From Poverty to Power Green, Oxfam 2008 - weman

I VOTE, THEREFORE I AMWhether in Florida, Lagos, or Nairobi, elections can be chaotic events.Over the course of a day, a single common act unites the citizens ofa country, unleashing hopes and fears, unity and division, fair playand foul. Stolen or fraudulent elections can trigger instability andviolence. But stand back, and perhaps the most astonishing aspect ofthe spread of elections, however flawed, is that they happen at all.Governments elected by universal suffrage were perhaps the mostnotable political innovation of the twentieth century. In 1900, NewZealand was the only country with a government elected by all itsadult citizens. By the end of the century, despite a number of severereversals (including fascism and communism and succeeding wavesof military coups against elected governments), there were ostensibly120 electoral democracies in place (out of 192 existing countries), ofwhich some 85 were thought to be ‘full’ democracies, in the sense thatthey provided respect for the rule of law and civil and political rights. 98The pace of democratisation has accelerated in recent decades.After Portugal in 1974, democracy spread first to Greece and Spainand subsequently to Latin America, where elected civilian governmentsreplaced military rulers in nine countries between 1979 and1985. The mid 1980s and early 1990s saw democratisation in thePhilippines, South Korea, Taiwan, Bangladesh, and Nepal. The fall ofthe Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991prompted competitive elections in most of the former Soviet bloc,79