California’s Recall Is Riding a Global Wave
From Nigeria to Brazil, Democracies Are Experimenting With New Ways for People to Hold Their Elected Officials Accountable
The recall attempt against Gov. Gavin Newsom is being widely—and wrongly—dismissed as a peculiar and illegitimate consequence of California’s strange direct democracy.
The truth is that the recall is very much a piece of a large and desperate global search for tools to hold powerful elected leaders accountable.
You can see the hunger for methods—any methods—to remove faltering officials in every corner of the world.
Recently, for example, a leading Nigerian scholar, Maduabuchi Ogidi of the Alvan Ikoku Federal College of Education in Owerri, wrote in infuriating detail how the democratization of his …
