DEMOCRACIES, AUTOCRACIES, AND TRANSITIONS
Lecture 1 Readings:
Przeworski, Adam. 2018. Why Bother with Elections? Chapter 1
➔ elections as "a competitive procedure for selecting individuals or groups to hold
public office"
➔ elections are essential to democracy because they allow citizens to choose their
leaders and hold them accountable.
➔ Allow for the peaceful transfer of power.
➔ Promote political participation and engagement
➔ Legitimate the government and its policies
➔ Help to ensure that the government is responsive to the needs of the people.
➔ elections are not perfect. They can be costly, inefficient, and manipulated.
➔ Elections are a way for citizens to hold their leaders accountable. When leaders
make decisions that the people do not like, they can be voted out of office. This helps
to ensure that the government is responsive to the needs of the people.
➔ Elections also allow for the peaceful transfer of power. When leaders lose an
election, they must step down and allow the winners to take over. This helps to avoid
violence and instability
➔ Elections promote political participation and engagement. When people have the
opportunity to vote, they are more likely to be interested in politics and to get
involved in their communities.
➔ Elections help to legitimize the government and its policies. When the government
is elected by the people, it is seen as being more legitimate than a government that
is imposed on the people.
➔ Elections help to ensure that the government is responsive to the needs of the
people. When leaders know that they can be voted out of office, they are more likely
to pay attention to the needs of the people
➔ Elections can be costly. The money spent on elections could be used for other
purposes, such as education or healthcare.
➔ Elections can be inefficient. It takes time and resources to organize and conduct
elections.
➔ Elections can be manipulated. Powerful individuals and groups can try to influence
the outcome of elections through bribery, intimidation, or fraud.
➔ two main types of elections: majoritarian and proportional.
➔ In majoritarian elections, the candidate with the most votes wins the election. In
proportional elections, seats in the legislature are allocated to parties based on the
proportion of votes they receive. Przeworski argues that both types of elections can
be democratic, but they have different advantages and disadvantages.
➔ Majoritarian elections are the most common type of election in the world. They are
used to elect presidents, prime ministers, and members of parliament in many
countries
➔ they are relatively easy to understand and administer. Second, they tend to produce
strong and stable governments. Third, they can help to concentrate power in the
hands of a single party, which can be beneficial for implementing policies.
➔ they can be unfair to minority groups. For example, in a two-party system, a minority
group may never be able to win an election, even if it has a significant number of
supporters. Second, majoritarian elections can lead to polarization and political
, instability. This is because the two major parties are often bitterly opposed to each
other, and they may be unwilling to compromise.
➔ Proportional elections are less common than majoritarian elections, but they are
used in some countries, such as Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands.
➔ they are fairer to minority groups. Second, they tend to produce more representative
governments. Third, they can help to promote cooperation and compromise among
different political parties.
➔ First, they can be more complex and difficult to administer than majoritarian
elections. Second, they can lead to weak and unstable governments. This is because
there are often many different parties in the legislature, and it can be difficult to form
a coalition government that can command a majority.
Sen, Amartya. 1999. “Democracy as a Universal Value.” Journal of Democracy. Vol 10,
No. 3.
➔ The idea of democracy originated, of course, in ancient Greece, more than two
millennia ago. Piecemeal efforts at democratization were attempted elsewhere as
well, including in India.1 But it is really in ancient Greece that the idea of democracy
took shape and was seriously put into practice (albeit on a limited scale), before it
collapsed and was replaced by more authoritarian and asymmetric forms of
government. There were no other kinds anywhere else.
➔ The idea of democracy as a universal commitment is quite new, and it is
quintessentially a product of the twentieth century.
➔ In any age and social climate, there are some sweeping beliefs that seem to
command respect as a kind of general rule--like a "default" setting in a computer
program; they are considered right unless their claim is somehow precisely negated.
While democracy is not yet universally practiced, nor indeed uniformly accepted, in
the general climate of world opinion, democratic governance has now achieved the
status of being taken to be generally right. The ball is very much in the court of those
who want to rubbish democracy to provide justification for that rejection.
➔ How well has democracy worked? While no one really questions the role of
democracy in, say, the United States or Britain or France, it is still a matter of dispute
for many of the poorer countries in the world. This is not the occasion for a detailed
examination of the historical record, but I would argue that democracy has worked
well enough.
➔ It is often claimed that nondemocratic systems are better at bringing about
economic development. This belief sometimes goes by the name of "the Lee
hypothesis," due to its advocacy by Lee Kuan Yew, the leader and former president
of Singapore. He is certainly right that some disciplinarian states (such as South
Korea, his own Singapore, and postreform China) have had faster rates of economic
growth than many less authoritarian ones (including India, Jamaica, and Costa Rica).
The "Lee hypothesis," however, is based on sporadic empiricism, drawing on very
selective and limited information, rather than on any general statistical testing over
the wide-ranging data that are available. A general relation of this kind cannot be
established on the basis of very selective evidence. For example, we cannot really
take the high economic growth of Singapore or China as "definitive proof" that
authoritarianism does better in promoting economic growth, any more than we can
draw the opposite conclusion from the fact that Botswana, the country with the best
record of economic growth in Africa, indeed with one of the finest records of
economic growth in the whole world, has been an oasis of democracy on that
, continent over the decades. We need more systematic empirical studies to sort out
the claims and counterclaims.
➔ There is, in fact, no convincing general evidence that authoritarian [End Page 6]
governance and the suppression of political and civil rights are really beneficial to
economic development.
➔ The question also involves a fundamental issue of methods of economic research.
We must not only look at statistical connections, but also examine and scrutinize the
causal processes that are involved in economic growth and development. The
economic policies and circumstances that led to the economic success of countries
in East Asia are by now reasonably well understood.
➔ openness to competition, the use of international markets, public provision of
incentives for investment and export, a high level of literacy and schooling,
successful land reforms, and other social opportunities that widen participation in
the process of economic expansion
➔ Famines are easy to prevent if there is a serious effort to do so, and a democratic
government, facing elections and criticisms from opposition parties and
independent newspapers, cannot help but make such an effort. Not surprisingly,
while India continued to have famines under British rule right up to independence
(the last famine, which I witnessed as a child, was in 1943, four years before
independence), they disappeared suddenly with the establishment of a multiparty
democracy and a free press.
➔ There is, I believe, an important lesson here. Many economic technocrats
recommend the use of economic incentives (which the market system provides)
while ignoring political incentives (which democratic systems could guarantee).
This is to opt for a deeply unbalanced set of ground rules. The protective power of
democracy may not be missed much when a country is lucky enough to be facing no
serious calamity, when everything is going quite smoothly. Yet the danger of
insecurity, arising from changed economic or other circumstances, or from
uncorrected mistakes of policy, can lurk behind what looks like a healthy state.
➔ The recent problems of East and Southeast Asia bring out, among other things, the
penalties of undemocratic governance. This is so in two striking respects. First, the
development of the financial crisis in some of these economies (including South
Korea, Thailand, Indonesia) has been closely linked to the lack of transparency in
business, in particular the lack of public participation in reviewing financial
arrangements.
➔ What exactly is democracy? We must not identify democracy with majority rule.
Democracy has complex demands, which certainly [End Page 9] include voting and
respect for election results, but it also requires the protection of liberties and
freedoms, respect for legal entitlements, and the guaranteeing of free discussion and
uncensored distribution of news and fair comment. Even elections can be deeply
defective if they occur without the different sides getting an adequate opportunity
to present their respective cases, or without the electorate enjoying the freedom to
obtain news and to consider the views of the competing protagonists. Democracy is
a demanding system, and not just a mechanical condition (like majority rule) taken
in isolation.
➔ If the above analysis is correct, then democracy's claim to be valuable does not rest
on just one particular merit. There is a plurality of virtues here, including, first, the
intrinsic importance of political participation and freedom in human life; second, the
instrumental importance of political incentives in keeping governments responsible
and accountable; and third, the constructive role of democracy in the formation of
, values and in the understanding of needs, rights, and duties. In the light of this
diagnosis, we may now address the motivating question of this essay, namely the
case for seeing democracy as a universal value
➔ I would argue that universal consent is not required for something to be a universal
value. Rather, the claim of a universal value is that people anywhere may have reason
to see it as valuable
➔ Some who dispute the status of democracy as a universal value base their argument
not on the absence of unanimity, but on the presence of regional contrasts. These
alleged contrasts are sometimes related to the poverty of some nations. According
to this argument, poor people are interested, and have reason to be interested, in
bread, not in democracy. This oftrepeated argument is fallacious at two different
levels.
➔ First, as discussed above, the protective role of democracy may be particularly
important for the poor. This obviously applies to potential famine victims who face
starvation. It also applies to the destitute thrown off the economic ladder in a
financial crisis. People in economic need also need a political voice. Democracy is
not a luxury that can await the arrival of general prosperity.
➔ Second, there is very little evidence that poor people, given the choice, prefer to
reject democracy
➔ There is also another argument in defense of an allegedly fundamental regional
contrast, one related not to economic circumstances but to cultural differences.
Perhaps the most famous of these claims relates to what have been called "Asian
values." It has been claimed that Asians traditionally value discipline, not political
freedom, and thus the attitude to democracy must inevitably be much more skeptical
in these countries
➔ The monolithic interpretation of Asian values as hostile to democracy and political
rights does not bear critical scrutiny. I should not, I suppose, be too critical of the
lack of scholarship supporting these beliefs, since those who have made these claims
are not scholars but political leaders, often official or unofficial spokesmen for
authoritarian governments.
➔ The value of democracy includes its intrinsic importance in human life, its
instrumental role in generating political incentives, and its constructive function in
the formation of values (and in understanding the force and feasibility of claims of
needs, rights, and duties). These merits are not regional in character. Nor is the
advocacy of discipline or order. Heterogeneity of values seems to characterize most,
perhaps all, major cultures. The cultural argument does not foreclose, nor indeed
deeply constrain, the choices we can make today.
Lecture 1: Introduction
PATTERNS OF DEMOCRACY
➔ Democracy is not the rule
➔ Declines in the established democracies
➔ Countries on the more authoritarian regimes often adopt democratic concepts such
as voting even though they might be not fair
WHY BOTHER WITH DEMOCRACY?
➔ Amartya Sen and Adam Przeworski
