Arnold Kling    Paul Collier on Democracy  Macroeconomic
Disconnects... Stiglitz and Orszags on Fannie...  He writes,
What incumbents fear most is not losing an election, but being
overthrown by their own military. When the international
community can protect a government from such a threat, it should
do so, conditional upon the election being properly conducted.
For example, the ousting of the properly elected president of
Madagascar in 2008 by a coup could have been averted by prompt
international military action. Ultimately, transparent budgets
and security guarantees might be enough to nudge these elections
closer to our democratic ideal.  I am wary of the term
"international community." It is a nice way of saying coercion
exerted by some governments on other governments.  I think that
the larger issue is that elections, even fair ones, are much
overrated. In Unchecked and Unbalanced, I make the case that
monopoly government is becoming increasingly incongruent with
the specialization and dispersion of k