Summary Democratization: a critical introduction (2nd edition, 2014)
J. Grugel & M.L. Bishop
ISBN: 978-0-230-22057-7
Chapter 1: Democracy
Democracy can be understood as an ideology, a concept or a theory
• “A mode of decision-making about collectively binding rules and policies over which the
people exercise control, and the most democratic arrangement is that where all members of
the collectivity enjoy effective equal rights to take part in such decision-making directly –
one, that is to say, which realizes to the greatest conceivable degree the principles of popular
control and equality in its exercise” (Beetham, p.21)
From direct to liberal democracy
• Direct democracy
o Athenian legacy of popular government within a small city-state and the Renaissance
republican tradition
o Ensuring democratic rights for the community as a whole
• Liberal democracy
o The individual, who has a right, but not an obligation to participate in politics
o Liberalism seeks to justify, but limit, the sovereign power of the state → through
political representation of those individuals deemed mature enough to be granted
political equality
o Role of the state: safeguarding the individual’s right to self-fulfilment and
development
o After 1945 this type of democracy was perceived to be – and presented as- the only
version that there was → constructed, transmitted and expounded in opposition to
both communism (an ideology and a geopolitical force) and fascism over which
democracy was thought to have triumphed
Empirical democratic theory
• Shumpeter: saw democracy as a form of government, and in particular, as a mechanism for
the election of leaders → applying the methodologies of neo-classical economics to the
study of political science
o Underlying Schumpeter’s approach was an assumption that the majority of the
population could not be entrusted with the important task for decision-making →
democracy became a way of creating a kind of market in which competition between
political actors vying for power was institutionalized
o Conditions that would allow competition between elites
▪ High-quality leadership in political parties
▪ Autonomy of political elites from the state
▪ An independent bureaucracy
▪ An opposition and civil society that accept the rules of the game
▪ A political culture of tolerance and compromise
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, • Dahl: suggested the use of the term ‘polyarchy’ since he recognized that there were
conditions for democracy which the western ‘democracies’ did not actually meet
o Polyarchy rests on a combination of elected government and civil liberties, which
should ensure that different groups in society have access to the political system,
main institutions
▪ The election of government officials
▪ Free and fair elections
▪ An inclusive suffrage
▪ The right of all citizens to run for public office
▪ Freedom of expression
▪ Citizens have a right to sources of information other than official ones
▪ Associational autonomy, and the right to form independent associations or
organizations, including political parties and interest groups (Dahl, p.29)
o Essentially: polyarchy is consensual government by a broad range of competing elites
or pluralist government
• Contemporary empirical theory
o From the 1980s onwards, domination of the ‘transition paradigm’
▪ Focussing upon the ways in which countries undergo the transition from
authoritarian political systems towards democratic ones
Critiques of empirical democratic theory
• It is useful to academics working within the behaviouralist tradition and to western policy-
makers, but it is inadequate in numerous ways
o Fails to capture the changing circumstances of contemporary democratic struggles
o It falsely assumes that all western societies are democratic or at least pluralist (all
groups in society can be heard equally) → ignores /underplays the structured
privileges and hierarchies that are generated, sustained and reconfigured by
capitalism and privileges of birth or social position
o It evidently has an western bias
Implications of empirical theory for democratization
• It contains within it a prescriptive bias which is condemnatory of many of the ingrained ways
of doing politics elsewhere, and perhaps especially in much of the Global South
• Empirical democratic theory, when applied too tightly to the democratization debate, runs
the risk of turning it into an exercise in neo-colonization or producing superficially imitative
(but fundamentally authoritarian) forms of government
• It is still tightly bound up with the normative ideational hegemony of democracy itself
• It promotes an electoralist or procedural understanding of democracy
• It does not taken hidden structures of power into account
• Economic resources (or a lack of them) impinge upon the operation of the political system
has particular consequences when applied to the developing world
o Poverty and privilege
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, Alternative approaches to democracy
• Participatory democracy
o Participation, not representation is the crux of democracy
▪ Assumption about the importance of freedom and activism; rejecting the
idea, therefore, that voting rights and alternation in government are, in
themselves, indicators of democracy
o New left and student movements in the 1960s and 1970s
• Feminism
o Uncovering the relationship between social, economic and political gender
inequalities and the ways in which western ‘democracies’ are in fact, systematically
undemocratic since the treat women implicitly / explicitly as inferior to men, thereby
violating the first principle of democracy (all citizens have equal rights)
• Associationalism
o Failure of the state to protect working people and the poor → recognizing both the
intrinsic capitalist bias of western states and the decline in the state’s capacity to
provide welfare, Hirst suggests building upon the traditions of associationalism
within 19th century working-class movements
o Human welfare and liberty are both best served when as many of the affairs of
society as possible are managed by voluntary and democratically self-governing
associations
• Citizenship theories
o Importance of civil society for democracy is a way of drawing attention to the role of
political culture, civic virtues, networks of associations within and across societies
and the importance of contestation in the practice of democracy
o Division between theorists who see citizenship as an eminently political affair and
those that argue that citizenship must be understood to encompass social and
economic components as well
• Global citizenship
o Question the ways in which state sovereignty – traditionally the ‘container’ for
democracy – is compromised as states find themselves ‘increasingly enmeshed in
worldwide systems and network interaction’
• Cosmopolitanism
o Increased interconnectedness between states, institutions, social organizations and
citizens → leads to a number of disjunctures in the world order (Held)
▪ Disjuncture between the formal authority of states to manage economic
policy-making inside national territories and their actual capacity to do so
independently → more power towards multinational corporations (MNCs)
and financial capital creating and controlling wealth
▪ The vast array of international regimes and organizations that have been
established to manage whole areas of transnational activity and collective
policy problems → changes in decision-making structures of world politics
and a shift away from state control towards ‘new and novel forms of geo-
governance’
▪ Globalization undermines the state as an autonomous culture centre →
national cultures are no longer distinct and perhaps even less distinctive than
in the past
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