The Doctrine for Political Development Today
Analysts of the 'non-Western political process' from the 1950s on attributed instability in the politics of the new states to the penetration of political institutions by social forces, and the absence of responsible elite mediation and control of mass participation. They argued that stability could be achieved if political institutions could be insulated from social pressure, and mass political participation could be brought under the control of responsible elites. These two ideas became constant points of reference thereafter in political development theory and the doctrine for political development alike. Within political development theory, the functional and cultural approaches focused on institutional autonomy and elite control in turn. However, these early efforts failed to provide a coherent framework within which a pragmatic doctrine for political development could be advanced.
The desire to turn the study of politics and public policy into a new discipline of political science prompted efforts to construct comprehensive theoretical frameworks, in the hope that this would eventually make it possible to address the problem of political development in transitional societies in a truly scientific spirit. This led to efforts to identify either universal functions operating through diverse structures without regard to place or time, or fundamental traits and processes of individual and social political psychology. But these approaches did little to address the specific circumstances arising from the explosion of mass participation in the new states, or the practical problems to which they gave rise. Their theoretical frameworks addressed the issues in such grand and abstract terms that no practical solutions emerged from them. Indeed, they appeared to demonstrate, despite the best efforts of their authors, that none were available. So long as the political system was defined as 'all structures in their political aspects', or seen from the perspective of individual orientations to 'political objects', attention was deflected from political institutions and elite politics as agencies of control. Equally, the grand analytical frameworks adopted made it seem that the typical 'non-Western political process' and its social and psychological underpinnings fell so far short of the ideal of a society marked by consensus and consent that deep pessimism was prompted regarding the likely practical efficacy of any form of institutional intervention. As a result, these approaches succeeded only in persuading their authors that the developing countries were as resistant to liberal democracy as they were to the theoretical encapsulation. For these reasons, despite the expressed concern with policy, it did not appear easy to offer particular institutional solutions to the problem of development within a cultural or functional framework. In spite of the continually professed concern with issues of public policy, therefore, the policy contribution of early attempts to produce a theory of political development was unclear.
In response to this impasse, the doctrine for political development set out in the early volumes of the Studies in Political Development series called for the creation of responsible political elites and of social and institutional mechanisms through which the masses could be subjected to their control. It linked this call for elite autonomy and authority to a particular programme, to be achieved through direct governmental action and a broader effort to shape social processes and interactions. Elites were urged to give priority to private enterprise in the promotion of economic development, to restrict the bureaucracy to a supportive rather than a leading role, and to postpone or deflect demands for increased levels of consumption, whether of private or public goods. All this was seen as a necessary prelude to the organization of emerging interests and the eventual expansion of participation for which pressure was mounting throughout the world. For this reason, the extension of political participation along 'Western' lines was to be postponed until the masses could be trusted to recognize and accept the limits to intervention, participation and welfare which the elites laid down. From this transitional perspective, as we saw in Chapter 5, it might be possible for future generations to enjoy full democracy, if interventionist bureaucracies could be persuaded to give priority to private enterprise, and if investment in the mass media and in education could reshape social attitudes. In the meantime, however, it was necessary to support quasi-authoritarian single parties able to impose an appropriate agenda of sequential reform while leaving space for new interests to emerge and take centre stage in the economy and in a consensual and competitive political system.
In the same period, elites in the developing world, seemingly sharing the view that the social and cultural conditions of developing societies made the modern democratic state 'unattainable in the immediate future' (Almond and Powell 1966: 327), regularly opted, to borrow Verba's phrasing, to exact obedience by more forceful means: repeatedly throughout the 1960s, military elites across the Third World seized power, putting a bloody end to experiments with democracy. They did so, what is more, with the enthusiastic backing of Western governments and the tacit or overt support of the theorists of political development. After a brief infatuation with the idea that 'civic cultures' could somehow be replicated around the world, attention turned from cases of gradual evolution towards stable democracy to others in which highly unstable and undemocratic states had been reformed by a conscious programme of state action from above. Britain and the United States fell out of favour as models, and Germany and Japan became the favoured points of reference.
In contrast to previous efforts to build a theory of political development, the doctrine for political development focused exclusively upon the emergence and character of the modern world and the conditions under which government by consent was possible in the specific circumstances of modernity. In an important shift of focus, theory and doctrine then converged upon the historical development and social purpose of specific political and social institutions, as addressed in Crises and Sequences in Political Development (Binder et al. 1971), with its focus on the historical record of political development in Europe and the United States, and the need to contain the participatory and distributive demands generated by demand for equality. However, the search for a satisfactory theoretical framework for the doctrine continued to prove elusive – failure of the 'crises and sequences' approach to survive critical inspection by the two sets of historians as assembled that the request of the Committee for Comparative Politics left the link between theory and doctrine weaker than ever.
Far from being an obstacle to the effort to produce a prescriptive model for political development in the developing world, however, the collapse of the misguided theoretical efforts of the 1970s was the essential precondition for it. It created space for the working out of a new analytical framework within which the doctrine for political development would emerge as the foundation of a new literature on democratization in the 1980s. As we saw in Chapter 7, the developing world had never been satisfactorily addressed within the successive frameworks proposed within political development theory. This had prompted a pragmatic response, with Pye and Almond successively proposing leadership as the key to understanding its politics and achieving satisfactory outcomes. Both had been forced to break with the analytical framework within which they were working in order to advance leadership as the key variable in bringing appropriate forms of politics into being in the Third World, but neither had provided an alternative analytical framework within which it could be addressed. In part, the way forward had been cleared by Huntington, who had cut through a large amount of theoretical obfuscation with the pragmatic observation that institutions were weak, the solution was to strengthen them. One further step remained to be taken, however, before the doctrine for political development could take centre stage: the creation of a coherent analytical framework which would link the question of institutions to satisfactory elite management of the process of democratization.
While political development theory as conceived in the Studies of Political Development series was giving away under historical scrutiny in the 1970s, and Almond was searching inconclusively for an eclectic alternative, such a framework, placing the question of elite management in the context of procedure and political process, was sketched out Rustow, Linz and Stepan. While hostile to the idea of theory, this process-oriented approach sidestepped previous sources of difficulty and provided a framework within which all the main themes of the doctrine for political development could be embraced. By focusing directly on the management of transitions to democracy by elites in the developing world, it created the conditions for a coherent synthesis of the doctrine for political development and the revisionist theory of democracy. The search for a grand theory of political development turned out to have been a long and unnecessary detour on the road to a separable and now separate doctrine for political development.
The New Paradigm: Elite Management of Transitions to Democracy
The first step in the provision of a new analytical framework within which the doctrine for political development could be inserted was the publication of Rustow's article on transitions to democracy in Comparative Politics in 1970. Rustow distinguished between the conditions which made democracy possible and those which sustained once it was established, and contended that studies which focused on Britain, the USA, Scandinavia, France and Germany tended to ask 'the functional question' – how successful democracies work – rather than 'the genetic question' – how a democracy comes into being in the first place – which interested students of developing regions. He argued, against the exponents of functional and cultural approaches, that
the genesis of democracy ... has not only considerable intrinsic interest for most of the world; it has greater pragmatic relevance than further panegyrics about the virtues of Anglo-American democracy or laments over the fatal illnesses of democracy in Weimar or in several of the French Republics (340).
In his search for a model relevant to developing regions, Rustow adopted an approach quite different to that taken by political development theorists up to this point. He eliminated cases in which the transition to democracy had taken place over a protracted period (such as Britain), or as a result of immigration (such as the United States), or through foreign imposition (such as Japan and Germany), and concentrated on cases of rapid internally driven transition, taking Sweden (1890–1920) and Turkey (from 1945) for the basis of his model. He then set out to explore 'some of the methodological problems involved in the shift from functional to genetic inquiry', offering ten propositions in support of his 'genetic theory' (Box 8.1).
The desire to turn the study of politics and public policy into a new discipline of political science prompted efforts to construct comprehensive theoretical frameworks, in the hope that this would eventually make it possible to address the problem of political development in transitional societies in a truly scientific spirit. This led to efforts to identify either universal functions operating through diverse structures without regard to place or time, or fundamental traits and processes of individual and social political psychology. But these approaches did little to address the specific circumstances arising from the explosion of mass participation in the new states, or the practical problems to which they gave rise. Their theoretical frameworks addressed the issues in such grand and abstract terms that no practical solutions emerged from them. Indeed, they appeared to demonstrate, despite the best efforts of their authors, that none were available. So long as the political system was defined as 'all structures in their political aspects', or seen from the perspective of individual orientations to 'political objects', attention was deflected from political institutions and elite politics as agencies of control. Equally, the grand analytical frameworks adopted made it seem that the typical 'non-Western political process' and its social and psychological underpinnings fell so far short of the ideal of a society marked by consensus and consent that deep pessimism was prompted regarding the likely practical efficacy of any form of institutional intervention. As a result, these approaches succeeded only in persuading their authors that the developing countries were as resistant to liberal democracy as they were to the theoretical encapsulation. For these reasons, despite the expressed concern with policy, it did not appear easy to offer particular institutional solutions to the problem of development within a cultural or functional framework. In spite of the continually professed concern with issues of public policy, therefore, the policy contribution of early attempts to produce a theory of political development was unclear.
In response to this impasse, the doctrine for political development set out in the early volumes of the Studies in Political Development series called for the creation of responsible political elites and of social and institutional mechanisms through which the masses could be subjected to their control. It linked this call for elite autonomy and authority to a particular programme, to be achieved through direct governmental action and a broader effort to shape social processes and interactions. Elites were urged to give priority to private enterprise in the promotion of economic development, to restrict the bureaucracy to a supportive rather than a leading role, and to postpone or deflect demands for increased levels of consumption, whether of private or public goods. All this was seen as a necessary prelude to the organization of emerging interests and the eventual expansion of participation for which pressure was mounting throughout the world. For this reason, the extension of political participation along 'Western' lines was to be postponed until the masses could be trusted to recognize and accept the limits to intervention, participation and welfare which the elites laid down. From this transitional perspective, as we saw in Chapter 5, it might be possible for future generations to enjoy full democracy, if interventionist bureaucracies could be persuaded to give priority to private enterprise, and if investment in the mass media and in education could reshape social attitudes. In the meantime, however, it was necessary to support quasi-authoritarian single parties able to impose an appropriate agenda of sequential reform while leaving space for new interests to emerge and take centre stage in the economy and in a consensual and competitive political system.
In the same period, elites in the developing world, seemingly sharing the view that the social and cultural conditions of developing societies made the modern democratic state 'unattainable in the immediate future' (Almond and Powell 1966: 327), regularly opted, to borrow Verba's phrasing, to exact obedience by more forceful means: repeatedly throughout the 1960s, military elites across the Third World seized power, putting a bloody end to experiments with democracy. They did so, what is more, with the enthusiastic backing of Western governments and the tacit or overt support of the theorists of political development. After a brief infatuation with the idea that 'civic cultures' could somehow be replicated around the world, attention turned from cases of gradual evolution towards stable democracy to others in which highly unstable and undemocratic states had been reformed by a conscious programme of state action from above. Britain and the United States fell out of favour as models, and Germany and Japan became the favoured points of reference.
In contrast to previous efforts to build a theory of political development, the doctrine for political development focused exclusively upon the emergence and character of the modern world and the conditions under which government by consent was possible in the specific circumstances of modernity. In an important shift of focus, theory and doctrine then converged upon the historical development and social purpose of specific political and social institutions, as addressed in Crises and Sequences in Political Development (Binder et al. 1971), with its focus on the historical record of political development in Europe and the United States, and the need to contain the participatory and distributive demands generated by demand for equality. However, the search for a satisfactory theoretical framework for the doctrine continued to prove elusive – failure of the 'crises and sequences' approach to survive critical inspection by the two sets of historians as assembled that the request of the Committee for Comparative Politics left the link between theory and doctrine weaker than ever.
Far from being an obstacle to the effort to produce a prescriptive model for political development in the developing world, however, the collapse of the misguided theoretical efforts of the 1970s was the essential precondition for it. It created space for the working out of a new analytical framework within which the doctrine for political development would emerge as the foundation of a new literature on democratization in the 1980s. As we saw in Chapter 7, the developing world had never been satisfactorily addressed within the successive frameworks proposed within political development theory. This had prompted a pragmatic response, with Pye and Almond successively proposing leadership as the key to understanding its politics and achieving satisfactory outcomes. Both had been forced to break with the analytical framework within which they were working in order to advance leadership as the key variable in bringing appropriate forms of politics into being in the Third World, but neither had provided an alternative analytical framework within which it could be addressed. In part, the way forward had been cleared by Huntington, who had cut through a large amount of theoretical obfuscation with the pragmatic observation that institutions were weak, the solution was to strengthen them. One further step remained to be taken, however, before the doctrine for political development could take centre stage: the creation of a coherent analytical framework which would link the question of institutions to satisfactory elite management of the process of democratization.
While political development theory as conceived in the Studies of Political Development series was giving away under historical scrutiny in the 1970s, and Almond was searching inconclusively for an eclectic alternative, such a framework, placing the question of elite management in the context of procedure and political process, was sketched out Rustow, Linz and Stepan. While hostile to the idea of theory, this process-oriented approach sidestepped previous sources of difficulty and provided a framework within which all the main themes of the doctrine for political development could be embraced. By focusing directly on the management of transitions to democracy by elites in the developing world, it created the conditions for a coherent synthesis of the doctrine for political development and the revisionist theory of democracy. The search for a grand theory of political development turned out to have been a long and unnecessary detour on the road to a separable and now separate doctrine for political development.
The New Paradigm: Elite Management of Transitions to Democracy
The first step in the provision of a new analytical framework within which the doctrine for political development could be inserted was the publication of Rustow's article on transitions to democracy in Comparative Politics in 1970. Rustow distinguished between the conditions which made democracy possible and those which sustained once it was established, and contended that studies which focused on Britain, the USA, Scandinavia, France and Germany tended to ask 'the functional question' – how successful democracies work – rather than 'the genetic question' – how a democracy comes into being in the first place – which interested students of developing regions. He argued, against the exponents of functional and cultural approaches, that
the genesis of democracy ... has not only considerable intrinsic interest for most of the world; it has greater pragmatic relevance than further panegyrics about the virtues of Anglo-American democracy or laments over the fatal illnesses of democracy in Weimar or in several of the French Republics (340).
In his search for a model relevant to developing regions, Rustow adopted an approach quite different to that taken by political development theorists up to this point. He eliminated cases in which the transition to democracy had taken place over a protracted period (such as Britain), or as a result of immigration (such as the United States), or through foreign imposition (such as Japan and Germany), and concentrated on cases of rapid internally driven transition, taking Sweden (1890–1920) and Turkey (from 1945) for the basis of his model. He then set out to explore 'some of the methodological problems involved in the shift from functional to genetic inquiry', offering ten propositions in support of his 'genetic theory' (Box 8.1).
Box 8.1 Rustow's ten propositions for a genetic theory of democracy
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1.
2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. |
The factors that keep a democracy stable may not be the ones that brought it into existence: explanations of democracy must distinguish between function and genesis.
Correlation is not the same as causation: a genetic theory must concentrate on the latter. Not all causal links run from social and economic to political factors. Not all causal links run from beliefs and attitudes to actions. The genesis of democracy need not be geographically uniform: there may be many roads to democracy. The genesis of democracy need not be temporally uniform: different factors may become crucial during successive phases. The genesis of democracy need not be socially uniform: even in the same place and time the attitudes that promote it may not be the same for politicians and for common citizens. Empirical data in support of a genetic theory must cover, for any given country, a time period from just before until just after the advent of democracy. To examine the logic of transformation within political systems, we may leave aside countries where a major impetus came from abroad. A model or ideal type of the transition may be derived from a close examination of two or three empirical cases and tested by application to the rest. |
Source: Rustow 1970: 346-7.
Rustow's genetic approach focused on causality within a 'semi-deterministic' perspective - 'a sceptical view that attributes human events to a mixture of law and chance'. Only within such a perspective, he claimed, could the social scientist 'accomplish his proper task of exploring the margins of human choice and of clarifying the consequences of the choices in that margin' (343). This approach combined the attention of Truman, Dahl and others to social and economic factors with an emphasis upon political factors, and particularly upon choice, and it abandoned the idea that democracy could not be promoted in the absence of democratic attitudes:
Many of the current theories of democracy seem to imply that to promote democracy you must first foster democrats – perhaps by preachment, propaganda, education, or perhaps as an automatic byproduct of growing prosperity. Instead, we should allow for the possibility that circumstances may force, trick, lure, or cajole non-democrats into democratic behaviour and that their beliefs may adjust in due course by some process of rationalization or adaptation (344–5).
For Rustow, since the advent of democracy required the emergence of new social groups and the formation of new habits, 'one generation is probably the minimum period of transition' (347). Democracy was brought about by the conscious adoption of democratic rules to resolve an entrenched and serious conflict in a community agreed on its common nationhood. It was then consolidated by growing commitment on the part of politicians and citizens alike to procedures of competitive recruitment through the institutions of parties and elections, and confidence in their ability to resolve substantive issues through these means. It required a single background condition – national unity, or a prior sense of community – and consisted of three phases – the preparatory phase, the decision phase and the habituation phase.
The preparatory phase consisted of a 'prolonged and inconclusive political struggle' between protagonists representing well-entrenched forces, usually social classes, in dispute of issues with significant meaning for them. This was likely to begin 'as the result of the emergence of a new elite that arouses a depressed and previously leaderless group into concerted action' (352). Its hallmark was polarization rather than pluralism; the character of the conflict would vary from case to case; and no common path to democracy could be expected. Democracy was a means to an end, and a country was likely to attain democracy 'not by copying the constitutional laws or parliamentary practices of some previous democracy, but rather by honestly facing up to its particular conflicts and by devising or adapting effective procedures for their accommodation' (354).
The preparatory phase came to an end when the decision phase was inaugurated with 'a deliberate decision on the part of political leaders to accept the existence of diversity in unity and, to that end, to institutionalize some crucial aspect of democratic procedure' (355). Thus democracy would result from 'a process of conscious decision at least on the part of the top political leadership', in which the degree of risk and the need for the negotiation of precise terms would mean that 'a small circle of leaders is likely to play a disproportionate role' (356). Although the decision phase might be described as 'an act of deliberate, explicit consensus', this was so only within four limits: the democratic content might be incidental to other substantive issues; the compromise might seem a second-best alternative to all major parties, rather than an agreement on fundamentals; different preferences on procedure were likely to remain; and it would still be necessary to transmit the agreement reached by leaders to professional politicians and citizens.
The last point here was central to the habituation phase. Initially the new regime was no more than 'a novel prescription for taking joint chances on the unknown' (358). During the habituation phase, if it succeeded, politicians and citizens learned from the successful resolution of some issues to place their faith in the new rules and to apply them to new issues; experience with democratic techniques and competitive recruitment confirmed politicians in their democratic practices and beliefs; and the population at large became 'firmly fitted into the new structure by the forging of effective links of party organization that connect the politicians in the capital with the mass electorate throughout the country' (360).
Rustow's contribution cleared away previous obstacles to the development of a coherent analytical framework and mapped a way forward. As a ground-clearing exercise, it removed the central features of previous attempts to articulate a theory of political development: the obsessive concern with the cases of Britain, France, Germany, Japan and the United States, and the insistence on the need for the prior achievement of consensus, appropriate attitudes to political participation, and key social and economic prerequisites. As a pointer to the way forward, it proposed a single focus, once national unity had been established, on a decision on the part of elites to resolve their differences through the adoption of democratic institutions.
A second crucial contribution to the construction of a new process-oriented framework within which the issue of liberal democracy in the Third World could be addressed came with a publication in 1978 of a four-volume study on The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes, under the joint editorship of Linz and Stepan. In the first of these, Crisis, Breakdown and Reequilibration, Linz (1978) examined the failure of democracies and the means by which they could be reconstructed. Although some of the emphases of the volume differed substantially from those of Rustow (it took the breakdown of democracy as its starting point, for example, and dwelt at length on the cases of Germany and Spain), the end result was a reinforcement of the perspective which separated the genesis of democracy from its maintenance once it was established, and gave analytical priority to negotiation and compromise between elites.
Linz and his collaborators proposed a systemic focus on the dynamics of the political process of breakdown rather than on the character of structural strains which ended democracy. They felt it important 'to analyze the behavior of those committed to democracy, especially the behavior of the incumbent democratic leaders, and to ask in what ways the actions or non-actions of the incumbents contributed to the breakdown under analysis' (Linz 1978: ix). And they emphasized that the study of the political dynamics of regime breakdown led directly 'to the analysis of the conditions that lead to the breakdown of authoritarian regimes, to the process of transition from authoritarian to democratic regimes, and especially to the political dynamics of postauthoritarian democracies' (xii).
Linz accused social scientists in general, and Marxist sociologists in particular, of giving too much emphasis to structural characteristics such as class conflict that limited the choices of political actors, and contending that the breakdown of liberal democracy was 'sufficiently explained by great social and economic inequity, concentration of economic power, economic dependency on other countries, and the inevitable antidemocratic reaction of the privileged against the institutions that allow the mobilization of the masses against the existing socioeconomic order' (4). While not denying the importance of such factors, he proposed to focus on breakdown as a dynamic process, and ask how it occurred, rather than why:
In our view, one cannot ignore the actions of either those who are more or less interested in the maintenance of an open democratic political system or those who, placing other values higher, are unwilling to defend it or even ready to overthrow it. These are the actions that constitute the true dynamics of the political process. We feel that the structural characteristics of societies – their actual and latent conflicts – constitute a series of opportunities and constraints for the social and political actors, both men and institutions, that can lead to one or another outcome. We shall start from the assumption that those actors have certain choices that can increase or decrease the probability of the persistence and stability of a regime (4).
In keeping with the focus on the political process, Linz offered a procedural definition of democracy in terms of freedom to advance political alternatives and periodic competition between leaders to validate claims to rule, commenting that in practice this meant 'the freedom to create political parties and to conduct free and honest elections at regular intervals without excluding any effective political office from direct or indirect electoral accountability' (5). This adoption of the Schumpeterian-Dahlian revisionist model of democracy was accompanied by the insistence that the focus was on political democracy rather than democratic society:
We have deliberately omitted from our definition any reference to the prevalence of democratic values, social relations, equality of opportunities in the occupational world, and education, as our focus here is on the breakdown of political democracy, not crisis in democratic societies (6).
Social and political systems were seen as independent of each other to an extent, so that each could be valued for itself. An analytical distinction could be made between the denial of legitimacy to the political system, and the denial of legitimacy to the social system, or between 'democracy itself', and 'the particular content that the regime-building and sustaining forces wanted to give it' (9). It followed the democratic institutions should be defended for themselves and could make a contribution to the preservation of social stability.
Finally, Linz announced that the focus was exclusively on the breakdown of democracy rather than regime breakdown generally, and that 'postcolonial democracies that had little time to become institutionalized, whose form of government was largely a transplant from the mother country, and whose consolidation of political institutions usually coincided with the process of state-building' were excluded from the analysis. This meant that attention was directed almost exclusively to 'states whose existence was consolidated before they became democracies' (7). Latin America now replaced Africa and Asia as the key region in the Third World, and attention turned away from the analytical framework of 'totalitarianism', with its primary focus on Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
Linz's analysis reflected the contemporary global context of revolutionary movements and authoritarian reactions in the Third World, and made Spain rather than Germany or Italy the primary European example from which lessons for contemporary democracy were to be drawn (83-5). It saw the triumph of 'extremist politics' as a sign of failure on the part of democratic leadership, and stated that the principal reason for its preference for political democracy and slow but non-violent social change over revolution was that rapid revolutionary change would inevitably lead not to greater social justice, but to counter-revolutionary authoritarian rule. For this reason, he argued, democratic leaders 'at least in the short run, should value the persistence of democratic institutions as highly if not more highly than other goals' (13). As we shall see, this perspective would become central to the articulation of the doctrine for political development in the 1980s and 1990s.
Linz shared with Rustow a focus on the internal dynamics of the political process in consolidated capitalist-oriented nation-states, starting from the identical assumption that 'a stable political system assumes that citizens in all parts of the country should feel bound by the decision of the authorities and not give their loyalty to another state' (61). His focus on how democracies broke down led to a similar interest in how they could be reconstructed, and he, like Rustow, denied the need for pro-democratic attitudes at the outset. He too proposed a different question to that put another analyses (how rather than why, in his terms), and focused on a different set of cases to those generally examined by the theorists of political development. Finally, just as Rustow placed his procedural approach in the context of deep and meaningful conflict, Linz proposed to turn his attention to political processes 'without ignoring the basic social, economic, and cultural conditioning variables' (5). In each case, too, the crucial variable was political leadership in the face of social and structural strains, and an essential precondition was that leaders, whatever other goals they might have, should be committed to the establishment and survival of democratic institutions for themselves.
Against this background Linz examined their analysed the elements of regime stability, and derived from them models for the breakdown and a restoration of democracy. He argued that stability was produced by a complex combination of legitimacy (the belief that for a particular country at a particular historical juncture no other type of regime could assure a more successful pursuit of collective goals), efficacy (the capacity to find solutions to the basic problems facing the system that aware citizens perceive as broadly satisfactory), and effectiveness (the capacity actually to implement the policies formulated, with the desired results). Rulers would pursue their own material and ideal interests, 'but they are unlikely to retain legitimacy if they pursue them exclusively or at too heavy cost to broader segments of the society'; they therefore had to 'demonstrate that they are pursuing collective goals acceptable to the majority' (19). At the same time, some sectors of society were more powerful and better organized than others (or, in Dahl's terminology, had more intense preferences). Hence
In addition to being responsive to the demands of the broad electorate and to the party membership, democratic governments cannot ignore the demands of key well-organized interests whose withdrawal of confidence can be more decisive than the support of the electorate. To give one example: policies that produce the distrust of the business community and lead it to an evasion of capital, even when those policies are supported by a majority of the electorate, might create a serious threat to a regime (20).
The way in which a new regime formulated its initial agenda was crucially important, and here governments had to minimize the opposition of potential opponents rather than gratify the demands of their followers:
outcomes beneficial to particular groups in society are likely to be delayed because of the difficulty of implementation at this stage. While efficacy is likely to be judged by outputs, sometimes the neutralization of potential opponents of the regime is of equal or more importance than the immediate satisfaction of those who have granted legitimacy to the new regime on the basis of their expectations (21–2).
The clear implication was that guarantees should be extended to private property and capitalist interests. This was reinforced by the claim that the historical record showed that wherever democratic governments had broken down it was because their legitimacy, efficacy and effectiveness had been undermined by leftist agitation, leading to their overthrow by right-wing forces (15).
With these considerations in mind, new democratic regimes would not seek to meet all the partisan demands of their supporters, but would give priority to establishing democratic procedures and facilitating the emergence of loyal opposition, equally committed to the rules of the democratic game. Government and opposition alike would agree to seek power by electoral means only, and to surrender it when defeated at the polls, on the single condition that necessary civil liberties were respected; to refrain from the use of violence or appeals to the armed forces against opponents loyal to the democratic system; and to play their part when necessary in co-operative action to secure the survival of the system when it was under threat (36–7). As there would always be some 'disloyal' opposition, the key to democratic stability was to ensure the loyalty of 'semi-loyal' opposition: breakdown occurred when the failure of parties supporting a regime to compromise in response to a crisis prompted an appeal by one of them to forces perceived as disloyal, rendering the government incapable of solving the crisis and giving rise to polarization and distrust.
Democratic breakdown had its roots, therefore, in the undermining of 'the consensus of the democratic parties and their capacity to cooperate' (50) when faced with serious problems. Although these were sometimes 'structural problems that perhaps no regime can solve, particularly in Third World countries where there was an absolute imbalance between the society's needs and its resources, a regime's 'unsolvable problems' were often 'the work of its elites' (51) in that they stemmed from 'the setting by the political leadership of goals for which it is unable to provide the necessary means, and its unwillingness to renounce those goals once it becomes apparent that the means cannot be provided' (52–3).
Linz's model of the 'process of re-equilibration' flowed directly from his analysis of the dynamics of the democratic process and the breakdown of democracy. Re-equilibration was defined as 'a political process that, after a crisis that has seriously threatened the continuity and stability of the basic democratic political mechanisms, results in their continued existence at the same or higher levels of democratic legitimacy, efficacy, and effectiveness' (87). Six conditions were required for it to succeed (Box 8.2).
Box 8.2 Linz's conditions for the re-equilibration of democracy
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1.
2. 3. 4. 5. 6. |
The availability of a leadership uncompromised by the loss of efficacy and legitimacy of the existing regime in crisis and committed to the creation of a new regime with new institutions to be legitimated by future democratic procedures.
Ability of the new leadership to gain the acceptance of those who remained loyal to the existing regime as well as those who opted for disloyalty in crisis and therefore are potential supporters of a nondemocratic regime. Willingness of the leadership of the regime that has lost power, efficacy, effectiveness and probably considerable legitimacy to accept that fact and facilitate rather than oppose the transfer of power. Willingness of the former leadership, with its commitment to certain policy goals, ideologies, and interests, to subordinate the realization of these goals in order to save the substance of democracy. A certain level of indifference and passivity in the bulk of the population during the final denouement of the crisis. Ability of the semiloyal opposition to a particular regime to control and neutralize a disloyal opposition that questions not only the particular regime or government but the democratic system. |
Source: Linz 1978: 87-8.
The immediate model for re-equilibration was the transition from the Fourth to the Fifth Republic in France. Such a transition might commence with an illegal act, but 'it must be legitimated by the democratic process afterward, and above all, it must operate thereafter according to democratic rules' (87). It might lead to a new equilibrium of forces, and to changes to such 'rules of the game' as electoral laws or relations between the executive and legislature. And these changes might even 'reach the borderline between democracy and semiauthoritarian solutions' (89) if civil liberties are limited and particular parties outlawed. But, Linz asked, 'might not a less democratic democracy ... be a better alternative than risking civil war or an authoritarian regime in defense of democratic authenticity' (89–90)? Answering his own question in the affirmative, he concluded that the re-equilibration of democracy always required
parties committed to the democratic order to sacrifice their particular goals, the interests of many of their followers, and their ideological commitments, as well as accepting limits on the most libertarian interpretation of civil liberties, for the sake of stabilizing the situation and insuring survival of the system (90).
Finally, Linz identified two situations comparable to the re-equilibration of a democracy threatened with breakdown – the restoration of democracy after a relatively short period of non-democratic rule, and its reinstauration or re-establishment after a long period. In the first case (after a period of as much as 20 years or so) former democratic leaders would play a decisive part, while in the second (which may last up to 50 years) a new generation would established the new democratic regime.
In conclusion, Linz spelled out the limits of change within a democratic political system. Noting the charge of radical critics that civil liberties alone cannot secure the transformation of power relations in society, he recognized its force in some cases: the introduction of liberal democratic institutions and political processes could not lead to 'a rapid and peaceful transformation through the political mobilization of the underprivileged' in underdeveloped countries, or in traditional societies where the cultural and social relations support an existing social order (95–6). It was true, also, that 'political democracy does not necessarily assure even a reasonable approximation of what we would call democratic society, a society with considerable equality of opportunity in all spheres, including social equality, as well as opportunity to formulate political alternatives and mobilize the electorate for them' (97), but it did allow for progress in that direction. The alternative option of revolution could only lead, directly or indirectly, to authoritarian rule:
From this perspective, which we would not argue to be value-free, the problem of the breakdown of even imperfect political democracies seems relevant. The danger lies in indifference to the crises of democracies and in willingness to contribute to their acceleration, in the hope that crisis will lead to a revolutionary breakthrough toward a democratic society rather than a mere political democracy. The vain hope of making democracies more democratic by undemocratic means has all too often contributed to regime crises and ultimately paved the way to autocratic rule (97).
As we shall see in the next section, the contemporary doctrine for political development rest squarely on the foundations laid down in the 1970s by Rustow, Linz and Stepan while elsewhere more ambitious attempts to produce a theory of political development were in a process of disintegration.
The Doctrine for Political Development Today
The procedural approach developed by Rustow and Linz underpins the contemporary doctrine for political development. It was taken further in the 1980s by O'Donnell and Schmitter, whose fourth volume (Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies) in the four-volume set they jointly edited with Whitehead on Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Prospects for Democracy (1986) showed the same concern with outlining the steps by which democracy could be achieved. Schmitter and O'Donnell expressed the hope that they were providing 'a useful instrument - pieces of a map - for those who are venturing, and who tomorrow will be venturing, on the uncertain path toward the construction of democratic forms of political organization' (O'Donnell and Schmitter 1986: 5). The first version of their argument, dating from 1980, identified two such paths: the transfer of power by the regime to a faction of their supporters, and the surrender of power to the opposition. The 1986 publication added a third: a 'pacted' transition between opposing groups. The relative strength and behaviour of supporters and opponents of reform in authoritarian regimes, identified as 'hardliners' and 'softliners' respectively, was seen as crucial in determining the path which would be taken. Four central chapters in Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies dealt with successive steps in the process of democratization: the opening and undermining of authoritarian regimes, the negotiation and renegotiation of pacts, the resurrection of civil society and restructuring of public space, and the convocation of elections and establishment of political parties. The tone of the argument throughout is represented by the injunction that the parties to the transition must pay the price of entering
into implicit compromises or explicit pacts with the transitional regime and with other parties and toning down their more militant supporters. This means that the basis of opposition tends to shift from expressions of principle to discussions of rules, and from demands for immediate benefits to pleas by political leaders to accept deferred gratifications (59).
There were six central features to the doctrine for political development as expounded in the 1980s both by O'Donnell, Schmitter and Whitehead, and in the subsequent multi-volume study of 'democracy in developing countries' edited by Diamond, Linz and Lipset (Diamond, Linz and Lipset 1988, 1989a, 1989b). These six central features were the abandonment of theory, the adoption of a normative commitment to democracy, the narrowly procedural definition of democracy in 'Schumpeterian' terms, the analytical separation of 'structure' from 'choice', the attribution of particular significance to leadership, and the endorsement of the withdrawal of the state from economic intervention and welfare provision. A brief review illustrates the centrality of these points to the doctrine for political development in the 1980s.
The abandonment of theory
O'Donnell and Schmitter introduced the final volume of their study with the declaration that 'we did not have at the beginning, nor do we have at the end of this lengthy collective endeavour, a "theory" to test or to apply to the case studies and thematic essays in these volumes' (O'Donnell and Schmitter 1986: 3). Diamond, Linz and Lipset similarly introduced their four-volume study of democracy in developing countries with the disarming statement that the 'abundant theoretical arguments and lessons' drawn from their deployment of ten theoretical dimensions, 26 countries, and 49 tentative propositions about the likelihood of stable democratic government 'are not integrated into a single, all-encompassing theory, and that it will be some time (if ever) before the field produces one' (Diamond, Linz and Lipset 1988: xiv).
The normative commitment to democracy
The abandonment of the quest for theory was linked to a strong normative commitment to political democracy, as O'Donnell and Schmitter declared, on behalf of themselves and their colleagues, that 'the first general and shared theme (of the collection) is normative, namely that the instauration and eventual consolidation of political democracy constitutes per se a desirable goal' (O'Donnell and Schmitter 1986: 3). Diamond, Linz and Lipset similarly stated their 'bias for democracy as a system of government' and concluded the joint preface which preceded each regional volume with the statement that 'we (along with an increasing proportion of the world's population) value political democracy as an end in itself – without assuming that it is a guarantee of any other important values' (Diamond, Linz and Lipset 1988: xxiii-iv, xxv).
The endorsement of procedural democracy
This emphasis upon political democracy was reinforced by the endorsement of Schumpeterian' contemporary theories of democracy' which, for Schmitter and O'Donnell,
place the burden of consent upon party elites and professional politicians (sporadically subject to electoral approval) who agree among themselves, not on ethical or substantive grounds, but on the procedural norm of contingency. These actors agree to compete in such a way that those who win greater electoral support will exercise their temporary political superiority in such a way as not to impede those who may win greater support in the future from taking office; and those who lose in the present agree to respect the contingent authority of the winners to make binding decisions, in exchange for being allowed to take office and make decisions in the future. In their turn, citizens will presumably accept a democracy based on such a competition, provided its outcome remains contingent upon their collective preferences as expressed through fair and regular elections of uncertain outcome (O'Donnell and Schmitter 1986: 59).
Equally, Diamond, Linz and Lipset drew upon Dahl and cited Schumpeter in support of their definition of democracy as:
a system of government that meets three essential conditions: meaningful and extensive competition among individuals and organized groups (especially political parties) for all effective positions of government power, at regular intervals and excluding the use of force; a highly inclusive level of political participation in the selection of leaders and policies, at least through regular and fair elections, such that no major (adult) social group is excluded; and a level of civil and political liberties – freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom to form and join organizations – sufficient to ensure the integrity of political competition and participation (Diamond, Linz and Lipset 1988: xvi, emphasis in the original).
The separation of structure and choice
O'Donnell and Schmitter argued that the dominant characteristic of the transition was uncertainty, as ethical and political choices had to be made, and responsibilities assumed, 'when there are insufficient structural or behavioural parameters to guide and predict the outcome'. In these circumstances, the group, class, sectoral or institutional affiliations of actors could not be taken as guides to their behaviour, and analysis should primarily rely upon 'distinctly political concepts, however vaguely delineated and difficult to pin down they may be' (O'Donnell and Schmitter 1986: 3, 4). In other words, for the duration of the transition, the effects of structure were suspended. Diamond, Linz and Lipset went even further, moving from their procedural focus on political democracy to question the need to explore the structural characteristics of capitalism and their implications at all. In the space of a paragraph, they passed from the reasonable claim that 'democracy as a system of government must be kept conceptually distinct from capitalism as a system of production and exchange' to the more defiant assertion that the concept of a capitalist economic system 'becomes in its vagueness almost meaningless' (xx-xxi). In the regional studies, the same attitude prompted a refusal to explore issues of international and domestic political economy: Diamond, for example, writing on Africa, declined point blank 'to revisit or revise the debate over whether European colonialism "underdeveloped Africa," or whether dependence retards or distorts economic growth' (Diamond 1988: 8).
The significance of leadership
The emphasis upon elite pre-eminence, contingency and choice led directly to a particular emphasis upon political leadership, of a kind understood to be committed to the model of elitist democracy endorsed throughout. Immense importance was attached by O'Donnell and Schmitter to initiatives by elite actors, not only in connection with the implementation of transition, but also in other parallel processes. Thus the possibility of winning the military over was related to the identification of an individual military leader who could play the role of persuader, the success of the transition was said to depend upon 'whether some civilian, as well as military, leaders have the imagination, the courage, and the willingness to come to interim agreements on rules and mutual guarantees' (36); and even the first challenges to authoritarian rule were described to 'gestures by exemplary individuals' (49). Similarly, the downgrading of structure in favour of choice and elite action by Diamond, Linz and Lipset gave political leadership far greater significance than was suggested by its inclusion as one among ten 'theoretical dimensions' in their analytical framework. The balance of Diamond's argument, for Africa, was represented by his view that 'the values and skills of political leaders have figured prominently in the destruction or nurturance of democracy' (18); his introduction to the volume on Asia found the decline and fall of democracy there to be prominently and often 'quite clearly decisively' associated with 'the choices, decisions, values, and actions of political and institutional leaders' (Diamond 1989: 3); and his introduction to the volume on Latin America, written with Linz, concluded by placing its faith for the future on 'effective political leadership and action' (Diamond et al. 1989b: 51).
The endorsement of state withdrawal
Finally, O'Donnell and Schmitter insisted that there was no room in the new democracies for either 'social democracy' (the extension of the democratic principle to the workplace, and to other institutions such as schools, universities, interest groups and political parties) or 'welfare' or 'economic' democracy (the provision of equal benefits to the population in areas such as wealth, income, education, health and housing). These were coupled under the term 'socialization' and explicitly excluded from 'political democracy' (11-14, especially 13, figure 2.1). Equally, Diamond, Linz and Lipset endorsed at every point the need to limit state initiatives in the areas of welfare and economic development, and to inure the masses to the prospect of delayed gratification in these areas. This position was implied in their preface, which used the term 'democracy' to 'signify a political system, separate and apart from the economic system to which it is joined' (Diamond, Linz and Lipset 1988: xvi), and concluded, as we have seen, that political democracy was to be seen as a value in itself, but not necessarily a guarantee of any other important values. The same position was explicit in the country studies. Diamond attributed economic failure in Africa to 'the heavy drag on economic development imposed by oversized, overowning, and overregulating states', and welcomed 'the increasing movement away from statist economic policies and structures' as 'among the most significant boosts to the democratic prospect' there (Diamond 1988: 22).
The Establishment of the New Orthodoxy
By the end of the 1980s doctrine for political development expounded in the O'Donnell, Schmitter and Whitehead and Diamond, Linz and Lipset volumes was becoming established as the new orthodoxy, as further contributions constructed and defined its genealogy, effected a synthesis of its ideas, ironed out inconsistencies, and applied it to contemporary cases. One such effort, interesting because it displayed his continuing ability to capture and distil the spirit of the times, was Huntington's (1991a) The Third Wave, delivered as the Julian J. Rothbaum Lectures at the University of Oklahoma in November 1989, and examined below. The most significant outline of the new approach came, however, from Karl, a contributor to the O'Donnell, Schmitter and Whitehead volume credited with introducing the idea of 'pacted' democracy on the basis of the Venezuelan experience (Karl 1986). Her subsequent paper on 'dilemmas' of democratization in Latin America, delivered in China in June 1988 and published in Comparative Politics two years later, codified the new approach, while correcting it at the same time to bring it into line with the new genealogy established for it.
Karl placed the O'Donnell and Schmitter text reviewed above at the centre of the new orthodoxy, and placed it in a tradition running through Rustow's 1970 article on transitions and the Linz and Stepan collection on the breakdown of democratic regimes, along with the work of Schumpeter and Dahl. Noting that 'the once-dominant search for prerequisites of democracy has given way to a more process-oriented emphasis on contingent choice', she proposed that 'theorists should now develop an interactive approach that seeks explicitly to relate structural constraints to the shaping of contingent choice' (Karl 1990: 1). She adopted a Schumpeterian/Dahlian definition of political democracy (with the Latin American addition of the criterion of 'civilian control over the military') and concluded that as the protracted search for economic, social, cultural/psychological, or international causes had not yet yielded a general law of democratization, 'the search for a set of identical conditions that can account for the presence or absence of democratic regimes should probably be abandoned and replaced by more modest efforts to derive a contextually bounded approach to the study of democratization (5). She then proposed a slight shift of emphasis from the approach initially outlined by Schmitter and O'Donnell, from 'contingent choice' to 'structured contingency', as
even in the midst of the tremendous uncertainty provoked by a regime transition, where constraints appear to be most relaxed and where a wide range of outcomes appears to be possible, the decisions made by various actors respond to and are conditioned by the types of socioeconomic structures and political institutions already present (6).
In this formulation, reminiscent of Ward and Rustow's approach in Political Modernization in Japan and Turkey, 'structural and institutional constraints determine the range of options available to decision makers and may even predispose them to choose a specific option' (7). At this point Karl incorporated ideas of path dependency' and the 'persistence' of periodic institutional settlements (Krasner 1988), suggesting that the terms on which transitions are made may shape available options for the foreseeable future.
Against this background, Karl compared transitions on two dimensions, depending on whether they were achieved by compromise or force and with elites or masses ascendant. She suggested that in Latin America 'no stable democracy has resulted from regime transitions in which mass actors have gained control, even momentarily, over traditional ruling classes', while 'democracies that have endured for a respectable length of time appear to cluster ... in the cell defined by relatively strong elite actors who engage in strategies of compromise' (Karl 1990: 8–9). These usually involved explicit pacts which
ensure survivability because, although they are inclusionary, they are simultaneously aimed at restricting the scope of representation in order to reassure traditional dominant classes that their vital interests will be respected. In essence they are antidemocratic mechanisms, bargained by elites, which seek to create a deliberate socioeconomic and political contract that demobilizes emerging mass actors while delineating the extent to which all actors can participate or wield power in the future (11–12).
Karl then identified the trade-off between political democracy and equity, inelegantly expressed as 'the relationship between the problematics of survivability and cui bono,' as 'the central dilemma of democratization in Latin America' (13). Despite her earlier emphasis upon the likely persistence of foundational institutional settlements, she concluded with the injunction that in the phase of consolidation, leading actors
must demonstrate the ability to differentiate political forces rather than draw them all into a grand coalition, the capacity to define and channel competing political projects rather than seek to keep potentially divisive reforms off the agenda, and the willingness to tackle incremental reforms, especially in the domains of the economy and civil-military relations, rather than defer them to some later date (17).
By the late 1980s, then, a new version of the doctrine for political development, fully reflected in Karl's remarkably accomplished synthesis, was securely in place. It took up precisely where the literature of the 1960s left off. It was devoid of theoretical ambition, highly elitist, and overwhelmingly concerned with pragmatic policy advice to aspiring political leaders. The model of democracy it endorsed – the sharp separation of politics and economics, the gradual extension of mass participation under elite control, and the central role ascribed to leadership, institutionalized parties and organized associational groups – could have been taken (and often was) point by point from the literature reviewed above.
There are two significant differences, even so, between the literatures of the 1960s and the 1990s. Where once theory and public policy were intended to be mutually supportive, the celebration of policy relevance and success now accompanies surprisingly cheerful confessions of theoretical failure. And where the theorists of the 1960s found themselves in an impasse in which they could formulate a model of stable liberal democracy but felt unable to recommend its implementation, those of today are avid exponents of the dissemination of democracy. The result has been the proliferation of frankly programmatic procedural guides to the installation of pro-Western liberal democracy in the Third World, and a chorus of claims that the theory of political development has been proved correct. As always, Huntington has been energetic in following and synthesizing the emerging trend, and it is to his developing account that I turn.
The Doctrine According to Huntington
In a series of publications in the 1980s and 1990s, Huntington turned to the question of democratization across the world. Noting a renewed if cautious optimism on the part of academics and policy-makers in the early 1980s, he asked what the prospects were for the emergence of democratic regimes, and what policies might be espoused by governments, private institutions, and individuals in order to encourage the spread of democracy (Huntington 1984: 193–5. Rejecting the automatic association of democracy with other values such as social justice, equality, liberty, fulfillment and progress, he adopted the narrow definition offered by Schumpeter, in which 'a political system is defined as democratic to the extent that its most powerful collective decision-makers are selected through periodic elections in which all candidates freely compete for votes and in which virtually all the adult population is eligible to vote' (195). He then identified two historical waves of democratization, a lengthy one up to 1920 and a brief one immediately following the Second World War, the first followed by a period of retreat and the second by three decades of mixed advance and retreat which left the global state of democracy in 1984 on balance much where it had been in 1954. Against this background, he examined the 'preconditions' and 'processes' of democratization, following the distinction drawn by Rustow (1970) between functional and genetic approaches. With regard to preconditions, he argued 1) that economic development forced the modification or abandonment of traditional political institutions but that the succeeding political system would be shaped by other factors 'such as the underlying culture of the society, the values of the elites, and external influences' (Huntington 1984: 202), with the choices made by leaders playing a vital role; 2) that democracy required a market economy, and was favoured by the existence of an autonomous bourgeoisie; 3) that the two waves of expansion of democracy had been associated with British and US global power respectively; and 4) that democracy was likely to flourish in cultures that were instrumental (along the lines of Protestantism) rather than consummatory (along the lines of Islam), and tolerant of diversity. He identified three paths to democracy: the linear sequence model of steady progress step by step; the praetorian model of cyclical alternation between democratic and authoritarian regimes in which neither was effectively institutionalized; and a 'dialectical' model of urban breakthrough, authoritarian reaction, and subsequent transition to stable democracy.
Although it had been observed that the prospects for democracy were enhanced when expanded participation was introduced at a late stage, he argued that this observation was irrelevant in view of 'the prevailing tendencies in the contemporary world ... for participation to expand early in the process of development, and concurrently with contestation' (211). It was a mistake to assume that the introduction of democracy itself required popular action and participation. On the contrary, democratic institutions were best created from the top down, 'through negotiations and compromises among political elites, calculating their own interests and desires' (212). In the period after the Second World War, they had been created either by the replacement of a failed authoritarian regime, or by the transformation of an existing authoritarian regime at the initiative of elites within it who concluded that the system no longer met their needs or those of their society. In either case, the role of like-minded elites was crucial. The replacement process required 'compromise and agreement among elites who have not been part of the authoritarian regime,' while the transformation process required 'skilled leadership from and agreement among the elites who are part of that regime' (213). At this point, it should be noted, Huntington regarded agreement between opposing elites (in-groups and out-groups) as inherently difficult, and did not include an option based upon it. He replaced the historically obsolete option of gradual evolution to democracy by stages with its introduction from above by like-minded elites, either from within an authoritarian regime or after its collapse, the key requirement being that 'either the established elites within an authoritarian system or the successor elites after an authoritarian system collapses see their interests served by the introduction of democratic institutions (214).
In this context, the United States could make a modest contribution by assisting the economic development of poor countries and promoting a more equitable distribution of income and wealth; encouraging developing countries to foster market economies and the development of vigorous bourgeois classes; refurbishing its own economic, military and political power so as to be able to exercise greater influence in world affairs; and developing a concerted programme to encourage and help elites in countries whose level of economic development was bringing them into the 'transition zone' to move their countries in a more democratic direction.
The predictions Huntington made regarding the prospects for democracy around the world proved mistaken, containing as they did the assertion that 'the likelihood of democratic development in Eastern Europe is virtually nil,' and the general conclusion that 'with a few exceptions, the limits of democratic development in the world may well have been reached' (218). In the apparently unexpected context of global democratization of the late 1980s and early 1990s, however, he refined and extended the model of elite-led political development in The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Huntington 1991a) and in articles taken from the book (Huntington 1991b, 1991-92). He modified his account of waves of democratization to recognize a third wave between 1974 and 1990, and now refused to say whether it would continue, halt or be reversed, confessing that 'predictions about the future are often embarrassing' but seeking to cover his own shame with the the bold assertion that 'social science cannot provide reliable answers to these questions, nor can any social scientist' (Huntington 1991a: 209, 280). The book was 'not an effort to develop a general theory of the preconditions of democracy or the processes of democratization' or to explain 'why some countries have been democracies for over a century while others have been enduring dictatorships'; rather, its limited purpose was to explain 'why, how, and with what consequences a group of roughly contemporaneous transitions to democracy occurred in the 1970s and 1980s and to understand what these transitions may suggest about the future of democracy in the world' (30). Where Political Order in Changing Societies (Huntington 1968) had expressed a normative preference for order, he now declared a preference for democracy as 'good in itself' and possessed of 'positive consequences for individual freedom, domestic stability, international peace, and the United States (Huntington 1991a: xv).
The Third Wave repeated and extended other arguments put forward in 1984. It adopted a Schumpeterian definition of democracy and nominated the beliefs and actions of political elites as 'probably the most immediate and significant explanatory variable' for the introduction of democracy (36). Five patterns of regime change were now identified for the third wave of democratization: the cyclical and 'dialectical' patterns previously identified (the latter now christened the 'second-try' pattern), along with interrupted democracy (resumption after an authoritarian interlude), direct transition from a stable authoritarian regime, and decolonization. The third wave of transitions was attributed to an eclectic set of five causes: the deepening legitimacy problems of authoritarian systems, the positive social consequences of the global economic growth of the 1960s, the changed doctrines and activities of the Catholic Church, the changed policies of external actors, and 'snowballing' or demonstration effects. However, while these 'general causes of the third wave of democratization,' varying in significance from case to case, created conditions favourable to democratization, they stood 'at one remove from the factors immediately responsible for democratization' (107). These immediate factors concerned leadership: 'In the third wave, the conditions for creating democracy had to exist, but only political leaders willing to take the risk of democracy made it happen' (108).
Huntington now identified four patterns of transition, noting the occasional case of establishment of democracy through intervention, and adding a middle term, 'transplacement' (joint action by government and opposition groups), between transformation (where the lead is taken by the elites in power), and replacement (where the opposition takes the lead). This followed the addition by Schmitter and O'Donnell in 1996 of 'pacted' transition to their original two moments of transition. Five types of participant were identified: standpatters' (supporters of the status quo), liberal reformers, and democratic reformers within the governing coalition, and democratic moderates and revolutionary extremists in the opposition. Positions could shift during the process, and, clearly, a democratic outcome required the triumph of the democratic reformers, the democratic moderates, or a combination between them. Shifting in his own words from the role of social scientist to that of political consultant (xv), he offered 'guidelines' for each of these circumstances, running to 27 specific proposals covering the reform or overthrow of authoritarian regimes, and the negotiation of regime changes. These presented a recipe for the installation of democracy from above, controlled by and in the interests of existing elites (Box 8.3).
Box 8.3. Huntington's guidelines for democratizers
For democratic reformers in the regime:
Seize and keep control of the initiative in the democratization process. Only lead from strength and never introduce democratization measures in response to obvious pressure from more extreme radical opposition groups
Keep expectations low as to how far change can go.
Encourage development of a responsible, moderate opposition party, which the key groups in society (including the military) will accept as a plausible nonthreatening alternative government. Do what you can to enhance the stature, authority, and moderation of your principle opposition negotiating partner.
For moderate democrats in the opposition:
Make particular efforts to enlist business leaders, middle-class professionals, religious figures, and political party leaders, most of whom probably supported creation of the authoritarian system.
Cultivate generals.
Be prepared to negotiate and, if necessary, make concessions on all issues except the holding of free and fair election elections.
For both:
Resist the demands of leaders and groups on your side that either delay the negotiating process or threaten the core interests of your negotiating partner.
When in doubt, compromise.
Source: adapted from Huntington 1991a: 141-2, 150-51, 162-3.
For democratic reformers in the regime:
Seize and keep control of the initiative in the democratization process. Only lead from strength and never introduce democratization measures in response to obvious pressure from more extreme radical opposition groups
Keep expectations low as to how far change can go.
Encourage development of a responsible, moderate opposition party, which the key groups in society (including the military) will accept as a plausible nonthreatening alternative government. Do what you can to enhance the stature, authority, and moderation of your principle opposition negotiating partner.
For moderate democrats in the opposition:
Make particular efforts to enlist business leaders, middle-class professionals, religious figures, and political party leaders, most of whom probably supported creation of the authoritarian system.
Cultivate generals.
Be prepared to negotiate and, if necessary, make concessions on all issues except the holding of free and fair election elections.
For both:
Resist the demands of leaders and groups on your side that either delay the negotiating process or threaten the core interests of your negotiating partner.
When in doubt, compromise.
Source: adapted from Huntington 1991a: 141-2, 150-51, 162-3.
Turning from the processes to the characteristics of democratization, Huntington then identified compromise, elections and nonviolence as the 'third wave of democratization syndrome' (165). Negotiations and compromise among political elites were at the heart of the democratization processes, and leaders made pacts and secret deals behind the backs of their followers:
Few political leaders who put together the compromises ... escaped the charge of having 'sold out' the interests of their constituents. The extent of this disaffection was, in a sense, a measure of their success ...In the third wave, democracies were often made by leaders willing to betray the interests of their followers in order to achieve that goal (168–9).
For leaders and groups alike, the price of participation in the process was moderation in tactics and policies, which often involved their agreeing
to abandon violence and any commitment to revolution, to accept existing basic social, economic and political institutions (e.g., private property and the market system, autonomy of the military, the privileges of the Catholic Church), and to work through elections and parliamentary procedures in order to achieve power and put through their policies (170).
Extending the analysis to consider the transitional problems of the consolidation of democracy, Huntington issued further guidelines on dealing with authoritarian crimes and curbing military power. These advised that in cases of regime overthrow, only former leaders should be punished, while in other cases there should be no prosecutions, and that in all cases the military should be professionalized by purging or retiring potentially disloyal officers, punishing attempted coup-makers, instituting civilian control, and creating a small force with good pay and conditions, a clear military mission, and lavish supplies of medals, ceremonies and shiny new toys to keep them occupied and boost their prestige (231, 251–3).
Finally, Huntington turned to a number of 'contextual' problems which fell into two sets: insurgency, ethnic or communal conflict, and terrorism; and extreme poverty, severe socio-economic inequality, chronic inflation, substantial external debt, and extensive state involvement in the economy. Accepting that these problems, where they existed, would not be solved in the short term, he argued that the prospects for democratic survival would depend not upon the severity of the problems faced or the ability to solve them, but 'the way in which political leaders respond to their inability to solve the problems confronting their country' (259). Elites would have to avoid blaming each other, while publics would have to learn to distinguish between the value of democracy as a system, and the ability of particular elected governments to deal with the problems facing them: 'Disillusionment and the lower expectations it produces are the foundations of democratic stability. Democracies become consolidated when people learn that democracy is a solution to the problem of tyranny, but not necessarily to anything else' (263).
Decreased political participation arising from resignation, cynicism, withdrawal and declining voting levels 'may have been undesirable in terms of democratic theory, but it did not, in itself, threaten the stability of the new democracies' (265). Equally, the election of anti-incumbent parties and anti-establishment leaders could consolidate democracy through the institutionalization of in-system responses' to policy failure (266). Only anti-system responses could threaten the democratic system, but the absence of alternatives to democracy in the 'third wave' meant that for the time being at least these were few, and attracted little support.
Huntington asserted in conclusion that poverty was the greatest enemy of democracy, while economic development still offered the best hope of producing conditions favourable for its extension. At the same time, such developments as a prolonged failure to provide welfare, prosperity, equity, justice, domestic order or external security, or a general international economic collapse might threaten the survival of existing democracies. His final comment, however, was a restatement of the importance of political leadership:
Democracy will spread in the world to the extent that those who exercise power in the world and individual countries want it to spread. For a century and a half after Tocqueville observed the emergence of modern democracy in America, successive waves of democratization washed up on the shore of dictatorship. Buoyed by a rising tide of economic progress, each wave advanced further and ebbed less than its predecessor. History, to shift the metaphor, does not move forward in a straight line, but when skilled and determined rulers push, it does move forward (316).
Between 1984 and 1991, then, Huntington revised his assessment of the prospects for democracy, and offered a step-by-step programme for elite-led and controlled democratization. Here, as in the past, his work was a distillation of the wisdom of the age, albeit with inimitable cynical touches of his own, rather than an original contribution to the debate. The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century played the same role in the 1990s – that of summarizing the consensus that had been reached among conservative scholars in the area – that had been played by Political Order in Changing Societies in the 1960s.
Conclusion
We noted at the beginning of this book that modern theorists of democracy have always had a problem with the relationship between liberal democracy and capitalism. The tension between the two is fully to the fore in the work of Rustow, Linz and contemporary theorists of the transition to democracy, but it is resolved by the submersion of substantive issues concerning the reproduction of capitalism beneath an apparently purely procedural surface. Thus for Linz, the essence of democracy is fundamentally procedural. It is
a political system that legitimizes decisions on the basis of formal, procedural, legal correctness without distinction of content except respect for civil liberties and the equality before the law of all citizens, with no reference to substantive justice and no link to a system of ultimate values (Linz 1978: 48).
But at the same time, the real content of the procedures advocated is always to favourite capitalist interests, and persuade the propertyless majority and their political representatives to accept substantive limits compatible with capitalist reproduction.
Although Rustow was explicit that the adoption of democratic procedures were secondary to the real commitment to resolve a deep and meaningful conflict, he too opened the door to a separation between procedure and substance. This was so not only because subsequent writers would choose to emphasize the former at the expense of the latter, but also because he made no attempt to explore the likely nature of meaningful conflicts in the contemporary Third World and the prospects for their resolution. On the contrary, he assumed that conflicts over social and economic issues were in principle capable of negotiation by elites, and management through democratic institutions. As a result, he too left the relationship between such conflicts in the Third World and their resolution through the adoption of democratic procedures untheorized.
As the previous discussion indicates, a new approach to the question of democracy in the developing world emerged in the mainstream literature in the 1980s. It favoured elite-led political democracy of the kind envisaged by the theorists of political development, but differed from the earlier literature in that it declared itself opposed to the search for a general theory, emphasized its normative commitment to political democracy, directed more attention to the process of democratization than to its preconditions, and sought to specify the procedural steps by which democracy could be achieved. Finally, it distinguished throughout between structural context and contingent choice, with Karl's 'structured contingency' eventually striking the balance which expressed the link between them. In the early 1990s, the entrenchment of the new doctrine in the mainstream literature proceeded apace, notably with the foundation with the founding of the Journal of Democracy in 1990. Even at this early stage, a process of institutionalization of new orthodoxy was under way, reminiscent of that which had occurred in the early 1960s with the original protagonists of the political development literature. The place of the Ford Foundation and the New York SSRC from that period was taken by the US National Endowment for Democracy, founded in 1983, and the Hoover Institution (sponsors of the Diamond, Linz and Lipset project), and the Latin American Programme of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, launched in 1977 (chief sponsor of the O'Donnell, Schmitter and Whitehead initiative). The continuity with previous efforts was further reinforced by Lowenthal's definition of the goal of the Wilson Center as being to 'bring together the realms of academic and public affairs', and his reminder that Woodrow Wilson himself had combined idealism, commitment to democracy, scholarship, political leadership and international vision with 'interventionist attitudes and actions towards Latin America and the Caribbean' (O'Donnell, Schmitter and Whitehead 1986: ix). The Journal of Democracy may be considered the equivalent for the 1990s of the Studies in Political Development series launched in 1963.
Few political leaders who put together the compromises ... escaped the charge of having 'sold out' the interests of their constituents. The extent of this disaffection was, in a sense, a measure of their success ...In the third wave, democracies were often made by leaders willing to betray the interests of their followers in order to achieve that goal (168–9).
For leaders and groups alike, the price of participation in the process was moderation in tactics and policies, which often involved their agreeing
to abandon violence and any commitment to revolution, to accept existing basic social, economic and political institutions (e.g., private property and the market system, autonomy of the military, the privileges of the Catholic Church), and to work through elections and parliamentary procedures in order to achieve power and put through their policies (170).
Extending the analysis to consider the transitional problems of the consolidation of democracy, Huntington issued further guidelines on dealing with authoritarian crimes and curbing military power. These advised that in cases of regime overthrow, only former leaders should be punished, while in other cases there should be no prosecutions, and that in all cases the military should be professionalized by purging or retiring potentially disloyal officers, punishing attempted coup-makers, instituting civilian control, and creating a small force with good pay and conditions, a clear military mission, and lavish supplies of medals, ceremonies and shiny new toys to keep them occupied and boost their prestige (231, 251–3).
Finally, Huntington turned to a number of 'contextual' problems which fell into two sets: insurgency, ethnic or communal conflict, and terrorism; and extreme poverty, severe socio-economic inequality, chronic inflation, substantial external debt, and extensive state involvement in the economy. Accepting that these problems, where they existed, would not be solved in the short term, he argued that the prospects for democratic survival would depend not upon the severity of the problems faced or the ability to solve them, but 'the way in which political leaders respond to their inability to solve the problems confronting their country' (259). Elites would have to avoid blaming each other, while publics would have to learn to distinguish between the value of democracy as a system, and the ability of particular elected governments to deal with the problems facing them: 'Disillusionment and the lower expectations it produces are the foundations of democratic stability. Democracies become consolidated when people learn that democracy is a solution to the problem of tyranny, but not necessarily to anything else' (263).
Decreased political participation arising from resignation, cynicism, withdrawal and declining voting levels 'may have been undesirable in terms of democratic theory, but it did not, in itself, threaten the stability of the new democracies' (265). Equally, the election of anti-incumbent parties and anti-establishment leaders could consolidate democracy through the institutionalization of in-system responses' to policy failure (266). Only anti-system responses could threaten the democratic system, but the absence of alternatives to democracy in the 'third wave' meant that for the time being at least these were few, and attracted little support.
Huntington asserted in conclusion that poverty was the greatest enemy of democracy, while economic development still offered the best hope of producing conditions favourable for its extension. At the same time, such developments as a prolonged failure to provide welfare, prosperity, equity, justice, domestic order or external security, or a general international economic collapse might threaten the survival of existing democracies. His final comment, however, was a restatement of the importance of political leadership:
Democracy will spread in the world to the extent that those who exercise power in the world and individual countries want it to spread. For a century and a half after Tocqueville observed the emergence of modern democracy in America, successive waves of democratization washed up on the shore of dictatorship. Buoyed by a rising tide of economic progress, each wave advanced further and ebbed less than its predecessor. History, to shift the metaphor, does not move forward in a straight line, but when skilled and determined rulers push, it does move forward (316).
Between 1984 and 1991, then, Huntington revised his assessment of the prospects for democracy, and offered a step-by-step programme for elite-led and controlled democratization. Here, as in the past, his work was a distillation of the wisdom of the age, albeit with inimitable cynical touches of his own, rather than an original contribution to the debate. The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century played the same role in the 1990s – that of summarizing the consensus that had been reached among conservative scholars in the area – that had been played by Political Order in Changing Societies in the 1960s.
Conclusion
We noted at the beginning of this book that modern theorists of democracy have always had a problem with the relationship between liberal democracy and capitalism. The tension between the two is fully to the fore in the work of Rustow, Linz and contemporary theorists of the transition to democracy, but it is resolved by the submersion of substantive issues concerning the reproduction of capitalism beneath an apparently purely procedural surface. Thus for Linz, the essence of democracy is fundamentally procedural. It is
a political system that legitimizes decisions on the basis of formal, procedural, legal correctness without distinction of content except respect for civil liberties and the equality before the law of all citizens, with no reference to substantive justice and no link to a system of ultimate values (Linz 1978: 48).
But at the same time, the real content of the procedures advocated is always to favourite capitalist interests, and persuade the propertyless majority and their political representatives to accept substantive limits compatible with capitalist reproduction.
Although Rustow was explicit that the adoption of democratic procedures were secondary to the real commitment to resolve a deep and meaningful conflict, he too opened the door to a separation between procedure and substance. This was so not only because subsequent writers would choose to emphasize the former at the expense of the latter, but also because he made no attempt to explore the likely nature of meaningful conflicts in the contemporary Third World and the prospects for their resolution. On the contrary, he assumed that conflicts over social and economic issues were in principle capable of negotiation by elites, and management through democratic institutions. As a result, he too left the relationship between such conflicts in the Third World and their resolution through the adoption of democratic procedures untheorized.
As the previous discussion indicates, a new approach to the question of democracy in the developing world emerged in the mainstream literature in the 1980s. It favoured elite-led political democracy of the kind envisaged by the theorists of political development, but differed from the earlier literature in that it declared itself opposed to the search for a general theory, emphasized its normative commitment to political democracy, directed more attention to the process of democratization than to its preconditions, and sought to specify the procedural steps by which democracy could be achieved. Finally, it distinguished throughout between structural context and contingent choice, with Karl's 'structured contingency' eventually striking the balance which expressed the link between them. In the early 1990s, the entrenchment of the new doctrine in the mainstream literature proceeded apace, notably with the foundation with the founding of the Journal of Democracy in 1990. Even at this early stage, a process of institutionalization of new orthodoxy was under way, reminiscent of that which had occurred in the early 1960s with the original protagonists of the political development literature. The place of the Ford Foundation and the New York SSRC from that period was taken by the US National Endowment for Democracy, founded in 1983, and the Hoover Institution (sponsors of the Diamond, Linz and Lipset project), and the Latin American Programme of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, launched in 1977 (chief sponsor of the O'Donnell, Schmitter and Whitehead initiative). The continuity with previous efforts was further reinforced by Lowenthal's definition of the goal of the Wilson Center as being to 'bring together the realms of academic and public affairs', and his reminder that Woodrow Wilson himself had combined idealism, commitment to democracy, scholarship, political leadership and international vision with 'interventionist attitudes and actions towards Latin America and the Caribbean' (O'Donnell, Schmitter and Whitehead 1986: ix). The Journal of Democracy may be considered the equivalent for the 1990s of the Studies in Political Development series launched in 1963.