Toward consolidated democracies

Journal of Democracy

Volumn 7, Issue 2, 1996, Pages

  Linz, Juan J ^a   Stepan, Alfred ^b  

^a YALE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b CENTRAL EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY   (Hungary)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0037513107     PISSN: 10455736     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jod.1996.0031     Document Type: Article

References (30)

1. See Robert A. Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), 3.
2. We document the incomplete status of the Chilean democratic transition in chapter 13 of our book. For military prerogatives, see Alfred Stepan, Rethinking Military Politics: Brazil and the Southern Cone (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 68-127. For the electoralist fallacy in Central America, see Terry Lynn Karl, "The Hybrid Regimes of Central America," Journal of Democracy 6 (July 1995): 72-86. Dahl in his Polyarchy has an eighth institutional guarantee, which does not address elections as such, but rather the requirement that "[Institutions] for making government policies [should] depend on votes and other expressions of preference," (p. 3). This addresses our concern about reserve domains.
3. We document the incomplete status of the Chilean democratic transition in chapter 13 of our book. For military prerogatives, see Alfred Stepan, Rethinking Military Politics: Brazil and the Southern Cone (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 68-127. For the electoralist fallacy in Central America, see Terry Lynn Karl, "The Hybrid Regimes of Central America," Journal of Democracy 6 (July 1995): 72-86. Dahl in his Polyarchy has an eighth institutional guarantee, which does not address elections as such, but rather the requirement that "[Institutions] for making government policies [should] depend on votes and other expressions of preference," (p. 3). This addresses our concern about reserve domains.
4. Some readers have accused our work - and other studies of democratic transition and consolidation - of being teleological. If this means advocating a single end-state democracy, we decidedly do not share such a view. If, however, teleological means (as the Oxford English Dictionary says) "a view that developments are due to the purpose or design that is served by them," our analysis is in part teleological, for we do not believe that structural factors per se lead to democracy and its consolidation. Social actors (and in some measure particular leaders) must also act purposefully to achieve a change of regime leading to some form of governing that can be considered democratic. The design of democracy that these actors pursue may be different from the one resulting from their actions, but without action whose intent is to create "a" democracy (rather than the particular institutionalized form that results), a transition to and consolidation of democracy are difficult to conceive. The processes that we are studying do, therefore, involve a "teleological" element that does not exclude important structural factors (or many unpredictable events). In addition, there is not a single motive but a variety of motives for pursuing democracy (as we define it) as a goal.
5. For other discussions about the concept of democratic consolidation, see Scott Mainwaring, Guillermo O'Donnell, and J. Samuel Valenzuela, eds., Issues in Democratic Consolidation: The New South American Democracies in Comparative Perspective (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992).
6. In essence, this means that the literature on democratic breakdown, such as that found in Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, eds., The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), would be much more directly relevant to analyzing such a phenomenon than this essay or related books on democratic transition and consolidation. This is not a criticism of the transition literature; rather, our point is that the democratic-transition and democratic-breakdown literatures need to be integrated into the overall literature on modern democratic theory. From the perspective of such an integrated theory, the "breakdown of a consolidated democracy" is not an oxymoron.
7. On the relationships between constitutionalism, democracy, legal culture, and "self- bindingness," see Jon Elster and Rune Slagstad, eds., Constitutionalism and Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 1-18.
8. Robert A. Dahl, in a similar argument, talks about two arrows of causation that produce this result; see his "Why All Democratic Countries Have Mixed Economies," in John Chapman and Ian Shapiro, eds., Democratic Community, Nomos XXXV (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 259-82.
9. See, for example, John R. Freeman, Democracies and Market: The Politics of Mixed Economies (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989).
10. For an excellent analysis of inevitable market failures, see Peter Murrell, "Can Neoclassical Economics Underpin the Reform of Centrally Planned Economies?" Journal of Economic Perspectives 5 (1991): 59-76.
11. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 2 vols. (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, Everyman's Library, 1910), 2:180-81.
12. Robert A. Dahl's line of reasoning follows a similar development. See his "Why All Democratic Countries Have Mixed Economies," cited in note 7 above, 259-82.
13. In postcommunist Europe, the Czech Republic and Hungary are well on the way to becoming institutionalized economic societies. In sharp contrast, in Ukraine and Russia the writ of the state does not extend far enough for us to speak of an economic society. The consequences of the lack of an economic society are manifest everywhere. For example, Russia, with a population 15 times larger than Hungary's and with vastly more raw materials, only received 3.6 billion dollars of direct foreign investment in 1992-93, whereas Hungary received 9 billion dollars of direct foreign investment in the same two years.
14. See Rogers Brubaker's "National Minorities, Nationalizing States, and External National Homelands in the New Europe," Daedalus 124 (Spring 1995): 107-32.
15. See, for example, the outstanding monograph by Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976), which analyzes in extensive detail the wide repertoire of nation-state mandated policies in the schools, the civil service, and the military that were systematically designed to repress and eliminate multilingualism and multiculturalism and to create a nation-state, From today's perspective, similar endeavors of modern states appear far from admirable and represent a cost that many of us would not like to pay. However, it is not just a question of how we evaluate such efforts of state-based nation-building, but of how feasible these efforts are in the contemporary context.
16. See Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983), 44.
17. This conjecture is developed by Gellner in Nations, 44-45.
18. See the excellent, and sobering, book by Anatol Lieven, The Baltic Revolution: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the Path to Independence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 434.
19. For David Laitin's analysis of what he calls a "migrant competitive-assimilation game" in Catalonia, and his analysis of a possible "colonial-settler game" in the Central Asian republics of the former Soviet Union, see his "The Four Nationality Games and Soviet Politics," Journal of Soviet Nationalities 2 (Spring 1991): 1-37.
20. See Arend Lijphart's seminal article "Consociational Democracy," World Politics 21 (January 1969): 207-25.
21. For interesting arguments that some notion of group rights is, in fact, necessary to the very definition of some types of individual rights and necessary to the advancement of universal norms in rights, see the work by the Oxford philosopher Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 165-217. Also see Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 107-30.
22. For interesting arguments that some notion of group rights is, in fact, necessary to the very definition of some types of individual rights and necessary to the advancement of universal norms in rights, see the work by the Oxford philosopher Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 165-217. Also see Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 107-30.
23. We develop this point in greater detail in our "Political Identities and Electoral Sequences: Spain, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia," Daedalus 121 (Spring 1992): 123-39; and in our Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation in the chapters on Spain, on "stateness" in the USSR, and on Russian speakers' changing identities in Estonia and Latvia.
24. In our Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation, we show how in Catalonia in 1982, when respondents were given the opportunity to self-locate their identities on a questionnaire offering the following five possibilities - "Spanish," "more Spanish than Catalan," "equally Spanish and Catalan," "more Catalan than Spanish," or "Catalan" - the most-chosen category, among respondents with both parents born in Catalonia, as well as among respondents with neither parent born in Catalonia, was the multiple and complementary category "equally Spanish and Catalan." We also show how identities in Catalonia were becoming more polarized and conflict-ridden before democratic devolution.
25. The title of a widely disseminated article by Jon Elster captures this perspective; see "The Necessity and Impossibility of Simultaneous Economic and Political Reform," in Douglas Greenberg, Stanley N. Katz, Melanie Beth Oliviero, and Steven C. Wheatley, eds., Constitutionalism and Democracy: Transitions in the Contemporary World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 267-74.
26. The voters might, due to negative economic performance, vote incumbents out of office, but the overall economic policies of their successors might well continue to be roughly the same. Poland in 1993-95, and Hungary in 1994-95 come to mind.
27. See our Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation.
28. See Richard Rose and Christian Haerfer, "New Democracies Barometer III: Learning from What is Happening," Studies in Public Policy No. 230 (1994), questions 22-23, 32-33. Percentages rounded off.
29. Rose and Haerfer, "New Democracies," questions 26, 35, 36, 39, 40, and 42.
30. Rose and Haerfer, "New Democracies," questions 24, 26, 35, 36, 39, 40, 42, and 34.