The Transition to Democracy Proceedings of a Workshop (1991) / Chapter Skim
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What is a Democracy?: Plenary Session I
What is a Democracy?: Plenary Session I
Pages 5-28
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From page 5... ...
This relatively recent discovery is a serendipitous stumbling onto a very strong relationship. When it was first discovered about 1U years ago, it sent everybody into a tizzy; nobody could believe it.
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From page 6... ...
But to the extent that democracy is about conflict, which it often is, it is about losing. A good democracy will help people lose well, and losing well, to my mind, includes losing peacefully.
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From page 7... ...
In another vision, somewhat in tension with the first, the system encourages deliberation about how best to promote the common good. The intellectuals in the newly democratizing nations of Central Europe recognize this tension better than we do.
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From page 8... ...
Democratic institutions in newly democratizing nations do not have the same force of tradition behind them that is present in most Western democracies. If the newly democratizing nations cannot create institutions that consciously guard against excessive power among their new elites, if they cannot find ways to spread power, they may find the legitimacy of their decisions severely undermined.
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From page 9... ...
When majority rule results in certain groups being outvoted again and again on almost all their major points of interest, majority rule democracy will not work. It needs corrective measures, such as proportional representation, or federalism, or something called Corporate federalism," which is devolving power to nonterritorial subgroups to legislate on matters that involve only them, or something that some political scientists have called "consociationalism," which is dividing power and state-provided goods like school and television time in proportion to each group's percentage of the population.
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From page 10... ...
Candidates and their policies become commodities, selling themselves or being sold. The dynamic of adversary democracy has traditionally made democracies incapable of the kinds of sacrifices that many newly democratizing nations must now ask of their citizens.
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From page 11... ...
The experience produced unity in the struggle, widespread practical understanding of how to take many interests into account, and consequent willingness to live with the results of decisions. This bottom-up practice in deliberative democracy may give Poland an edge over the other newly democratizing nations in the use of democracy to make hard decisions.
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From page 12... ...
In a grass roots democracy you learn not only how to lose and how to listen to one another, you can also learn how to move from the deliberative institutions appropriate to moments of commonality to the adversary institutions appropriate to moments of conflict and back again. In the long run, deliberative processes may offer the best hope of finding ways to handle not only the class conflicts, but also the ethnic disputes that threaten to split several of the newly democratizing nations in Central Europe.
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From page 13... ...
Modest political opening is now taking place in East Asia as well. The Mexican government is deliberately seeking to phase in the political opening slowly until the economic opening breeds results.
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From page 14... ...
In Eastern Europe it came from below, and the political opening occurred first. In East Asia and Latin America, political opening came mostly from above.
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From page 15... ...
I think you will find that the conditions for what I am talking about are now extremely good in Latin America because of shifts in both economic and political openings that are taking place in almost every country in the Western hemisphere. The politics have grown far more fragile than the economic opening, and therefore, I would advise A.I.D.
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From page 16... ...
For example, we observed in a comparative study of Southern Europe and Latin America that it is frequently only after the previous authoritarian or autocratic regime has begun to 16
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From page 17... ...
Finally, as a dependent variable, one has types of democracy. My central theme is that the countries of Latin America, Southern Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, and perhaps even the Middle East are not just undergoing a transition to Democracy," but that they are undergoing a transition toward various and different types of democracy.
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From page 18... ...
The reason some Eastern Asian or Asian societies may have very substantial advantages, not merely economically, but also politically, is the previous existence of land reform in these countries that has reduced some of the grotesque inequalities one tends to find, for example, in Latin America. The second major hypothesis that comes out of the work of Barrington Moore and others, is that it is very difficult, and one is tempted to say impossible, to imagine a civil society in which coercive force is a major element in the constitution of the productive units of the society.
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From page 19... ...
The code word in political science jargon for the former is "pluralism, and the code word for the latter is ~corporatism." The United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and in a rather different way, Italy and France, are frequently cited as those with more pluralistic, overlapping, multiple structures. The Scandinavian countries, Austria, Germany, certainly Switzerland, and, interestingly enough, contemporary Spain are countries that have adopted, or rather conformed to, the second model.
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From page 20... ...
It has been over-conceptualized, misunderstood, and Under-understood." In the past there has been an incredible proliferation of suspicious adjectives stuck in front of it: guided democracy, tutelary democracy, popular democracy, people's democracy, unitary democracy, consensual democracy, even African democracy, Latin American democracy, and Asian democracy. Usually these have been very thinly-disguised attempts to justify something that was not at all or only remotely democratic.
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From page 21... ...
One could have only quasi-democracies in colonies in which the outside colonial power controls the basic parameters and leaves the "natives" to deliberate and to decide minor points after the colonial power has fixed the essential ones. Second, most definitions of democracy do not pay much attention to what the Spaniards like to call los poderes facticos: the military, the civil service, the church, the various kinds of institutions that may condition the 21
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From page 22... ...
The most probable outcome, if you simply project previous experiences into the future, would be reversion to autocracy. If you simply look at the data and mindlessly say that there is no change in these countries, and the probability of Latin America remaining democratic is the same today as it was in the 1950s and 1960s, you feel pretty hopeless.
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From page 23... ...
The literature in political science on types of democracy is generally quite unsatisfactory because it focuses on single types and does not really try to lay out the full range of possibilities. It seems to me that there are two abstract properties to consider in charting the types of democracy.
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From page 24... ...
The one institutional setting that interests people in Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, and even in Latin America the most is the German constitution. There are certain features -- I will not call it a model 24
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From page 25... ...
Latin Americans, Venezuela for example, were pioneers in the use of social pacts. But if you are looking for shortcuts to figure out what people are thinking about, then look into the German constitution and the Spanish transition.
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From page 26... ...
Her distinction between adversarial and deliberative democracy raised a number of potential pitfalls for outside agents trying to promote democracy and highlighted the difference between adopting democratic forms and actually producing democratic participation. Tilly placed Schmitter between the other two, as more ambivalent, keenly aware of how the specific history of a given country's civil society affects prospects for and the shape of democracy.
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From page 27... ...
Noting that his task was to focus on the economic aspects of democracy and NI.D.'s role in the economic arena, he emphasized that in his view, meaningful political participation of any kind -- leaving aside entirely the finer distinction of adversarial versus deliberative democracy -- would be very unlikely with a state-dominated economy. As for the likelihood of successful outside efforts, he stated that the United States could definitely exert influence at critical moments, but he expressed doubt about the ability of the United States to determine outcomes.
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From page 28... ...
He cited African tribalism, Middle Eastern confessional differences, and Asian ethnic divisions as extremely deep, vertical divisions, and questioned the validity of applying theoretical literature largely written about northern Europe to such cases. Mansbridge largely agreed that it was correct to question the validity of such approaches, but noted the necessity of first attempting to apply the theory to see how well it fits a given case.
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