depict a model for the specific type of fraud that may occur during the forthcoming elections, the method we propose can be adjusted to test modern forms of electoral fraud, as the recent research in Colombia and Zambia.
What are the most important issues regarding the transparency of the national elections in Argentina?
Argentina’s voting system is quite outdated. Citizens vote with slips of paper that carry the names only of a given party’s candidates, like the coupon ballots used in the nineteenth-century United States. Each political party prints, distributes and supplies its own ballots during Election Day. This voting “technology” allows party operatives, to potentially condition any benefits (or punishments) targeted to individual voters on their receipt of the party printed ballot. It also implies that political parties often require thousands of poll-watchers to avoid ballot theft and to monitor the count in each of the polling stations. Therefore, the existing system tends to favor incumbents as well as political parties with territorial outreach and resources, namely president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s Front for Victory (Frente para la Victoria, FPV), the Peronist Party (Partido Justicialista, PJ) and the Radical Civic Union (Unión Cívica Radical, UCR).
How can the management of the country’s elections be improved?
The capacity to monitor individual vote choice could be reduced by the adoption of the so-called Australian ballot (AB). The recent experiences of Cordoba and Santa Fe, two provinces that experimented with the AB seem quite promising. Researchers at the Observatorio Electoral Argentino of the Center for the Implementation of Public Policies Promoting Equity (CIPPEC) found that voters were highly satisfied with the AB. The introduction of electronic voting could also make voting in Argentina a simpler and more pristine affair. Nonetheless, there are reasons to believe that one should be cautious in this respect. A recent study by Alvarez et al. (2013) measured the causal effect of replacing traditional voting technology with e-voting on the voting experience using data from an e-voting field experiment in Salta, the only Argentinean province where 100% of the registered voters are expected to cast an electronic ballot in the upcoming October elections. The authors found that while e-voters perceived the new technology as easier to use, it also raised some concerns about ballot secrecy. In addition, Katz et. al (2011) found that alternative voting technologies may favor some parties to the detriment of others and could lead to changes in election results. Therefore the adoption of new voting systems should take these effects into account when evaluating the implementation of different technologies.
What are the most interesting things that we might learn from this month’s elections in Argentina?
President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner’s Frente para la Victoria is one of the few parties with a large enough territorial organization to field candidates everywhere. As such, it is the favorite to carry the nationwide vote. Nonetheless, the results of the Open, Compulsory and Simultaneous Primaries (PASO) held on 11 August 2013 indicate that her party’s candidates will be defeated in five critical districts: the City of Buenos Aires, the province of Buenos Aires, Cordoba, Santa Fe, and Mendoza. The victorious leaders in these districts will be very well positioned to contend the presidential candidacies of their respective parties for the 2015 elections: Mauricio Macri (PRO), Elisa Carrio (UNEN), Sergio Massa (Frente Renovador), Jose Manuel de la Sota (Partido Justicialista), Hermes Binner (Frente Amplio Progresista), Julio Cobos (Union Civica Radical). In the case of the incumbent party, the most likely presidential candidates to emerge from this contest will be Daniel Scioli and Sergio Urribarri. The former is the governor of Buenos Aires, a province that concentrates 37.3% of the country’s registered voters. So, despite being the runner-up in his district, he could still stake a claim on the FPV’s mantle. The latter, is the governor of Entre Rios. If his chosen candidates repeat their performance in the August primaries, he could become the preferred choice of president Kirchner, who is term-limited and has never been too enthusiastic about Daniel Scioli.
Finally, you begin your paper asking, “How can we distinguish an electoral landslide from a stolen election?” In a nutshell, what’s the answer?
As Beber and Scacco (2009) suggest, “the devil is in the digits.” Assessing the integrity of an election by only looking at the final outcome is a challenging task, so we propose to analyze the electoral results at a more disaggregated level and to think in which way fraud should affect particular features of the vote tallies; in our case, we focused on the distribution of the first significant digits of the vote counts. If the particular type of fraud has an expected effect on the electoral results, then it is possible to simulate vote tallies with and without electoral manipulation to then assess whether the real data resemble a clean or a manipulated election. The extension of our method to other elections only relies on the plausibility of modeling the way in which fraud perpetrators cheat.
Dr. Francisco Cantu is an Assistant Professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Houston. Sebastian Saiegh is an Associate Professor in the Political Science Department at the University of California, San Diego. He is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Research Department of the Inter-American Development Bank. They are the co-authors of “Fraudulent Democracy? An Analysis of Argentina’s Infamous Decade Using Supervised Machine Learning” (available to read for free for a limited time) in Political Analysis.
Political Analysis chronicles the exciting developments in the field of political methodology, with contributions to empirical and methodological scholarship outside the diffuse borders of political science. It is published on behalf of The Society for Political Methodology and the Political Methodology Section of the American Political Science Association. Political Analysis is ranked #5 out of 157 journals in Political Science by 5-year impact factor, according to the 2012 ISI Journal Citation Reports. Like Political Analysis on Facebook and follow @PolAnalysis on Twitter.
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