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Politics 324 Reading summariesContents
WEEK 6 .................................................................................................................................................... 2
Schmitter and Karl: what democracy is…and is not .............................................................................. 2
WEEK 7 .................................................................................................................................................... 7
Rothstein and Teorell: What Is Quality of Government? A Theory of ................................................. 7
Impartial Government Institutions (20 pages) ...................................................................................... 7
Sebudubudu and Lotshwao: Managing Resources and the Democratic Order: The Experience of
Botswana .............................................................................................................................................. 14
WEEK 8 .................................................................................................................................................. 17
Willy Jou Ideological radicalism and democratic experience in new democracies ........................... 17
Poverty, Inequality, and Democracy: Why Democracies Fail. Ethan B. Kapstein, Nathan Converse 22
WEEK 9: ................................................................................................................................................. 26
Democratic Breakdown and Survival: Scott Mainwaring and Aníbal Pérez-Li~nán .......................... 26
WEEK 10 ................................................................................................................................................ 33
Larry Diamond: The Road to Digital Unfreedom: The Threat of Postmodern Totalitarianism ......... 33
WEEK 11 ................................................................................................................................................ 35
Hannah Arendt Article ......................................................................................................................... 35
WEEK 12 ................................................................................................................................................ 39
William A. Galston: The Enduring Vulnerability of Liberal Democracy .............................................. 39
1
, WEEK 6
Schmitter and Karl: what democracy is…and is not (15 pages).
Summary (5 pages)
What Democracy Is
• One of the major themes of this essay is that democracy does not consist of a single
unique set of institutions. There are many types of democracy, and their diverse
practices produce a similarly varied set of effects.
• Modern political democracy is a system of governance in which rulers are held
accountable for their actions in the public realm by citizens, acting indirectly through
the competition and cooperation of their elected representatives.3
• A regime or system of governance is an ensemble of patterns that determines the
methods of access to the principal public offices; the characteristics of the actors
admitted to or excluded from such access; the strategies that actors may use to gain
access; and the rules that are followed in the making of publicly binding decisions.
o To work properly, the ensemble must be institutionalized
▪ All actors must agree and abide by it
▪ preferred mechanism of institutionalization is a written body of laws
undergirded by a written constitution
• Like all regimes, democracies depend upon the presence of rulers, persons who
occupy specialized authority roles and can give legitimate commands to others.
• What distinguishes democratic rulers from non democratic ones are the norms that
condition how the former come to power and the practices that hold them
accountable for their actions.
• The public realm encompasses the making of collective norms and choices that are
binding on the society and backed by state coercion.
o Its content can vary a great deal across democracies
• Citizens are the most distinctive element in democracies.
o All regimes have rulers and a public realm, but only to the extent that they
are democratic do they have citizens.
o Historically, severe restrictions on citizenship were imposed in most emerging
or partial democracies according to criteria of age, gender, class, race,
literacy, property ownership, taxpaying status, and so on.
o Today, the criteria for inclusion are fairly standard. All native-born adults are
eligible, although somewhat higher age limits may still be imposed upon
candidates for certain offices.
• Competition has not always been considered an essential defining condition of
democracy.
2
, o “Classic” democracies presumed decision making based on direct
participation leading to consensus.
o The assembled citizenry was expected to agree on a common course
of action after listening to the alternatives and weighing their
respective merits and demerits.
o A tradition of hostility to “faction,” and “particular interests persists in
democratic thought, but at least since The Federalist Papers it has become
widely accepted that competition among factions is a necessary evil in
democracies that operate on a more-than-local scale.
o Yet while democrats may agree on the inevitability of factions, they tend to
disagree about the best forms and rules for governing factional competition.
Indeed, differences over the preferred modes and boundaries of competition
contribute most to distinguishing one subtype of democracy from another.
• The most popular definition of democracy equates it with regular elections, fairly
conducted and honestly counted.
o For some merely having elections is enough to call it a democracy.
o “electoralism” or “the faith that merely holding elections will channel
political action into peaceful contests among elites and accord public
legitimacy to the winners”—no matter how they are conducted or what else
constrains those who win them.
o During the intervals between elections, citizens can seek to influence public
policy through a wide variety of other intermediaries: interest associations,
social movements, locality groupings, clientelistic arrangements, and so forth.
o Modern democracy, in other words, offers a variety of competitive processes
and channels for the expression of interests and values—associational as well
as partisan, functional as well as territorial, collective as well as individual. All
are integral to its practice.
• Another commonly accepted image of democracy identifies it with majority rule
o Any governing body that makes decisions by combining the votes of more
than half of those eligible and present is said to be democratic, whether that
majority emerges within an electorate, a parliament, a committee, a city
council, or a party caucus.
• A problem arises, however, when numbers meet intensities
• Cooperation has always been a central feature of democracy.
o Actors must voluntarily make collective decisions binding on the polity as a
whole. They must cooperate in order to compete.
• But democracy’s freedoms should also encourage citizens to deliberate among
themselves, to discover their common needs, and to resolve their differences
without relying on some supreme central authority. – classic democracy said this
3
, • In contemporary political discourse, this phenomenon of cooperation and
deliberation via autonomous group activity goes under the rubric of “civil society.”
o At its best, civil society provides an intermediate layer of governance
between the individual and the state that is capable of resolving conflicts and
controlling the behavior of members without public coercion.
o Rather than overloading decision makers with increased demands and
making the system ungovernable, a viable civil society can mitigate conflicts
and improve the quality of citizenship—without relying exclusively on the
privatism of the marketplace.
• Representatives—whether directly or indirectly elected—do most of the real work in
modern democracies.
o Most are professional politicians who orient their careers around the
desire to fill key offices. Democracy wouldn’t survive without them
Procedures That Make Democracy Possible
• Any polity that fails to impose such restrictions upon itself, that fails to follow the
“rule of law” with regard to its own procedures, should not be considered
democratic.
• Robert Dahl has offered the most generally accepted listing of what he terms the
“procedural minimal” conditions that must be present for modern political
democracy (or as he puts it, “polyarchy”) to exist:
1) Control over government decisions about policy is constitutionally vested in
elected officials.
2) Elected officials are chosen in frequent and fairly conducted elections in which
coercion is comparatively uncommon.
3) Practically all adults have the right to vote in the election of officials.
4) Practically all adults have the right to run for elective offices in the government. . .
5) Citizens have a right to express themselves without the danger of severe
punishment on political matters broadly defined. . . .
6) Citizens have a right to seek out alternative sources of information. Moreover,
alternative sources of information exist and are protected by law.
7) . . . . Citizens also have the right to form relatively independent associations or
organizations, including independent political parties and interest groups.
8) Popularly elected officials must be able to exercise their constitutional
powers without being subjected to overriding (albeit informal)
opposition from unelected officials. Democracy is in jeopardy if military officers,
entrenched civil servants, or state managers retain the capacity to act independently
of elected civilians or even veto decisions made by the people’s representatives.
9) The polity must be self-governing; it must be able to act independently
of constraints imposed by some other overarching political system.
4
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