Is 2008 Working?
So, I started reading James Madison a bit deeper. Last week when I was going over the Federalist Papers, I saw that he has written a thing or two about small republics. I then ended up reading about people Madison was arguing with, and the people he borrowed ideas from. Here, today, I want to set out, as honestly as I can, why I think the democratic system we set up in 2008 doesn't work in the Maldives, and why I don't think it's going to start working if we just wait a bit longer or elect better people.
A few things up front.
These are my own views and I'm also no scholar. I explain these views I have written here the way I understood them.
Everything I argue here is about the shape of the system, about who holds which power and who gets to appoint and sack whom. Maldivians shouldn't have less say. If anything, more.
People talk about 2008 as if we adopted "democracy" in general, as one thing. What we actually adopted was a particular design. In August 2007 there was a referendum on the system of government, and voters chose a presidential system over a parliamentary one, 62.04% to 37.96%. The 2008 Constitution followed from that. The president is elected directly by the whole country for five years and can serve two terms. The president picks the cabinet. There's a People's Majlis elected separately. And there's a set of independent bodies, the courts and the Judicial Service Commission, the Elections Commission, the Anti-Corruption Commission, the Auditor General and so on, which are supposed to stand apart from whoever wins.
We don't have Westminster system. We have something much closer to the American model, a big directly elected executive with a separately elected legislature, dropped onto a country with fewer citizens than many American cities.
The 2022 census counted 515,132 people living here, and 382,639 of them were Maldivian. The rest are foreign workers. We live on about 187 inhabited islands, many of them with a few hundred or a few thousand people. If you divide the Maldivian population by each parliament seat you get roughly 4,100 people per seat, and this includes children. A parliament seat here is decided by a crowd you could fit into one wedding. Well, a few weddings.
Politics here has become a five-year popularity contest. Whoever wins the presidency gets the cabinet, political appointments, boards of the state companies, housing schemes, contracts and, given a bit of time, a strong say over referees too. Whoever loses gets very little. So everyone fights as if their livelihood depends on it, because for a lot of people it does. The word for the result is clientelism. It just means politics run on favours. I give you my vote, you look after me. Sometimes that's cash. More often it's a job, a place on a housing list, a contract for your brother's company, a scholarship for your daughter.
It's rarely put that crudely. Nobody needs to say it out loud.
Transparency Maldives sent observers out for the 2023 presidential election. In 37% of their long-term observer reports they recorded cash being offered for votes. In 31% they recorded favours being promised. And in 42% they recorded voters themselves asking for money or favours, with amounts ranging from MVR 1,000 to MVR 20,000.
Then look at who pays the wages. On World Bank figures the public sector was 47.1% of all employment here in 2019, the highest of the 139 economies in their data. The civil service alone had 30,127 people in 2023. The state-owned enterprises (SOEs) employ more than 42,000, according to what the Finance Minister said in April 2026. And as of 2025 there were thousands of political appointees. Every one of those posts is something a winner can hand out.
When nearly half or more of the jobs in a country depend one way or another on the state, an election turns into a fight over who holds the keys to the payroll, and policy comes a long way second.
The IMF interestingly also found the central government wage bill went from 13% of GDP in 2004 to 21% in 2008. Some of that was hiring after the Tsunami. So the old government when it faced a real contest, reached for exactly the same tools as what the governments after it has been doing all along. At least we can say that contest does this to whoever is running. The debt is the other half. General government debt was 39.0% of GDP in 2008. It hit 155.7% in 2020 when COVID shut tourism down, and the IMF's estimate for 2025 is 125.4%. Fitch has us at CCC−. COVID was a real shock. But debt was climbing well before it, through all the governments.
And then there's the even uglier part of this whole charade, which is what all this does to us as people. Families split along party lines and people stop speaking to each other. Islands believe, sometimes correctly, that they're being rewarded or punished for how they voted. We are a small, close, related people and the system keeps setting us against each other every five years, and there is no time in between to heal because the next round is already starting. So, Madison. James Madison was one of the men who designed the American constitution in 1787, and with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay he wrote the Federalist Papers to persuade the people of New York to ratify it. They're newspaper essays, which helps. Some of the sentences go on forever.
Madison started from a list of complaints, and he finalized the theory much later. In April 1787, before the convention, he wrote a private memo called "Vices of the Political System of the United States". He'd been watching the individual American states, which were small and very democratic, and he didn't like what he saw. Their legislatures kept passing laws that helped whoever had the majority locally, debt relief for debtors, paper money, that kind of thing, at the expense of everyone else. The laws were perfectly legal and properly voted for, and they were unjust. And he asked what, in a system where the majority makes the law, is supposed to stop a majority from trampling on the minority when it has a shared interest in doing so. That question is the whole of Madison really. What frightened him about small republics was that they'd be democratic in the worst way, with a settled majority winning every vote and then using perfectly lawful power against the people who lost.
In Federalist No. 10 he calls this faction. A faction, for him, is a group of citizens, could be a minority, could be a majority, held together by some shared passion or interest that runs against other people's rights or against the long-term good of the whole community. He thought we couldn't get rid of the causes. People will always have different interests and different opinions, and the only way to stop factions forming is to take away liberty itself, which is worse than the disease. His line is "Liberty is to faction what air is to fire." You don't put out the fire by taking away the air, because then everyone suffocates.
So faction stays, and what we can manage is what it does. And a minority faction is easy to control, he says, because the majority just outvotes it. The real danger is a majority faction, because in a popular government the majority holds the vote, and the vote was supposed to be the protection. He also says, very drily, that you can't count on good leaders to fix it, "Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm."
Now the part that matters for us. Madison's big idea was that size helps.
Madison says the smaller the society, the fewer distinct parties and interests there'll probably be, and the fewer interests there are, the more often one group will find itself in the majority, and the smaller and more compact that majority is, the easier it is for them to get together and carry out their plans. Make the country bigger, bring in more interests, more regions, more trades, more religious groups, and it gets harder for any one group to form a majority with a motive to invade everyone else's rights. Even if they do have the motive, they find it harder to discover each other and act together.
He put it even more bluntly in a private letter to Thomas Jefferson in October 1787, where he says that divide and rule, which is the old maxim of tyrants, is under certain conditions the only way a republic can be run justly. For Madison, lots of competing interests was how a republic protected itself.
I have known people who have misquoted him. Madison never said a small country can't be a republic! His argument is all about the tendency. "Probably." "More frequently." "More easily." He's talking about, I believe the very real risk. A small republic, in his view, is a higher-risk republic.
But look at what that risk means here. We have one religion, which is a condition of citizenship. One language. One capital where more than 42% of employed residents live. An economy that leans on tourism, fishing and above all the state. The deep differences that, in a big country, cut across each other and stop any single bloc from dominating (north versus south, farmers versus factory owners, traditional versus modernists, whatever it might be) mostly aren't there. What divides us is which leader you're with and what that leader can do for your family and friends. That's what Madison's small society almost exactly meant. Fewer distinct interests, a majority that can form around one person, and a tight, compact place like Male’ where everyone can find everyone on the course of a day.
And in April 2024, as before that, one party won 66 of the 93 seats in the Majlis, a two-thirds supermajority, organised around the current president. In a society with the kind of variety Madison was counting on, that's rare. Here it happened, and it will happen again and again. Madison knew size wasn't enough on its own. So in Federalist No. 51 he adds a second defence inside the government itself. This is the famous one. "If men were angels, no government would be necessary." Since we aren't, you have to set things up so that the government can control the people and then, harder, so that it has to control itself. Elections are the first check, but experience shows you need what he calls auxiliary precautions. Split the power between branches and give each one the legal means and the personal motive to resist the others. "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition."
The key word there is motive. Madison didn't trust anyone to be good for long.
Madison wanted people's own ambitions to push them into defending their own patch. A legislator who wants to keep his seat should have reasons to stand up to the executive. A justice with a secure post and a fixed salary has no reason to fear the president. So, there are two layers. The outer one is a large and varied society. The inner one is separated powers with real motives behind them.
So, what happens in a small republic is that it loses the outer layer by its very definitions. It has to rely entirely on the inner one.
Now, if we think about what happened to the inner layer here. In November 2024 the constitution was amended so that an MP who changes party, or gets expelled, loses his seat. I understand why people wanted it, floor-crossing for reward had been a real problem. But look at what it does to Madison's mechanism. The MP's ambition now depends on staying loyal to his party's leadership, and if his party holds the presidency, then his ambition is tied to the president's. Ambition no longer counteracts ambition.
Then the courts. In February 2025 the Supreme Court bench went from seven justices to five. In May 2025 the Parliament removed two justices, and their suspension stopped the court's challenge to the anti-defection amendment. The referee was taken off the pitch in the middle of the match. And the referee's replacement will be appointed by the people who won.
Madison also cared a lot about information. In 1822, writing to a Kentucky politician called W. T. Barry about public schooling, he said that a popular government without popular information, or the means of getting it, "is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both." Here, recently a media law was passed in 2025 that set up a commission with powers to fine, block and suspend news media. Freedom House now gives us 1 out of 4 for media freedom.
There's one more Madison line I remember from Federalist No. 55. "Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob." His point is that a badly structured body behaves badly whoever sits in it. We could fill our Parliament with saints, and the incentives would still pull them the same way. It’s just how humans are, I am sure one or two of you will give me an example of a saint or an incorruptible person, but they are outliers. You don’t design systems for the one in a 100,000 angel within the human species. I find that oddly comforting. It puts the blame on what we built, and we can always rebuild things.
The next person, I had to look in to was Socrates, I am sure each one of us who had spared a little bit more than 5 minutes to ponder about the history and the world will know who Socrates is.
Socrates, as far as I know, did not writing anything himself. We know him mostly through his student Plato. The famous democratic Athens put him on trial and executed him. In Plato's Republic there's a famous image about a ship. Socrates asks you to picture a ship whose owner is big and strong but a bit deaf and short-sighted and doesn't know much about sailing. The crew are all fighting over who should steer. None of them has learned how to steer by the stars, and they say it can't be taught anyway. They flatter the owner, they give him all the drink and food, they throw the rival crew members overboard, and whoever wins the scramble takes the helm and turns the voyage into a party with the ship's stores. Meanwhile the one person on board who actually studied and studied the stars, the wind is dismissed as a stargazer and a waste of space. Interesting image for anyone I guess, especially in today age and time.
So, reading the ship passage, one might think that in our politics we have built a system where the crew who win the scramble get to choose who's allowed to read the charts, and choose who steers.
Now, Plato's answer to this was rule by philosopher kings, a trained elite who'd govern because they knew best. Well, I don't think this is the most optimal way forward, maybe Nayib Bukele will disagree. What will probably happen is that if we put the experts in charge, they too will become a faction, and nobody can vote them out. It is just a part of being human. But the diagnosis, the bit about a crew who've learned that seizing the wheel is more rewarding than sailing the ship, that bit I recognise.
What is interesting is that Plato changed his mind as he got older. His last big work, the Laws, is much more practical and much less sure of itself.
He fixes the number of households at 5,040. Part of the reason is maths (it divides by lots of numbers) but part of it is that the citizens should be able to know each other. So Plato liked small, like a lot of the thinkers I'll get to.
More useful for me was his idea of the two "mother" constitutions. In Book III of the Laws he says, more or less, that there are two root forms of government. One is monarchy, and his example is Persia. The other is democracy, and his example is Athens. Both, he argues, went wrong when they were pushed to the extreme. Persia ended up with too much authority and no freedom. Athens ended up with too much freedom and no respect for any authority. A good state, he says, needs a share of both. Some of the monarchic principle, some of the democratic, held in balance. Well… this is quite interesting, in our case in the Maldives we have had centuries of monarchy and then a republic that for long stretches was run by one man at a time with very little check. And since 2008 we've swung towards a kind of politics where the only authority anyone respects is the authority of having won, that also for a fortnight. Plato's idea is that you need a bit of each, and the tricky part is to figure out how to mix them. In the Republic Plato also describes how a democracy slides into tyranny. Freedom becomes the only value. A popular champion comes forward who promises the people what belongs to others, and the people back him against his enemies, and step by step he becomes their master instead of their servant. It could be anything, against wealthy people, against landowners, against entrepreneurs, against basically any group. Humans tend to flock together against a common enemy, so the task at hand is to construct an enemy for people to group against and leading the group as its master. Plato had no time for democracy, and I do, so I won't push it. But the route he describes, from champion of the people to someone nobody can remove, is one any small country should watch closely.
Aristotle was Plato's student and much more down to earth. He and his students collected accounts of well over a hundred real constitutions.
He thought a state could be too big as well as too small. In Book VII he argues that if citizens are going to choose officials and decide lawsuits on merit, they have to know each other's characters. Where they don't, both elections and court cases go wrong. So the best size is the largest number that's still self-sufficient and can be "taken in at a single view." Well this is obviously a bit deviated from the principle I am working with. Aristotle treats the fact that everyone knows everyone as a good thing. It's exactly the condition I'm saying makes our democracy fail. After thinking about this, where I've got to is that knowing someone's character is one thing and owing him is another. Aristotle's citizens knew each other, but they were roughly independent men voting on who'd be the best magistrate. In our case, we certainly know the candidate. We know he's your cousin's husband. You know your nephew's job at STELCO might depend on him. We know his family helped yours when your father had to be taken to Asters Medicity under Aasandha. All that knowledge does go into your vote, but it goes in as obligation, and very little of it is about whether he's fit for office. Aristotle's mutual knowledge was supposed to make elections wiser. Ours makes them more personal, and more about debt.
Aristotle also wrote at length, in Book V, about why constitutions break down. He calls it stasis, which is roughly faction or civil strife. Democracies, he says, are usually overturned by demagogues who flatter the people and attack the rich and then take power for themselves. And one of the things he says matters most for keeping any constitution stable is that holding office shouldn't be a way of making money. The people don't mind so much being kept out of office, he says, as long as they don't think the officials are helping themselves to public funds. What they really resent is seeing office turned into profit.
Well, we have 1000s of political appointees officially and of course more multiples of that indirectly through SOEs. And scandals like the MMPRC where million of USD were diverted, and the Auditor General who exposed it was removed, we can name quite a lot. I believe Aristotle would have recognized all of it.
One last thing from Aristotle.. He talks about kingship in some detail, and he's interested in the limited kind, like the Spartan kings who had very defined roles. In Book V he tells the story of a Spartan king who agreed to reduce his own powers. His wife asked whether he wasn't ashamed to hand on a smaller kingship to his sons than he'd inherited, and he said no, because he was handing on one that would last longer. Aristotle's point is that the fewer powers a king holds, the longer the kingship survives. This is wise, and would be considered common sense now, and I believe a lot of people do advocate for it in a liberal democracy.
For about two thousand years, nearly everyone who thought about republics agreed they had to be small. Then came Madison and turned that upside down, and the man his opponents kept quoting at him was Montesquieu.
Montesquieu was a French magistrate and nobleman, and his big book, The Spirit of the Laws, came out in 1748. It's enormous and in my opinion, it is all over the place, I am not an expert, I did read it, but I think I did not really get to the inner core of the material, but, nevertheless, a few ideas in it went everywhere. One is that there are three kinds of government, each with its own spirit. A republic runs on virtue, by which he means love of the laws and of equality, the willingness to put the public good ahead of your own. A monarchy runs on honour. A despotism runs on fear.
And republics, he says, belong in small places. In Book VIII he writes that "It is natural for a republic to have only a small territory; otherwise it cannot long subsist." In a large republic there are great fortunes and less moderation, and the public good gets sacrificed to a thousand private views. In a small one, the public interest is more obvious, better understood, closer to every citizen.
So on Montesquieu's terms the Maldives should be ideal. I've gone back and forth on this, and where I've landed is that Montesquieu was right about the mechanism and quite wrong about what it produces here. Yes, in a small place everything is more visible, I am sure all Tom, Dicks and Harrys will agree. The public good is visible. So is the private good. Everyone can see exactly who got the job, who got the flat, whose brother got the contract, and what island got the harbour or the airport.
Visibility in Montesquieu's republic was supposed to make people act for the common good because they could see it. In ours it makes people act for their own family because they can see, very precisely, what the other family is getting.
And his republic depends on virtue in a very particular sense, equality and frugality. A citizen of Montesquieu's republic doesn't want much and doesn't have much more than his neighbour. Well, that isn't us. We have one of the world's great luxury tourism industries sitting next to islands where housing is the first thing anyone complains about. The gap between Malé and the atolls is real. Montesquieu would have said that's exactly the condition in which a republic's virtue goes rotten.
There's something else in Montesquieu that I think matters more than the bit about size. He spent a lot of the book on what he called the general spirit of a nation, the mix of climate, religion, laws, customs, manners and history that makes each people what it is. He thought laws should fit the people they're made for, and that it would be a GREAT coincidence if the laws of one nation suited another. Our 2008 Constitution was put together rather quickly, with a lot of borrowed parts. Some of the parts were good. Nobody asked hard enough, though, whether they fitted a country of a few hundred thousand related people spread across a few hundred islands. And one which had a long span of administrative networks in place, long tensioned, and long endured.
Montesquieu's most famous chapter, the one that gave the world the idea of separating legislative, executive and judicial power, is about England. A monarchy. He admired the English system because power was set against power, and he describes England somewhere as a nation where the republic hides behind the form of a monarchy. So the man everyone quotes for small republics thought one of the freest countries he knew was a crowned one, with the actual governing done by others and the powers kept apart.
Rousseau was next and his works are hard, very hard. Well, at least for me. The Social Contract (1762) is short, but it's super slippery. He'll define a word one way on one page and use it differently a few pages later, or that's how it felt to me. Extremely confusing, I am a student of science and engineering, my tool kit is full of laws of nature and mathematics, so this was, to put it plainly, quite irritating to me!
His big idea is the general will. Sovereignty belongs to the people as a whole, and a law is legitimate only if it expresses what the whole people wills for the common good, as opposed to what each person wants for himself. He thought the general will could be bent out of shape by what he called partial associations, groups inside the state with interests of their own. Best if there are none, he says, and if there have to be some, better to have many of them and keep them equal, so none can dominate. That's actually quite close to Madison, coming from the other direction.
Rousseau also liked small states. He thought democracy (by which he meant the people themselves carrying out the laws, not just making them) suited small states, aristocracy middle sized ones, and monarchy big ones.
And then he lists four conditions for real democracy. A very small state, where the people can easily meet and everyone can know everyone else. Great simplicity of manners. A lot of equality in rank and fortune. And little or no luxury. Right after that comes the line most people remember, “Were there a people of gods, their government would be democratic. So perfect a government is not for men."
I found Rousseau's conditions useful as a kind of checklist. We meet the first one easily. Very small, everyone knows everyone. But the other three we don't meet, at all! Our manners are far from simple, we're plugged into the global economy and the global internet like everyone else. Equality of fortune isn't there. And luxury, well, luxury is literally the business we're in. Rousseau, I think, would point at inequality and luxury before he pointed at size. He's partly right, though I'd add that the inequality that matters most here is between the people with access to the state and the people without it. Two other things from Rousseau surprised me. He says the best form of government is elective aristocracy, the wisest governing on behalf of everyone, chosen by election. And he has a passage about hereditary monarchy that I've read a couple of times. He's critical of it. He says that by making the crown hereditary, nations chose an apparent peace over wise government, and accepted the risk of children and fools on the throne rather than fight over the choice of a good king at every election. That is a fair criticism. But.. notice the bit that he's admitting. The alternative to heredity, for the top office, is a fight at every election, each and every election.. I would go further and say, for all types of elections it is definitely a fight. That's exactly what we have, and he describes the cost of it quite precisely. David Hume is the one I enjoyed most. He was a Scottish philosopher and historian, a generation older than Madison, and he writes like a sensible man talking to you over dinner. Madison borrowed a lot from him. I had the good fortune to visit his place of research and even took a picture with his very well-made statue in Edinburgh.
In an essay called "Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth", published in 1752, Hume took on the old view that only a city or small territory could be a republic. He thought the opposite was probably true. His line is that "Though it is more difficult to form a republican government in an extensive country than in a city; there is more facility, when once it is formed, of preserving it steady and uniform, without tumult and faction."
This, I think describes our last eighteen years better than anything else I've read. A small republic is easy to set up. Everyone's close together, everyone can agree quickly, you can draft a constitution and hold an election in a couple of years, which is roughly what we did. Keeping the whole thing steady is the hard part. Hume says in a city the "force of popular tides and currents" is felt very sharply, because everyone is near everyone. "Democracies are turbulent," he says, just like that. In a big state the parts are so far apart that it's hard to whip them all up into the same passion at once.
In 2008, we had a new constitution, a new president. Within a couple of years that president had resigned in the middle of a … let’s say a complication. Within ten years the Chief Justice had been arrested under a state of emergency. Within seventeen the Supreme Court bench had been cut and two justices removed. In between there have been genuine corrections at the ballot box, more than once. But it's the pattern Hume describes. Easy to found. Very, very and very hard to hold steady. Every tide in Malé runs through the whole country within a day or less. The whole country is whipped by a couple of social media handlers operating in main platforms like X, and Facebook.
Hume has another essay that I now think about every time someone tells me we just need better people in charge. It's called "Of the Independency of Parliament", from the 1740s, and it opens with the maxim that when you design a system of government and its checks, "every man ought to be supposed a knave." He means you should assume everyone will act in their own interest and design the checks so that even knaves are pushed into serving the public. He admits it's strange for a maxim to be true in politics and false in fact.
Hume says men behave worse in groups than alone, because a party will always approve of what helps the party, and honour stops being a check once your own side is cheering you on. That's a very precise description of what happens to decent people once they're inside a campaign.
And then there's Hume's essay "Of Parties in General", which honestly could have been written about us. He sorts factions into different kinds. Some are factions of interest, groups who want different material things. Some are factions of principle, people who disagree about ideas. And some he calls factions of affection, which are based on attachment to particular families and persons. People generally follow a leader or a family. I don't need to explain to a Maldivian what that looks like. Our parties have split along individual characters or family lines more than once. People will tell you which group or individual they're with before they'll tell you what they believe about debt or housing, or technology etc.
Hume does not agree with me on legitimacy as well. He thought governments rest on opinion, mostly on long habit. People obey because their fathers did. Our republic is decades old and most Maldivians alive have known nothing else, so by Hume's logic anyone proposing a big change starts at a disadvantage. I accept that. People here are deeply attached to voting, though, and I'm much less sure they're attached to this particular design.
I hadn't realised what a fight the American argument was. Madison's side won, so we remember them. But there was a whole crowd of writers on the other side, now called the Anti-Federalists, who wrote under Roman pen names in the newspapers. The ones that come up most are "Brutus", "Cato" and "Centinel". Historians think Brutus was probably the New York lawyer Robert Yates, Cato possibly the New York governor George Clinton, and Centinel probably Samuel Bryan in Pennsylvania, but nobody's completely sure.
The writings of these people were collected much later by an American scholar called Herbert Storing, in The Complete Anti-Federalist (1981), and Storing's argument was that we should take them seriously as founders too. I decided to have a read, intrigued, and dare I say, I do agree with him.
Brutus, in his first essay in October 1787, said a free republic could not succeed over a country as huge as the United States. And then he said this, "In a republic, the manners, sentiments, and interests of the people should be similar." If they aren't, there'll be constant clashing of opinions. For Brutus, being alike was what made a republic work, because people who are alike agree on the common good and their representatives resemble them.
If Brutus was right, a people as alike as Maldivians should make the ideal republic. Madison said similarity produces an unopposed majority. We're pretty much the test case between them.
Where I come down is that Brutus assumed a sameness of interests that we don't have, even though we have sameness of everything else. Our manners and sentiments are similar to a certain extent. Our interests split the moment an election is called, because so much of the economy runs through the state, and whoever wins the state wins the economy. Two extended families on an island of about 1500 people, having the same kind of daily lives, can have completely opposite interests in who's president, because one of them gets the council job and the other doesn't. Brutus's homogeneity was supposed to produce consensus. But in our case, it produces a winner and a loser.
But the Anti-Federalists got something else very right. They were terrified of the presidency. Cato warned that the president's powers and his ability to be re-elected looked a great deal like a king's, and that the office could grow into one. Brutus, in later essays, warned that the new federal courts would be so free of any check that they'd stretch their own power, which is the opposite worry, but it comes from the same instinct about concentrated power. Centinel thought the whole thing was a design to put power in a few hands and wanted simple government where you can see who's responsible.
And it wasn't only the Anti-Federalists. Thomas Jefferson, who was in Paris at the time and had mixed feelings about the constitution, wrote to John Adams in November 1787 that the new president "seems a bad edition of a Polish king."
Poland at that time elected its kings, and these elections were notorious for intrigue, bribery and foreign meddling. Jefferson's fear was that a president who could be re-elected again and again would turn every election into that kind of auction for a prize worth almost any price. I can't think of a better description of a five-year presidential contest in a small country. We built exactly the elected king the Anti-Federalists were afraid of. So every 5 years we put the king price up for auction, and our society is so small that bids can be delivery by hand.
Alexis de Tocqueville was a young French aristocrat who went to America in the 1830s, officially to study prisons, and came back with Democracy in America, two volumes, 1835 and 1840. I read some of the parts initially, because I planned to read only those parts relevant to a curious itch I had, but I ended up reading the whole thing.
His first big idea, for me, is that small nations have always been the cradle of political liberty. He noticed that many small nations lost their freedom as they grew bigger, which suggested to him that their freedom had a lot to do with their size. So, again, a thinker who likes small. And his solution for America was to keep the small inside the big.
The second is the one he's famous for, the tyranny of the majority.
Tocqueville saw that a democratic majority can do something subtler than pass oppressive laws. It can surround thought with a kind of wall. You're free to say what you like, in principle, but if you step outside what the majority thinks you'll find yourself shut out, socially and at work, until speaking up just doesn't seem worth it. He said he knew of no country "in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America." This was America, supposedly the land of liberty. Well, if you think bout this on the scale of a Maldivian island, this isn't a theory. Everyone knows who said what. My critics are my neighbors, and my neighbor’s cousin works in the ministry that renews my license. Nobody has to pass a law against criticising the government. People already know what it might cost them, or their brother, or their son's scholarship. In a big country a dissenter can disappear into the crowd. In Maldives, there is literally no crowd to disappear into.
And there's a second danger Tocqueville describes in his later volume that I think about. He imagined a new kind of despotism, very gentle, that wouldn't torment people but would look after them. An immense power that provides for people's needs and manages their affairs, and in doing so keeps them in a sort of permanent childhood. He meant it as a warning about where democracies might drift. But, in our case the whole whelmeing portion of employment depends on the state, and housing, scholarships, medical treatment abroad and subsidies all flow from the same place, you can see how a population ends up looking upwards to the state for everything, and how that changes what people are willing to say and to whom.
So we have created yet again a family with a patriarch/matriarch and we are their teenage kids, it is quite difficult to rise up against the person giving us our weekly allowance.
Tocqueville's remedy was local self-government and a thick layer of voluntary associations between the individual and the state. Clubs, societies, newspapers. Things people ran for themselves. Jefferson had a similar idea, actually. In his old age he wrote about "ward republics", dividing each county into small wards where every citizen could take part in person, so that the small republic lived inside the big one.
If the problem is concentration, then pushing power down to islands and atolls and building up local councils and civil society would help, and I may be would support it. But… as it is now, this is the picture, in December 2025 the constitution was amended to abolish atoll councils from the next local elections. Island councils depend on Malé for most of what they do. And our associations, have long had a way of getting pulled into party politics, because everything here eventually does. Tocqueville's associations need a bit of space that no party owns, and I don't think our current system gives them any.
John Stuart Mill is the English liberal everyone's heard of because of On Liberty. The book that's more relevant for me is Considerations on Representative Government, from 1861. It's clear, which I was grateful for after Rousseau.
Mill thought representative government was, in principle, the best form of government, mainly because it makes citizens active. It asks things of people and so it improves them. I do agree with him.
But Mill also asked when representative government fails. A people has to be willing to accept it, and willing and able to do what it takes to keep it going and carry out its duties. He warns that a people who can be taken in by the tricks of a would-be despot may lose it. And he says a people may be unfit for it if they don't have the habit of cooperating beyond their family and their locality.
Beyond family and locality. A kinship society like ours does cooperate, enormously. I remember (when I was a bit young though) when the whole of an island helps to pull boats from the boatyard to the sea, not for a fee or anything, but just to help one of us. But it cooperates in circles that start with the family and the island, and the national state gets treated as the place where your circle competes with other circles. I don't particularly see a moral failing in that. You'd expect it when everyone you trust is related to you. But Mill's point stands.
Representative government needs people to treat some things as belonging to everyone, and our system gives them every reason not to.
I want to be fair to Mill. He didn't think a people's character was fixed. He thought the capacity for self-government grows with practice, and that people get ready for free institutions by using them. He also rejected the idea of a "good despot" quite firmly. Even a wise and benevolent ruler, he says, leaves the people passive and stunted. If someone took my argument as a case for a strongman, Mill would probably take up arms against me.
I'm not proposing anyone stronger. I want to keep the elected parliament, and a government that answers to it.
I'm worried about something narrower, which is that our current design hands the winner the referees of the game too, and I don't see Mill defending that. He was a great believer in a professional civil service recruited by open competition, because he could see how patronage in appointments corrupted government. He also argued for proportional representation, so that minorities wouldn't be wiped out by whoever won the most votes. Both of those are about stopping the winner from owning everything. I think he'd recognise our problem even if he wouldn't like my answer.
So that’s philosophers take on my thesis, next are the political scientists.
Robert Dahl, one of the great American political scientists, wrote Size and Democracy with Edward Tufte in 1973. Tufte later became famous for books about how to draw good charts, which I have to say I personally appreciate. Their conclusion is that no size is best for a democracy, and you get a trade-off instead. Small units are better at what they call citizen effectiveness, meaning each person's vote counts for more and leaders are easier to reach. Large units are better at system capacity, the ability to handle big complicated problems and to tolerate a wide spread of opinion. You can't maximise both.
That fits us. Our citizen effectiveness is astonishing (probably even your MP answers his phone, and half the time you can meet him for a coffee) and our system capacity is weak. And Dahl and Tufte noted one more thing about small units that I think matters a lot for us. They tend to be more consensual, but they give dissenters fewer exits and less anonymity. If you fall out with the powers that be in a big country you can move to another city or find another employer. Here, if you fall out with the government, there's a good chance the government is the only employer or the only entity that has its hands on everything connected to you. From the early 1990s onwards, people like Axel Hadenius in Sweden (Democracy and Development, 1992), Dana Ott (whose book is actually called Small is Democratic, 2000), Dag Anckar in Finland and Hilliard Srebrnik (who wrote on small island nations and democratic values in 2004) looked across all the countries of the world and found that small states, and especially small island states, are more likely to be democracies than big ones. This was a huge blow to me. Iceland has a population of about 390,000 and is one of the most solidly democratic countries on earth. Malta, Cabo Verde, Seychelles, Mauritius are all small and work reasonably well, in my humble opinion of course.
What I'd say is that these studies mostly measure whether elections are held and are competitive, and whether power changes hands. On that measure we do fine. Since 2008 we have been voting out anyone in power on each chance we get. What the indices are less good at measuring is what happens between elections, and in particular what happens to the referees.
The two researchers I found most useful are Wouter Veenendaal, a Dutch political scientist, and Jack Corbett, an Australian. They've spent years doing interviews in very small states, places like San Marino, St Kitts and Nevis, Seychelles and Palau. Veenendaal's article in 2015 has a title that says "Democracy in Microstates: Why Smallness Does Not Produce a Democratic Political System." Their book together, Democracy in Small States (2018), has the subtitle Persisting Against All Odds.
What these people found is that small states do stay democratic on paper, and often in practice at election time. But politics in them works very differently. It's intensely personal! In small states, parties are vehicles for individual leaders and families. Voters and politicians know each other directly, so exchanging jobs, loans, contracts and favours for votes is easy to arrange and easy to check up on. The state is often the biggest employer and contractor, so the government controls a big share of everyone's livelihood, and criticising it carries a personal economic risk. Courts, auditors, regulators and the media are staffed from a tiny pool of people who are related to or dependent on the politicians. And the fights are bitter but not really about ideas. They follow the feuds of leading personalities.
Reading their description, I felt someone had been following me around.
But I have to be fair to them, because they say something I don't like. In the summary of their 2018 book they say the standard explanations for democratic success, including colonial history and institutional design, don't seem to have much explanatory power in small states. In other words, changing the institutions doesn't reliably fix it. So.. it is kind of like a warning that you can't just swap one textbook for another and expect a different result. If we change anything, it has to be aimed precisely at the specific way small-state politics goes wrong, and for me that's the capture of the referees. That's a narrower target than "change the system", because, all these talk about changing the system, in my opinion, just changes the way the game is played, much like we start playing basketball instead of football, while keeping the same set of referees, and same set of axioms to dictate the rules to be followed by the referees.
Some newer writers have studied how democracies decay without anyone cancelling an election.
Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way wrote Competitive Authoritarianism in 2010. It's about regimes where elections are real, the opposition can genuinely win, but the people in power use the state's resources, media and the courts so heavily that the playing field is badly tilted. It sits somewhere between a dictatorship and a fair democracy.
Then Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt wrote How Democracies Die in 2018, which got a lot of attention. Their argument is that modern democracies mostly die slowly and LEGALLY. Elected leaders capture the referees, by which they mean courts, election bodies, prosecutors, tax and anti-corruption agencies. This is quite a familiar tone for anyone in the Maldives. They sideline the key players, opposition, media, business people who might fund the other side, again.. will be familiar to a Maldivian. And they rewrite the rules, the constitution and the electoral laws, so the advantage becomes permanent. All of it can look perfectly lawful, voted for by a majority, signed off by a court that's been reshaped.
Look at our sequence. Anti-defection amendment in November 2024, Supreme Court bench cut from seven to five in February 2025. Two justices removed in May 2025, which stopped the challenge to the amendment. A media law with powers to block and suspend outlets. I believe Levitsky and Ziblatt would recognize all these steps. And I want to repeat, that this isn't only one government. A lof of other similar things happened under earlier governments of different parties as well.
Levitsky and Ziblatt say the real guardrails of democracy are two unwritten norms. Mutual toleration, accepting that your rivals are legitimate. And forbearance, meaning that you don't use every power you legally have to crush them. I believe them. But think about how hard forbearance is here. If losing an election means your supporters lose their jobs and your island loses its planned airport or something similar, then not using every power you've got feels like betraying your own people. The stakes are just too high for gentlemanly restraint. Adam Przeworski is a Polish-American political scientist. His most famous line is a definition "Democracy is a system in which parties lose elections." By that test we're a democracy. Parties lose here all the time. That's a real achievement. But Przeworski's deeper point is about why losers accept losing. They go along with defeat because they believe the rules will give them a fair chance next time. That's the bit that's eroding. If the winners can rewrite the rules and replace the referees, the losers start to wonder whether there'll be a fair next time, and once both sides think like that, every election is played as if it's the last one. And that is what in my opinion has been happening in our country.
Samuel Huntington had a related test, the "two-turnover test", in his book The Third Wave (1991). A democracy is consolidated, he said, when power has changed hands peacefully twice. We've passed that more than once. But Huntington has an older book, Political Order in Changing Societies (1968), that I think fits us better. His argument there is that trouble comes when political participation grows faster than institutions can grow to hold it. When that happens, every group uses whatever weapon it has (money, crowds) and the institutions get pulled apart. In 2008, in theory our participation went from almost nothing to everything overnight. With the new constitution, the new independent bodies were a few months old and staffed from the same small pool of people who were also running the parties. So, this was Huntington's mismatch mirrored perfectly.
I now think the choice of a presidential system in 2007 made everything I've described worse. Alfred Stepan and Cindy Skach published a study in 1993 comparing parliamentary and presidential systems across the world. They found that pure parliamentary democracies survived far more often than pure presidential ones, and that presidential systems were much more prone to coups and breakdowns. Reasons are fairly simple once you see them. In a presidential system one person wins the whole country. It's winner takes all. The term is fixed, so if a president governs badly there's no clean way to change course short of a crisis. And the president and the legislature both claim to speak for the people, so when they disagree there's nobody to settle it. So in a democracy, except for the ballot, the concept of ‘the people’ is an abstract, it’s like an abused go-to term, everyone is doing everything in the name of people, for the people, by the people. And this ‘people’ is everyone and no one.
Arend Lijphart, a Dutch-American political scientist, makes a related point in Patterns of Democracy (1999). He compares what he calls majoritarian democracies, where the winner takes most of the power, with consensus democracies, where power is spread out, shared between parties, checked by independent bodies. He found the consensus ones did at least as well on most things and better on several. And he has argued that presidential government tends to push a democracy towards the winner-takes-all end.
And M. Steven Fish, in an article in 2006 called "Stronger Legislatures, Stronger Democracies", found that the strength of the national legislature is one of the best predictors of how democratic a country is. Countries where parliament has real power over the executive do better than ones where a president dominates.
In our case, we are a tiny related society with few competing interests and a state that controls more than half the jobs, and on top of all that sits a single prize, the presidency, that gives the winner the cabinet, appointments and over time a big say over the referees, fixed for five years with no way to adjust. If you set out to design a system that would maximise patronage and polarisation in a country like ours, I'm not sure you could do much better.
Seymour Martin Lipset wrote a famous paper in 1959, "Some Social Requisites of Democracy". He found that democracy goes with wealth, education, cities and a big middle class. These are conditions that change, and our income per head has grown a great deal, so on Lipset's numbers alone we should be fine. But Lipset also said stability depends on two things together, effectiveness and legitimacy, meaning that people believe the institutions are the right ones for them. And he made an observation I didn't expect. Of the stable democracies in Europe and the English-speaking world in his day, most were constitutional monarchies, and he thought keeping the crown had helped older, conservative groups accept democracy because the symbol of continuity stayed in place. He was careful to call it a pattern and not proof, and so will I.
Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, in The Civic Culture (1963), sorted political cultures into three rough kinds. Parochial, where people hardly think of themselves as part of a national system at all. Subject, where people know the government exists and receive things from it but don't see themselves as shaping it. And participant. Stable democracy, they thought, needs a mix. We're a strange case. At election time we're as participant as anywhere on earth, turnout here is high and Maldivians care fiercely. Between elections a lot of us deal with the state as subjects, through a person who knows a person.
Edward Banfield is harder to bring up without offending someone. In 1958 he published The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, about a poor village in southern Italy. He described an attitude he called "amoral familism", acting to maximise the short-term advantage of your own family on the assumption that everyone else is doing the same. In a place like that it's very hard to get anyone to act for the common good, and everyone assumes officials are on the take. If you are living in Male’ or anywhere else, and you have any kind of discussion about politics, I am sure the overwhelming majority of our friends would within an hour explain how one guy is enriching himself of the back of the state, and how he or she can do the same in the future. Banfield's book has been heavily criticized since, for blaming people for what was really poverty and the way land was owned, well.. the criticisms are fair, yes. And Maldivians are about as generous a people as I know. But the mechanism he describes, where every public thing is quietly sized up for what it'll do for your family, isn't foreign to us. I personally know how much of a grip this concept has on our society, I do try to systematize and do things in a manner that is organized and structured, but the overwhelming majority of the people, do not believe that whatever is being done is for the sake of system, rather they genuinely believe that, the whole thing is a facade and the true workings is of course, the labor for my kinship, it is quite difficult to change their views, because it is the overarching principle and the evidences are plenty everywhere. Robert Putnam's Making Democracy Work (1993) helped me make sense of this. Italy set up new regional governments in 1970, all with the same structure. Twenty years later some worked well and some badly. Putnam found the difference was in society. Where people were linked horizontally, as equals, in clubs and cooperatives, government worked. Where society ran vertically, patron and client, the same institutions failed. What counted, in other words, was the direction of the ties more than how many there were. We have extremely dense ties, more than almost anyone. A lot of them run vertically, though, and every five years the party system bends even the horizontal ones into vertical ones.
Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel, using decades of survey data, argued in Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy (2005) that as people become more secure, their values shift from survival values to what they call self-expression values, and real democracy follows that shift. I wonder about that here. Our GDP looks like a middle-income country's. But a lot of people's security still comes from a patron and the state payroll, and if your security depends on staying on the right side of someone, you keep thinking in survival terms however well the economy is doing. Well a certain someone’s party for the longest time here would be the posterchild of this theory.
Now the other side. Amartya Sen, an Indian economist, wrote "Democracy as a Universal Value" in 1999.
Sen argues that democracy isn't a Western possession, that traditions of public reasoning and argument exist all over the world, and that the claim that some country "isn't ready" for democracy has been made again and again and turned out wrong again and again. His view is that a country becomes fit for democracy by practising it. He also made the famous argument that famines don't happen in working democracies with a free press, because governments can't ignore what everyone can see.
I accept Sen's point. Maldivians can reason together and govern ourselves. Our voters show up. Recently a government with a two-thirds supermajority put a constitutional amendment to the people and they rejected it by 68.74%, on a turnout of 74.98%. A people who do that are perfectly capable of self-government. My complaint is with a design that takes a capable people and gives them every reason to behave badly.
When I was researching for this, I've dealt with some objections as they came up. Madison himself never said small states can't be republics. Which is true. Our size takes away his outer defence completely, and our closeness makes the inner one unusually easy to capture. He also said, in 1788, that "To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea." I agree. I think there's plenty of virtue here. It is just that the design keeps rewarding the opposite.
Small states are, on the evidence, more democratic than big ones. Also true, if you're measuring elections. On V-Dem's measure of liberal democracy, which looks at courts, rights and limits on the executive, we were a reasonably liberal democracy for only about eight of the eighteen years since 2008. Elections have survived. The guardians of the system, I would argue, have not.
Hume says legitimacy comes from long habit, and our habit is now the republic. People voted to end the monarchy in 1968. From what I've heard, some older people remember that ballot as confusing, but I can't prove it. In 2007 they chose a presidency. Any change has to go to the people and they have to say yes. Nothing else would be legitimate, and Mill, Sen and Jefferson would all be right to object if anyone tried another way.
And Huntington's "king's dilemma", from Political Order, warns that monarchs who try to run and modernise a country end up being swept away by the forces they create. I think that's right about monarchs who govern. Aristotle's Spartan king had already found the answer to it. In my opinion, the 2008 system assumes a big, varied country, where losing an election costs you little more than your pride. Here a five-year contest for a president who gets the whole executive and, in time, the referees works like a machine for turning neighbours into rivals. It's been doing that for eighteen years and I see no reason it'll stop.
I don't think the answer is fewer votes. The thinkers I trust most on this, Madison, Mill, Tocqueville, Sen, would never accept that, and nor would I. Parliament should stay elected, and the people should still be able to throw a government out.
What I keep coming back to is the referees. All the serious account of how this goes wrong, from Aristotle to Madison's auxiliary precautions to Levitsky and Ziblatt, points at the same weak spot. In a country as small as ours, whoever wins gets to choose and remove the people who are supposed to check them, and there's nobody in the system who isn't playing. So I started thinking about a head of state who isn't playing at all. Someone above party politics, who belongs to all Maldivians and to no faction, who doesn't run the government and doesn't want to, and whose one real job is to keep the referees out of the winners' hands. The elected Parliament and a Prime Minister who answers to it would do the actual governing, every day, the way parliamentary democracies do. Plato's two mothers, a bit of each. Aristotle's king with fewer powers and a longer life. I've been thinking for a while about what we'd call such a person, and where they'd come from, given that the hard part is finding someone no network can win. Our own history has an answer that a lot of people will find surprising. We had a long and robust kingdom, for the longest time, it is in our history, Maldivians and outsiders have written in length about the time of the kings in the Maldives. Something like a crown, but one that does not do any governing and belongs to the people. A King of the Maldivians, maybe, rather than a king of the country.
I know how that sounds. I have given this quite a though, but I need a bit of time to really structure this whole thing. But then again, this is just me testing the limits of my curiosity. I do believe, for the learned and the experienced, and the scholars, this may be something that might get them to open a more open dialogue and really expand the sphere of ideas that we will use to maybe make a change to our existing system of governance. All I ask in the is that we take the problem seriously before reacting to the idea.