PS3086 Subject Guide

Democracy and democratisationG. PhilipPS3086, 2790086

2011

Undergraduate study in Economics, Management, Finance and the Social Sciences

This subject guide is for a 300 course offered as part of the University of London International Programmes in Economics, Management, Finance and the Social Sciences. This is equivalent to Level 6 within the Framework for Higher Education Qualifi cations in England, Wales and Northern Ireland (FHEQ).

For more information about the University of London International Programmes undergraduate study in Economics, Management, Finance and the Social Sciences, see: www.londoninternational.ac.uk

This guide was prepared for the University of London International Programmes by:

G. Philip, Professor of Comparative and Latin American Politics, London School of Economics and Political Science.

This is one of a series of subject guides published by the University. We regret that due to pressure of work the author is unable to enter into any correspondence relating to, or arising from, the guide. If you have any comments on this subject guide, favourable or unfavourable, please use the form at the back of this guide.

University of London International ProgrammesPublications OfficeStewart House32 Russell SquareLondon WC1B 5DNUnited KingdomWebsite: www.londoninternational.ac.uk

Published by: University of London © University of London 2007Reprinted with minor revisions 2011

The University of London asserts copyright over all material in this subject guide except where otherwise indicated. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher.We make every effort to contact copyright holders. If you think we have inadvertently used your copyright material, please let us know.

Contents

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Contents

Introduction ............................................................................................................ 1

Aims ............................................................................................................................. 1Learning outcomes ........................................................................................................ 1Syllabus ......................................................................................................................... 1Reading and preparation ............................................................................................... 2Online study resources ................................................................................................... 5Structure of the subject guide ........................................................................................ 6Reading time ................................................................................................................. 7The examination ............................................................................................................ 7

Chapter 1: Defining and conceptualising democracy ............................................. 9

Aims of the chapter ....................................................................................................... 9Learning outcomes ........................................................................................................ 9Essential reading ........................................................................................................... 9Further reading ........................................................................................................... 10Introduction ................................................................................................................ 10Democracy as participation .......................................................................................... 11Democracy as competition ........................................................................................... 16Democracy as balance ................................................................................................. 19Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 24A reminder of your learning outcomes .......................................................................... 24Sample examination questions ..................................................................................... 24

Chapter 2: Democracy and the state ................................................................... 25

Aims of the chapter ..................................................................................................... 25Learning outcomes ...................................................................................................... 25Essential reading ........................................................................................................ 25Further reading ............................................................................................................ 25Introduction ................................................................................................................ 26Limited and façade democracy ..................................................................................... 27Democracy in biased states .......................................................................................... 29Illiberal democracy ....................................................................................................... 30Delegative democracy .................................................................................................. 31The notion of democratic consolidation ........................................................................ 32Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 34A reminder of your learning outcomes .......................................................................... 34Sample examination questions ..................................................................................... 34

Chapter 3: Non-democratic systems and the transition to democracy ................ 35

Aims of the chapter ..................................................................................................... 35Learning outcomes ...................................................................................................... 35Essential reading ........................................................................................................ 35Further reading ............................................................................................................ 35Introduction ................................................................................................................ 36Colonial rule and the collapse of empires ..................................................................... 37Political consequences of imperial control and decolonisation prior to 1990 .................. 38Negative legacies of colonialism .................................................................................. 39Other forms of non-democratic organisation ................................................................ 41

86 Democracy and democratisation

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Transitions to democracy .............................................................................................. 45A reminder of your learning outcomes .......................................................................... 45Sample examination questions ..................................................................................... 45

Chapter 4: General theories of democratisation .................................................. 47

Aims of the chapter ..................................................................................................... 47Learning outcomes ...................................................................................................... 47Essential reading ......................................................................................................... 47Further reading ............................................................................................................ 48Introduction ................................................................................................................ 48Modernisation theory and its critics .............................................................................. 49Managing social and political change .......................................................................... 55Social class and comparative historical sociology .......................................................... 55Democracy as ideas and culture: Fukuyama and Huntington ......................................... 63A reminder of your learning outcomes .......................................................................... 65Sample examination questions ..................................................................................... 66

Chapter 5: Threats to democracy, democratic breakdown and the prevention of democratic breakdown .................................................................................... 67

Aims of the chapter ..................................................................................................... 67Learning outcomes ...................................................................................................... 67Essential reading ......................................................................................................... 67Further reading ............................................................................................................ 67Introduction ................................................................................................................ 68Democratic breakdown: cases and near misses ............................................................. 69General explanations .................................................................................................. 72Developmental dictatorship? ....................................................................................... 74Economic progress in wealthy countries ....................................................................... 75Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 77A reminder of your learning outcomes .......................................................................... 77Sample examination questions ..................................................................................... 77

Appendix: Sample examination paper ................................................................. 79

Introduction

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Introduction

AimsIn our study of democracy and democratisation we have three main aims. These are to consider:

• how democracy is defined and understood, and how far actual systems conform to democratic principles

• the main explanations of why political systems have moved from non-democracy to democracy

• whether or not democracy is a stable political system, and whether democratic systems run any serious risk of breakdown.

Learning outcomesBy the end of this course, you should be able to discuss critically a range of issues relating to democratisation. You should be able to:

• explain how democracy actually works in real world conditions

• explain how democracy relates to the non-elective institutions of the state

• discuss different ways in which democracy can work badly

• outline the essential arguments of comparative historical sociologists of democratisation, such as Moore and Rueschemeyer

• explain how some forms of non-democracy can make the transition to democracy

• assess theories of democratic breakdown in relatively poor countries and arguments for developmental dictatorship

• discuss why democracy has survived in wealthy countries.

SyllabusIf taken as part of a BSc degree, 114 Democratic politics and the State or 130 Introduction to modern political thought must be passed before this course may be attempted.

In this course we will consider various aspects of the conditions of democracy, the processes of democratisation, and the breakdown of democratic regimes.

Conceptualising democracy. General criteria for democracy and particular forms of semi-democracy. Delegative democracy, illiberal democracy and biased states. Democratic consolidation.

Process of democratisation. Paths to democracy. Comparative historical studies.

Conditions of democracy and its maintenance. The concept of democratic legitimacy and the functioning of liberal democracy in advanced capitalist societies.

Transitions to democracy. Forms of non-democracy and transitional paths towards democratisation.


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Democratic breakdown and reconstruction. Mass society theories and theories of class conflict. Modernisation theory and later criticisms. Democracy and war. Democratic reconstruction and its problems.

A range of countries will be examined in relation to these themes from Europe, Asia and Latin America.

Reading and preparationThe reading required for this course is quite wide and extensive. It goes well beyond this subject guide. The history of democratisation, democratic breakdown and democratic reconstruction extends across virtually the whole world and backwards through centuries. It may be better for you to take a limited part of the syllabus, and study that very thoroughly, than to range widely but superficially across a very broad area. The fact that you have an hour in which to answer each examination question indicates that the Examiners will be looking for a certain amount of depth from each candidate rather than a wide range of knowledge.

In your examination, you will have to answer three questions from a choice of 12. You will need to prepare more than three topics, but if you are careful to cover Chapter 1 of this subject guide – which really is essential – together with its associated reading, along with the material covered in one other chapter, that should be enough.

You also will want to consider the Sample examination paper, which is given in the Appendix to this subject guide, in order to get a sense of what is likely to come up. It may be a good idea to test yourself before the examination by writing a one-hour answer to one or more of the sample questions. It should be reasonably clear to you whether you have written a good answer or not.

Reading adviceA very large number of works cover different aspects of democracy and democratisation, and you cannot hope to read them all. Moreover, some of the works that you do need to read are long and complex. The main thing is to get a sense of the arguments presented rather than trying to follow every detail. Remind yourself when reading complex works that this subject is mainly designed to explain concepts. The amount of potentially relevant factual material is virtually infinite, but you do not need to master it all – you only need to know enough facts to be able to illustrate and understand general ideas.

Listed below are works described as Essential reading. These relate mainly to authors whose arguments are specifically discussed in the text. Other works are listed as Further reading. These should supplement the essential texts and give a fuller basis for those topics that you choose to concentrate on in detail. If you are keen to read more on your selected topics than the works listed here, use the bibliographies of the listed works to find additional material.

Essential reading

Books

Dahl, R.A. Democracy and its Critics. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991; re-issue edition) [ISBN 9780300049381].

Fukuyama, F. The End of History and the Last Man. (London: Penguin, 2006; reprint edition) [ISBN 9780743284554].

Introduction

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Galbraith, J.K. The Culture of Contentment. (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1992) [ISBN 9781856191470].

Linz, J. and A. Stepan Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) [ISBN 9780801851582].

Lipset, S.M. Political Man: the Social Bases of politics. (London: Heinemann, 1983) [ISBN 9780801825224].

Moore, B. Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World. (London: Penguin, 1967; reprint edition 1993) [ISBN 9780807050736].

Przeworski, A. Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) [ISBN 9780521423359] Chapters 1 and 2.

Rueschemeyer, D., E. Stephens and J. Stephens Capitalist Development and Democracy. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) [ISBN 9780226731445].

Schumpeter, J. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. (London: Allen and Unwin, 1978) fifth edition [ISBN 9780043350324] Chapters 21 and 22.

Whitehead, L. Democratization: Theory and Experience. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) [ISBN 9780199253289].

Journals

Carsten, Q. and Philippe C. Schmitter ‘Liberalization, transition and consolidation: measuring the components of democratization’, Democratization, 11(5) 2004, pp.5990.

Huntington, S.P. ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’, Foreign Affairs, S93, 72(3) 1993, pp.2249.

O’Donnell, G. ‘Delegative Democracy’, Journal of Democracy, 5(1) 1994, pp.5569. Available online at www.nd.edu/~kellogg/publications/workingpapers/WPS/172.pdf

Zakaria, F. ‘The Rise of Illiberal Democracy’, Foreign Affairs, 76(6) 1997, pp.22–43.

Detailed reading references in this subject guide refer to the editions of the set textbooks listed above. New editions of one or more of these textbooks may have been published by the time you study this course. You can use a more recent edition of any of the books; use the detailed chapter and section headings and the index to identify relevant readings. Also check the virtual learning environment (VLE) regularly for updated guidance on readings.

Further readingPlease note that as long as you read the Essential reading you are then free to read around the subject area in any text, paper or online resource. You will need to support your learning by reading as widely as possible and by thinking about how these principles apply in the real world. To help you read extensively, you have free access to the VLE and University of London Online Library (see below).

Other useful texts for this course include:

Books

Anderson, J. (ed.) Religion, Democracy and Democratisation. (London: Routledge, 2006) [ISBN 0415355370].

Beetham, D. (ed.) Defining and Measuring Democracy. (London: Sage, 1994) [ISBN 0803977891]. This is available via the publisher’s website.

Brooker, P. Non-Democratic Regimes: Theory, Government and Politics. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000) [ISBN 0312227558].


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Bull, M. and P. Newell (eds) Corruption in Contemporary Politics. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) [ISBN 0333802985].

Buxton, J. The Failure of Political Reform in Venezuela. (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Group, 2000) [ISBN 0754613461].

Crystal, J. Oil and Politics in the Gulf: Rulers and Merchants in Kuwait and Qatar. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995; updated edition) [ISBN 0521466350].

Diamond, L. et al. (eds) Consolidating the Third Wave Democracies. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997) [ISBN 0801857953].

Diamond, D. and M. Plattner The Global Resurgence of Democracy. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) second edition [ISBN 0801853052].

Diamond, D. and M. Plattner (eds) The Global Divergence of Democracies. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001) [ISBN 0801868424].

Di Palma, G. To Craft Democracies: an Essay in Democratic Transition. (Berkeley: University Presses of California, Columbia and Princeton, 1990; reprint edition) [ISBN 0520072146].

Gill, G. The Dynamics of Democratisation. (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 2000) [ISBN 0333801970]. This is available via the publisher’s website.

Hagopian, F. Traditional Politics and Regime Change in Brazil. (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996) [ISBN 0521032881].

Handelman, H. and M. Tessler (eds) Democracy and its Limits: Lessons from Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999) [ISBN 0268008914].

Haynes, J. (ed.) Towards Sustainable Democracy in the Third World. (London/Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001) [ISBN 0333802500].

Held, D. Models of Democracy. (Cambridge: Polity, 2006) third edition [ISBN 9780804754729].

Huntington, S.P. The Clash of Civilizations. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996) [ISBN 0684811642].

Huntington, S.P. The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993) [ISBN 0806125160].

Leftwich, A. States of Development. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999) [ISBN 0745608426].

Lieven, D. Empire: The Russian Empire and its Rivals. (London: John Murray, 2000) [ISBN 0719552435].

Mann, M. Sources of Social Power: Volume 2, The Rise of Classes and Nation States 1760–1914. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) [ISBN 052144585X].

Marx, K. and F. Engels The Communist Manifesto: a Modern Edition. (London: Verso, 1998) [ISBN 1859848982].

North, D. Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) [ISBN 0521394163].

O’Donnell, G., P. Schmitter and L. Whitehead (eds) Transitions from Authoritarian Rule and Prospects for Democracy: Latin America. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986) [ISBN 0801826829].

O’Neill, M. and D. Austin (eds) Democracy and Cultural Diversity. (Oxford: Oxford University Press with the Hansard Society, 2000) [ISBN 0199290008].

Parry, G. and M. Moran (eds) Democracy and Democratization. (London; New York: Routledge, 1993) [ISBN 0415090504].

Philip, G. Democracy in Latin America: Surviving Conflict and Crisis? (Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity, 2003) [ISBN 0745627601].

Rousseau, J.J. The Social Contract. (London: Penguin, 2006) [ISBN 0143037498]. Skocpol, T. (ed.) Vision and Method in Historical Sociology. (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1984) [ISBN 0521229286]. Vanhanen, T. Prospects for Democracy: a Study of 172 Countries. (London:

Routledge, 1997) [ISBN 041514406X or 0521297249].Whitehead, L. (ed.) The International Dimensions of Democratization: Europe

and the Americas. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002; revised 2005) [ISBN 0199243751].

Introduction

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Journals

Philip, G. ‘The Venezuelan Coup Attempt of February 1992’, Government & Opposition, 27(4) 1992, pp.454–69.

Philip, G. ‘Democracy and State Bias in Latin America: Lessons from Mexico, Venezuela and Peru’, Democratization, 6(4) 1999, pp.74–92.

Plattner, M. ‘Liberalism and Democracy’, Foreign Affairs, 77(2) 1998, pp.171–80.

Online study resourcesIn addition to the subject guide and the Essential reading, it is crucial that you take advantage of the study resources that are available online for this course, including the VLE and the Online Library.

You can access the VLE, the Online Library and your University of London email account via the Student Portal at:http://my.londoninternational.ac.uk

You should have received your login details for the Student Portal with your official offer, which was emailed to the address that you gave on your application form. You have probably already logged in to the Student Portal in order to register! As soon as you registered, you will automatically have been granted access to the VLE, Online Library and your fully functional University of London email account.

If you forget your login details at any point, please email [email protected] quoting your student number.

The VLEThe VLE, which complements this subject guide, has been designed to enhance your learning experience, providing additional support and a sense of community. It forms an important part of your study experience with the University of London and you should access it regularly.

The VLE provides a range of resources for EMFSS courses:

• Self-testing activities: Doing these allows you to test your own understanding of subject material.

• Electronic study materials: The printed materials that you receive from the University of London are available to download, including updated reading lists and references.

• Past examination papers and Examiners’ commentaries: These provide advice on how each examination question might best be answered.

• A student discussion forum: This is an open space for you to discuss interests and experiences, seek support from your peers, work collaboratively to solve problems and discuss subject material.

• Videos: There are recorded academic introductions to the subject, interviews and debates and, for some courses, audio-visual tutorials and conclusions.

• Recorded lectures: For some courses, where appropriate, the sessions from previous years’ Study Weekends have been recorded and made available.

• Study skills: Expert advice on preparing for examinations and developing your digital literacy skills.

• Feedback forms.

Some of these resources are available for certain courses only, but we are expanding our provision all the time and you should check the VLE regularly for updates.


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Making use of the Online LibraryThe Online Library contains a huge array of journal articles and other resources to help you read widely and extensively.

To access the majority of resources via the Online Library you will either need to use your University of London Student Portal login details, or you will be required to register and use an Athens login:http://tinyurl.com/ollathens

The easiest way to locate relevant content and journal articles in the Online Library is to use the Summon search engine.

If you are having trouble finding an article listed in a reading list, try removing any punctuation from the title, such as single quotation marks, question marks and colons.

For further advice, please see the online help pages:www.external.shl.lon.ac.uk/summon/about.php

Structure of the subject guideThe first chapter in this subject guide seeks to explain how democracy can be defined and understood. It takes three different approaches to defining, understanding and theorising democracy and considers each in turn.

Chapter 2 looks at systems that have some of the characteristics of a democracy but which contain significant shortcomings from the viewpoint of democratic purists. These include systems defined by O’Donnell (1994) as ‘delegative democracies’ and Philip’s work on biased states (1999). It also includes systems defined by Zakaria’s (1997) work as ‘illiberal democracies’, which is mostly considered to relate to some Asian countries. Finally, the work of Linz and Stepan (1996) is discussed and, in particular, their study of democratic consolidation. The notion of consolidation allows us to evaluate the working of democracy according to different criteria.

Chapter 3 deals with non-democratic systems and transitions to democracy. It does not deal in very great detail with the internal characteristics of non-democratic systems. However, it does discuss how far the different internal characteristics of different kinds of non-democracies either facilitate or impede democratic transition.

Chapter 4 looks at general attempts to theorise the development of democracy. In doing so, it discusses the works of six major authors. The first part deals with Lipset (1983), who is a classic modernisation theorist, and Vanhanen (1997), who has written about democratisation from a similar standpoint. The second part deals with historical sociologists who look at class-based theories of political change, particularly Moore (1967) and Rueschemeyer (1992). The third part deals with a clash between Fukuyama (1992), who believes that democracy reflects a universal human aspiration, and Huntington (1996), who is much more of a cultural relativist.

Chapter 5 has to do with threats and alternatives to democracy. It considers one case of democratic breakdown (Chile in 1973) and one case in which democracy might have broken down but did not (Venezuela in the 1990s) and tries to relate these outcomes to theories. It also considers economic theories that appear to argue in favour of the greater developmental efficiency of authoritarian government. Finally, it discusses the possibility that democracy in wealthy countries may face different prospects and problems than democracy in poor countries.

Introduction

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At the end of each chapter, you will find a list of Learning outcomes and some Sample examination questions to help you with your revision. In the Appendix, you will find a Sample examination paper for further practice.

The subject guide offers a summary of quite a lot of reading matter, and deals with quite a number of different topics. It is an introduction to the literature and not a substitute for it. It is intended to raise questions rather than close off discussion by offering answers too readily. It also deals largely with comparative and theoretical issues, even though there are some case studies mentioned in particular chapters. If you are familiar with your own political system, or have read about the political systems and recent history of other countries, then you should consider this familiarity with particular cases to be an advantage. However, no matter how much you may know about detailed political arrangements, there is no substitute for engaging with concepts.

Reading timeIf you can find the readings without too many problems, and have no difficulty reading English, then in roughly 25 full days, you should be able to cover enough of the subject to be able to answer three examination questions. Another way of expressing this is that we normally recommend that if you study one course over an academic year, you need to do a minimum of seven hours of study per week. It will take longer if you read more slowly or with difficulty. Please note that this is the absolute minimum and we would never recommend that you only prepare for the minimum number of questions required on the examination paper! If you have already taken 82 Comparative politics (although this is not a prerequisite), then you may need to do a little less reading.

The examinationImportant: the information and advice given here are based on the examination structure used at the time this guide was written. Please note that subject guides may be used for several years. Because of this we strongly advise you to always check both the current Regulations for relevant information about the examination, and the VLE where you should be advised of any forthcoming changes. You should also carefully check the rubric/instructions on the paper you actually sit and follow those instructions.

There will be a three-hour examination. You will be expected to answer three questions out of 12, allowing one hour per question, which should enable you to explore a selected set of topics with some degree of depth.

It is a good idea, when the examination actually begins, to spend a reasonable period of time making absolutely sure that you understand the questions and preparing your answers in outline. You can probably afford to spend at least one quarter of the examination period preparing. It is important not to embark on an answer until you are sure that you know what you are going to say. Since all answers are all given equal marks, it is important to spend virtually equal amounts of time on each question. You should therefore not begin an answer until you know how you intend to conclude it.

Remember, it is important to check the VLE for:

• up-to-date information on examination and assessment arrangements for this course

• where available, past examination papers and Examiners’ commentaries for the course which give advice on how each question might best be answered.

Notes


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Chapter 1: Defining and conceptualising democracy

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Aims of the chapterThis chapter considers three different ways of explaining how democracy works and how it differs from other forms of government:

• the first of these is that democracy has to do with voting and popular participation

• the second is that democracy has to do with free, fair and competitive elections

• the third is that democracy is essentially a system of checks and balances.

Each of these approaches is set out and then criticised. At the end of the chapter you should be able to explain, at least in outline, the advantages and disadvantages of all three approaches to democracy.

Learning outcomesBy the end of this chapter, and having completed the Essential reading and activities, you should be able to:

• list, describe and compare the main theoretical approaches to understanding democracy

• describe the main criticisms of each of these approaches

• outline and discuss the main ethical principles that lie behind democracy as a system of government

• outline the ways in which the relationship between majoritarian government and individual rights has been understood

• analyse the role of activists in democratic politics

• explain why the notion of contestation is crucial to our understanding of how democracy works

• explain why liberal democracy is inherently a rather complex system of government.

Essential readingDahl, R.A. Democracy and its Critics. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991;

re-issue edition) [ISBN 9780300049381].Linz, J. and A. Stepan Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation:

Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) [ISBN 9780801851582].

Schumpeter, J. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. (London: Allen and Unwin, 1978) fifth edition [ISBN 9780043350324] Chapters 21 and 22.


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Further reading Beetham, D. (ed.) Defining and Measuring Democracy. (London: Sage, 1994)

[ISBN 0803977891]. Fukuyama, F. The End of History and the Last Man. (London: Penguin, 2006;

reprint edition) [ISBN 0743284550].Handelman, H. and M. Tessler (eds) Democracy and its limits: Lessons from Asia,

Latin America, and the Middle East. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, c1999) [ISBN 0268008914].

Held, D. Models of Democracy. (Cambridge: Polity, 2006) third edition [ISBN 9780804754729].

Przeworski, A. Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) [ISBN 052142335X] Chapters 1 and 2.

Rousseau, J.J. The Social Contract. (London: Penguin, 2006) [ISBN 0143037498].

IntroductionThe post-1945 period has seen a very great extension of democratic government. Virtually every wealthy, industrialised country is now a democracy. A high proportion of poorer countries in Asia, Eastern Europe, Africa and Latin America are also democracies, although some clearly are not. While the downfall of Soviet Communism has not democratised the entire world, it has led to a significant increase in the number of democratic systems. By the same token, cases of democratic breakdown, though certainly not unknown, have been proportionately fewer since 1945 than they were during the 1920s and 1930s. No First World country has suffered from democratic breakdown since 1945, although democracies have been overthrown in quite sophisticated political societies, such as Greece in 1967, Chile in 1973 and Pakistan in 1999. In the first two cases, however, the military governments that replaced democracy did not prove infinitely durable, lasting for seven and 16 years, respectively. Both of these countries are now democracies once again.

This transformation has given some encouragement to those who believe that democracy is the best form of government and would like to see it extended further. It does, however, raise a number of questions. Many of these questions are discussed in subsequent chapters of this subject guide. In this chapter, we consider in general terms some of the questions that we need to ask about particular situations. These are essentially questions about democracy itself:

• On the basis of ideas about individual freedom and human rights – does democracy have to be liberal?

• How can we understand and theorise liberal democracy?

• How democratic is liberal democracy?

• How liberal is it?

• How stable is it?

How far political systems can usefully be compared just because they are democracies is also a valid question. For example:

• Do the political systems of Bolivia, the United Kingdom and Bulgaria really have much in common just because they are democracies?

• Or are they still divided by more than unites them?


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There are many approaches to and theories of democracy, but the ruling ideas that lie behind them can be summarised under three headings:

1. democracy as participation

2. democracy as competition

3. democracy as balance.

Democracy as participationThe first major theorist of democracy in the modern world was the eighteenth-century French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau is still a controversial figure in the history of political thought. How far his views were understood and how far they were misrepresented by later authors presents a complex question. However, even if his views were actually rather complex and somewhat misrepresented on some occasions, Rousseau is forever associated with the idea that a good political system allows its citizens the freedom to participate in political life. We need to consider such a viewpoint because the notion of participation must be central to our understanding of what democracy is, can be and should be. The most influential present-day exponent of the ‘participationist’ view of democracy is Robert Dahl. In his work, Dahl (1989) specifically outlines and defends participatory democracy against a number of competing arguments.

Participationists seek to replicate in the modern world the virtues of the political system invented in Athens in classical times. It may be difficult to describe as a democracy a system in which slavery existed and in which women did not vote, as was the case in Athens. What many people saw as valuable about the Athenian system, however, was the assembly where all full citizens were encouraged to attend, participate and vote. Rousseau believed that people were free only when they were actually voting to choose their leaders or actively discussing proposed legislative changes.

Central to this approach is the argument in favour of participatory democracy. The essential argument is psychological. Political participation is good for us, both as individuals and as a society. It is an important dimension of human experience that we should seek to participate in choosing the rules and the people that govern us. It is also important for our society that we should exert some important influence on the decision-making process in our capacity as independent-minded individuals with personal viewpoints. Ultimately, from this standpoint, political participation is a good thing, because it is an expression of human desire and social need for civic equality.

The notion of democracy as being about participation plus equality reached its clearest and most extreme expression during the French Revolution. Fukuyama (1992), following the German philosopher Hegel, recently put forward the view that the radical democratic ideas of the French Revolution moved the argument for political equality from the religious to the secular dimension. Secular democratic ideas are more universal in their appeal than ideas about human equality in the sight of God, and their relationship to politics is direct and explicit. Although the French Revolution did not put an end to despotism, even in France it helped to create modern democratic ideology – along with the War of American Independence (the principles of which are discussed later in this chapter). Since the French Revolution, the idea of civic equality has lain at the heart of all significant demands for political change – even if some movements, like Communism, have been mistaken and subject to perversion when in power.


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Civic equality means the notion that we are all capable of understanding and debating issues that concern the general good. We are not all equal at our place of work, or in what we have in the bank. However, so the argument goes, what unites us is (or should be) a common concern for the general good. This common concern needs to be given institutional expression if it is to remain vibrant. Voting and (in some countries) jury service are very important here. Unless we keep activating some formal concept of equality, society is in danger of dividing more and more into the rich and powerful on one side and everybody else on the other.

Legitimacy and governabilityA related and more recently elaborated argument in favour of the view that the key to democratic politics is participation has to do with legitimacy and governability (Beetham, 1991). People will accept authority more easily if they see it as rightful, and this is more likely if they have an opportunity to make the rules themselves. This is necessary because, in any successful society, people have to do things that they do not much like doing, such as paying taxes, obeying the speed limit for driving cars, and so on. The state is obviously able to use force to make people comply with the law, but it is much better for all concerned if there is a general culture of agreement. This is much more likely when people are able to challenge and possibly change the law through appropriate participatory channels.

It is important to distinguish here between the conservative argument that democracy is mainly about legitimation – in other words, about giving the appearance of self-government to people so that they obey authority more willingly – and the radical argument that democracy allows popular notions of morality to discipline the rulers. Both viewpoints conclude that participation is a kind of public good.

Critics of the participationist theory of democracyParticipationist arguments for democracy have been criticised on three main grounds:

• apathy

• intolerance

• logistics.

Apathy

This reason for criticising participationist theories relates to differential knowledge. We live in a complex and sophisticated world. Decision-makers need to have a reasonable amount of knowledge so they can make good decisions. We might ask ourselves whether we want to live in a world in which a porter or a gardener has as much influence on political outcomes as a diplomat or a scientist. We would not go to a gardener to be operated on if a doctor of medicine was available instead. The objection is not really about narrowly defined expertise – because all political systems need to rely on experts to some extent – it is rather that the democratic need to express political arguments in ways that will influence ordinary people lowers the level of public debate. The current phrase used in the UK to express this is ‘dumbing down’.

It could be argued that the effect of too much popular participation is that democratic political systems pay too much attention to presidential adultery and not enough to foreign policy. This is mainly because most people can understand adultery, but only a few understand foreign policy.


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If the world is indeed a dangerous place, then misplaced emphasis of this kind can make it very dangerous. In Europe in the 1930s, for example, the democracies made a very poor job of standing up to Hitler, largely because they were not sufficiently focused on the main threat.

A supporter of participation could try to counter this argument by saying that a lot of general knowledge – albeit not the most detailed and specialist knowledge – could be acquired by interested voters. This is not true of very specialised knowledge, but monarchies and aristocracies do not have this either. All kinds of government have to rely on specialist advisers, and there need be no problem with democratic states having professional bodies of experts to give detailed expression to the democratic will. General legislative bodies do not need to set interest rates or draft precise legislation. All that might be needed for effective popular participation is a willingness to understand the main issues and relate them to general principles, just as members of legislative assemblies are expected to.

However, this observation does not get rid of the problem. In order to acquire knowledge, people need to have not only the ability but also the inclination to learn. Some may find it interesting and enjoyable to do this, but ordinary people may not want to learn the details of every public policy. The only realistic incentive that a democracy can give to people to learn about policy is a chance to change it. The problem here, though, is that the nature of the democratic process ensures that non-expert individuals can have only the most minimal impact on the choice of government. If 20 million people vote at the next election, then it is statistically inconceivable that the way in which you or I might vote will make any difference to the outcome. So why bother to vote at all?

In many present-day democracies, most people do vote at major national elections when given the chance; although turnout in local elections is at very low levels and non-voting has increased alarmingly in the USA and the UK. Voting in general elections, and perhaps even at local elections, however, can be seen as a kind of civic ritual. Most people vote because they want to make some kind of statement of principle or to participate in what is seen as a social process of some significance. Media coverage of election campaigns is very high and also helps to bring out the vote. Party machines sometimes play an active part in persuading people to go to polling stations. None of this, however, explains why people should learn about policy issues in detail.

In fact the ‘why bother?’ argument becomes much stronger in the context of active or informed participation on policy issues. A voter may be a family man with a job or a working mother with a young family who does not want to spend time mastering the complex details of, for example, economic policy in order to decide how to cast a vote. A voter’s time is not free. The theoretical idea that voters may not want to involve themselves in mastering the details of complex issues is reinforced by empirical findings. Majority participation in most democracies is limited to voting in national elections; just about every other form of active participation is limited to minorities.

Critics, such as Schumpeter, say that, overall, most people either do not participate much in politics and do not know much about policy issues (by the standards of a professional politician at least) or else they do participate in politics, but still do not know much about policy issues (Schumpeter, 1978). Neither is necessarily a good idea.


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Intolerance

A second argument against democracy as participation is that it gives too much attention to what majorities think and not enough to individual or minority rights. Majority opinion does not necessarily reflect respect for personal freedom or a respect for individual rights, and critics do not necessarily accept that one will lead to the other. Most of us accept that people have individual rights that should not be violated by pure majoritarianism. Minority rights can be violated by an excessive emphasis on majority rights. Majorities have discriminated against minorities on the grounds of religion or ethnic background. The rights of neighbours and foreigners should be considered – most of us understand why it would be undesirable for the popular majority of a large and powerful country to vote to go out and conquer a smaller and less powerful neighbour.

Popular participation is not the same as mob rule, but some authors have expressed the fear that one might lead to the other. There is a memorable scene in Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar when the mob kills a poet called Cinna because he has the same name as a conspirator, even though he is a completely different person. In historical fact, there has been less mob rule in reality than may have appeared in theory. Usually, when crowds or popular masses have put on a show of intolerance, they were encouraged by antidemocratic or politically manipulative elites. As Rousseau would have put it, they have been misled rather than corrupted. Even so, an alliance of irresponsible or antidemocratic elites and manipulable masses can be very damaging. For this reason, most democratic systems in the First World try to protect minority and individual rights through some kind of constitutional provision. Such provisions are generally accepted to be, on the whole, beneficial for democracy. They do not prevent or limit the amount of popular participation, but they do put limits on what can be expressed or decided democratically.

Logistics

A third problem with participation, often argued reluctantly by people who generally sympathise with the idea of greater participation, is practicality. The problem here is that participation involves more than deciding and voting. It should also involve listening, deliberating and debating. It is impossibly difficult in a large community, however, for people to be able to present arguments to other people in the hope of making them listen. The media – even the correspondence columns of newspapers – have space for only a tiny amount of possible communications.

Dahl (1989) makes the point very clearly. Suppose that every adult citizen had the right to address his or her fellow citizens for two minutes only, once a year, on any subject. All citizens would have to have the corresponding duty to listen to all others: if this were too drastic a rule, then there could be at least one television channel given over purely to individual speech-making. At that rate, 30 citizens could speak every hour and 720 every day, allowing no breaks for eating, sleeping or anything else. If this went on for an entire year, then 262,800 citizens would get to speak. However, most people in the democratic world live in countries whose electorates are well over 20 million. So even if this drastic experiment in participation were possible, then only around one per cent of the population would be able to enjoy their two-minute speech, and it is reasonable to suppose that this one per cent would soon cease to command the full attention of the other 99 per cent.


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Referendums as expression of the need to participateRealistically, the existence of societies with very large numbers of people makes full-scale participatory democracy impossible, although universal suffrage is, of course, feasible. In fact, computer technology means that popular voting has never been easier to organise from a purely technical point of view and there have been arguments that referendums should be used more often to take advantage of this fact. Participatory democracy, however, was originally intended to mean more than voting. Participants – like jurors in a courtroom – should listen and perhaps ask questions: they should inform themselves of the main issues and then make a decision. To vote in semi-ignorance, with one’s mind made up by a slogan or a reflex, is a much poorer form of participation.

A genuine difference in emphasis as to how much weight to give to referendums as instruments of policy exists between different democratic political systems. Switzerland uses them frequently, some states of the USA occasionally and the UK hardly at all. Since different countries have adopted different attitudes to referendums, it is evident that strong arguments are in favour of (and against) each type of system. It has been widely observed that public opinion tends to be rather conservative (in the sense of disliking change) and systems for referendums have been more effective in blocking change than promoting it. For example, the Irish people once voted by referendum to prevent any change in their divorce laws and only narrowly reversed this decision in 1995. The Swiss have remained outside the European Union and have played little part in foreign affairs: they also gave women the vote much later than most other countries. In the USA, the California electorate has at times voted to restrict public spending according to a formula (proposition 13) and to make life far tougher for undocumented migrants from abroad (proposition 187). Broadly speaking, these are ‘right-wing’ decisions.

Supporters of referendums see them as an important antidote to the inevitable elitism of professional politicians and organised interests. Opponents see them as giving too much power to possibly ignorant people. Opponents of referendums also fear that too much direct voting can make it easy for opponents of change to block desirable innovations. There have often been cases where legislative majorities have introduced change, even when this has been unpopular; later on, public opinion has accepted such changes. For example, when abortion was legalised in the UK in the 1960s, it was clear that Parliament was voting for a change that was not supported by most people. Today, however, only a minority want the state to prevent abortion by law. Much the same was true in the USA, although the actual decision was made by the Supreme Court rather than the legislature. In the late 1960s, conservative Americans (who opposed abortion) hoped that the issue would prove seriously damaging to liberal Americans (who supported the legalisation allowing abortion). A generation later, the opposite had become true. The abortion issue is very delicate for conservative Americans, because many women will refuse to vote for a candidate who openly opposes abortion.

Overall, although the historical importance of participationist ideas and arguments should not be ignored, there are many reasons why an uninhibited form of direct democracy would not be feasible and might not be desirable. In practice, the direct effect of democratic participation is mediated by the fact that there are legal and representative aspects to democracy as well.


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Activity

List the different ways in which Robert Dahl (1989) defends his theory of democracy against its critics.

Democracy as competitionAnother important theoretical approach to democracy defines it by the existence of free and fair elections and electoral competition. The most famous exponent of this argument was the Austrian political philosopher and economist Joseph Schumpeter (1978).

Schumpeter believed that it was wrong to idealise either democracy or the folk wisdom of the people. His view of the characteristics of ordinary people is much more pessimistic than that of Rousseau or Dahl. Schumpeter was writing a few years after the German electorate had voted in sufficient numbers to allow Adolf Hitler to take power. Schumpeter also argued that, although democracy was important, it was not the only public good. Under extreme political circumstances, people would be more likely to be guided by an innate sense of right and wrong than by any doctrine of the democratic mandate. For example, people either supported or opposed Hitler on moral grounds: a few people who opposed him nevertheless believed that he should be supported because he was democratically elected. However, many people during the past century – including intellectuals – have at times supported antidemocratic parties or movements such as fascism and communism. At the opposite extreme, many people who today prefer democracy do so because of a belief in freedom and the rights of the individual. They are pro-democracy, because they believe that democracy is the best means of securing freedom and rights. If they were persuaded otherwise, they might change their minds about democracy itself.

Schumpeter believed, therefore, that democracy should not be theorised in too idealistic a way. Whether a political system is democratic is not at all the same question of whether we like it. Nor, argued Schumpeter, should democracy be based on an overly optimistic view of people’s wisdom. People devote their main care, attention and skill to areas of their life where it would make a real difference, such as their livelihoods and their families. Because few people believe that their vote does make a real difference, they mainly participate in politics by expressing attitudes rather than reflecting quietly on issues. Even quite intelligent people are capable of casting their votes without much thought to the consequences.

Such arguments are pessimistic, of course. What is interesting, though, is that Schumpeter could find a strong defence of democracy even though he started from so negative a position. His main argument is that elections discipline elites. Anybody who wants to be head of government must first win an election. For many ambitious elite figures, argued Schumpeter, the pursuit of power is actually a bit of a game. In order to win the game, however, a democratic leader must appeal to ordinary people. Furthermore, a party leader cannot afford to be too arrogant because he or she might well lose the next election. Power is less likely to corrupt people who have only a limited tenure on it.

Criticisms of SchumpeterSchumpeter’s arguments have been criticised as being too negative and restrictive on a number of grounds:

• the role of activists

• democracy and law

• democracy and collective interest.


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The role of activistsIt may be true that not everybody who participates in politics does so intelligently, but intelligent participation is the hallmark of a democracy. If we only have elites competing for the vote and voters acting in semi-ignorance, we lose an important aspect of democracy – the ability of people who do not want to be professional politicians to take some active interest in how they are governed and to bring issues to the attention of the public as a whole.

Furthermore, democratic politics is much more than party politics. Pluralism was an important strand in post-1945 US political science, to some extent reacting against the view that democracy is essentially an auction for votes. Pluralists such as Dahl (1989) have generally been less interested in political parties than in organised groups, including voluntary organisations that people join in order to express a view (e.g. Amnesty International) and those that represent them at their place of work (e.g. trade unions). Early pluralist scholars argued that anybody could be an activist and that organised group politics were a way of extending the effectiveness of democracy. It was not the case that citizen participation was restricted to one vote every four or five years. The politics of organised groups, it was argued, could bring ordinary people into contact with governmental decision-making on a day-to-day basis.

Activists are people – not generally personally ambitious – who wish to use democratic action to bring about (or sometimes prevent) change. In today’s wealthy democracies, they are often supporters of environmental causes and sometimes of the rights of minorities, children or even animals. There can be no doubt that such people have succeeded in changing the political agenda in a variety of ways. Conservative critics see activists as misguided and, not infrequently, as a nuisance. At times, that is true – they are motivated by impractical ideas and support experimental changes that do not work well. Activism, however, often initiates the slow process of changing the way in which non-activists think about particular issues. In general, plural groups create an additional dimension to political life that is valuable and positive. One only has to compare the state of the physical environments in the former Soviet Union – where this kind of activism was ruthlessly suppressed – with that of Western Europe – where environmentalist groups have been very active for years – for the point to be very clear.

Unfortunately, though, subsequent scholarship has shown some of these pluralist arguments to be somewhat optimistic. Activists involved in interest group activity are not usually the very poor. They tend to be from a relatively well-educated minority of the population and are often quite unrepresentative of the population as a whole. Furthermore, some interest group activity has more to do with helping a selected group make extra money than with seeking a better world. Business and labour interest groups are entirely legitimate, but one cannot really see them as deepening democracy. In fact, business interests often operate even under authoritarian governments.

An additional problem is the way in which activist politics tends to turn itself into just another form of political organisation. Interest groups, like parties, may quickly acquire a salaried bureaucracy, which may come to see itself as simply doing an ordinary job. For some (though by no means all) salaried officials, interest group politics are just another means of earning a living.


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Some scholars, identified more with a conservative than pluralist viewpoint, tend to see activists as forming a counter-elite rather than a representative body of the citizenry. It is their activism itself that makes them atypical. Nevertheless, the number of genuine activists – although relatively small in terms of society as a whole – is much greater than the number of professional politicians or people in public office. The existence of intermediate groups prevents society from polarising between the leaders and the led.

Democracy and law

Liberals would be critical of Schumpeter on another point – that it may be possible to restrict the effect of any excesses and injustices caused by mistaken popular decisions by putting some constitutional and judicial restrictions on democratic politics. It is surprising that Schumpeter, who was a very strong supporter of capitalism and the US way of life, did not give this point more attention. Of course, no legal system is necessarily proof against a really determined despot, because such a despot can simply refuse to enforce the law; however, in political cultures in which the legal process is generally respected, the rule of law can discipline some of the excesses of political competition.

Democracy and collective interest

Like many free-market economists, Schumpeter starts from the notion that people participate in the political process as individuals. Yet in the real world, many people define their participation in public life in terms of a collectively formed identity – such as social class, religious belief or regional origin. Some people do change their preferences between parties on the basis of promises made to themselves as individuals or as a result of dissatisfaction with the performance of incumbents. However, there are ‘loyalist’ voters who have always voted Labour, Christian Democrat, Republican, or Ulster Unionist, for example.

Of course, it may be objected that loyalist votes do not determine electoral outcomes, but swing votes do, because they are determined by the political alternation necessary for democracy to work. Nevertheless, democratic leaders have to appeal to people who think of themselves as members of collectives. For example, in Northern Ireland, the Ulster Unionist Party has, for many years, been mainly Protestant, and the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) and Sinn Fein have been mainly Catholic. Little competition for votes exists across religious boundaries, although there is some. Democratic systems somehow still have to be made to work in societies where competition is blocked by strongly held collective identities.

Overall, Schumpeter is right to point to electoral competition as an essential and valuable part of the democratic process. Some of his scepticism about the intelligence commonly shown by the general public is, at least, valuable as a corrective. However, his theory of democracy as competition oversimplifies and limits too much.

Activity

List the criticisms that Schumpeter makes of what he calls the classical theory of democracy.


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Democracy as balanceI would hazard the view that most political scientists today would define democracy mainly as a system of balances. They would give some weight to participation, some to competition, and some to the expression of collective aspirations within an overall context where individual rights are protected via the legal process. The task of a successful democracy is to make these coherent or, if this is not possible, to manage difficulties effectively as may arise.

Theories of constitutional balance were developed, in different ways, in eighteenth-century France, Britain and the USA. Two particular ideas are of interest here:

• The first is the notion of the English eighteenth-century philosopher Edmund Burke that a system of government based on elections should be representative.

• The other is the US notion, normally ascribed to James Madison, that different aspects of a democratic political system should provide checks and balances. Madison is regarded as the key intellectual force behind the doctrines expressed in the US Constitution, whereas Burke, originally a supporter of the American Revolution, eventually emerged as the foremost English critic of the French Revolution.

Burke’s argument attempts to reconcile representative government with the autonomy of the political class. His point is that elected representatives do not exist to do exactly what the voters want them to do. They exist to provide knowledge and good judgment as well as to reflect any popular preference. It is not the job of a representative political system to give people what they want, but to make decisions based on striking a reasonable balance between what is popular, what is morally desirable and what works in practice. Although Burke was by no means a democrat, his thinking has influenced the way in which one school of thought looks at democracy. The essential point is that democracy is generally a rather complex system that seeks to strike a set of balances between different sets of principles.

The US Constitution was based on a rather similar idea. However, the important difference between British and US thinking at that time is that, in the case of the USA, much more emphasis was put on limiting the power of the state. Government was seen as a necessary evil. Popular participation was desirable in so far as it made it harder for the state to exercise despotic power, although popular dictatorship was itself a threatening but possible form of government. Political institutions should therefore be devised both to express and to limit the popular will. To avoid any overpowering effect, voting should be channelled through a complex set of institutions:

• strong local government

• separate legislative assemblies

• separate elections for a president

• a written constitution

• powerful courts.


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For a system of checks and balances to work, it is necessary for the institutional system to be popularly supported – in other words, legitimate. As part of the normal political process, those who control one branch of government (or one part of the state) may be tempted to exceed their authority. Although those in control of other parts of the state may be capable of preventing this, the task of maintaining the system becomes much easier if public opinion remains steadfastly in favour of the constitutional process. Where this does not reliably happen, we may find ourselves dealing with imperfect forms of democracy, which are discussed in the next chapter.

Prerequisites for balance: the defeat of absolutismIt is important to note that much eighteenth-century thinking in the English-speaking world (following the example of John Locke a century earlier) was based on the notion that government needed to be limited and, where necessary, opposed. This view can be seen as expressing an antithesis between economic and political power. It was almost universally accepted in the eighteenth century that property conferred rights. Moreover, property owners – whether merchants or nobility – wanted to protect what they had from the Crown. The monarchs themselves tended to engage in wars and inevitably found this to be an expensive pursuit. Finding themselves short of money, they sought to impose taxation. This desire met resistance in a number of ways. In England in medieval times, these conflicts led to deliberate efforts to contain royal power through the signing of Magna Carta in 1215 and the effort of Simon de Montfort, an English politician and military leader, to organise a parliament in the later thirteenth century.

It is not easy to trace a clear line from medieval institutions such as Magna Carta in England and the early development of Parliament to the dramatic constitutional changes that took place in England, the USA and France between 1642 and 1815. However, the sources of tension between property and political power were rather similar:

• The crown asserted its right to power, but it needed money.

• Civil society was unwilling to pay taxes.

• Parliament offered some scope for bargaining between civil society and the crown.

• Eventually bargaining broke down and armed conflict resulted.

The monarchical state was defeated in England in the 1640s, in the USA in the 1780s and in France at the beginning of the 1790s. In England and France, the monarchy was eventually restored (although in France it was subsequently re-abolished), but the absolutist state was not. The USA went further in the direction of democracy by abolishing the monarchy altogether and replacing it with a presidency.

This subject guide does not have the space to give a detailed discussion of constitutional change in these countries since then. However, it is clear that the defeat of the principle of absolutism in the most economically advanced and most powerful countries of the world represented a victory for propertied interests. This is not to say that the propertied interests that played a vital part in this transformation were wholly and unambiguously in favour of democracy (they were not), but rather that independently held property provided a base of social power. This could, on rare but decisive occasions, challenge the authority of the state and initiate


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far-reaching political change. The point still relevant today is that the issue of property versus taxation led to some very sophisticated thinking about political organisation and to the development of what are still some dominant intellectual ideas about how a political system should work.

Checks and balances versus the doctrine of the democratic mandateFashions change in political science, as they do everywhere else, and the idea of democracy as a system of checks and balances was rather superseded in the mid-twentieth century, in Europe if not elsewhere, by the doctrine of the democratic mandate. According to this, democracy was essentially a means of empowering government to change society in accordance with the wishes of the majority. This majority, so the argument went, would use their vote to support the political party (or parties) of their choice. These would represent their supporters in parliament and would legislate according to the desires of their supporters. Class interests or political ideas would establish a natural affinity between certain kinds of voter, certain kinds of political ideology and one or more political parties. Political parties would play the role of encouraging activists and attracting ordinary people into politics. (There is a significant overlap between this idea and the pluralist idea of activist participation.)

The doctrine of the democratic mandate never came close to describing the conduct of politics in the USA, but it did come closer to describing how democracy worked in the mid-twentieth century in some European countries. Labour or Social Democratic parties tended to compete with Conservative or religious parties. If the left-wing parties won, they would increase taxes on high incomes and property; if the right-wing parties won, income and property taxes would be reduced. A range of other issues always complicated the actual process, but the essential model, according to which parties reflected defined social interests, largely seemed to operate.

The absence of a role for checks and balances in this kind of political game, however, left collectivist doctrines of democracy vulnerable to the accusation that they had no good way of limiting the possible abuse of power by elected governments. Surveys show that voters in industrialised countries have become more suspicious of government in the past 50 years and that people are less collectively minded and more interested in personal freedom. The end of the Cold War and the damage done to the credibility of socialist doctrines by the collapse of the of Soviet Union also led people to doubt that the best form of politics involved a clash between the advocates of rival ‘big ideas’ about politics. Furthermore, the past 50 years has seen a decline in religious observance in most industrialised countries and also a significant class dealignment. There are therefore, for example, fewer politically motivated Catholics, irrespective of what they do, who are likely to vote for religious parties, and fewer manual labourers with an obvious affinity for working-class politics.

For these reasons, theories that premise democratic politics on the role of the individual rather than the collective, and on problem-solving rather than general political doctrines, have come back into fashion. From this viewpoint, the point of democracy is as much to limit state power and protect citizens against the abuse of government as it is to express the view of majorities or transform society. What makes a political society healthy or otherwise is whether individual citizens are content with the working of their public institutions. The influence of this kind of thinking can be seen in major recent works by political scientists, such as Przeworski (1991, 26).


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Przeworski argues that democracy is in equilibrium when ‘all the relevant political forces find it best to continue to submit their interests and values’ to the uncertainties inherent in the democratic system. The people are subject to both law and the ultimate authors of the law-making power. Because of popular attachment to the system, participants in politics face lower costs or greater benefits by complying with the procedures of democratic process than by breaking them. For this to be possible, democratic institutions need real popular backing, otherwise those in charge of such institutions may gain from behaving undemocratically and may be tempted to do so.

Some of the ideas of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment have been abandoned. People today do not generally believe (as the authors of the US Constitution did) that we have inalienable ‘natural rights’ given to us by God. We believe instead that we have to work at creating and protecting our rights and that if this is not done then our political system will fail. The protection of rights, however, is still considered to be essential for a good political system.

One reason for the current ascendancy of ideas about democracy as balance has to do with the longevity of the US system and the considerable contemporary prestige of the USA. The US political system is still recognisably the same that existed in 1800. This is not really true in the UK, where parliamentarianism did not severely limit the role of the monarchy until after the 1832 Great Reform Act. It is not at all true of most other countries that are now democracies. A good question is how far the US model can usefully be adapted to other democratic systems. Although many political scientists are wary of the US idea that the executive and legislative bodies should be elected separately, however, there is now almost universal agreement that democracy needs a strong constitutional system with powerful courts. In many wealthy countries today, an aggrieved individual is at least as likely to visit a lawyer as a parliamentary representative.

The complexity of democracyIn the mid-1980s, when democratic transition was more or less complete in southern Europe, just underway in Latin America and possibly just beginning in eastern Europe, more emphasis was put on holding free and fair elections. For many observers, the important thing was to get elections held and then a country could be considered a democracy. Now there is a general view that free-and-fair elections are not enough. Democratically elected leaders are capable of acting very undemocratically at times. Democracy is now seen as the embodiment of a set of principles including:

• individual freedom

• human rights

• non-discrimination on the ground of religion, ethnicity or gender

• opportunities for participation

• an element of electoral competition.

We need all of these things, because the absence of any one of them makes us vulnerable to some form of bad government.

Although the theory of democracy as involving a complex balance of different aspects is probably accepted by the majority of political scientists, it also has weaknesses. These include, for example:

• The fact that democracy is unavoidably complex. This may not matter to a well-educated and sophisticated elector. Many people, however, will not see much relationship between how they vote and what they get. There is, inevitably, too much else going on. Less sophisticated


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people may be ‘turned off’ politics altogether by the complex nature of the democratic process. Electoral turnout has tended to fall in recent years in both the USA and the UK. The result may be to create a more apathetic, or fatalistic, culture among the population at large. This, in turn, might create opportunities for populist politicians. It is too early to be sure that this is happening, but concerns have been expressed. As a result, some politicians have tried to find ways of reinvigorating the political process, possibly by strengthening local government.

• Multiple criteria can make definitions of democracy very demanding. This may not be a bad thing in wealthy, First World countries, where constant thought needs to be given to how to upgrade the quality of the political process. It may not be so helpful, however, in evaluating emerging democracies, where the holding of free-and-fair elections on a consistent basis may seem to be an achievement in itself. The best may become an enemy to the good.

• The US version of democracy tends to be biased against strong government and (at least by implication) sympathetic to the role of markets. This certainly fits the spirit of the times. We live in an age that is rather sceptical about the role of government. In most First World countries the press is constantly full of details about government policy failures in transport, agriculture, education and so on. The idea – very widespread in the 1940s – that government could be used as an active instrument to achieve valuable social purposes has lost a lot of credibility. Certainly the idea of democracy as balance is very congruent with the idea of limited government, and with the notion that state power is generally part of the problem rather than part of the solution. It is understood that people will seek their main satisfactions in private life and that the economy works best if it is run essentially privately. This approach is not problematic, as long as its underlying bias is recognised and the assumptions on which it is based continue to be accepted.

Democracy and capitalismIt may be, however, that the relationship between capitalism and democracy will turn out to be more problematic than eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers originally supposed. As we saw earlier, democracy was originally intended to give expression to notions of civic equality. What happens, however, if private ownership of property and capitalist relations of production have the effect of maintaining and even increasing inequality? Most eighteenth-century thinkers did not care very much about the genuine poor, but today’s democrats do. It follows that the relationship between democracy and equality – like that between democracy and property – has become complex and problematic.

It is widely accepted (perhaps more in Europe than in the USA) that very great disparities of wealth are potentially threatening to democracy as well as being socially undesirable and perhaps morally wrong. For these reasons, generations of socialist or social democratic politicians have sought to use democracy to turn the state into a materially equalising institution. In other words, the idea was that the less-privileged majority in any society would use the powers of universal suffrage to elect redistributionist parties. For much of the twentieth century, left-wingers hoped, and conservatives feared, that democracy would foment equality and reduce differentials based upon unequal incomes and ownership of property.


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It did not turn out like this. This is at least partly because a very balanced and sophisticated democratic system, although good at preventing undesirable things from happening, is nothing like as good at getting anything done. This is not a problem for people who believe that they can mostly organise their lives satisfactorily with only minimal help from the state. However, the abandonment of the idea that a strong, central government can resolve pressing social problems ensures that democracy offers at best only limited opportunities for redressing the inequalities of the marketplace. Moreover, if genuine economic or political crises developed, we would have to think again about what we wanted from our democratic system.

Overall, the definition of democracy as embodying a balance of principles reflects the way in which most of us think of democracy. Whether this will be the case in the future remains to be seen.

ConclusionDemocracy is a complex system that is understood in ways that are increasingly demanding. Democracy is a word that has to be understood by ordinary people and also by practising politicians, so that political scientists are not able to define it purely as they please. What they can do is to try to make our understanding coherent, or at least to point out inconsistencies when they occur. The general international trend in the past generation has been to emphasise individual rights in our understanding of democracy and de-emphasise (to some extent) participation. Countries, however, have to satisfy a whole series of conditions before they can truly be regarded as democracies.

A reminder of your learning outcomesBy the end of this chapter and the relevant reading, you should be able to:

• list, describe and compare the main theoretical approaches to understanding democracy

• describe the main criticisms of each of these approaches

• outline and discuss the main ethical principles that lie behind democracy as a system of government

• outline the ways in which the relationship between majoritarian government and individual rights has been understood

• analyse the role of activists in democratic politics

• explain why the notion of contestation is crucial to our understanding of how democracy works

• explain why liberal democracy is inherently a rather complex system of government.

Sample examination questions1. ‘A system is more democratic if people can vote more often on issues

which concern them. That is why democracy should make frequent use of referendums.’ Discuss.

2. ‘A democracy is a country that chooses its leaders through election.’ Discuss.

3. ‘The notion of liberal democracy is inherently contradictory.’ Discuss.

4. To what extent, if any, does contemporary, First World democracy allow ordinary voters to exert control over what their government does?

Chapter 2: Democracy and the state

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Aims of the chapterThis chapter looks at systems that are democratic in some ways and not democratic in others. It considers several variants of systems that do not fit easily into either category. These include façade democracy, state bias, illiberal democracy and delegative democracy. It then discusses the notion of democratic consolidation as a way of distinguishing semi-democracies from countries that are fully democratic.

Learning outcomesBy the end of the chapter and the associated reading, you should have a good understanding of how political scientists have tried to conceptualise these different forms of semi-democracy and what their main characteristics are. You should be able to:

• identify and discuss when it is most difficult for elected political leaders to control the military

• explain when democracy is most at risk from within the state itself

• outline what illiberal democracy is

• outline what delegative democracy is

• explain what happens when a democratic state is biased in favour of incumbents

• analyse the advantages and disadvantages of using a demanding standard of democratic consolidation.

Essential reading

BooksLinz, J. and A. Stepan Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation:

Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) [ISBN 9780801851582].

JournalsO’Donnell, G. ‘Delegative Democracy’, Journal of Democracy 5(1) 1994, pp.55

69. Available online at www.nd.edu/~kellogg/publications/workingpapers/WPS/172.pdf

Zakaria, F. ‘The Rise of Illiberal Democracy’, Foreign Affairs 76(6) 1997, pp.22–43.

Further readingBooks


North, D. Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) [ISBN 0521394163].

Philip, G. Democracy in Latin America: Surviving Conflict and Crisis? (Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity, 2003) [ISBN 0745627601].

Przeworski, A. Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) [ISBN 052142335X] Chapters 1 and 2.


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JournalsPhilip, G. ‘Democracy and State Bias in Latin America: lessons from Mexico,

Venezuela and Peru’, Democratization 6(4) 1999, pp.74–92.Plattner, M. ‘Liberalism and Democracy’, Foreign Affairs 77(2) 1998, pp.171–80.

IntroductionThe previous chapter established that democracy, as we understand it, is a fairly complex form of government. Some early political philosophers would not have recognised it as democracy at all. This chapter looks at some cases in which the minimum conditions of democracy have probably been met, but in which there are still serious problems in achieving all of the things we generally want from democracy. This issue is especially relevant when we look at new democracies, or democracies that are imperfect in some ways but effective in others. Is there a dividing line that enables us to say that ‘A’ is a democracy but ‘B’ is not? More importantly still, is there a good way to understand and conceptualise a system that has some of the characteristics of democracy but not others?

These are open-ended questions to which no definitive answer can be given. They are, however, questions that can usefully be explored further. Linz and Stepan (1996) and other authors such as Przeworski (1991) have introduced into the literature a broad notion of ‘democratic consolidation’. This can be used to separate systems in which elections are held but in which the democratic process is flawed from those that are democratic in the fullest sense. We will look at the issue of democratic consolidation later in the chapter. Non-consolidated democracy can refer to a wide range of situations, which need to be narrowed down somewhat. In this chapter, we look at four specific but different kinds of situation.

1. Limited democracies, in which elections are held freely but the government does not fully control the state. The state – by which is meant principally the army, the police and the judiciary – does fairly much as it sees fit. This is normally known as limited democracy, but at the extreme its critics could regard it as ‘façade democracy.’

2. Biased states, in which votes are honestly counted and individual freedoms mainly respected, but where the elected government tends to use the state for partisan advantage (Philip, 1999). The courts, police, etc. are subject to the will of powerful politicians. These, in turn, act as though they are above the law and may resort to illegal methods of media manipulation or campaign financing at election time.

3. Illiberal democracies, in which the government and state control each other and where effective government is possible, but where there is little respect for individual rights (Zakaria, 1997). We have already noted that the notion of human rights seems essential to our understanding of democracy today. In addition to this, a problem exists with the internal logic of illiberal democracy, in that illiberal systems can deny essential rights to opposition politicians and thereby limit democratic participation and competition.

4. Delegative democracies, in which the government responds only to public opinion and neglects pluralist arrangements and institutions (O’Donnell, 1994). Some overlap exists between illiberal and delegative democracy, in that both are likely to involve the abuse of rights by the forces of the state. There is a difference of degree, however: delegative democracy is more likely to be a response to crisis and something that is inherently transitional. Moreover, the


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abuse of rights under delegative systems is more likely to be the result of personalist arbitrariness than systematic state policy. One might consider the outcome as being the ‘personalisation’ of the state.

The distinctions drawn in the literature between different forms of semi-democracy are possibly a little bit neater than real-life situations, and the literature sometimes overlaps categories. It is, however, a good idea to keep them apart for the purposes of clear discussion.

We will now look at each of category in turn.

Limited and façade democracySome political systems may appear superficially to be democratic without being democratic at all. In such cases, democracy is no more than a façade, and the real power is in the hands of a dominant party or the military or an individual dictator. It may be better to regard such systems as non-democracies and to analyse them as authoritarian systems.

We do, however, need to be concerned with systems in which there is a genuine democratic element, but in which this is not strong enough for a country to be considered fully democratic.

Example: South America

Between 1945 and 1976 (or thereabouts), South America had many elected civilian governments. Could South America be regarded as fully democratic? The answer is ‘not exactly’, because most countries had military interventions and long periods of military dictatorship as well.

For example, the Ecuadorian politician, Velasco Ibarra, was famous as an orator. His personal motto was ‘give me a balcony and I will govern’. He found, to his cost, however, that winning elections was one thing and governing quite another. He won five presidential elections and was unable to complete a single term: the military always stepped in and overthrew him before the end.

Could we say that these countries were democratic at some points and authoritarian at others? This may be true as far as it goes, but it does not go very far. It is quite reasonable to treat authoritarian rule as non-democratic, but it is not clear that we can regard a country as democratic merely because it is not currently run in an authoritarian way. There are several reasons why this is so:

1. A democratically elected government will not do certain things, because it cannot expect to survive the consequences of opposition from non-democrats. We call this an ‘anticipated reactions’ problem.

2. So-called democracies with powerless democratic leaders will have a problem of legitimation. Democracy can only take hold in a society if it is taken seriously as a means of deciding who governs. If anybody dissatisfied with an election result or government can just call in the military, people will be likely to see democracy as a meaningless game.

3. Non-democratic forces, possibly including the military and the police, will control ‘enclaves’ of society and will not be accountable for their actions via democratic means.

4. In policy terms, this creates a situation in which measures that might help with long-term democratic stabilisation are inhibited by the short-term needs of political survival. For example, it was sometimes politically impossible for elected governments to use the legal process against their authoritarian predecessors for corruption or the abuse


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of power. The realisation that senior ranks of the military were often above the law made it even harder for civilians to govern in the long run.

Democracy and the stateMoving from specific examples to consideration of more general points, we can see that limited democracy exists when the elected government does not control the state. It is of course true that the word ‘control’ is problematic. There are ways in which the elected government should not control the state (for example, it should not be able to win exemption from prosecution for corruption). Democratic systems require a balanced relation between the democratic and non-democratic parts of the state. (We saw in Chapter 1 that democracy involved a complex set of balances.)

Democratic systems vary according to which positions are subject to election and which are not, but there is always a non-elected aspect to the state. Some democracies elect their judges. Very few elect their generals. The relation between the elected and non-elected part of the state needs to be constructive if democracy is to be successful. It is evident that the elected government must be able to govern; however, elected government still needs to be subject to the constraints of the law. The elected government must not have absolute power over the state, or else it may be able to place itself above the law. The problem of securing a good relationship between the government and the state cannot just be a matter of command and control. It needs to involve elements of command, but also agreement and cooperation.

Situations do sometimes arise in which what we might call the permanent state – officials, judges and security forces – is out of favour with the elected government. Such a situation will always generate a certain amount of tension, but normally this is likely to be manageable. The problems that arise can also be more serious, however. One of the reasons why the parliamentary republic in Weimar Germany failed to prevent the rise of Hitler in 1933 had to do with the lack of sympathy with democratic values on the part of the German state elite – judges, the police, the military and so on. Nazi street fighters enjoyed over-tolerant policing and leniency from the courts, and Hitler served only a few months in prison in 1923, despite having been involved in an attempt to overthrow the democratic state by force. Obviously, this enormously strengthened the Nazi party.

Similar problems occurred in the case of Allende’s Socialist government in Chile (1970–73). It is quite possible that this government would have encountered severe problems whatever the circumstances, but it did not help that the courts, police and military were completely out of sympathy with the elected government. A lack of trust in the existing state induced some militant supporters of the government to bypass the constitution and to engage directly in property seizures and harassment of opponents. This, in turn, led conservatives to claim that the government was failing to uphold the law and to invite the military to step in. In the end, the military accepted this invitation.

Tensions within the state are especially likely to arise under conditions of war, serious insurgency or terrorism, because such conditions are likely to create a security dilemma. Either the state fights its enemies in an indiscriminate way, or else it accepts certain restraints on its conduct of conflict. Restrained warfare can be a tenable option if the aim is to bring the adversary into a negotiating situation. It is often the case, however,


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that military officers, senior policemen and others will resent the restraints that democracy puts on what they are allowed to do, and they may be tempted to break the rules. The liberal democratic solution to such occurrences is for those responsible for lawlessness to be arrested and brought to justice. When even genuine liberal democracies are involved in some kind of armed conflict, though, such an outcome does not occur as often as it possibly should. When the security forces are in a position to make a credible threat to overthrow the state, it may in fact be impossible for an elected government to intervene too much in what the forces of the state do. It may have to ignore past or present-day abuses. In the worst case, the military becomes the effective arbiter of power.

Democracy in biased statesMoving further along the democratic spectrum, in some political systems, elections are routinely held and contested, but the state is biased toward incumbents. This situation is not uncommon and requires some further discussion.

Most social scientists accept Douglass North’s way of defining institutions and organisations (1992). Institutions are enforced rules – some people would say valued and enforced rules. Organisations are collectives that seek to gain some advantage by playing according to the rules. There is a clear analogy here with sporting occasions – for example, a football match. The referee and ultimately the governing council of football (the institution) interpret and enforce the rules. The team players (the organisation) seek to win the game. In football, as in life, rules are occasionally broken and enforcement is occasionally mistaken. The key point, however, is that different people have different roles.

In liberal democratic systems, the state is the rule-enforcing body. Those who run the state may have interests of their own, but they still have to operate through laws and formal procedures. State bodies operate the political process by enforcing the rules rather than by trying to determine the outcome. They intervene only when the rules are in dispute or where they have been broken. Political parties and interest groups are organisations. Organisations may not want to observe the rules, but they have to do so or else they will fail to achieve their objectives. As a result of winning power (when they do so), organisations can change the rules in ways that are of benefit to their members and supporters; however, they still have to operate through the formal rules of impartial institutions rather than directly as they please.

In biased states, the state behaves ‘organisationally’ as well as institutionally. The people who run the top echelons of the state – elected politicians, the military, the police, sometimes the economic technocracy and sometimes the judiciary – do not necessarily have to respect formal procedures operated by impartial officials. They can act more or less as they wish. They may prefer one political party or one political outcome above others.

Example: Mexico

By way of example, Mexico was governed in the 1980s and 1990s by an economic technocracy. The technocracy was introduced into the political system by the power of the presidency, and it was kept there by a system that allowed the outgoing president to select his successor. For most of this period, there were contested elections.

If one takes competitive elections with the vote honestly counted as the minimum definition of democracy, then Mexico was a democracy during the 1990s at any rate.


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However, the ruling party that contested the elections – the Institutional Revolutionary Party (the PRI) – was very much dominated by the state itself. It would be impossible to argue seriously that the state was indifferent as to whether the PRI was elected or not, or that the state simply enforced impersonal rules within which different organisations competed. Instead, the situation was that the referee was also a player. The state and the PRI were so closely connected that it was hard to say where the PRI ended and the state began.

Example: Peru

A further example can be taken from Peru under Fujimori in the 1990s. Fujimori was elected to the presidency as an independent candidate. He faced serious problems on a number of fronts:

• Peru was suffering from economic decline and hyperinflation.

• Peru had a problem with terrorism.

• Fujimori did not enjoy a congressional majority.

It seems that some Peruvian military officers who wanted to fight against terrorism without constitutional restraint approached Fujimori and suggested that they get together and overthrow the congress and existing judiciary. Fujimori agreed to this and, in April 1992, closed congress by force. Public opinion generally approved of this – Fujimori’s popularity actually rose following the closure.

In policy terms, the closure of congress was quite successful:

• inflation fell

• economic growth resumed

• the main terrorist organisation – Sendero Luminoso – was largely defeated.

Fujimori took advantage of the resulting increase in presidential popularity in order to run for re-election. He was able to do this in 1995, but things become more complicated afterwards. Fujimori wanted to run again in 2000, despite the fact that the constitution approved by plebiscite in 1993 forbade him to do so. However, Fujimori’s supporters in congress voted in a law that would allow him to run again. The Peruvian Supreme Court declared this unconstitutional. Fujimori’s supporters in congress counteracted by voting to impeach Supreme Court judges opposed to Fujimori’s re-election. These were replaced with tame judges, who ruled that Fujimori’s candidacy for re-election did not break the constitution. In the end, Fujimori appeared to win the 2000 elections, but further allegations of bribery led the Peruvian Congress – which was also elected in 2000 – to vote Fujimori from office at the end of that year.

Activity

Using the relevant reading, present some explanations as to why democracy in biased states does not break down altogether.

Illiberal democracyThe term ‘illiberal democracy’ was developed in an article by Zakaria (1997), in which he made the point that democracy, as we generally know it, involves a mixture of majoritarianism and respect for individual rights. He argued also that many independently established consolidated democracies enforced systems of individual rights before they introduced universal suffrage. Britain, for example, was a liberal state (according to some definitions of the term) after 1689, but only became fully democratic after 1918. Zakaria questioned whether the introduction of universal suffrage before systems of individual rights were firmly established would lead to liberal democracy or whether majoritarian systems would actually stand in the way of the development of rights.


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Zakaria’s argument has led to a considerable debate in academic literature, and Plattner’s critique is directly relevant (1998). Plattner argues that liberal values can be institutionalised via the democratic process in cases where liberalism did not precede democracy. It is, though, not entirely clear that this is the case. In Latin America, most countries are democracies, but it is not at all clear that they have institutionalised systems of state impartiality. Nor are countries that have been democratic for longer – such as Colombia and Venezuela – more successful at building liberal institutions than others.

Zakaria can be criticised for using the concept of liberalism (or ‘illiberalism’) too widely. Some people think of liberalism as having to do with impartiality, others think of it as having to do with freedom. Some political systems can be broadly fair and impartial but quite intolerant as well. It might be best to call such systems illiberal, while using a concept such as bias to describe state partiality (as seen in the previous sub-section).

Although Zakaria’s concept of illiberal democracy may need some reformulation, it does work reasonably well in at least one important real-world context. This context is the system in which cultural values are rather authoritarian and not particularly responsive to the individualistic principles of equality before the law and competition for the popular vote. Many such systems are to be found in Southeast Asia.

It is certainly the case that a country can be governed according to a set of political values that are not individualist or liberal but indeed formally democratic. Whether such systems are democratic in a deeper sense is disputable.

Activity

Consider illiberal democracy alongside Schumpeter’s definition of democracy, which was described in the last chapter. Would illiberal democracy fit Schumpeter’s definition?

Delegative democracyThe term ‘delegative democracy’ was developed by Guillermo O’Donnell to cover some countries in Latin America (1994). Although O’Donnell principally had in mind the presidencies of Collor in Brazil and Menem in Argentina, some people would say that other examples in the region could also be found, notably those of Fujimori in Peru and Chavez in Venezuela.

The basic idea is that the system is run on the basis of extreme personalism. People vote for the president – delegative democracy is far more likely in presidential than in parliamentary systems – on the basis that they are voting for a pure leader figure who will solve all of the country’s pressing problems. A relation exists between this idea and the Weberian notion of charismatic authority. Weber’s notion is based on earlier religious leaders who successfully appealed to large numbers of people. A relation also exists between this idea and ‘cults of personality’, which are common enough in non-democracies. O’Donnell’s notion, however, refers to countries that are indeed democratic and to elections that have been freely held and actively contested.

Empirically, personalist politicians do not usually win presidential elections in Latin America, and where they have done so, they have often faced overthrow by congress. However, the phenomenon of extreme personalist rule, although not common even in Latin America, is not unknown and is worth discussing further. Certainly, one important reason why extreme


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personalists sometimes do win elections is the fact that democratic systems can fail in policy terms and this failure can produce political crisis. In Latin America at the beginning of the 1990s, for example, there was a clear relationship between hyperinflation and extreme personalism.

Delegative democracy may well prove to have been an inherently transitional form of government. An individual cannot solve all of a society’s problems and will soon lose his (or her) authority if he (or she) tries to do so. Very personalistically minded presidents in the region have often been removed from power by congress. An individual leader, however, can sometimes reorganise the state so that, although the moment of extreme personalism is transitory, its political significance may be long-term. The significance may be that a personalist leader will make use of the military to help him govern, which is what happened in Peru under Fujimori and, to some extent, in Venezuela under Chavez, or else he can make common cause with business leaders, as happened in Argentina under Menem. The end result may be that the system changes into some other form of semi-democracy.

Activity

List O’Donnell’s main criteria for characterising delegative democracy.

The notion of democratic consolidationWe saw in the introductory chapter that liberal democracy is a complex form of government. It is entirely likely that we will find systems that are democratic in some aspects and not in others. We have already discussed some of these situations in this chapter. We should also ask whether there is a dynamic of democracy. In other words, does the experience and practice of democracy make it more likely that democracy will be strengthened? If it does, then limited, biased, illiberal and delegative democracies are likely to be transitional phenomena pending the deepening of democratic institutionalisation. Although some countries have indeed seen a strengthening of their democratic institutions after they democratised, this has not been so in all cases. There does not seem to be much evidence of a general trend according to which non-consolidated democracies are likely to become consolidated according to a set pattern.

Linz and Stepan discussed this point in their work on democratic consolidation (1996). Their work is rich and complex, and the methodology is reasonably clear. They start by defining democracy in a very demanding way. Essentially they define five arenas of democratic consolidation.

1. In civil society, there has to be freedom of association and communication.

2. In political society, there has to be free and inclusive electoral contestation.

3. There must be a rule of law and a spirit of constitutionalism.

4. The state apparatus has to be fun, according to legal–rational (Weberian) bureaucratic principles.

5. Economic society has to be organised around respect for property rights, and conditions must be in place to permit economic growth.

These conditions are rather demanding, and contrast with a simpler definition proposed by Prezworski, which is that:

‘democracy is consolidated when under given political and economic conditions a particular set of institutions becomes the only game in town’ (1991, 26).


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The problem with any very demanding definition is that only a few political systems can meet it. For example, most people would regard the UK and Spain as democracies, but armed groups wanting some form of secession have attacked each country from within:

• the Irish Republican Army (IRA) wants Northern Ireland to become part of a united Ireland

• the Basque Separatist Movement (ETA) wants an independent Basque country.

For years, the southern states of the USA were racially segregated and black Americans did not enjoy the full protection of the law. It would be an extreme view, however, to say that the USA was not a democracy during this period, although it is a view that has been advanced. Some European democracies have also been run in very corrupt ways. Can we seriously say, however, that the rule of law did not operate in these cases?

There are some advantages in having a demanding definition of democracy:

• We saw in the last chapter that democracy is inherently a complex form of government.

• We do need to break down the concept into some of its component parts in order to see how they fit together in different ways and at different times.

• We need to be able to analyse systems in which there are elections but where there also exists a threat to democracy from armed minorities.

• We also need to be able to analyse systems in which elections are routinely held and contested but in which there is not much confidence in the judicial system and in which it would be optimistic to speak of a rule of law.

In practice, Linz and Stepan give considerable weight to voter attitudes towards democracy. Their work uses extensive survey data and seeks to evaluate answers to questions such as:

• Are people convinced that democracy is the best form of government?

• Do they have confidence in their own democratic institutions?

Other authors, such as Diamond (1999) also believe that we have a lot to learn about democracy by asking questions of ordinary people, particularly in places where democracy is a relatively new form of government.

In principle, this does seem to be a useful way of proceeding. We can learn more about how democracy works in practice, by learning about people’s attitudes towards it. It is likely that these attitudes will be rationally explicable in terms of the objective conditions facing the country. For example, if voters perceive their government as being economically unsuccessful, then it is entirely likely that the economic indicators will show this to be so. If that is the case, then we can specify what objective conditions are likely to orient public opinion in a given way. There is, however, always some irrationality in politics, and it may well be that there is some lack of fit between what people believe to be the case and that is actually the case. If such a lack of fit exists, then we will not be able to explain democratic legitimation purely in terms of objective conditions. We may need to look for more complex kinds of explanation.

It is also important that the notion of non-consolidated democracy does not become a theory of stages. We really cannot know whether democratic systems that today seem non-consolidated will in the future:

• become consolidated

• break down altogether


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• remain non-consolidated

• consolidate in some ways and de-consolidate in others.

Not only is democracy a complex category in itself, but the dynamics of democratisation or non-democratisation in some respects remain obscure. There are limits to our possible knowledge of these things.

Activity

Explain how each of the Linz and Stepan arenas of democratic consolidation interconnect to form an overall picture of a consolidated democracy.

ConclusionThis chapter has considered some of the ways in which scholars have tried to conceptualise and categorise political systems that were at least minimally democratic (having free and contested elections) but not completely so, according to the rather demanding criteria set out at the end of Chapter 1. The authors considered here do not have a monopoly on these characterisations. There are other possible ways of discussing imperfectly democratic systems – an enormous amount of literature exists on the subject, and fresh ideas will no doubt be put forward in the future. Those authors considered here do, however, have the merit of putting forward characterisations that work both at a conceptual level and as descriptions of one or more real-world political systems.

A reminder of your learning outcomesBy the end of the chapter and the associated reading, you should have a good understanding of how political scientists have tried to conceptualise these different forms of semi-democracy and what their main characteristics are. You should be able to:

• identify and discuss when it is most difficult for elected political leaders to control the military

• explain when democracy is most at risk from within the state itself

• outline what illiberal democracy is

• outline what delegative democracy is

• explain what happens when a democratic state is biased in favour of incumbents

• analyse the advantages and disadvantages of using a demanding standard of democratic consolidation.

Sample examination questions1. What is ‘illiberal democracy’? What are the reasons for supposing it to

be a potentially durable form of government?

2. ‘“Delegative democracy” is just a sophisticated name for presidentialist personalism.’ Discuss.

3. What good reasons, if any, are there for supposing that non-consolidated democracies are likely to become more consolidated over time?

4. What is state bias? What impact does it have on democracy?

Chapter 3: Non-democratic systems and the transition to democracy

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Aims of the chapterThis chapter looks at the relation between different kinds of non-democracy and different kinds of transition to democracy. The types of non-democracy discussed in the chapter are:

• imperial and colonial rule

• monarchy

• military government

• dominant party government.

We will give an account of some of the ways in which each of these systems has been transformed into democracy.

Learning outcomesBy the end of this chapter, and having completed the Essential reading and activities, you should be able to:

• explain the main problems and difficulties that are likely to be associated with democratising each system of government discussed in this chapter (empire, monarchy, military government and dominant party rule)

• explain how transition could happen in different kinds of non-democratic political system.

Essential reading Przeworski, A. Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in

Eastern Europe and Latin America. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) [ISBN 9780521423359] Chapters 1 and 2.

Further readingBrooker, P. Non-Democratic Regimes: Theory, Government and Politics. (London:

Palgrave Macmillan, 2000) [ISBN 0312227558].Crystal, J. Oil and Politics in the Gulf: Rulers and Merchants in Kuwait and Qatar.

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) updated edition [ISBN 0521466350].

Di Palma, G. To Craft Democracies: an Essay in Democratic Transition. (Berkeley: University Presses of California, Columbia and Princeton, 1990; reprint edition) [ISBN 0520072146].

Gill, G. The Dynamics of Democratisation. (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 2000) [ISBN 0333801970]. This is available via the publisher’s website.

Hagopian, F. Traditional Politics and Regime Change in Brazil. (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996) [ISBN 0521032881].



Lieven, D. Empire: the Russian Empire and its Rivals. (London: John Murray, 2000) [ISBN 0719552435].


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O’Donnell, G., P. Schmitter and L. Whitehead (eds) Transitions from Authoritarian Rule and Prospects for Democracy: Latin America. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986) [ISBN 0801826829].

IntroductionDuring the past 20 years, many countries that were formally non-democracies have become democracies. Essentially this chapter is an empirical discussion of how democratisation took place in the recent and more distant past. It suggests that the way in which societies became democratic (or not) depended significantly on the way in which they were organised prior to democratisation. This chapter should be read in conjunction with the next chapter, which examines some theories of why democratisation occurred.

Huntington’s (1991) notion that there have been three waves of democratisation has generally been accepted as empirically useful. The first wave of countries essentially adopted democratic principles in the nineteenth century. They included:

• the USA

• Switzerland

• France

• Britain.

The second wave consisted of countries that democratised after the defeat of fascism in 1945. The list includes:

• (the then) West Germany

• Italy

• Japan

• Austria.

The third wave began in 1974 with the overthrow of the authoritarian government of Portugal. The military government in Greece also fell in 1974, and the following year the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco died. By 1980, these three southern European countries had all become democracies. During the next decade, the majority of Latin American countries changed from non-democracies to democracies. Many African countries also adopted democracy in the 1980s or early 1990s. From the late 1980s, the countries of eastern Europe also rejected communism and adopted democracy. The process culminated in mid-1991, when a failed coup attempt brought about the destruction of the Soviet Union as a unit. Many, though not all, of its component parts became democracies.

It is, however, important to qualify the notion of ‘waves’ in one respect. In the past, in some regions of the world there were almost as many cases of democratic breakdown as of democratisation. To adapt Huntington’s phraseology, waves sometimes pulled away from the shore as well as moving towards it. Latin America has suffered several waves of democratic breakdown, the most important of which took place in the 1930s, 1960s and early 1970s. In continental Europe, many parliamentary systems were set up at the end of the First World War and the majority of these broke down in the 1920s or early 1930s. In the 1930s, many observers believed that fascism or communism, and not democracy, would be the wave of the future.

What is significant for this discussion is that there has been much less democratic breakdown since 1980 than there was following earlier ‘waves’ of democratisation. By the middle of the 1990s, well over 50 countries that


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were not democracies at the beginning of 1974 had become democracies. Most of these were in the Third World, and so far the vast majority of these democratic transitions have not been reversed. Some countries nevertheless did suffer from democratic breakdown. A military coup took place in Pakistan in 1999, and serious problems were seen with the electoral process in Zimbabwe in 2002. It is also clear that some important parts of the world – China and much of the Middle East – did not participate in the most recent democratising wave. Nonetheless, we cannot really speak of any major reversal of the most recent wave of democratisation.

However, progress towards democracy has slowed down since the mid-1990s. Even so, the extent of democratisation has surprised scholars. As we shall see in more detail in the next chapter, some modernisation theories did not expect the spread of democracy across Africa and Latin America to be sustained. It is true that some new democracies do not seem to be particularly secure and that only some of the countries that have democratised since 1974 can be regarded as democratically consolidated. Nevertheless, as we saw in the last chapter, the criterion of democratic consolidation is demanding. The mere fact that democracy has proved as durable as it has over quite long periods of time is significant.

One way of trying to understand the magnitude of this transformation is to consider how different forms of non-democracies have evolved into democracies or, on occasion, have failed to do so. This approach will be considered in the rest of this chapter.

Colonial rule and the collapse of empiresAn important force behind political change has been the decline, or in some cases, collapse of empires. This process has sometimes created entirely new countries – new countries that need new political systems. Ex-colonial countries have not invariably adopted democratic systems of government. Former British colonies have often done so – the USA, India and Ireland are positive examples – but there are negative examples as well, such as Pakistan. Former Spanish colonies did not immediately develop democratic institutions, even in countries, such as Argentina, that were settled principally from Europe. Nevertheless, the history of decolonisation has seen major changes in the way in which very large numbers of people have been governed.

The defeat of the British Empire in the War of American Independence had particularly important consequences for the history of democracy worldwide. The USA pioneered the presidential system of government, which today is the main alternative to parliamentarianism. A generation later, the success of many former Latin American colonies of Spain and Portugal in securing independence also brought into existence new states and new constitutional systems – although constitutional development was much less successful in Latin America than in the USA. Most Latin American countries adopted hybrid systems that include:

• presidentialism

• continental European systems of administrative law

• a tradition of rule by decree.

Unfortunately, very few systems of this kind have truly consolidated institutionally in the long run.

In 1918, the collapse of the Austro–Hungarian Empire also brought a number of new states into existence. Attempts were made to set up democratic parliamentary systems in most of these new states, but virtually


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all of them failed, falling victim to authoritarian forms of politics by the 1930s. Many were then occupied or controlled by the Nazis during 1941–45. In some cases re-democratisation followed the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945 and in others it followed the collapse of Communism in the 1980s.

After the Second World War, the European empires pursued a consistent, if not always voluntary, policy of decolonisation. The political results of independence were mixed, but at least some countries adopted and retained democratic systems. India famously adopted a democratic parliamentary system in the late 1940s, while some other countries, notably in Africa, only became democracies in the 1980s ‘wave’, and sometimes not even then.

Political consequences of imperial control and decolonisation prior to 1990

The effect of imperial collapse upon democratisation was therefore rather mixed. In some very important cases, the end of empire led to democratisation, but this was by no means the only outcome. It is clear that democratisation did spread after the collapse of the former Soviet Union, but much less clear that the collapse of previous empires had so general an effect. The consequences of earlier forms of imperial control and decolonisation in various parts of the world depended upon (among other things):

• the character of the imperial society

• the extent to which there was settlement from the metropolitan country

• the historical epoch in which the colonising and decolonising took place.

In some cases, the impact of colonial rule was utterly destructive. Indigenous populations in much of the Americas were either totally wiped out or greatly reduced in number.

In other cases, the colonial power sought to reduce the cost of direct administration, either by allowing some precolonial patterns of authority to survive or by developing and transmitting new institutions. This was done with varying degrees of success in different parts of the world. In some cases, European colonial powers were able to legitimate their rule, in the sense that subjects of the empire wished to remain so, at times on the basis of full-scale integration into the imperial country, but such cases are extremely few. Sometimes, willing ex-colonies have proved to be more a source of embarrassment than satisfaction to the colonial power, which wanted to find an acceptable means of getting rid of a colony eager to stay in the empire – the Falkland Islands are one example and Gibraltar another. Of course, the Falklands are populated by British settlers rather than indigenous people. On the other hand, though, indigenous peoples in Martinique and French Guyana are content to remain part of France. This kind of government is not inevitably non-democratic, in the sense that the French Guyanese vote in French elections and the Falkland Islanders elect a council of their own.

Far more often, however, the imperial power was unable to persuade former colonies to remain as colonies. When the opportunity for independence presented itself, it was generally accepted and sometimes seized. We can identify four possible ways in which decolonisation interacted with democratisation:

• continuity and democratisation


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• continuity and non-democratisation

• discontinuity and democratisation

• discontinuity and non-democratisation.

Continuity and democratisationIn some cases, independent countries adopted democratic institutions from their former colonial powers (which were themselves democracies). It sometimes mattered that independence was granted and accepted on relatively good terms, though this was not necessarily decisive. Britain retained good relations with India after independence in 1947, and India adopted and maintained a parliamentary system based on the British model. The same was also true of British Honduras, which became known as Belize upon independence in 1981. Nevertheless, the bitterly fought independence movement in Ireland did not preclude Ireland from adopting parliamentary institutions after 1922.

Continuity and non-democratisationIn some cases, the independent country threw off the control of a non-democracy, but did not democratise when it did so. A form of colonial rule that was doubly non-democratic (both because colonialism is not inherently democratic and because the colonial power was not a democracy) then gave way to a non-democratic but local form of post-colonial rule. When Brazil became independent from Portugal in the 1820s, it retained a monarchical system of government. The monarchy was not overthrown until 1889, and Brazil did not really establish a democratic form of government until the 1980s.

Discontinuity and democratisationThe category most relevant to the issue of democratic transition occurred where the collapse of a non-democratic empire led to the adoption of democracy in the newly independent countries. When Soviet rule collapsed in Eastern Europe after 1989, most of the countries of eastern Europe adopted democratic systems of government. They did so partly in reaction to the unpopular Communist system imposed upon them earlier, partly out of a genuine preference for democracy and partly because the new states enjoyed the support of the USA and the European Union. Such cases are illustrations of transition to democracy via imperial collapse.

Discontinuity and non-democratisationIn some cases, newly independent countries seemed likely to adopt democratic parliamentary systems similar to those existing in their former colonial powers, but in the end did not do so. This pattern of abortive democracy is common in Africa, although the past decade has seen significant amounts of re-democratisation in the region. Vietnam and Algeria became independent from France when France was a democracy, but they did not democratise themselves.

Negative legacies of colonialismSometimes the impact of colonialism created problems that made it hard for post-colonial countries to become stable democracies. One of the legacies of colonialism was that centralised states and national borders were organised over territories that had not previously known them or that had experienced quite different boundaries at earlier times. Borders that once seemed artificial often remained intact after the ending of colonial rule and tensions often resulted from a poor ‘fit’ between the externally imposed national


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borders and the original allegiances of indigenous peoples. Because empires were coercive, they sometimes imposed a single form of rule on ethnically or religiously divided territories. The downfall of such empires has led, at times, to an upsurge in conflict between different ethnic or religious groups as each tried to consolidate its own territorial claims.

Sometimes a clear-cut secession is possible and may appear to resolve the issue (for example, the Czech Republic and Slovakia agreed to separate in 1991). At other times, clear-cut solutions are less easy to find and serious armed conflict may develop. These conflicts did not absolutely prevent subsequent democratisation but they did make it more difficult. Examples include:

• the former republics of Yugoslavia in the 1990s

• Ireland after 1922

• India/Pakistan after 1947.

One might conclude this discussion, therefore, by saying that empires, although they do not often make any successful claim to legitimacy in their own terms, do at times develop institutions that can be transmitted successfully to colonies and kept on after independence. It is often a matter of contingency whether or not this happens, however, and there have been many failures as well as successes. For this reason, the decline of empires – although an opportunity for democratic transition – can also be a time of very great disorder and conflict.

Whether the influence exerted today by the USA over Latin America and by some European countries over parts of Africa can be considered imperial is controversial. What is clear, though, is that attempts by the USA and to some extent Europe to export democracy to various parts of the world have been influential. In southern and eastern Europe, countries that could sustain democratic institutions over the long term could enjoy the prospect of membership of the European Union. Such membership is advantageous on many grounds. In the African case, quite significant amounts of aid have been made conditional on democratisation. The relative importance of this linkage for democracy has varied from case to case and is never preponderant. International bodies do have to work through local agents if they are to succeed and most Africans do prefer democracy. At the very least, however, the international community is much less supportive of non-democracy in the Third World than was once the case. In Latin America, too, international influence has played a part in discouraging dictatorship, although abundant survey evidence shows that most people within the region prefer democracy, and this fact needs to be taken into account as well.

Consequences of the breaking-up of the former Soviet Union in 1991

The central event in the third wave of democratisation was the fall of the former Soviet Union. Although Soviet rule over eastern Europe loosened considerably after 1986, the seminal event here was the breaking up of the former Soviet Union after a failed military coup attempt in 1991. This had three important consequences.

1. Several countries in eastern Europe that would probably have adopted democracy if left to themselves could then do so. The Soviet Union had supported communist rule in eastern Europe and invaded Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 in order to preserve communism in the region, but from the late 1980s, the former Soviet Union no longer tried to do so.


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2. The decline and eventual disintegration of the former Soviet Union changed the nature of politics in other parts of the world. Communist parties in non-communist countries needed to rethink their ideologies and strategies. This was also true of anti-communists. Some of those who had supported military rule in Latin America because they believed that this was the only way of suppressing communism had to re-evaluate their positions. Similarly, the USA and some European governments, which had previously backed non-democratic rulers in parts of the Third World because they were anti-communist and likely to suppress communism, no longer needed to do so. The USA, in particular, became a global advocate of democratisation and this is also true of the European Union.

3. A number of newly independent republics that had formerly been part of the Soviet Union (though not all of them) subsequently adopted democratic systems of government.

Activity

List the most important European Empires, including the former Soviet Union. Trace out which of their ex-colonies became democracies immediately after independence and which did not.

Other forms of non-democratic organisationWe now turn to countries that have made the transition to democracy without major changes in their basic identity or international relations. There are three fairly common forms of non-democratic rule in the world today:

• monarchy

• military government

• rule via a dominant party system.

We might want to make a further distinction between totalitarian and authoritarian rule, but this will not be discussed in great detail here, because it is not directly relevant to democratisation.

MonarchyA number of countries are monarchies today, but for many it is in name only, in the sense that the monarch is a figurehead for what is, in practice, parliamentary government. Nepal, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates of the Persian Gulf are still run on monarchical principles, and the King of Thailand exerts real, though not absolute, power in his country.

At first sight, the concept of monarchy might fit perfectly into Weber’s belief that some political systems can be run on the basis of ‘traditional’ legitimation. There can be little doubt that the maintenance of a figurehead monarchy in parliamentary democracies relates to the aim of legitimating political authority among certain sections of the population. Soldiers in the UK are asked to risk their lives for ‘Queen and country’. The appeal of ‘Prime Minister and country’ may be somewhat less. Monarchists in the UK would almost certainly win a referendum on the question of whether the UK should become a republic. It would be far too much to claim that the monarchy in the UK legitimates the political system as a whole, but it probably plays a modest part in the overall process of legitimating state power.


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In countries where the monarch actually does rule, it would, by the same token, be too simple to adopt an uncritical definition of traditionalism. Traditionalism usually is, to some degree, contrived and deliberately designed to maintain stability. Another Middle Eastern monarchy – that of Reza Shah II in Iran – could scarcely be seen as traditional at all, although this partially explains its undoing. In 1979, the Shah was overthrown by religious fundamentalists, who did not believe that he was traditional enough.

Most observers have attributed the survival of the Saudi and Gulf monarchies less to the legitimation produced by traditional values than to the neo-patrimonial allocation of resources in oil-rich countries (see Crystal, 1990). In other words, oil money is recycled through these societies as a result of essentially personalist decisions made by the ruling families. The money clearly alleviates social discontent. The deliberate arbitrariness and unpredictability of a system that depends upon individual decision-making creates some degree of insecurity within civil society. As a result, people who need access to public money are less likely to try to organise themselves in order to demand their rights or oppose the government. The objective of all of this from the viewpoint of the rulers is not so much to build political institutions as to avoid the need for them, although family networks remain.

Monarchical systems can, however, undertake the transition to democracy. Sometimes this may occur because of the will of the monarch. A notable example of this occurred in Spain after 1975 when King Juan Carlos made a determined attempt to ensure that his country adopted democratic principles. Although there were some anxious moments, in the end the transition to democracy was a clear success. When this happens, it is likely that the country will retain a constitutional monarchy. Such a system can remain a surprisingly popular form of government as long as the monarch does not seek to undermine the principles of the constitution. At other times, though, monarchs have been opposed to democratisation and have either prevented it from happening or else have fallen from power under pressure from forces demanding change. The most spectacular recent case was the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979. Since it is hard to think of a smooth and sustained transition to democracy that has also involved the overthrow of a monarchy, it is likely that democratic prospects are enhanced when the monarch supports democratic transition rather than opposes it.

Military governmentMilitary rule, like monarchy, is a more complex form of government than it may at first seem. It may indeed appear coercive and repressive. After all it might be said that the whole point of military rule is to introduce policies and forms of governance different from those the people would choose if they could. Often, it is true that the whole purpose of military rule is to block democratic government. Some significant exceptions to this rule do exist, however, and the question of how military rule can give way to democratic government is complex.

Sometimes the military itself initiates democratisation. This may happen because military rulers have got into difficulties and seek some form of extrication. Commonly, a military withdrawal from power occurs on the implicit basis that it could be cancelled or reversed later on. Military officers may be more willing to hand over power to civilians if they think that the new arrangement may only be temporary. Of course, if democracy is to survive, any expectation that the military is handing back power temporarily will have to be changed at a later date. This is, to a degree, what happened in Latin America in the early 1980s. Many officers who


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were involved in handing back power to elected civilians did so in the belief that this was just another phase in a cycle of military and civilian rule. Only in retrospect did the transfer appear definite. What needs to be explained, therefore, is less the original decision to hand power back than the inability or unwillingness of the military to organise fresh intervention. The changed international environment may be an important part of the explanation for this.

Another possible pattern of transition occurs when the military seeks to move from a position of outright dictatorship to a position in which they still rule, but in which they do so in a more indirect and therefore theoretically more constitutional way. Sometimes, a move from open dictatorship to semi-dictatorship has appeared to work. General Pinochet in Chile twice won plebiscites – in 1978 and 1980. In the longer run, however, semi-dictatorship is an unstable form of government. By attempting to sustain it, military rulers have often put themselves in positions where they had to give up power altogether. When General Pinochet lost the 1988 plebiscite (his third), he was forced to give up power altogether. By the same token, military officers sometimes prefer one civilian political party to another and they may try to organise democratic transition in such a way as to help their friends. If the military government is unpopular, however, people may vote for a candidate who is seen as the most anti-military of all of those available.

Another reason for the military allowing a transition to democracy is that it sometimes sees no further point in continuing to govern. Military officers are not necessarily anti-democrats in principle – they may have genuine institutional concerns. One reason the military sometimes distrusts democracy has to do with the concept of hierarchy, which is central to the military itself. The military organisation is based on hierarchy, discipline and obedience, not on participation or activism. To that extent, it can be threatened by civil commotion and political militancy. After a period of time, however, it may come to feel that society has changed and the danger has passed. After 1975 the Spanish military was mostly prepared to believe that the circumstances prevailing at the time of the 1936–39 Civil War no longer existed. The decline of communism in the 1980s also persuaded some military officers in South America that they had less to fear from democracy.

A less stable way by which military governments have sometimes tried to adapt to democracy was for officers to make the transition into civilian politics. It is not impossible for officers who have already taken power to organise some kind of political party, provided that they are willing to accept a transition from military to civilian life. Colonel Peron played an important part in the Argentine military coup of 1943, but thereafter behaved much as any civilian politician. Although Peron himself was eventually overthrown by the military in 1955, Peronism was (and is) a successful political movement. Similarly, the Mexican Revolutionary Party was created by successful revolutionary generals willing to operate through a party organisation. Today, the party is wholly civilian. In ex-military or semi-military governments in the Middle East, the instrument of government is a ruling party rather than the military. However, these transitions, real though they were, did not for the most part lead quickly to stable democracy.

Finally, the military may simply be defeated and become unable to maintain itself in power. In this situation, however, political change will not necessarily lead to democracy. In Cuba, the military dictator Batista was overthrown by Fidel Castro in 1959, and in Nicaragua, the military dictator Somoza was overthrown by the Sandinistas in 1979. Neither of these dictatorships was typical of the region – they were much more


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personalistic than the majority. However, this does not alter the fact that they were overthrown by force. Nicaragua, after a flirtation with communism, eventually evolved in the direction of democracy; Cuba remains authoritarian. In other cases, political change has been precipitated by defeat by an external force. The Argentine military government fell in 1982–83 following a military defeat by the UK, and democracy returned to Panama after the USA invaded and deposed General Noriega in 1989.

Activity

List the main real-world cases that involved democratisation of monarchical systems and the democratisation of military governments.

Dominant party governmentThe idea of government by an all-controlling party largely stems from Lenin’s organisation of the Russian Bolsheviks. Lenin set up a Revolutionary party, not in order to compete for power in a democratic system, but rather to seize power from an autocracy. His idea was to create a strongly disciplined elite party composed of professional revolutionaries – a so-called vanguard party. This would, in turn, control a range of other organisations either openly or through clandestinity.

Lenin did not bring about the overthrow of the Tsarist monarchy. He did not expect this to happen, and played little part in it. What he did do was take advantage of the power vacuum that followed the defeat of the Tsar in order to organise the seizure of power. The Bolsheviks were then able to take control of the whole of the Soviet Union and govern until the entire system collapsed at the end of the 1980s.

The idea of a vanguard party was hugely influential in other parts of the world. However, the communist parties in China, Cuba and Yugoslavia differed from the Bolsheviks in that they were originally, in large part, military organisations as well as political ones. Mao, Tito and Castro actually took power by force from pre-existing dictatorships. The military aspect of government in these countries was correspondingly greater than that in the former Soviet Union.

We have already noted that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Essentially, it was torn apart by internal conflicts between would-be modernisers and traditionalists who wanted to retain the Soviet Empire at all costs. Meanwhile, some of the modernisers had become alienated from the Communist Party and wanted a new kind of political system altogether. Most dominant party systems, however, are run in a very disciplined way by people who understand that internal disunity is likely to have very serious consequences, which is what happened in the former Soviet Union. Of the world’s remaining non-democracies, the most important are based on dominant party systems run by autocratic leaders.

Can Leninist vanguard systems adapt to democratic circumstances? Evidence shows that they can, even though they may not particularly want democracy. The Mexican PRI had many of the characteristics of a dominant party system, although it was able to adapt to democratisation. The same was also true for the former ruling party in Taiwan. Both of these parties were able to retain an essential degree of unity, while moving from being authoritarian parties to parties willing to engage in democratic contestation. Both eventually lost power via the popular vote, but neither disintegrated completely. Both parties continue to play an active part in democratic politics.


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Transitions to democracyIt is difficult to theorise about democratic transition on the basis of logical deduction about the strengths and weaknesses of non-democratic forms of rule – so many different possibilities exist. Moreover, subjective factors – such as whether particular individuals prefer democracy or distrust it – may matter as much as objective conditions.

Attempts have been made to discuss democratic transition in more general terms, however.

• A first influential approach is based on ideas about class power and state power.

• A second approach is based on ideas of economic change and assumes that democratisation is associated with economic progress. This kind of approach – known as modernisation theory – is also discussed in the next chapter. It is important to note, however, that a number of quite poor countries have democratised since 1985, and that this is something that modernisation theory on its own would have failed to predict.

• A third approach refuses to consider general ideas and puts a lot of emphasis on the detail of individual cases (see di Palma, 1990). If 50 countries have democratised in the past 15 years, there are likely to be 50 different combinations of factors responsible. This approach is valuable as a corrective, and it reminds us that democratisation is something that has to be brought about by political practitioners: it does not just happen by itself. Yet, if there were no general influences, one would expect democratisation to be something of a random process.

In point of fact, democratisation has generally occurred in waves rather than as a set of random events. We do need, therefore, to consider changes in international politics. These are not the only relevant factors, but they clearly matter and they are capable of being analysed in reasonably general terms.

A reminder of your learning outcomesHaving completed this chapter, and the Essential reading and activities, you should be able to:

• explain the main problems and difficulties that are likely to be associated with democratising each system of government discussed in this chapter (empire, monarchy, military government and dominant party rule)

• explain how transition could happen in different kinds of non-democratic political system.

Sample examination questions1. Under what circumstances are empires most likely to be able to

transmit effective political institutions?

2. ‘Whether or not monarchies can democratise rather depends on the monarch.’ Discuss.

3. What are the main problems that arise when military regimes try to control the handing over of power to their preferred democratic candidates?

4. ‘Dominant party systems are authentic political institutions, but they do not always survive democratisation.’ Discuss.

Notes


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Chapter 4: General theories of democratisation

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Aims of the chapterThe main purpose of this chapter is to discuss the works of six different authors, all of whom are associated with different theories relating to democratic transition. The six are grouped into pairs to look at three different approaches to democratisation:

• modernisation theory

• comparative historical sociology based mainly on class factors

• theories based on culture and ideology.

Learning outcomesThis chapter should give you a broad understanding of the way in which the works discussed provide theories for democratisation. By the end of this chapter and the relevant reading, you should be able to:

• explain what the central logic of each of the main arguments is

• list the main principles of classic modernisation theory

• outline the main points made by critics of classic modernisation theory

• explain why some authors have believed that there is an affinity between modernisation and democratic government

• describe and explain the main weaknesses of approaches that seek to explain political change primarily in social or economic terms

• list and explain the main principles of Moore’s argument in respect of the social origins of democracy

• discuss the key variables identified by Rueschemeyer et al. as being helpful to and negative for democratic transition

• explain the main criticisms of both Moore’s and Rueschemeyer’s work

• explain what Fukuyama intends us to understand as ‘the end of history’

• explain why Huntington is sceptical about the spread of democracy to the Middle East.

Essential readingFukuyama, F. The End of History and the Last Man. (London: Penguin, 2006;

reprint edition) [ISBN 9780743284554].Huntington, S.P. ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’, Foreign Affairs, S93, 72(3) 1993,

pp.22–49.Lipset, S.M. Political Man: the Social Bases of Politics. (London: Heinemann,

1983) [ISBN 9780801825224].Moore, B. The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in

the Making of the Modern World. (London: Penguin, 1967; reprint edition 1993) [ISBN 9780807050736].

Rueschemeyer, D., E. Stephens and J. Stephens Capitalist Development and Democracy. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) [ISBN 9780226731445].


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Further readingDiamond, D. and M. Plattner The Global Resurgence of Democracy. (Baltimore:

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) second edition [ISBN 0801853052].Gill, G. The Dynamics of Democratisation. (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000)

[ISBN 0333801970].Mann, M. Sources of Social Power: Volume 2, The Rise of Classes and Nation

States 1760–1914. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) [ISBN 052144585X].

Skocpol, T. (ed.) Vision and Method in Historical Sociology. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) [ISBN 0521229286].

Vanhanen, T. Prospects for Democracy: a Study of 172 countries. (London: Routledge, 1997) [ISBN 041514406X or 0521297249].

Whitehead, L. (ed.) The International Dimensions of Democratization: Europe and the Americas. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002; revised 2005) [ISBN 0199243751].

IntroductionSo far, we have discussed how we define and understand democracy and how we understand cases of semi-democracy and democratic transition. This chapter looks at some rather ambitious theories that seek to explain why some countries are democracies and others are not. It is not at all clear that such theories can ever be completely successful. A good place to start, therefore, is by asking what the purpose of such theorising is and what we can hope to learn from it.

Historical approachesOne approach is historical. We look at the course of history to try to find key junctures in the evolution of democracy. We try to explain why democratisation occurred in particular cases. If there are enough similarities, we try to generalise. Historical approaches (usually) look at a few cases in detail, seeking to establish findings from carefully focused comparisons. They are more powerful than statistical approaches in gaining insights into particular cases, and they may produce ideas that can subsequently be tested statistically. They are also better at explaining anomalous or different outcomes, and they might also be better at asking nuanced questions. As we saw in Chapter 2, not every country in the world is either wholly democratic or wholly undemocratic.

However, we still come up against the limits of inductive reasoning. In other words, even if we suppose that the initial theory met all of the historical facts, it might not necessarily continue to do so in the future. The relevant conditions may have changed. The act of theorising about politics may possibly change the way in which we think about and act in politics – and this may itself change our behaviour and its consequences. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus pointed out that ‘no man jumps into the same river twice’.

Statistical approachesAnother approach is statistical. We look at countries that are democracies and those that are not. We try to find correlations that indicate what the countries in each of the different categories have in common. Statistical truth is a matter of probabilities. A statistical approach can indicate the strength of relations between certain selected variables and others. There may well be exceptional cases, but these need not be a problem. A statistical relation has to be significant, but not perfect. It is not intended to replace the detailed study of particular cases, but to supplement it.


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Here, too, we have the same problem of inductive reasoning. For example, in 1985, very few African democracies existed, and since Africa is on the whole a poor part of the world, it was reasonable to suppose that poverty and non-democracy went together. In 1998, however, 22 African countries were authoritatively counted as new democracies. Much less of a statistical relation between affluence and democracy now exists. It may be, of course, that some of these African democracies will eventually break down, but we have no real means of knowing whether or not this will happen. All we can say is that a statistical relation that seemed robust enough as recently as the mid-1980s may no longer work. The world is in a constant process of change.

What do we hope to learn from general theories?Whether we find general theories of democracy useful or not depends on what we hope to learn from them. We will not get very much purchase on individual events. None of the authors whose work is considered below will help us to assess the likelihood of a military coup in Pakistan or Venezuela within the next six or 12 months. They might tell us that these countries are likely to be democratically ruled in 50 years’ time if they achieve reasonable economic progress in the interim and if the world does not change radically during this period. This is not, however, very illuminating, and there is no guarantee that even these conditions will be met. They might tell us that democratic breakdown in First World countries is unlikely; however, we are likely to have a good idea that this is so by looking at opinion poll data telling us that most people in Europe, the USA, Canada and Oceania are reasonably satisfied with the way their systems operate.

Occasionally, a theorist may produce a finding that surprises us and turns out to be true. It was prescient of Lipset in the first edition of his work, which was published in 1959 (second edition 1983), to claim that democratic breakdown in Europe was unlikely – some people had expressed fears over the political evolution of 1950s Europe. Vanhanen (1987) helps explain the failure of Weimar democracy in Germany, by pointing out that power relationships were rather heavily concentrated within the country at that time. Although Germany in the aggregate was an advanced industrial country at that time, there was not the greater diffusion of power resources within Germany that tends to be found in more materially advanced countries. Where insights of this kind can be found, they give us an additional dimension to understand the history of particular cases. Attempts to find a single big explanation that can cope in its entirety with so large a topic as democratisation are likely to fail, however.

Theories of this kind provide good mental exercise as well. They establish intellectual connections – through statistical or historical means – that give us an extra dimension of understanding when considering particular cases. They do not provide us with answers. They do help, however, to make our understanding of particular cases more sophisticated than it otherwise might be. In general, moreover, a good knowledge of history is helpful to students of political science.

Modernisation theory and its criticsIf we look around, we see that most wealthy countries in the world are liberal democracies. We also see a historical trend according to which countries that are now democracies tended to democratise as they became richer, although this does not at all suggest that they became democratic at the same pace or without struggle and conflict. Nor, as just noted, does it imply that poor countries cannot be democracies; in fact, many


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poor countries are democracies. Nor can we be certain that democracy is necessarily the wave of the future. The future is, by definition, unpredictable. There is little doubt, however, that, for most of the past hundred years, a definite relation could be established between affluence and democracy. The question is not so much whether but why this is true.

Economic development and democracyThe question of whether economic development leads to democracy was first raised in the USA. At the end of the Second World War, the European empires were in decline and Soviet communism was seen by many as an alternative to European colonialism. The US government, in contrast, became identified with a different position. It believed that independent countries would gradually increase their national wealth. This, in turn, would lead to social change, which in turn would ultimately bring about both democracy and development.

This line of analysis has frequently been criticised as too optimistic and evolutionary. It does rather de-emphasise the importance of political culture and the historical specificity of each country. If we allow for the fact that we are dealing with a relatively simple explanation that does not seek to cover everything, modernisation theory does have advantages. What helps it is a further phenomenon that has proved broadly true up until now – that the world’s most affluent societies typically suffer from less internal inequality and a greater diffusion of economic power than poorer societies. This enables a happy coincidence of view between authors who put most emphasis on limited internal inequality as a key condition of democracy – the case with Vanhanen (1997) and Rueschemeyer (1992) – and those who regard affluence itself as the most important factor. It also helps that First World countries have, for the most part, experienced fairly constant improvements in living standards since around 1950. The ability of societies to enjoy the benefit of steady increases in real income may also be a factor making for democratic stability. People become relatively contented with their life chances and are less likely to resort to anti-democratic means in order to change them.

Finally, the years since 1945 have seen an absence of major war, although there have, of course, been conflicts in various parts of the world. We cannot know for certain what effect nuclear warfare would have upon democratic stability, but it is likely that it would be powerfully negative.

LiteracySometimes, as in the case of Lipset’s work (1959; 1983), various kinds of argument are run together. One of these has to do with the role of literacy in democracy. The key point is that, once societies reach a certain size and sophistication, the written word becomes crucial in the communication of information. The outdoor assembly may have been feasible in a small city-state, but could not serve much of a purpose once a country’s population reached tens of millions. Much political argument takes place through the written word – in pre-televisual days, almost all of it did. How could a voter be expected to assess a complex economic argument if he or she could not read?

This theory is appealing, but the relation between literacy and development is not perfect. India is a good example of a country that has remained democratic since independence despite the existence of significant illiteracy. Better evidence shows that the relation works in the opposite direction. High levels of literacy and a good educational system


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are regarded as crucial if countries are able to move from poverty to relative affluence. At the same time, wealthier societies can more easily spare the resources necessary to operate ambitious public education systems. Even today, evidence from some poor countries shows that very poor people are not much interested in education because they need their children to bring in an income – however small – from a very early age.

UrbanisationAnother factor that has been regarded as important for the development of democratic systems is urbanisation. From the beginning of time until the nineteenth century, most of the world’s population was rural. Britain was the first country to urbanise extensively. Although the British Industrial Revolution dates from the beginning of the nineteenth century, the rate of social change increased radically from the development of the railways in the 1830s and 1840s. It was only in the later part of the nineteenth century that the majority of the British population was urban based. By the same token, urbanisation took place even later in the main countries of Europe and in the USA. Most present-day first world societies only acquired urban majorities in the early part of the twentieth century.

Since around 1800, an increasing proportion of the world’s population is to be found in urban areas. The pattern of urbanisation has spread from First World countries to parts of the world that are still considered relatively less developed. Latin America had a rural majority in the 1950s and reached the 50 per cent urbanisation rate some time during the 1960s. It is now heavily urbanised. Urbanisation is now taking place across Africa and Asia, including – at a very fast rate – China.

Why should cities be associated with democracy? Modernisation theorists have argued that the urban voter is less deferential than the rural one. It is certainly true that established churches, where they are strong, tend to find greater followings in rural than in urban areas. By the same token, socialist and communist parties have almost always performed better in urban than in rural areas.

It has been argued that urban voters communicate more with people like each other and less with people in different class situations. It is possible that the anonymity of urban life can allow somewhat greater personal independence, which might in turn encourage greater political activism. Moreover, the greater possibilities for socialisation in urban areas might allow the urban poor to appreciate the distinctiveness of their situation rather than defining their interests in terms of a dominant value system. Urban mobs are less likely to be deferential and more likely to be radical. Well-attested historical examples certainly point to cases in which established power was challenged in the cities, but found support in the countryside.

It would be a mistake, however, to regard country dwellers everywhere as naturally conservative. Moore (1967), discussed later in this chapter, calls some of these assumptions into question. Where there have been major social upheavals – for example, the French and Russian revolutions – rural rebellion was an important part of the process. It might be more accurate to say that country dwellers are not natural social democrats in the way that the urban working class was once reputed to be. Country dwellers might organise their political lives around particular collective demands – for example, for the redistribution of land or for a particular form of national self-determination – that simply do not easily fit into the world’s views of urban social democrats.


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Diffusion of powerA broader version of modernisation theory – one that features in the work of Vanhanen – suggests that democracy is associated with the diffusion of power. Modernisation theorists generally believe that the process of economic development would itself tend to diffuse power within a society and therefore undermine the position of ‘traditional’ elites. As society became more sophisticated, the distribution of power would become broader, even without political change. Under these circumstances, a traditional elite would find that it no longer held all the levers of power within its own society. Control over resources, particularly financial resources, would be extended to a wider section of the population, with the result being that the middle classes and others would be better able to assert their right to political representation through democratic means.

It is certainly true that there are European cases in which the power of money was used to ensure that monarchical or aristocratic rulers became more accountable to the people. When the Duke of Wellington tried to maintain the old semi-monarchical political system in the early 1830s against demands for reform, some of his opponents tried to organise a run on the banks. ‘To stop the Duke, go for gold’ was the slogan. This version of modernisation theory is rather bland, however. Political power is generally transferred significantly, when it is so transferred, through active contestation rather than through the slow diffusion of power via the increased complexity of society – although diffusion may change the odds attached to the outcome of particular conflicts.

Criticisms of modernisation theory

Economic criticisms

Left-wing and right-wing critics challenged some of the main premises of modernisation theory during the 1960s and 1970s. On the Left, doubts were expressed as to whether modernisation was actually occurring in many parts of the world. In Latin America, where these doubts were elaborated in their most sophisticated form, so-called dependency theory suggested that the developing countries would be unable to catch up with First World countries, because they lacked sufficient economic power. Ironically, these doubts were being expressed at a time when many parts of the developing world – Latin America and East Asia in particular – were doing fairly well. By the early 1980s, it appeared as though dependency theory could be dismissed as empirically false. Yet the data, which had seemed at one stage to refute dependency theory, has more recently shown how difficult it is for poor countries to catch up economically with rich countries. Although a number of Asian economies have enjoyed a positive economic performance during the 1980s and 1990s, this was not generally true of Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, eastern Europe or the former Soviet Union. With only a small number of exceptions, the world is now very clearly divided into a number of quite rich countries and a larger number of quite poor countries.

It is likely that many people in poor countries find the slowness of any improvement in their material conditions frustrating. Between 1995 and 2001, survey evidence from Latin America showed a considerable increase in disenchantment with democracy. This correlates with - and may well be explained by - the experience of significant economic setbacks. While traditional dependency theory was too pessimistic about the economic prospects of poor countries, modernisation theory may well have been too optimistic.


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Social criticisms

Critics of modernisation theory are also sceptical as to whether the ‘modernisation’ experience of First World countries could be replicated in socio-economic terms in a different world order. A hundred years ago, the mark of a country experiencing successful socio-economic development was the existence of a large working class made up of manual labourers. This was a powerful social force that acted mainly in favour of social democracy. Today, First World countries no longer have a large traditional working class – poor people certainly are present, but the link established by early twentieth-century sociology between mass production, proletarianisation, poverty and potential economic power can no longer be made (Rueschemeyer, 1992). In most advanced economies, only around one-quarter of the workforce is engaged in manufacturing, and some of this is actually quite well paid. Similarly, in developing countries, typically only a minority of the workforce is engaged in manufacturing production, although there are exceptions.

International criticisms

Democratisation also clearly relates to international factors. It is clearly the case that some countries, by virtue of their geographical position, are heavily dependent upon more powerful neighbours. This may make it difficult for them to adopt autonomous political strategies unwelcome to them. For example, the countries of eastern Europe between 1945 and the late 1980s had little choice but to adopt some form of communism because of the will of the then Soviet Union. Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 were actually invaded because the then Soviet Union feared that they were about to abandon communism. The USA, which prior to around 1977 often supported non-democratic regimes, subsequently changed its foreign policy to support democracy. This certainly had a major impact on the subsequent democratisation of most of Central and South America.

Demographic criticisms

Historically speaking, it can be observed that a number of countries underwent unsuccessful experiments in democracy before democratic government was finally installed. In many cases, democratic breakdown occurred well after the serious beginnings of economic development. Democracy failed (temporarily) in Germany, Spain and Argentina in the 1930s and in Portugal and Italy during the 1920s. Of all the developed democracies, only a very few (the USA, Britain and some British Commonwealth countries, and Switzerland) have a record unbroken by some form of crisis or democratic breakdown, and the USA had its own civil war between 1861 and 1865.

It is almost a truism within conservative social thought that social transformation can be stressful. It has been suggested that these stresses were themselves likely to make it very difficult to establish democratic institutions. It is also true that a tradition in European sociological thought, associated particularly with Emile Durkheim, related rapid social change to social breakdown (although Durkheim was not primarily a political theorist as such).

The role of population growth plays an important part in the argument. A quick look at the demographics of development might help here. Poor and traditional societies have high birth rates and high death rates.


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Because infant and child mortality is very high, parents tend to have many children, in the hope that some will survive to support them in their old age. There is little education, so the cost of raising children is relatively low: they are expected to start some form of work at the age of six or seven. When serious development begins, however, the level of infant and child mortality is likely to fall sharply. These factors are very responsive to changes in the level of income.

The parental generation will not immediately change its reproductive behaviour, even though the rate of child mortality is falling. Thus, the birth rate remains high, even though the death rate may be decreasing and life expectancy rising. As a result, a predominantly young population comes into being. It will not be long before the younger generation itself reaches the age of parenthood, and a disproportionately high young population then reinforces itself by producing further children.

A rapidly growing population is socially disruptive, increasing the pressure on relatively fixed amounts of land. Population growth, therefore, adds to conflict over land tenure, and a disaffected peasantry can be a powerful catalyst to radical social change. Another consequence of a rising population is likely to be an accelerated drift to the cities. Conservative social theorists have sometimes seen the city as a source of political alienation and disaffection. What they see as the ‘natural’ or ‘organic’ ties of rural life are replaced by a kind of rootlessness, which may lead lonely or socially dissatisfied people to drift into politically extremist movements out of a desire to find solidarity and comradeship. The existence of extremist movements with popular appeal has been seen as one of the factors behind the breakdown of political institutions.

A further consequence of a growing population, and rising living standards, occurs higher up the social scale. As development occurs and the size of the middle classes increases, so competition for university places becomes more intense. Sometimes, universities respond by adopting a conservative policy on admissions; at other times, under political pressure, they expand in order to take in more students. This expansion is not necessarily accompanied by better teaching or more money for facilities. The result is that students often fail to graduate or find that they have little to offer a potential employer upon graduation. This leads to discontent, and radical political forces have often been able to recruit extensively from the student/bohemian sub-culture of young people who may be unable to break into the fully middle-class world. A very good recent example of such a political force is Peru’s communist Sendero Luminoso, which was very active in the 1980s and early 1990s.

The arguments evaluatedThe non-economic critics of modernisation theory do identify some potential opponents of democracy (such as Rueschemeyer, 1992). Studies of anti-democratic political movements often find that they are disproportionately supported by people drawn from three different groups:

1. Some traditional families who find it difficult to accept the demand for greater social and civic equality coming from democracy.

2. Potentially ambitious people who find that they do not fit easily into any particular social role. Rapid change may be a factor here.

3. Aggrieved peasants threatened by conflicts over land tenure. The Zapatista rising in Mexico in 1994 would be a good example of this kind of problem.


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Managing social and political changeThe challenge of social change could be regarded, to some extent, as a problem of political management. Consensual styles of politics and a reliance on pacts and alliances that cross narrow sectional lines are feasible ways of defusing the tensions inherent in certain kinds of social conflict. Political institutions do not just occur – they have to be built and maintained – and the subjective role of individual political leaders is likely, therefore, to be as important as the outcome of social and economic processes.

Modernisation theorists still need to ask themselves why democracy sometimes survives in poor countries and has extended recently into much of Africa and Latin America. India has a largely uninterrupted history of democracy since independence in 1947. In most cases, the former British colonies in the West Indies have made a successful transition from colonial rule to democratic government. Ireland, after it became independent in 1922, was a poor country, in which conservative modernisation theorists would surely have expected democracy to break down; however, democracy has survived uninterrupted to the present day.

Institutional factors may be responsible for this. It is true that many cases of democratic stability in poor countries have occurred in former British colonies. We considered the role of empires in transmitting institutions in Chapter 3. The record of former Spanish colonies is much less good, although Costa Rica has a long history of democracy. Even though many former British colonies did not, in fact, maintain stable democracies, it is possible that parliamentary systems are more robust against stress and pressure than presidential systems.

The transfer of ideas may be important as well. For example, in India, Ghandi and Nehru were clearly committed to the principle of democracy, as was de Valera in Ireland. Yet if one accepts that ideas are influential in this way, the explanatory power of structural factors such as urbanisation, the birth rate, etc. is limited. Nevertheless, one might wish to argue that structural change brings about changes in values that themselves ultimately change the nature of politics.

The question of how far political outcomes can be understood by observing general social processes (structural explanations), and how far subjective human consciousness matters ‘autonomously’, is very important. We will consider it again in the next section. Meanwhile, a reasonable conclusion might be that modernisation theorists have raised interesting ideas, but that they leave a great deal unexplained.

Activity

In conjunction with the reading in this chapter and Chapter 5, consider three cases of democratic breakdown or near breakdown. Ask how far modernisation theory arguments would have predicted them. Use the arguments of both Lipset and Vanhanen.

Social class and comparative historical sociologyAs an alternative to rather broad analyses of socio-economic factors in making democracy possible, some writers have attempted far more detailed historical analyses of particular transitions to see what can be learned from them. However, these authors share with those we have already considered the belief that democratisation can be understood in essentially structural terms. The most influential practitioners of what we might call comparative historical sociology are Barrington Moore (1967) and Rueschemeyer, Stephens and Stephens (1992).


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Barrington Moore’s approachAn important work of historical sociology – and a point of departure for many other works – was produced by Barrington Moore. In Moore’s own words, his book:

‘endeavors to explain the varied political roles played by the landed upper classes and the peasantry in the transformation from agrarian societies…to modern industrial ones…it is an attempt to discover the range of historical conditions under which either or both of these rural groups have become important forces behind the emergence of Western parliamentary versions of democracy, and dictatorships of the right and left’ (1967, p.viii).

Immediately, we come across one important feature of Moore’s approach. Traditional nineteenth-century sociologists – whether radicals, such as Marx, or conservatives, such as Durkheim – put the notion of industrialisation or urbanisation at the centre of their work. For many years thereafter, the dominant scholarly trends were taken up with attempts to explore the role of the emergent working class or industrial bourgeoisie as key catalysts for political change. Moore, however, takes the argument much further back in time. He argues, famously, that the success or otherwise of transitions to democracy depends upon the character of agrarian capitalism.

This is an interesting and fruitful observation. There can be no doubt that some of the seminal events in the history of at least some European and American countries came at a time when most of the population lived off the land:

• The English Civil War and the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 occurred when England was mainly a rural country. After 1688, England was certainly not a democracy, but it had a liberal, parliamentary system with an independent judiciary.

• By the same token, the French Revolution occurred at a time when France was predominantly a rural country. Although it is not possible to trace an unbroken constitutional line from the revolution to the present day, it is nevertheless clear that it created intellectual traditions of democratic republicanism that are alive today. Moreover, even if we consider that the democratic history of France started with the beginning of the Third Republic in 1871, this was still a time when most French people lived in rural areas.

• The USA provides another example of the same point. When the USA became independent from Britain, it was predominantly a rural society. The US Constitution, with its famous first amendment – the Bill of Rights – was designed largely by Virginian landowners. If one takes the story into the more recent past (as does Moore) and considers that democracy in the USA was only assured after the defeat of the South in the 1861–65 war and the abolition of slavery, then the conclusion still holds. When these events took place, most Americans still lived in the countryside.

Problems do arise, however, when we consider the last two cases that Moore discusses:

• Russia

• Germany.


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When Moore wrote his book in the mid-1960s, the former Soviet Union was still a socialist empire. Today, Russia is a (somewhat precarious) democracy. By the same token, Germany was, in 1966, divided between a communist East and a capitalist West. Its Nazi years were barely 20 years in the past. Under these circumstances, it might have been quite reasonable for Moore to categorise the history of both of these countries as non-democratic – but can the same observation still hold good today?

It is certainly an important question to ask why Russia underwent a non-democratic revolution in 1917 and why democracy did not take hold in Germany before 1945. There were no doubt historical roots to non-democracy in both countries, although shorter-term factors such as the disastrous experience of both during the First World War also need to be considered. History does not stand still, however, and from today’s perspective the most important features of Russia and Germany may be seen to be the fall of communism and Nazism, respectively. Germany’s Nazi experience, although it certainly affected millions of lives, is not a guide to German politics today.

Returning to Moore’s argument, the main hypothesis to explain the different political evolution of these various countries has to do with the role of the bourgeoisie during the period when agriculture becomes commercialised. When the bourgeoisie defines its interests in opposition to the land-owning class, the result is likely to be democracy. When it forms an alliance with them, the result is non-democracy, because of the emergence of labour-repressive forms of agriculture that prevent the opening up of politics.

A critique of Moore’s approach

Even Moore’s critics accept that he has produced an interesting and original piece of work. Flaws are present in Moore’s historical analysis, however, and questions about his methods have not been fully resolved.

Moore entitled his work The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. An origin is not a cause, although the two words mean something rather similar. If one is to establish a cause–effect relation, then this should be something that can be specified independently and applied comparatively. The causal relationship need only be probabilistic – in other words, it need not apply on absolutely every occasion, but merely with sufficient frequency to establish that a definite tendency exists. An author seeking to establish a causal relationship, however, needs theory, hypothesis and statistics.

The idea of an ‘origin’ is less demanding – although it is also less enlightening. It is true but trivial that because event A occurred before event B, it necessarily had some impact upon event B. There is no historical event, however trivial, that cannot be said to have had an impact upon another historical event. The notorious and not very impressive ‘Cleopatra’s nose’ theory of history asserts that, had Cleopatra’s nose been longer, Mark Antony would not have fallen in love with her. Without this distraction, he would not have lost the war with Octavian and Rome would have remained a republic. As a republic, Rome would not have undergone the process of imperial expansion and decline that occurred after it became an empire. Christianity could never have been adopted by the empire. And the whole history of the world would be unimaginably different.


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The point of the Cleopatra’s nose theory is that history can give rise, in principle, to almost any number of arbitrary ideas about causation. Historical sociologists may choose to interpret the course of events in terms of:

• economic factors

• demographic factors

• the role of nations and nationalism

• the character of class conflict

• the rise and decline of organised religion

• the role of the state

• the progress of medical science

• or virtually anything else.

How is one to choose between conflicting interpretations?

One possible solution is to try to deal, in principle, with virtually everything. Professional historians try to take a very wide range of factors into account when attempting to explain events – sometimes they avoid explanation altogether. Moore, however, mostly ignores factors that he does not wish to emphasise. Little in his analysis considers the role of the state, the rise of empire and the effect of war. Yet, these are crucial elements in the evolution of early modern and, indeed, twentieth-century Europe. It must also be admitted that Moore’s history, as such, is flawed in places. Flawed history, like arbitrary explanations of causality, is an occupational hazard for historical sociologists. The problem is that any scholar starting with a framework will be tempted to make the available facts fit that framework – whether or not they easily do so. Many historians would dispute, for example, that there were neat class factors behind the English Civil War, or that the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 represented any kind of defeat for the traditional landowner classes.

More complex structural theories: Rueschemeyer and othersOne of the key differences between the comparative historical sociology of the late 1980s and early 1990s and the earlier work of Barrington Moore is the greater statistical sophistication of the former. Many attempts have been made to find correlations between democracy or democratisation and other variables. The work of Rueschemeyer, Stephens and Stephens seeks to combine some statistical analysis with historical sociology (1992). The fact that both approaches are combined surely strengthens the work.

Rueschemeyer and others also move away from single-factor explanations of complex historical change in favour of a more nuanced set of explanations. Rueschemeyer et al. seek to explain democratisation in terms of three sets of variables:

• class formation and alliances

• international factors

• the role of the domestic state.

They also look at a different and wider range of cases, including most of South and Central America as well as North America and Europe. This protects them from the criticism levelled at Moore and, to some extent, Lipset – namely, that they are only really interested in the history of countries that today are rich.


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The authors conclude that the main agent of democratic change in Europe was the organised working class. This was less of a factor in South and Central America, where the middle class – whose role in European democratisation was more ambiguous – played a more important role. In general terms, the landed upper class was the enemy of democracy, while the bourgeoisie was not especially friendly to it either, although it was often in favour of forms of political liberalisation. As for the role of the state, this needed to be strong enough to maintain domestic order and to act with a degree of internal autonomy, but not so strong that it overpowered civil society as a whole. International factors were sometimes negative for democracy, especially if the country was excessively dependent upon others, but overall they had varying consequences.

As this very brief synopsis of the authors’ conclusions might suggest, the work itself is complex and its methods are sophisticated. Many comments might be made about it, but this discussion will focus particularly on the authors’ treatment of the working class. This is because the main respect in which their treatment differs from that of Moore (and the modernisation writers discussed in the last chapter) is the importance that they give to this particular class. First though, the general role of class analysis is worth a brief discussion at this point.

Marx’s theory of classLet us start with the question of how one defines what a class is, what it does and what its interests may be. The first, and one of the most influential, discussions of working-class politics came from Karl Marx, who believed that the working class was a revolutionary class whose historical role was to overthrow capitalism. His argument can be divided into three stages (Marx, 1998; Mann, 1993):

1. He characterised the working class by its relationship to the means of production. In other words, in principle one could find out, by looking at the right kind of statistics, the size of the working class, its location and its potential strength compared with other classes. Marx argued that industrialisation would, in time, spread across much of the world and that this would bring about a very large increase in the absolute numbers and weight of the working class.

2. The working class was organised in such a way that it was inherently likely that it would acquire a class consciousness. Marx explicitly characterised some other classes, such as the small peasantry in France, as unlikely to acquire consciousness because a peasant’s experience of work did not bring him (or her) much into contact with other peasants but rather into a world of superiors and (occasionally) subordinates. As we have seen, Marx compared the peasant class to ‘potatoes in a sack’, which rubbed up against each other but did not acquire a collective awareness of each other. Marx believed that working-class consciousness would develop because the factory employers did not socialise with the workers (in the way that agrarian employers often did) but rather built separate workers’ housing, segregated workers within factories and took few measures to organise the workers either industrially or politically.

3. Marx believed that capitalism was incapable of significantly increasing the living standards of the working class. Although there would be economic growth, there would also be increased inequality of income and wealth, and the trade cycle would become increasingly virulent. The working class would try to improve its position within capitalism by reformist means but would fail. Increasingly frustrated, it would then turn its attention to overthrowing the capitalist system itself.


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Criticisms of class-based interpretations

The variability of capitalism

Much has been said about all three of Marx’s assertions, and it might be best to take them in reverse order. Marx did not actually claim (as his critics have asserted) that the working class would undergo continuous drops in real living standards. He certainly underestimated, however, the likelihood that – where successful – capitalism might deliver quite significant improvements in real wages.

Even by 1900, it was becoming clear that the living standards of the working classes in industrial countries were showing a slow but definite trend towards improvement. It was also the case that under some circumstances, trade unions were able to increase the living standards of those working-class members who were able to join them. The number of middle-class occupations was also slowly increasing. Although it was true that social inequality remained great, the ability of workers to enjoy limited increases in income introduced an element of choice into revolutionary working-class politics. Should workers seek to improve their position within the system or should they seek to overthrow the system altogether? Some political revolutionaries sought to bring about the overthrow of capitalism by seeking positions of influence within working-class movements.

Since 1900, democratisation has enabled workers and their families to vote for political parties that were able to achieve power and use the tax system and public spending to bring about at least a limited redistribution of income in the direction of poorer people.

Even if one were to accept some of the premises of Marx’s original argument (and he was a perceptive critic of capitalism), it is clear that the urban working class might adopt any of a variety of possible political positions. They might want the overthrow of capitalism, but they might just as easily want to reform the existing system. This brings us to the question of class-consciousness.

What creates class-consciousness?

Why should workers identify themselves politically as members of the working class? There are many other ways in which they might define themselves:

• They could be nationalists or members of a religious party.

• They might have ambitions to upward mobility within the existing system.

• They might decide not to take an active interest in politics and live for their families or their sporting activities instead.

There is not necessarily a connection between membership of a sector of society and social activism of any particular kind.

It might be countered that the working-class experience – which is one of social as well as occupational difference – was inherently socialising under conditions of industrial capitalism. Moreover, political organisations, such as parties and trade unions, tended to offer a social as well as a purely political aspect. Although it might be claimed that there will always be a tendency for organisations to represent their own interests rather than the interests of their members, there are influences in both directions. A working-class party or a trade-union bureaucracy will not succeed for long without responding in some serious way to what the membership wants.


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Nevertheless, working-class interests are not always easy to define. It is reasonable to suppose that the business class is primarily interested in making money – this is not necessarily an interest that will lead to class solidarity, but it is reasonable to suppose that it is an objective that accurately reflects the aspirations of most individual businesspeople. But what is the corresponding working-class interest? Is it to achieve some financial success and so emerge from the working class, to use working-class organisation to improve the position of the working class within the system, to show solidarity and advance collective class interests (assuming that these can be satisfactorily defined), or to overthrow the existing system altogether?

A critic of Marxist kinds of theory might reasonably express scepticism about whether working-class politics really exist. They do not deny that members of the working class have engaged in politics or that some organisations, such as trade unions or parties, identify themselves as working class. They do doubt, however, whether any claim to ‘represent’ a class can be substantiated, and they point out that working-class people have voted for and otherwise supported a range of parties with a wide variety of policies and aspirations. What matters, according to critics, is the nature of the political leadership that successfully attracts working-class support on a sustained basis. That is quite a different matter from the inherent outlook of the support itself.

The limited spread of industrialisation

Marx was more perceptive than many other writers of his generation about the spread and significance of industrialisation; however, this was still a process with limits. During the course of the twentieth century, the relative share of the population involved in manual labour has consistently declined in Europe – at first gradually and then quite quickly. Many former workers, or at least their children, were able to move into the middle class. The USA never had as high a proportion of its population engaged in manufacturing as was the case in Europe, and here too there has been a sustained decline since the early part of the twentieth century. In many Third World countries, only a very few people are engaged in the blue-collar manufacturing jobs regarded as typical working-class work. The political weight of such people has diminished largely in proportion to their diminished numbers.

Rueschemeyer’s treatment of classRueschemeyer et al. (1992) are fully aware of these difficulties. They seek to overcome them by defining working-class politics in ‘social’ terms. In other words, they implicitly accept that there is no such thing as a clear-cut definition of working-class interests. One can observe, however, forms of working-class politics that are conducive to democracy; these forms are – according to Rueschemeyer et al. – of key significance in the emergence of democracy.

This argument is defensible, but how illuminating is it? The problem is that working-class politics, as defined by Rueschemeyer et al., may have little to do with any objective definition of the working class. A trade-union official who lives in an expensive house and sends his children to a fee-paying school may be ‘socially’ working class, but is hardly economically so. There is, moreover, a danger of circularity in the explanation. For example, when considering why Mexico and Argentina have experienced difficult transitions to democracy, Rueschemeyer et al. explain that working-class movements in these countries have been co-opted by leaderships whose own commitment to democratic principles is ambiguous at best. At an empirical level, this is indeed true, but it also constitutes an admission that the working class can, under certain circumstances, be co-opted by authoritarian leaders.


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Nor was this just a matter of authoritarian control. Juan Peron won contested and fair presidential elections in Argentina in 1946 with the willing support of the leaders of organised labour. Rueschemeyer et al. are left with the observation that the working class is democratic when it is democratically led and that it can, under these circumstances, make a contribution to the establishment of democracy. This argument is probably true, but it is very modest. It becomes even more modest when set beside these authors’ admission that working-class politics mattered far more to democratisation in Europe than it did in South or Central America.

A further question needs to be asked about the argument that Rueschemeyer et al. develop. This has to do with historical specificity or, to put the matter differently, whether there can be (or is) any general pattern to which most cases of democratisation can be expected to correspond. Even if it were true that the working class played a major role in the transition to democracy in (say) nineteenth-century Britain, then why should this also be true of the transition to democracy in Peru or Chile? Moore admits that his own argument does not translate very easily, if at all, to the history of the countries that he does not specifically analyse. Rueschemeyer et al. do attempt to go beyond Europe, and a significant part of their work is taken up with a discussion of Latin America. As noted above, these authors conclude in any case that the role of the working class in democratic transitions was much less in Latin America than in Europe. They tend to conclude, therefore, that the democracies in these countries are less firmly established. It is not clear, however, that the conclusion follows from the argument. It is logically possible that the different combination of forces that lay behind the stabilisation of democracy in South America (with a far stronger middle-class role) could turn out to be as effective in its own historical context as the very different combination in Europe.

The role of the stateThe role of the state in democratisation is more complex. Moore hardly discusses the issue at all. Rueschemeyer et al. suggest that there are two opposite extremes in state–society relations that are detrimental to democratic development.

1. At one extreme, the state can sometimes play an overpowering role and inhibit the development of plural groups within civil society that might, if allowed to do so, press for democratisation. Something of this kind seems to have happened in Mexico, where the co-optation of civil society by a post-revolutionary state has allowed the maintenance of one-party rule until quite recently. Turkey is another country that is sometimes seen as having an overpowering state with regard to civil society, although Turkey (like Mexico) is now a democracy.

2. At the other extreme, it is damaging to have a weak state completely penetrated by powerful social groups or business enterprises. This is because some degree of autonomous law enforcement is necessary to persuade social forces to operate through institutions. Some Central American countries are seen as cases in which an insufficiently autonomous state is an impediment to democratisation.

It would seem clear that, if the state is seen as the private property of an individual ruler or elite group, then the state–government distinction, which is necessary for peaceful political contestation to develop, will be hard to find. On the other hand, effective and tightly run states are not necessarily the enemies of democracy if the state elite itself is clearly pro-democratic.


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Activity

Read Rueschemeyer et al. (1992) carefully and list all of the countries in which the working class was regarded as the most important force making for democratisation. Make another list of countries in which other factors were regarded as being more important.

Democracy as ideas and culture: Fukuyama and Huntington

The first part of this chapter was taken up with theories of economic progress and democracy, and the second part with theories of social class and democracy. In this final part we look at theories of ideas and democracy. Ideas can be rooted in a political culture (a viewpoint that is clearly formulated by Huntington), but they can also be posited as reflecting universal aspirations. This is an ambitious approach, but it has its adherents – Fukuyama is one of them, and we will consider his work first.

Fukuyama and the end of historySome authors have indeed argued that the idea of democracy does have universal appeal. One of the best-known writings of this kind is that of Fukuyama. His argument, essentially, is that democracy appeals to core human values of which the most important are human equality and the right of self-expression. These were once expressed in religious belief, but they became secularised in the aftermath of the French Revolution. The nineteenth century saw the gradual sweeping away in Europe and the USA of systems of governance based on traditional forms of belief. The most progressive ideas in the nineteenth century were democracy and socialism – both depended on notions of human equality, albeit incompatible ones. The collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the twentieth century saw the discrediting of socialism, leaving democracy as the only major belief system that both emphasised equality and proved compatible with the efficient running of a modern state.

Although ‘the end of history’ is an ambitious theme, Fukuyama’s actual argument is somewhat more limited than this suggests. He does not mean that nothing more will happen to human political life. He only means that the dominating ideological struggles that have given a kind of meaning to political conflict since the days of the French Revolution are largely over. Democracy has won the day, because it is the form of government best suited to the aspirations of ordinary human beings. Given the choice, people would rather live in a mediocre society with nobody clearly better than they are, rather than aspire to collective achievement at the price of authoritarianism and hierarchy.

Critics of Fukuyama

Fukuyama’s argument has proved controversial. Critics have pointed out that non-enlightenment philosophies, such as fascism and forms of politics based on religious belief, were by no means absent in the twentieth century. This criticism calls into question the idea that human history is governed by some ideational notion of rationality or abstract human preferences for one system of government over another. One cannot deny altogether that politics in the past century has involved a conflict of ideas, but it has involved a battle for power as well. Fukuyama’s critics have also pointed out that liberal capitalism may not necessarily be as successful an economic strategy in poorer countries as it has been in the USA. Some countries might have adopted democracy out of an over-optimistic view of its economic benefits, and they may turn to alternatives if it becomes clear that these benefits are not forthcoming.


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In defence of Fukuyama

Nevertheless, Fukuyama’s approach does have some advantages. It is clear that democratic values do have a genuine appeal to people. This does not mean that democracy can easily be introduced against the wishes of powerful non-democrats or anti-democrats; however, the observation that democracy requires committed democrats is true, and it shows that such people do exist in the real world. Beyond doubt, many people genuinely see democracy as a desirable form of government, because they see its characteristics as inherently attractive. For this reason, democratic breakdown in established democracies has been rare. Democratic breakdowns in countries that have become democratic since around 1975 have been comparatively few. We might regard these systems as new democracies, and only a handful of them have given way to overt systems of authoritarianism. It is also clear that public opinion surveys do show a high, or at least a reasonably high, commitment to democracy on the part of electorates in new democracies. Fukuyama is surely right to state that democracy is both an intellectually appealing and a popular form of government.

Democracy, civilisation and culture: the work of HuntingtonHuntington’s discussion of democracy is far more sceptical. He departs from a far more culturally specific viewpoint. In fact, he does not explicitly present a theory of democracy in his work, but he does see it as relating to a particular kind of political culture, which he defines as a civilisation. He argues that the spread of democracy during the 1980s and 1990s to parts of the world that had not been democracies in the past relates more to perceptions that democracy had made the USA successful than to any intellectual conversion to the desirability of democracy as such. Ultimately, according to Huntington, some kinds of political culture are conducive to democracy, while others are not – among the less suitable cultures, the most important is Islam.

In some ways Huntington is rather cavalier in his treatment of what he calls civilisations. For example, he does not use recent survey evidence to try to substantiate his arguments about civilisations, although in principle this does exist. It is true that the use of surveys to try to capture political culture in different countries has advanced considerably since Huntington’s own work was published. The data about public opinion that is now available, however, does not bear out all of Huntington’s judgments. For example, most Muslims do not want conflict with liberal democracies. The preferences of public opinion are not necessarily conclusive evidence of how a country’s political system will develop. Public opinion can change over time or be manipulated by powerful elites. For example, relatively few Germans in the 1930s were genuinely committed Nazis, but they still ultimately went to war under a Nazi regime. Yet if public opinion is not regarded as key evidence for the future orientations of political systems, then how useful is it to group these systems together into so-called civilisations?

Huntington’s work is most valuable as a corrective to what may be seen as Fukuyama’s over-optimism. Huntington may well be right to suppose that some systems of government that did not democratise during the 1980s or early 1990s are not necessarily going to become democratic soon. Despite the considerable spread of democracy since 1985, some countries have not adopted democracy and seem unlikely to do so in the near future. We may have to get used to the fact that the world still contains some influential non-democracies. It is also the case that cultural differences may lead to forms of political conflict that make a consensus on the desirability of spreading democracy across the globe more difficult to achieve. The


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more difficult international security situation following the events of 11 September 2001 may work against further democratisation. To the extent that the interests of the Great Powers lie in pursuing short-term security imperatives, they cannot easily take on long-term institution shaping interests as well. For example, the US government strongly opposed the military coup in Pakistan in 1999, but when anti-Taliban military operations began in October 2001, the US government found it necessary to drop its objection to military rule in Pakistan.

Huntington may, however, be rather too pessimistic about the prospects for new democracies. Less reversal of democracy in Latin America and eastern Europe has occurred than pessimists expected, even though economic progress in democratic Third World countries has not been especially impressive. Furthermore, it is not at all clear that democracy is only feasible in Western or Christian societies. India, Japan and now perhaps Taiwan are obvious counter-examples. Indeed, Germany did not become securely democratic until the defeat of Nazism, nor Russia until the downfall of communism.

Both Fukuyama and Huntington raise very big issues. Their purpose is mainly to raise awareness and encourage discussion rather than to present hard-and-fast rules about democracy. Fukuyama seeks to draw general lessons from the ending of the Cold War, while Huntington is more concerned with the failure of the liberal democracies to transform the countries of the Middle East in the direction of greater democratisation or greater sympathy for the USA. In the end, all generalisations of this rather ambitious kind break down against the obstinacy of specific facts, but works of this kind do raise serious issues and it is well worth them being written.

Activity

List the most important countries within each of Huntington’s civilisations. Cross-reference them to Vanhanen’s indicators of power resources. Consider which of the two notions – power resources or civilisations – best explains whether these countries are democracies or not.

A reminder of your learning outcomesThis chapter should give you a broad understanding of the way in which the works discussed provide theories for democratisation. By the end of this chapter and the relevant reading, you should be able to:

• explain what the central logic of each of the main arguments is

• list the main principles of classic modernisation theory

• outline the main points made by critics of classic modernisation theory

• explain why some authors have believed that there is an affinity between modernisation and democratic government

• describe and explain the main weaknesses of approaches that seek to explain political change primarily in social or economic terms

• list and explain the main principles of Moore’s argument in respect of the social origins of democracy

• discuss the key variables identified by Rueschemeyer et al. as being helpful to and negative for democratic transition

• explain the main criticisms of both Moore’s and Rueschemeyer’s work

• explain what Fukuyama intends us to understand as ‘the end of history’

• explain why Huntington is sceptical about the spread of democracy to the Middle East.


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Sample examination questions1. What happens to societies when they modernise? What are the political

consequences likely to be?

2. What are the strengths and weaknesses of economic explanations for democratisation?

3. Does underdevelopment make it more difficult to sustain a democracy? If so, why has democracy sometimes survived in poor countries?

4. ‘The principal weakness of Moore’s analysis is his class reductionism.’ Discuss.

5. What general lessons, if any, have we to learn from the Rueschemeyer study of democratisation?

6. ‘The spread of democracy to over 50 countries since the mid-1970s proves that Fukuyama is likely to be right about “the end of history”.’ Discuss.

7. What implications does Huntington’s theory of clashing civilisations have for the spread of democracy?

Chapter 5: Threats to democracy, democratic breakdown and the prevention of democratic breakdown

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Aims of the chapterThis chapter tries to explain why democratic breakdown is relatively rare today, although it was not so rare in the comparatively recent past. It considers some empirical cases first and then looks at explanations to do with:

• class conflict

• international opposition to democracy

• the argument that dictatorships can be more efficient than democracies, especially in poor countries.

The chapter then looks at the main reasons for the stability of democracy in wealthy countries.

Learning outcomesBy the end of the chapter and the associated reading, you should be able to:

• discuss the main explanations given by scholars for democratic breakdowns – when these have in fact occurred – and for the non-occurrence of democratic breakdown in wealthy democracies

• explain what the main theories of democratic breakdown are, and how they relate to one or more specific examples

• examine how far class factors can be said to have influenced anti-democratic right-wing interventions in countries such as Spain and Chile

• explain why some people think that authoritarianism is more economically efficient than democracy

• outline why democratic stability has so far remained the normal case in First World democracies.

Essential readingGalbraith, J.K. The Culture of Contentment. (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1992)

[ISBN 9781856191470].Rueschemeyer, D., E. Stephens and J. Stephens Capitalist Development

and Democracy. (Chicago: University of Chicogo Press, 1992) [ISBN 9780226731445].

Further readingBull, M. and P. Newell (eds) Corruption in Contemporary Politics. (Basingstoke:

Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) [ISBN 0333802985].Buxton, J. The Failure of Political Reform in Venezuela. (Aldershot: Ashgate

Publishing Group, 2000) [ISBN 0754613461].Diamond, L. et al. (eds) Consolidating the Third Wave Democracies. (Baltimore:

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997) [ISBN 0801857953].Fukuyama, F. The End of History and the Last Man. (London: Penguin, 2006;

reprint edition) [ISBN 0743284550].


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Leftwich, A. States of Development. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999) [ISBN 0745608426].

O’Neill, M. and D. Austin (eds) Democracy and Cultural Diversity (Oxford: Oxford University Press with the Hansard Society, 2000) [ISBN 0199290008].

Philip, G. ‘The Venezuelan Coup Attempt of February 1992’, Government & Opposition, 27(4) 1992, pp.454–69.

Vanhanen, T. Prospects for Democracy: a Study of 172 countries. (London: Routledge, 1997) [ISBN 041514406X or 0521297249].

IntroductionWe are no doubt fortunate that there has been no case of democratic breakdown in any First World democracy since 1945, although France came close in and just after 1958, and there was a failed coup attempt in Spain as recently as 1981. In order to study democratic breakdown, therefore, we have to look further afield. There were many examples of democratic breakdown in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, when a considerable number of weak democracies were replaced with authoritarian or outright fascist systems. Democracy also broke down in Greece in 1967, and several incidences of military involvement in Turkish politics have occurred since 1945. A number of military coups took place in South America, even in the most politically sophisticated and economically developed countries of the region, such as Argentina and Chile. Democracy has also broken down more often, though not invariably, in poorer Third World countries, such as Pakistan and Zimbabwe.

As with the readings discussed in the last chapter, scholars have approached the question of democratic breakdown in two different ways.

1. The first approach has to do with general theories. An evident premise behind Fukuyama (1992) is that democracy should not break down once it has been properly established. Vanhanen (1997) also claims that democracy is here to stay in countries whose index of power resources has passed a certain threshold. These theories seem fairly optimistic, but it has to be said that they have not yet been falsified. Relatively wealthy countries can face democratic crises, but this need not lead to democratic breakdown. This kind of theorising, of course, does not help much when considering the possible futures of poor countries that have democratised since the 1970s. It does explain, though, why scholars have on the whole paid less attention to discussing democratic breakdown than they did a generation ago.

2. The second approach is to look at the actual or possible appeal of non-democratic forms of government. We should not look only at the defeat of democrats without considering the victory of non-democrats. At various times in the past, fascism and communism appeared to many people – including some intellectuals in wealthy countries – to be attractive models. This is no longer the case. Today, the appeal of potential alternatives to democracy – fundamentalist Islam and developmental dictatorship – is more limited. In places where democracy performs really badly, however, people might reject it on pragmatic grounds, without necessarily accepting any authoritarian ideology. It could possibly be argued that the most dangerous figures


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for democracy are semi-democrats, who may appear to be liberal democrats but are not. They have the power to deceive people who might otherwise reject an openly anti-democratic politician.

It may be that the relative importance of these two aspects – democratic weakness and anti-democratic strength – varies between cases. At one end of the scale, there are few democrats and many authoritarians. Democracy has not so much failed as been insufficiently tried. This may be because elites prefer non-democracy due to their interest in pursuing goals that they might consider incompatible with democracy – such as rapid economic development. Vanhanen may be right to suppose that an unequal distribution of factors of power within a society may be negative for democracy when such cases arise. An unfavourable international climate might also be an influence. The overthrow of the Weimar Republic in Germany in 1933 principally had to do with a general lack of support for democracy. It was not so much that democracy failed, but that it had not really been tried.

At the other end of the scale, it may be that democracy might be preferred in principle, but found lacking in practice because of its inability to resolve pressing problems. For example, the Chilean coup of 1973 reflected a widespread (though by no means universally held) idea that democracy had failed in that country, rather than any idea that it had not been sufficiently tried. Much the same could be said about the various populist experiments tried in Latin America in the 1990s, although these did not quite amount to democratic breakdown. The discussion below looks at one of the 1990s cases – namely Venezuela – in some detail.

Are there good arguments to the effect that democracy is not necessarily the most appropriate form of government under all circumstances? It is certainly true that from the viewpoint of economic growth some of the most successful governments of the twentieth century have been authoritarian. Franco’s Spain developed from effectively being a Third World country to being a society that, by the mid-1970s, was ready for full membership of the European Community. Countries such as South Korea, China and Taiwan made considerable material progress under authoritarian rule. Pinochet took power in Chile when that country was in severe economic crisis, and when he left power 16 years later, the Chilean economy was by far the most successful in Latin America. The social costs of these achievements, in terms of repression and inequality, however, have often been high. Many people would prefer to live in a country whose economic performance was no better than average, but where they could feel safe and at peace. The argument that authoritarianism is somehow best for economic efficiency will be discussed in a later part of this chapter.

Democratic breakdown: cases and near missesAlthough, today, democracy appears to be in the ascendancy and non-democracy in retreat, there have been historical periods in which it was democracy that appeared to be in retreat. The 1920s and 1930s were the most evident period in respect of Europe, and the 1960s and early 1970s in respect of Latin America. During these periods, democracy proved vulnerable to replacement by authoritarian rule at two opposite extreme situations. At the one extreme, elites felt threatened and frightened by democracy and wanted to put a stop to it. At the other, democracy seemed so unsuccessful and corrupt that it failed to generate any popular enthusiasm. Its opponents could then attack democracy for being not so much threatening as pointless.


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Good examples of each of these two extremes come from Latin America. The overthrow of President Allende in Chile in 1973 was the result of social polarisation following on from excessive social conflict. The coup attempts in Venezuela in 1992 (which failed narrowly) show that democracy can also be vulnerable to atrophy, policy failure and a general sense of futility. The Venezuelan case also provides an example of a country in which democracy might have broken down but has so far narrowly survived. This is an obvious point of contrast.

Chile in 1973

The Chilean case is fairly well known. Of all the countries in Latin America, Chile had, in 1970, one of the most overtly institutionalised democracies (Rueschemeyer, 1992). There had been a brief experiment with military rule in the late 1920s, but the Great Depression set in motion a series of developments that forced the military from power. From the early 1930s onwards, there were regular elections and alternations in power – there were socialists in the Chilean government as early as 1939. Despite the banning of the Communist Party for a decade at the height of the Cold War, there was enough consistency in the electoral process to convince some observers that democracy in Chile was fully established.

Two more ominous trends lay below the surface, however.

1. One trend was the expansion of political participation. The alternations in power of the 1930s and 1940s took place in a country with relatively few electors. Women were not given the right to vote, and there was an illiteracy disqualification as well. This meant that only a minority – though a substantial one – could vote. During the 1950s and 1960s, the suffrage was extended to cover virtually everybody. Six times as many Chileans voted in 1970 as in 1952.

Although it is not necessarily ominous for the electorate to expand in an existing democratic context, the process clearly introduces some dangers. It might be that the demands of new electors, or organisations that compete with each other for the popular vote, could damage existing institutional arrangements. In retrospect, observers of Chile in the 1950s were too complacent about what might happen as the franchise became less and less restricted.

2. The other key trend was the relative decline in the Chilean economy. During this period, Chile was heavily dependent on copper exports and suffered for this dependency. Copper was losing ground to aluminium in the world economy, and countries other than Chile were rapidly increasing their output of copper. Meanwhile, the international price of copper fluctuated greatly (as it still does today). All of this engendered a politics of frustration, as the high expectations of Chileans in the post-war years were not met. This encouraged many Chileans, and their leaders, to look for ever more radical solutions to their country’s problems.

Under these circumstances, Salvador Allende won the Chilean presidential elections in 1970 as the Socialist candidate. He was the head of a four-party coalition within which there was considerable tension between the reformist and the revolutionary wings. Allende himself never seems to have made up his mind between the two, thus enabling his political enemies to portray him as a revolutionary. Allende inherited a weak economy and mismanagement made it much worse. Economic decline and political tension then reinforced each other and set off a spiral of events that led to the intervention of the military in September 1973. The military dictatorship that replaced the Allende government was particularly brutal, and many thousands of Chileans lost their lives in the resulting repression.


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The near-miss in Venezuela

The Venezuelan case was more ambiguous in the sense that there were two military coup attempts in 1992 which did not succeed. However, the man who led the first coup attempt – Lt Col. Hugo Chavez – was elected to the presidency with 56 per cent of the vote in December 1998. His victory, while certainly achieved by fully democratic means, did not fully stabilise the situation in the military. This has remained difficult since 1992 and still does so today.

The Venezuelan case is important because many observers saw the country in the 1970s – like Chile a generation earlier – as a stable South American democracy. Elections had been held consistently since 1958. There was contestation and alternation in power, and Venezuela avoided the extension of military rule that happened across so much of the rest of the region in the 1960s and 1970s. The political parties that ran the country were politically moderate and ready to negotiate with each other.

Despite these advantages, democracy in Venezuela was also seriously flawed in two ways:

1. One of these flaws was economic. Venezuela was dependent on oil revenues in precisely the same way that Chile was dependent on copper. However, whereas copper prices have always fluctuated, the price of oil held steady during the 1950s and 1960s. It then increased sharply during the 1970s before falling back with equal sharpness in the mid-1980s.

The result of this was to create a classic, but very large, boom and slump effect in Venezuela. The boom led to mismanagement and corruption; the slump to capital flight and misery. By the end of the decade, the Venezuelan people had lost confidence in their politicians’ ability to manage the country’s affairs either honestly or competently.

2. Additional problems had to do with the rather hierarchical, non-receptive and generally closed nature of the main democratic institutions themselves and with the rigid and ineffective nature of the public bureaucracy. The difficulty with the democratic institutions had partly to do with the electoral system. Elections were held every five years. President and congress were elected together and there were no mid-term elections. One of the parties occasionally experimented with a primary system, but most presidential candidates were simply nominated through internal party processes. Until 1989, local governors were appointed from the centre rather than being elected directly – this was also true of municipal authorities until 1969.

Whereas the process of selecting candidates was rather centralised, thereby reinforcing the role of party machinery, the party elites developed close relationships with business interests. Election campaigns were extremely expensive, even by US standards, and needed to be financed. Business interests were also heavily involved in policy-making. This led, in some cases, to suspicions of corruption and also to a distancing between ordinary people and their political representatives. Judicial power was also weak and often corrupt.

The combination of an aloof political system and economic decline led to a very severe popular disillusionment with politics. As a result, an opportunistic coup by a small group of relatively junior officers came close to success and was widely applauded. Moreover, although the coup failed, the coup leader – Hugo Chavez – was later granted amnesty by the government. He stood for president in 1998 and won. He subsequently changed the entire national constitution in ways that were certainly popular, but that paid little respect to due process. The new constitution was not generally accepted by Chavez’ opponents.

We now need to move away from discussion of particular situations to see what general factors can be taken into account when discussing the breakdown of democracy.


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General explanations

Class conflictFor a number of scholars – many, though not all, of them writing within the Marxist tradition – class conflict provides an important explanation for democratic breakdown (see Rueschemeyer, 1992). It is certainly true that some of the most notorious destroyers of democracy – Franco in Spain, Pinochet in Chile and Papadopoulos in Greece – were concerned above all with destroying challenges to the existing order from the left of the political spectrum. Class conflict was certainly an important explanation of the coup in Chile. It played no significant part in events in Venezuela, however, and is evidently not an essential ingredient in any threat to democracy.

Those who argue that class conflict is a primary factor in explaining democratic breakdown in general need also to explain why it has not had this effect in other parts of the world, such as the UK, France or Scandinavia. In the last chapter, we considered the arguments of Rueschemeyer et al. to the effect that the working class tends to be pro-democratic in its orientation. If this is broadly true, then why should class conflict lead to the overthrow of democracy?

There are two compelling reasons why we would not expect working class assertiveness to lead to the collapse of democracy.

1. The first reason is economic. We have already seen that capitalism does have the capacity to raise the living standards of ordinary people via the normal process of economic growth. Why should an employing class, faced with potentially militant workers, not simply buy them off by offering pay increases or selective opportunities for promotion, and why should a working class not accept such inducements?

2. The second reason is political. When class polarisation has occurred, the workers have almost invariably lost. The number of Marxian working class-led revolutions currently stands at zero, and no new revolutions (of this kind) in industrial countries are expected soon. Every successful revolution in history has involved a significant degree of involvement from rural forces and at least some from the urban middle class. Twentieth-century revolutions also involved some kind of ‘vanguard’ political leadership, which exploited rather than represented its social supporters. So why should the working class precipitate class confrontation when it has little prospect of victory and every likelihood of defeat?

One possible answer is that what matters is the political leadership of the working class rather than its structural political characteristics as a class, always assuming that this is something that can actually be said to exist. When labour movements were in the hands of moderate politicians, democracy was not in danger. When there was a significant communist or ‘ultra’ leadership, however, this might have been a different matter. Communist or other revolutionary forms of politics were influential in the political composition of the Weimar Republic in Germany, the Popular Front in Spain and Popular Unity in Chile. All of these were overthrown by right-wingers. By the same token, the Bolshevik vanguard in the former Soviet Union did successfully make a revolution, but this resulted in a Stalinist dictatorship.


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In other words, the key issue may be conflict rather than class. We cannot safely deduce whether social differences in any particular society will lead to conflict. This depends upon how these differences are interpreted, how society is organised and how the most important social organisations are led. These factors can be observed, but they cannot be deduced from a country’s socio-economic characteristics. Ideas about politics, international developments and pure contingencies matter as well.

It may also be that class conflict, while important, was by no means the only factor in democratic breakdown in countries where this has taken place. Additional reasons seem to have contributed to democratic breakdown in both Spain and Chile. The religious issue should not be ignored – Marxism, as a political movement, was not just about equality, but was about atheism as well. The Marxism prevalent in Spain in the 1930s and in Chile in the 1960s was aggressively anti-clerical. This led to hostile reactions from people who might not have been so threatened by the purely economic aspect of what the left-wing governments were proposing. In point of fact, the campaign on which Allende fought the 1970 elections in Chile was not significantly different from the campaign of Rodmiro Tomic, the leader of the left wing of the Christian Democratic Party. Tomic’s radical Catholicism might, however, have been more acceptable to moderate Chilean conservatives than Allende’s Marxist atheism.

International influencesInternational issues were also important in the cases of Chile and Venezuela. The Cold War was clearly an important influence in the Chilean case. The US government actively sought to encourage opposition to Allende, and it played a significant – though probably secondary – part in his overthrow. In Venezuela, the USA was opposed to a coup and made its opposition clear.

Comparative politics tends to operate on the assumption that most people live in a world of effectively independent countries. In practice, however, a significant proportion of the world’s population (though a much diminished one by comparison with a century ago) cannot choose its government without some reference to the wishes of one or more powerful neighbour.

In the past, heavy international involvement was mostly negative from the point of view of democratic stability. This might sometimes have been because a powerful neighbour was simply opposed to democracy in a satellite country. This was largely the case in eastern Europe until 1986. It might also have been that hostility to a powerful neighbour built up to a point where a domestic dictator could achieve power and popularity by asserting the national identity of his country. This was very much the case in Cuba with Castro, whose successful defiance of the USA played a key part in his consolidation of power.

International pressures in recent years, however, have been self-consciously supportive of democracy. One important reason for the stabilisation of democracy in Spain after the death of Franco in 1975 was the desire of much of the Spanish elite to enter the European Community. This factor may also have played a part in the stabilisation of democracy after the fall of the Colonels’ regime in Greece in 1974. Since the mid-1980s the US preference for democratic governments within Latin America may well have warned off potential military coup leaders in particular countries. It is entirely possible that this was the case in respect of Venezuela during the 1990s, when on three separate occasions the US government publicly declared its opposition to a coup.


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Efforts by the international community to press for democratisation are sometimes ambiguous in their effects. With respect to the majority of countries that democratised after 1980, it would appear that the initial pressures for democratisation came from within, and received international support only after it had already become effective to some extent in domestic terms. It is true that the big powers today are less likely to try to undermine democracy in Third World countries than they were during the days of the Cold War and are more likely, in consequence, to offer limited encouragement to democratising movements. Democracy cannot survive, however, without local democrats, and international pressures are generally likely to be, at best, of secondary importance, even when they are favourable.

Policy failureMany theorists of democracy have tended to take it for granted that a country is likely to achieve material progress if it:

• adopts liberal capitalism as an economic system

• adopts democracy as a form of government

• gives due weight to technocratic expertise in policy-making.

From the economic viewpoint, however, the performance of newly installed democratic governments in many regions of the world – in Africa, the former Soviet Union and Latin America – turned out to be disappointing (during the 1990s, at least). Will people become disillusioned with democracy if democratic governments perform poorly in policy terms? Disillusionment with democracy as a result of severe corruption and policy mismanagement did play a significant part in the near-breakdown of democracy in Venezuela during the 1990s.

In Latin America more generally, there does seem to be survey evidence that a failure to progress economically has led to growing distrust of democracy since the late 1990s. According to a poll reported in the Economist (26 July 2001), the percentage of Argentinians agreeing that ‘democracy is preferable to any other kind of government’ fell from 77 per cent in 1995 to 58 per cent in 2001. Meanwhile, those who agreed with the statement that ‘in certain circumstances an authoritarian government can be better than a democratic one’ rose from 11 per cent to 21 per cent. In Brazil, 41 per cent of respondents clearly preferred democracy in 1995 – this had fallen to 30 per cent by 2001. Those who preferred authoritarianism under certain circumstances also declined – but from 21 per cent to 18 per cent. In Paraguay in 2001, more people preferred dictatorship under certain circumstances to democracy under all circumstances. This response also indicated a swing of opinion against democracy.

Activity

When you have specifically read about Chile and Venezuela, look again at the work of Linz and Stepan on democratic consolidation (1996). How consolidated would you say that Venezuela was in 1992 and Chile in 1973? What have we to learn from the two experiences about democratic consolidation as a concept?

Developmental dictatorship? Mussolini famously claimed that Italian Fascism would make the trains run on time. History does not really record whether he succeeded, though his government was clearly a failure on far more important criteria. Authoritarians do argue, however, that they are more likely to be able to achieve national progress and prosperity than democrats. How well founded are these claims?


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In order to achieve any economic growth, all societies need to be able to achieve a certain level of savings and investment. If one assumes (and this is a questionable but not absurd assumption) that the amount of investment determines growth most of all – rather than the quality or allocation of the investment – then countries that wish to grow rapidly need to find a lot of investment capital. Some of this may be funded from abroad, but the most important source of domestic investment is domestic saving. This can either be voluntary or involuntary (in the sense that the saving is achieved through tax revenue, inflation, the appropriation of social security funds or other forms of fiscal coercion). Money that is saved by whatever means, though, cannot at the same time be consumed.

Democratic systems depend, however, upon competition for the popular vote. Politicians can hope to win elections by promising tax reductions, spending increases and general prosperity. They are unlikely to do so by raising taxes, cutting spending or reducing consumption. Essentially, democracy may be associated with an excessive demand to consume, both privately or publicly. This can lead to financial instability and high real interest rates, or it can lead to a squeezing out of investment. It is noteworthy that the amount of income saved by Latin Americans actually fell when the region democratised during the 1980s, but rose in Chile, which remained dictatorial until the end of that decade.

This argument is plausible, but it also contains a number of weaknesses. One key point is that savings ratios in democracies are generally high enough to finance growth. If democracy is bad for economic performance, how can the general economic success of wealthy democracies since 1950 be explained? It seems to make more sense to explain problems in new democracies, where these exist, in terms of institutional shortcomings. What is needed is the right kind of public policy and the right kind of economic technocracy. A democratic state can have effective institutions of economic policy-making that are autonomous of the political process – which is, after all, the situation with the European Central Bank and the Federal Reserve Bank in the USA. In order to ‘de-politicise’ economic decision-making, it is not necessary to have a dictatorship. Moreover, some authoritarian governments have been as much driven by short-term considerations of political expediency as some democracies.

In fact, no clear relation between democracy and economic performance exists. Some democracies have performed well in economic terms, others badly. The same is true of authoritarian systems. As Leftwich (1999) pointed out, the most successful economic performers in the past generation have been a diverse set of countries that do not have very much in common. In other words, democracy has an economic aspect, but it should not be seen too much in economic terms.

Economic progress in wealthy countriesFinally, if we turn our attention to the notion of why democracy has not broken down in First World countries that have adopted it, we again come across a range of explanations emphasising somewhat different factors. It is reasonable to start with the idea that capitalist liberal democracy has, for the most part, been a reasonably successful form of government in terms of international conflict. The First and Second World Wars – and also the Cold War – were won by the most powerful of the world’s democracies (which is not to deny that the former Soviet Union played a major part in the outcome of the Second World War).


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When we move from considering primarily military to primarily economic issues, there are other reasons to understand why liberal democracy has remained stable. Economic growth in First World countries is entrenched in the sense that progress is expected virtually every year. In the UK, which has not by any means been the most successful First World country from an economic viewpoint, there have only been three years since 1945 in which economic growth has been negative. The average rate of growth over the past 40 years has been in the order of 2.5 per cent per annum. This is not especially fast, but it still allowed national income to double in less than 30 years. First World countries tend to have stable, or in some cases slightly declining, populations, so that per capita income grows as rapidly as national income. Most people are gradually becoming better off materially, and the improvement can be very noticeable over a generation. There is, therefore, reason for contentment with the status quo.

The economic performance of First World liberal democracies (a category which now includes some Asian countries) was markedly superior to that of communist systems. Although some capitalist authoritarian systems have proved economically successful, it remains true that the world’s richest countries are almost all democracies. It is certainly true that some countries have adopted democratic forms of government only after achieving significant levels of economic growth, but it is still the case that the economic record of the wealthy democracies is reasonably good. The democracies are under no pressure to change their systems of government in order to achieve superior economic performance.

Political stability in wealthy countriesThreats to First World liberal democracy seem to consist mainly of events that might hypothetically take place, but that so far have not. It is not clear that liberal democracy (or any form of government) could survive a full-scale nuclear conflict. Nor is it clear that liberal democracy could survive if advanced capitalism went into severe and prolonged economic crisis. No capitalist system (or any other kind of economy) operates without some difficulties, but prophets of the ‘coming crisis of capitalism’ have been proved wrong so often that they are now largely discredited. Sometimes, economic slowdowns and recessions occur, but these are not usually so long-lasting that resentment against the system as a whole has time to accumulate. Bad economic results may often lead to a vote against the government of the day, but not generally to a reaction against democracy as a concept.

Finally, it seems implausible that democracy could be the loser in any coming battle of ideas. In this sense, Fukuyama’s thesis may be valid. Doctrines based on human inequality evidently lack appeal within established democratic systems. Of all the major doctrines that are based on the notion of equality, liberal democracy has been the least unsuccessful in practice. This need not mean that every society in the world will eventually adopt democracy – there may always be limited, provisional justifications for particular authoritarianisms. Furthermore, illegitimate government is indeed possible under certain circumstances. There are, however, no longer intellectual rivals to democracy with sufficient appeal to encourage significant numbers of people within stable democracies to seek to replace their system with a different one.


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ConclusionDemocratic breakdown has been unknown in First World democracies since 1945 (unless we count Greece in 1967 as First World), though it was relatively common in the 1920s and 1930s. It was relatively common in semi-industrialised countries, such as Chile, between 1945 and 1980 but has since become much rarer. It is still common, though less so than it was, in genuinely poor countries such as Zimbabwe and Pakistan. In some poor countries political elites still believe, with mixed evidence, that authoritarianism is good for economic progress.

It cannot be taken for granted that this situation will remain unchanged, especially in respect of semi-industrialised countries. Venezuela has come close to full-scale democratic breakdown at several points since 1992. However, the likelihood of democratic breakdown in genuinely First World democracies seems remote except in consequence of a genuinely catastrophic event such as nuclear war.

On the whole, positive economic change seems to have reinforced democracy where this has occurred. Where it has not occurred (and is not occurring), then democratic breakdown remains a possibility. It could be triggered by popular rejection of democracy due to policy failure, by changes in international conditions that might reward non-democratic leaders, or by class conflict due to frustration at the failure to achieve economic progress. However, democracy does seem to have won the battle of ideas, at least for the present, and can be expected to survive in the majority of the world’s democracies in the absence of severe crisis.

A reminder of your learning outcomesBy the end of the chapter and the associated reading, you should be able to:

• discuss the main explanations given by scholars for democratic breakdowns – when these have in fact occurred – and for the non-occurrence of democratic breakdown in wealthy democracies

• explain what the main theories of democratic breakdown are, and how they relate to one or more specific examples

• examine how far class factors can be said to have influenced anti-democratic right-wing interventions in countries such as Spain and Chile

• explain why some people think that authoritarianism is more economically efficient than democracy

• outline why democratic stability has so far remained the normal case in First World democracies.

Sample examination questions1. What are the main problems facing newly created democracies?

Discuss with respect to any one country of your choice.

2. What can the case of either Chile or Venezuela tell us about conditions under which democracy can break down?

3. ‘Class factors, on their own, do not cause the breakdown of democracy. Other issues are usually more important.’ Discuss.

4. ‘Democracy is likely to be the normal form of government in the future.’ Discuss.

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Appendix: Sample examination paper

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Appendix: Sample examination paper

Important note: This Sample examination paper reflects the examination and assessment arrangements for this course in the academic year 2010−2011. The format and structure of the examination may have changed since the publication of this subject guide. You can find the most recent examinations papers on the VLE where all changes to the format of the examination are posted.

Time allowed: three hours.

Candidates should answer THREE of the following TWELVE questions. All questions carry equal marks.

1. ‘Democracy is a set of electoral practices.’ ‘Democracy is a set of values.’ Which of these statements do you prefer, and why?

2. ‘Pluralist theory suffers from unrealistic ideas about participation.’ Discuss.

3. ‘Political competition is an essential but only a limited part of liberal democracy.’ Discuss.

4. Discuss some of the complexities in the relation between capitalism and democracy.

5. ‘Referendums are inimical to representative democracy.’ Discuss.

6. What are the main reasons for believing that democracy is unlikely to be sustainable in poor countries? Are these good reasons?

7. Discuss, with reference to any one historical sociologist, the role of class analysis in our understanding of the process of democratisation.

8. What, if any, reasons are there for believing that we are at ‘the end of history’?

9. What is democratic consolidation? How can we tell whether a democracy is consolidated or not?

10. Why has democratic breakdown been so rare in developed countries since 1945?

11. ‘Right-wing reaction against democracy has more to do with nationalist or religious extremism than with class politics.’ Discuss with examples.

12. Has the spread of democracy to many Third World countries since 1985 decisively undermined modernisation theory?

END OF PAPER

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Documents

PS3086 Subject Guide