Democracy

Tilly’s main puzzle: How and why do democracies form? Why do they sometimes disappear? What causes whole countries to democratize or de-democratize? CHAPTER ONE – What is Democracy? __4 Main Types of Definitions of Democracy__ 1. Constitutional · Concentrates on laws a regime enacts concerning political activity · Within democracy, can distinguish between constitutional monarchies, presidential systems, and parliament systems · ADVANTAGE: This type is easy to spot, ∆ easy to ‘measure’ · DISADVANTAGE: Large discrepancies between what is announced and what actually happens 2. Substantive · Concentrates on conditions of life and politics promoted by a certain regime · For instance: human welfare, individual freedom, security, equity, social equality, public deliberation, and peaceful conflict resolution · DISADVANTAGE: How do we handle tradeoffs in these indicators (i.e., a poor state with relative citizen equality)? · DISADVANTAGE: Doesn’t help explain whether some political systems (i.e. democracy) are better than others at promoting these outcomes 3. Procedural · Singles out a narrow range of governmental practices to determine whether a regime qualifies as democratic · Most often the focus is on elections and whether competitive elections with large turnout produce changes in government (8) · DISADVANTAGE: Very narrow definition 4. Process-oriented · Identifies some minimum set of processes that must be continually in motion for a situation to qualify as democratic · Robert Dahl’s 5 criteria: 1. Effective participation (everyone must have equal opportunity to share their views) 2. Voting equality 3. Enlightened understanding (everyone must have equal opportunity to learn about alternative policies and their consequences) 4. Control of the agenda (and the ability to change it) 5. Inclusion of all adults · Dahl’s //polyarchal democracy// centers around 6 institutions (elected officials; free fair and frequent elections; freedom of expression; alternative sources of information; associational autonomy; and inclusive citizenship) describe a working process of regularized interactions between //citizens// and the //state// · DISADVANTAGE: it’s all or none – doesn’t measure for degrees of democracy or whether one country is more democratic than another · DISADVANTAGE: Sometimes the criteria conflicts with each other. __Elements of Democracy, Democratization, and De-Democratization__ · **State** = controls legitimate use of violence within territory; has priority over all other institutions within territory; and receives recognition of that priority from other organizations (i.e. states) outside that territory · **Citizens** = everyone who lives under that state’s jurisdiction (=gross simplification) · Tilly narrows the scope of these relationships to public politics (elections, voter registration, legislative activity, patenting, tax collection, military conscription, coups d’état, revolutions, social movements, etc) · **Democracy** = certain class of relations between states and citizens o Degree of democracy = the extent to which a state conforms to its citizens’ demands o A regime is democratic to the degree that political relations between the state and its citizens feature broad, equal, protected, and mutually binding consultation (13-14) · **Democratization & De-Democratization** = changes to the relationship between state and citizen o Democratization = net movement towards broader, more equal, more protected, and more binding consultation o De-Democratization = net movement in the opposite direction · High levels of breadth and equality are the crucial aspects of citizenship whereas protection and mutually binding consultation have more to do with the state. __State Capacity and Regime Variation__ · **State capacity** = the extend to which interventions of state agents in existing non-state resources, activities, and interpersonal connections alter existing distributions of those resources, activities, and interpersonal connections as well as relations among those distributions · **High-capacity undemocratic** = Little public voice except what the state says; extensive involvement of security forces in public politics; regime change either due to struggle at the top or mass rebellion from the bottom · **Low-capacity undemocratic** = Warlords, ethnic blocs, and religious mobilization; frequent violent struggle including civil wars; multiple political actors including thugs · **High-capacity democratic** = Frequent social movements, interest group activity, political party mobilization; formal consultations (i.e. elections) as high points of political activity; widespread state monitoring of public politics combined with relatively low levels of violence · **Low-capacity democratic** = Same as High-capacity democratic except less effective state monitoring, and higher involvement of semi-legal and illegal actors in public politics (drug lords, mafia, etc) with much higher levels of violence __Democratization and De-Democratization__ · Fundamental processes promoting democratization are: increasing integration of trust networks into public politics, increasing insulation of public politics from categorical inequality, and decreasing autonomy of major power centers from public politics (23) CHAPTER TWO – Democracy in History This chapter surveys where and when democratic regimes multiplied and shows that democracy rose, fell, and varied over the centuries [NB: really interesting ‘graphs’ in this chapter] __Precursors of Democracy__ · Starts with Greek city-states (Thucydides) à Italian city-states (Machiavelli) à Pre-19th century Europe (merchant oligarchies, peasant communities, religious sects, and revolutionary movements) · Concludes that democracy is a modern phenomenon __French Democratization and De-Democratization, 1600-2006__ · 3 main features of French path to democracy need further explanation: o Before 1789, never came close to being democratic o Despite France’s revolutionary start, major reversals of democratization occurred several times and quite rapidly o Political shocks (1848, 1870-71) played a disproportionate part in accelerating French democracy · Before 1789, state bargaining with citizens for access/control of agrarian resources can lead to both democratization and de-democratization: the former because rulers depend on compliance from their citizens to get goods and therefore establish rights and obligations that amount to mutually binding consultation; the latter because compliance of citizens typically hurts elites who otherwise would control them o Therefore, major shifts in state-citizen bargaining over state-sustaining resources can be causes of a regime’s entry into democratic struggle · Reversals resulted not from popular disaffection with democracy but mostly from elite defection · Shocks undermine self-reproducing systems of control and leave room for ordinary people to negotiate consent to newly emerging systems of rule __Waves of Democratization__ · To determine and explain degrees and changes of democracy, Tilly identifies substantial periods and places where there was significant movement anywhere along the undemocracy-democracy axis and to ask what was going on  · Concludes that democracy arrives in waves · Chronology echoes patterns of French democratization o Clusters of regimes moved from long periods of no democracy to a volatile back-and-forth between democratization and de-democratization o Once regimes hit the d&de-d point, de-d occurs rapidly under elite influence, whereas bottom-up is more effective at promoting democracy **Tilly, Charles (2007), //Democracy.// Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.** Ch.s 3-5 (summarized by Kate) **CHAPTER 3: Democratization and De-Democratization** In this chapter, he presents his ‘research design’ (loosely defined) and also his core argument, along with case studies of both India and Switzerland. His research design is summarized on p. 60 (box 3-1). - He is trying to explain variation in degrees of democratization, and he operationalizes the concept of a ‘high degree of democratization’ as follows: ‘a regime is democratic to the degree that political relations between the state and its citizens feature [1] broad, [2] equal, [3] protected, and [4] mutually binding consultations’ (59). - He will try to look for evidence of these forces in relations between citizens and states, focusing on both democratic and non-democratic states over time, standardizing scores, comparing, and focusing especially on outliers. - HOWEVER – since it’s really hard to measure the four indicators above, he’s actually just going to use Freedom House as a proxy and compliment this with historical case studies to establish where a country sits on a democratic – un-democratic scale. Main argument: There are no cut and dry ‘necessary and sufficient conditions’ for democratization. However, there are three broad processes that will promote democratization (and whose reversal would promote de-democratization): 1. Existing trust networks must be either dissolved or integrated into the political system, and new trust networks must emerge that are explicitly connected to the political system 2. Categorical inequality must be removed from the political system (though it does not necessarily have to disappear from the private sector) 3. Autonomous power centers that are outside of the public politics must be integrated into the state mechanism (through coalitions or cooperation) or disappear. [each of these is addressed in the following three chapters] He also argues that: - Political processes such as domestic confrontation, military conquest, revolution, and colonization can accelerate these processes. - Democracy and state capacity tend to develop together and support one another. - Democracy results from ‘recurrent causal mechanisms’ not from a standard sufficient sequence of events with a clear end point. - ‘the fundamental processes promoting democratization have remained the same over democracy’s several centuries of history’ (78) **CHAPTER 4: Trust and Distrust** In this chapter, he defines trust networks, talks about how they can become integrated into public politics, generates some indicators of such change, talks about why trust networks matter for democracy, and provides examples with case studies of the US and Argentina. - Definition of a trust network: they ‘contain ramified interpersonal connections, consisting mainly of strong ties, within which people set valued, consequential, long-term resources and enterprises t risk to the malfeasance, mistakes, or failures of others’ (81). è What does this mean? It’s similar to the idea of social capital in that it talks about long-term relationships between people who trust each other, and also //en//trust things that they value (their lives, children, businesses, etc.) to each other’s care. Examples include religious communities, or ethnically mobilized groups in boroughs. - Unlike Putnam, he sees the potential for voluntary groups to be largely exclusionary and to serve primarily parochial interests. When they are not incorporated into the state apparatus, they actually fragment political and social life, and so the decline of associational life can be seen as a ‘good thing’. - HOWEVER – they can also help to promote democratization in the early phases by drawing excluded groups into the political process (for example by engaging in ‘bring out the vote’ campaigns among their members who usually do not engage in formal state politics) and also by giving members a first taste of organizational activity. - States will use various political resources (namely [1] coercion, [2] capital, and [3] commitment) to try to attach these trust groups to the formal political sphere. They will do this through ‘intermediaries’ who are privileged members of the associational group who draw benefits (for example financial) in exchange for bringing their groups into the political process (i.e. politicians pay a community leader to get their community to vote for them). - Indicators that trust networks are being successfully incorporated include that people let other members of their trust network join the army, attend public schools, or become public servants. - He then uses case studies of the US and Argentina to demonstrate how this happened. **CHAPTER 5: Equality and Inequality** The chapter opens with an interesting case study in South Africa: since the end of Apartheid, there has been an increase in the number of people who believe in witchcraft and will use violence to root them out – this puts the politicians in an awkward place: agreeing to fight the witches goes against human rights, privacy and the rule of law, but denying witchcraft alienates the electorate. This speaks to a fundamental problem in democracy of how to deal with the discrepancy between widespread prejudices and the premises of public politics. He later closes the chapter by going back to South Africa in time to the era of apartheid to address the more obvious case of categorical inequalities, especially under Afrikaaner rule, where the ruling whites were able to fully exploit the categorical inequalities to their own benefit. The actual argument of the chapter is that categorical inequalities that are crystallized into formal public policies and politics are bad for democracy, and that democracy will thrive to the degree that these categorical inequalities are removed. Such inequalities inhibit broad coalition formation, and give members of the advantaged groups the incentive and means to evade outcomes of the democratic process that they don’t like. He highlights that inequalities can be created and reinforced through a wide array of mechanisms. In pre-industrial societies, these were large coercive means (such as guns and jails) and land (rich landowners essentially have all the political power). After that, control of machines, and financial capital became important. Recently, important drivers of inequality have been scientific-technical knowledge. Somehow this shift has made it such that capitalism leads to decreased inequality leads to democracy (but I don’t completely understand why). Also, once a regime is in place, it can invest resources in producing inequality – for example by protecting its supporters, establishing systems of extraction, and redistributing resources in inequitable ways. Less obviously, because they do things like guarantee property rights and inheritance laws, they ensure that existing inequality is passed down through the generations. States move toward decreased inequality and therefore increased democracy through a variety of mechanisms (box on p.119), but basically these can be summarized as either (1) equalizing divisions between categories of people that had previously been upheld through legal or economic structures, or by (2) buffering public politics from these inequalities (for example through secret ballots or cross-cutting party mobilization). However, historically, such mechanisms have only occurred very rarely.
 * Charles Tilly, //Democracy// (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).**

** Charles Tilly, //Democracy// (2007), Chapters 6-8 ** ** Summary by Suzanne Ghais 10/16/10 ** [Tilly’s mantra, as a reminder: Democracy=increase in breadth, equality, and protection of mutual binding in citizen-state relations] There are 3 connected processes involved in this reduction of power centers: “Broadening of political participation,” “Equalization of access to non-state political resources and opportunities”, and “Inhibition of autonomous and/or arbitrary coercive power both within and outside the state” (p. 139). These three combine to “reduce the influence of autonomous power clusters, including those of rulers, over public politics” which then helps in the “subjection of states to pubic politics” and “facilitation of popular influence over public politics” (see diagram p. 138), all of this leading to democracy. Contrary to other theories, not a lot of “elite assent” is a prerequisite here, but there is ultimately some bargaining involved as power centers negotiate for some specification of rights in exchange for their compliance w/ state demands (like paying taxes). Case study of Russia: Gorbachev initiated democratization; state capacity fell under Yeltsin; then Putin strongly increased state capacity while rolling back democracy. However, Putin may have laid the foundations for future democracy by “subordinating capitalists who had acquired extraordinary independence from state control” (p. 137), even though, on the de-democratizing side, he was “reversing citizens’ acquisition of collective capacity” (p. 139). On p. 141 is a list of mechanisms by which states are subjected to “public politics” or popular influence over public politics is facilitated. Illustrations of a few of these are offered: subjecting citizens to taxation often sparks a mobilization against the state, leading to a “mobilization-repression-bargaining” cycle in which political standing or rights are conferred to the mobilized citizens (illustration from 1992-93 struggle in Renshou, Sichuan, China). Algeria is offered as an illustration of another mechanism--containment of autonomous military forces. Using an upsurge in oil revenue, President Bouteflika managed to sideline a powerful military leadership by building up another military branch. There is a recurring motif in this book--that moves towards democracy don’t look, sound, or smell democratic at all at the outset. They’re motivated by citizens’ pursuit of their own particular interest and rulers’ struggles to stay in power. Yet certain kinds of such moves pave the way for democracy. In the Algerian case, Tilly argues that if Bouteflika’s “containment of the military’s autonomous power” helps enable democracy even if democracy has not yet arrived (p. 146). Tilly moves on to a longer case study of Spain and particularly its period of dramatic de-democratization and re-democratization through the 20th century to illustrate the processes described in the chapter, and contrasting his approach with other explanations of Spanish democracy which focused on preconditions and immediate precipitating events--an approach that fails to explain processes and mechanisms of (de-)democratization as he seeks to. He argues by way of a long historical narrative that the three processes he has set out did indeed promote democracy, and reversals in these processes caused de-democratization. Tilly summarizes the Spanish case as follows, arguing that even though Franco was an authoritarian, important shifts occurred under his rule that made democratization possible: The first cycle [this is pre-Franco] left important political residues in the form of popular political organization (both public and clandestine) [this refers to industrial & agricultural workers who organized politically against an earlier non-democratic regime] as well as accumulated experience with democratic institutions [during a brief interlude of democracy in the 1920s]. But Franco’s victory in the Civil War temporarily reestablished autonomous power clusters: both the army and Franco’s own ruling clique. Franco’s authoritarian rule then decisively subordinated the army to civilian control.] Less deliberately but no less decisively, the state’s management of economic expansion and increased international involvement after 1960 subjected Franco’s state to public politics and facilitated popular influence over public politics (pp. 157-58). This chapter theoretically separated the power issue from those of the previous two chapters--integration of trust networks and insulation of the state from systematic inequality, but they obviously interrelate. The cases of Spain, the U.S. and South Africa illustrate that the three processes can occur in a variety of different sequences and over different time frames. Tilly revives over a dozen questions posed early in the book and attempts to answer them. Some themes that emerge in the answers include: • The process of state-building often is concomitant with the democratization processes • Periods of conflict enlarge participation in public politics, therefore making both democratization and de-democratization more likely (leading to periods of rapid alternations) • De-democratization is a fast process because it occurs when powerful elites defect from democratic mutually-binding consultation, which can happen more quickly than any of the democratizing processes. • Democratization tends to happen in waves (over multiple countries within a close time period) //not// because it’s a fad or a model easily copied but rather because the three democratizing processes (integration of trust networks etc.) can occur transnationally, and also because of the pressures of external actors. • Regimes that control their own resources (mainly oil) and can therefore bypass citizen consent still have hope for democratizing, either if the price of the resource drops or if government repression unites the opposition. • The three big changes (again, integration of trust networks, insulation of public politics from categorical inequalities, and reduction of the influence of independent power clusters over public politics) are //processes,// not preconditions, of democratization. A key summarizing point: his analyses “call for a shift of attention away from the moments when one regime or another crosses the threshold from authoritarianism to democracy. … every instance of substantial democratization results from previous political processes that do not in themselves constitute democratization” (p. 203). He also makes “an additional risky claim: that the fundamental processes driving democratization and de-democratization have not changed over time” (p. 203). He makes predictions: “that net democratization will continue… that de-democratization will persist with slowly diminishing frequency; and that both will occur… in bursts and in accelerated response to shocks” (pp. 203-04).
 * Ch. 6: ** Main point: the third essential element in democratization is “reducing autonomous power clusters within the regime’s operating territory, especially clusters that dispose of their own concentrated coercive means” (p. 137) (C’mon, can’t he just say “that are armed”?). He seems to imply that “public politics” is the positive result of this reduction in autonomous power clusters.
 * Ch. 7: ** This mistitled chapter is really about the interaction of state capacity and democratization. An extended case study of Venezuela shows that “democratization and de-democratization work differently depending on changes in states capacity. More exactly, the the extent that an undemocratic state builds up citizen consent by bargaining with citizens over the means of rule [such as through taxation of military conscription], subsequent democratization proceeds farther and faster… because bargaining over the means of rule subordinates autonomous power centers, extends popular influence over public politics, and expands control of public politics over the state” (p. 173). But when a state controls the wealth directly, this diminishes the need for bargaining and can lead to de-democratization. Although a strong state can misuse its capacity and be undemocratic, the process of state strengthening typically involves eliminating autonomous power centers, which in turn makes the integration of trust networks more likely. (“No consistent relationship exists, however, between states strength and insulation of public politics from categorical inequality” [p. 174]). Weak states have a harder time becoming democratic--those that have are typically small states protected by a powerful neighbor. Moreover, weak states are far more prone to civil war. These conflicts are often inaccurately portrayed as ethnically motivated. Civil war often causes de-democratization, but other shocks, such as conquest, colonization, revolution, and domestic confrontation can sometimes advance democratization.
 * Ch. 8 ** : Concluding chapter. A brief summary of the whole book is on p. 188. He looks at the overall trajectory of democratization: there has been an overall increase in democracy since the 18th century, but these gains are fragile and reversible. Some regimes declare themselves democracies only in order to gain domestic and international acceptance. Organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy support democratic institutions and procedures but they cannot bring about the three big changes that undergird democracy: integration of trust networks, insulation of politics from categorical inequality, or minimization of the influence of autonomous power centers over public politics.