How democratic is Estonia?

Posted: January 23rd, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Estonia, human rights, politics, thoughts | No Comments »

One way to look at how democratic a country is, is to look at who is represented in the government and parliament and whether this reflects the diversity of the population in the country. Having a diverse group of people in government helps to legitimise the government in the eyes of the minorities and brings better results overall.

The results of the recent census allows to look a little into how well the diversity of Estonian population translates into the mix of people who govern Estonia. I have decided to use just a few charts to show the situation regarding certain areas (all data from Statistics Estonia 2011 Population and Housing Census). Let’s start with citizenship.

Citizenship

citizenship

As can be seen from the chart, there are more than 190 000 people living more or less permanently in Estonia (ca 16% of population) who do not have Estonian citizenship. These people are not able to vote in Estonian parliamentary elections (although most of them can vote in the local government ones). Non-EU citizens are also not allowed to belong to any political party.

I have deliberately separated the EU citizens living in Estonia from other non-citizens, because their rights are quite well protected by EU law as well as Estonian law. The ca 185 000 non-citizens (more than the total population of Tartu and Narva combined) have mostly, however, Russian (non-EU) citizenship or are stateless.

Obviously, there are no non-citizens in the government or parliament so it is pointless to make these charts.

This means that there is a sizeable part of society that lack any output in national political context. None of the political parties are interested in representing them, because they cannot vote. They do have a strong link to Estonia, as many have been born here and lived here for many years (more than five years, which is generally the legal requirement in the EU to show integration into host Member State). They pay taxes and contribute to the society.

Gender

The gender pay gap is the highest of the EU in Estonia. Things are not much better when comparing political representation. When roughly half of the population is female, only 22% of Members of Parliament are female and only 8% of government ministers (one person). It does not seem that women are well represented in our democratic political system.

gender

Ethnic origin

This category is difficult due to problems with source data, but also the fact that people may identify with multiple ethnic origins. According to the census data, there are people from 192 different ethnic nationalities living in Estonia, with largest groups being Estonians and Russians. Now, it is not easy to find out the ethnic nationalities of members of Riigikogu, but I guesstimate that there are fewer than 25% of ethnic Russians in the Parliament. In government, it is rather easy to see that all of the ministers are Estonians. I might be mistaken, but since re-independence, there has been only one government minister who is not Estonian (Eldar Efendijev who was minister of population 2002-2003).

nationality

Other

There are a number of minority groups, which might have issues with political representation (there are no openly gay members of parliament or government, for example). There are only a few people with disabilities in parliament and none in government (at least that we know of).

These are issues that should be addressed in our democracy. Of course it is not possible to mirror in parliament and government exactly the diversity in society, that would be a completely ridiculous exercise, but more should be done to discuss and address why certain groups in society are more and certain groups less represented. In terms of success of the society, the less there are opportunities wasted, the more voices heard, the stronger and better the democracy is. By cutting certain people off from political representation, the whole society loses.

 



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