Democracy and Democratization in Comparative Perspective - RPD

Conceptions, Conjunctures, Causes, and Consequences

Jørgen Møller, Svend-Erik Skaaning

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136188817
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

This book provides an introduction to democratic theory and empirical research on democracy and democratization. The book first examines conceptions of democracy from the origins in ancient Greece to the present day, then tracks when and where modern democracy has developed. On this basis, the book reviews the major debates and schools of thought dealing with domestic and international causes and consequences of democratization. Based on a systematic distinction between minimalist and maximalist definitions of democracy, the book provides a comprehensive and critical assessment of existing theories. Furthermore, using a comparative, historical perspective, it not only sketches the development in the conceptions of democracy and the corresponding empirical reality but also discusses whether causal relationships differ across periods. Finally, the book documents the way in which all of this has been reflected by the development within the literature. In doing so, the book offers a coherent framework, which students and scholars can use to grasp the literature on democracy and democratization as a whole.

Democracy and Democratization in Comparative Perspective will be of interest to students of political science, democracy and democratization, comparative politics, political theory, and international relations.

Conceptions Democracy – what is it?

Jørgen Møller and Svend-Erik Skaaning

Conceptions of democracy in ancient Greece

DOI: 10.4324/9780203083994-1

Yet a term that means anything means nothing. And so it has become with ‘democracy’, which nowadays is not so much a term of restricted and specific meaning as a vague endorsement of a popular idea.

(Dahl 1989: 2)

These are the words of the most prominent scholar working on democracy after World War II. His message is indicative of the debate surrounding the concept of democracy. Democracy offers an apt example of what Walter Bryce Gallie has referred to as ‘essentially contested concepts’: concepts that are characterized by disagreement regarding the fundamental meaning. In fact, Gallie (1956: 184) suggested that democracy is the essentially contested concept par excellence, i.e., democracy is a construction about which there will never be agreement because it is multidimensional, abstract, qualitative, internally complex, and evaluative (see also Held 2006: 2).

There is definitely something in this; but social science requires clearly defined concepts (Sartori 1970). To determine if a given country is a democracy or the extent to which it is democratic, we must know what democracy is (and is not). This is also the case if we are interested in studying causes and consequences of democracy. The minimum requirement is therefore the ability to present one or more definitions of democracy. We return to this in Chapter 3, where we discuss some of the definitions frequently employed in empirical democratization research and order them in a typology.

Our purpose here and in Chapter 2 is somewhat different. In these two chapters, we outline the contours of some of the most significant conceptions of democracy through the ages. The structure and content of our discussion of conceptions of democracy is inspired by three central bodies of works dealing with this issue. The first is the influential overview provided by David Held (2006) in Models of Democracy. The second is the work of Robert A. Dahl, who has done more than anyone else to create clarity about what characterizes and justifies democratic rule. The third is the works of Mogens Herman Hansen on democracy in classical Athens and beyond.

Dahl, Held, and Hansen all situate the origins of democracy as both idea and practice in ancient Greece. Indeed, the most important theorists trace democracy back to the ancient Greeks.¹ This, therefore, is where we begin. More particularly, it seems pertinent to start with an excerpt from one of the most famous speeches of all times, the great Athenian statesman Pericles’ Funeral Oration – or, more precisely, Thucydides’ report of it:

It has the name democracy because government is in the hands not of the few but of the majority. In private disputes all are equal before the law; and when it comes to esteem in public affairs, a man is preferred according to his own reputation for something, not, on the whole, just turn and turn about, but for excellence, and even in poverty no man is debarred by obscurity of reputation so long as he has it in him to do some good service to the state.

(Hansen 1999: 73)

This passage is often used to summarize the Athenian understanding of democracy. In a historical perspective, the regime and ideology that Pericles is describing is nothing less than revolutionary. Throughout most of recorded history, human societies have been characterized by political hierarchy. This has generally assumed either the form of rule by a single person (monarchy/tyranny) or rule by the few (aristocracy/oligarchy). Some 2600 years ago, however, a number of Greek city-states began breaking down the monopoly on power held by the narrow elite. In Democracy and Its Critics, Dahl (1989) accordingly describes how the very idea of the ‘rule of the many’ emerged in ancient Greece, more specifically in Athens. Dahl refers to this as the first democratic transformation.

The understanding of liberty in the ancient polis

But what were the ancient ideas about democracy? It is often asserted that the classical understanding of democracy differs fundamentally from the modern, liberal view (see Sartori 1987: 158).² This claim is first and foremost founded in the understanding of liberty. Benjamin Constant (1988 [1819]), in his renowned lecture entitled The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns (De la liberté des Anciens comparée à celle des Modernes), underlined that the citizens in the Greek city-states were only free in the sense that they participated in the political decision-making process. In other words, citizens were liberated by their political participation, regardless of which chains the decisions of the majority placed upon them (see also Berlin 2002 [1995]: 283–284; Fried 2007).

According to this view, one could also say that the citizens of the polis had no experience with civil liberties or the rule of law. The critics of Athenian democracy often refer to Socrates’ trial in order to illustrate this point. Not only is this one of the most renowned trials in human history due to Plato’s ‘Socratic dialogues’; Socrates was actually sentenced to death for having led the youth astray, that is, for expressing his opinions. As such, the case arguably demonstrates the distance to the modern ideal regarding freedom of speech.

Inspired by Constant, Isaiah Berlin (2002 [1958]) drew a distinction between the ‘positive’ understanding of liberty in Antiquity and the ‘negative’ understanding of liberty among classical liberals. Whereas Berlin very much maintains Constant’s modern liberty (the negative conception), without noticing it he alters Constant’s ancient liberty (the positive conceptions). To Berlin, the positive conception of liberty demands not so much that people participate in politics but rather that they are able to control themselves, restrain their passions, and realize themselves via their reason (Hansen 2010d: 315–318). This is in contrast to negative liberty, which Berlin identified in the English liberal tradition, where liberty is defined as the absence of physical coercion, in particular from officialdom. According to Berlin, the negative sense of liberty (i.e., negative liberty as an ideal) was entirely absent in the Greek city-states, even if the citizens did occasionally enjoy genuine personal liberty.

The famous critique forwarded by Constant and Berlin against the antique understanding of liberty has not gone unchallenged, however. Others have emphasized how the Greek city-states produced a political idea closely resembling the modern understanding of democracy. Hansen (1989) thus points out that the Greek democracies celebrated two ideals: liberty (eleutheria) and equality (isonomia), and that liberty was paramount to equality. Among other sources, he draws upon Aristotle’s famous description of the principles of democracy. This deserves to be quoted at length, as it is such a central factor in the disagreement over the respective understandings of democracy in ancient Greece:

The basis of a democratic state is liberty; which, according to the common opinion of men, can only be enjoyed in such a state – this they affirm to be the great end of every democracy. One principle of liberty is for all to rule and be ruled in turn, and indeed democratic justice is the application of numerical not proportionate equality; whence it follows that the majority must be supreme, and that whatever the majority approve must be the end and the just. Every citizen, it is said, must have equality, and therefore in a democracy the poor have more power than the rich, because there are more of them, and the will of the majority is supreme. This, then, is one note of liberty which all democrats affirm to be the principle of their state. Another is that a man should live as he likes. This, they say, is the privilege of a freeman; and, on the other hand, not to live as a man likes is the mark of a slave. This is the second characteristic of democracy, whence has arisen the claim of men to be ruled by none, if possible, or, if this is impossible, to rule and be ruled in turns; and so it coincides with the freedom based upon equality.

(Aristotle 2008 [350 BC]: 280)

Naturally, however, the crux of the matter is what liberty meant in the Athenian context. The problem is that the Greek eleutheria would appear to have been a rather vague term without a particularly well-specified meaning³ (see also Held 2006: 16). On one level it denoted being free as opposed to being a slave, that is, a question of status. Within the democratic sphere, however, the word had other meanings. Hansen (1989: 10–11) notes that, in the quote, Aristotle presents eleutheria as two rather different things: the right to participate politically and the right to freedom from political repression, including the right to arrange one’s life according to one’s own choices. The latter meaning is very close to Berlin’s negative sense of liberty.

Pericles’ Funeral Oration likewise indicates that democracy was associated with the tripod of equality, liberty, and tolerance; three values that operated in the private and public sphere alike. As regards the notion of personal liberty, it was first and foremost freedom of speech and legal protection that distinguished the democracies from the oligarchies of the day. The Athenian statesman Demosthenes provides a telling example of the opposing perspectives on the freedom of speech when pointing out that while the Athenians had the right to criticize democracy and praise the Spartan constitution, the Spartans were unable to praise any constitution other than their own. And when Demosthenes was accused of non-democratic behavior by his opponent Aischines, because he had arrested an Athenian without basis in any decree adopted by the people, the emphasis was on the rule of law (Hansen 1999: 77).

In arguing the case for a negative conception of freedom in democratic poleis, Hansen also makes reference to Socrates’ trial. While this was clearly an attack upon free speech, he sees the furore surrounding the trial as illustrating how the protection of personal liberties was an actual ideal. It was just that it was not always respected, which has also been the case in many modern democracies. What is more, the trial occurred in a period of upheaval for Athens, shortly after a brutal civil war, which makes the transgression part of a more general anomaly. Finally, we can observe that Aristotle’s and Plato’s famous criticisms of democracy owed much to their criticism of what amounts to a negative conception of liberty. In fact, Plato’s outright dismissal of democracy seems to be a consequence of his understanding of the democratic freedom as the freedom of each citizen to do as he pleases (i.e., as negative liberty). Why would particularly Plato but also Aristotle spend so much effort denouncing the negative conception of freedom in the democracies of the day, had this not been something that existed on the ground?⁴

Note in this connection that Constant actually recognized that one antique exception to his scheme existed, namely classical Athens, where the liberty of the moderns – the right to live one’s life as one pleased – was indeed recognized (Hansen 2010b: 6, 13). But Constant took Sparta, where no such negative liberty was recognized, as the symptomatic model of the classical polis, regarding Athens as an aberration. Ignoring Constant’s distinction between Athens and Sparta, Berlin, on the other hand, claimed that even the Athenians did not appreciate negative liberty.

Direct democracy

One area where contemporary democracy undoubtedly distinguishes itself from the democracy of Antiquity is regarding our use of elected representatives, who appoint a government and pass legislation. The modern representative model would have seemed foreign to a citizen in ancient Greek democracies.⁵ The democracy of the city-states was a direct democracy. All of the citizens had the right to participate in the popular assembly and debate political decisions. The basic ideal was for all (male) citizens to participate in the exercise of government and the legislative process, meaning that democracy was deliberately carried out by amateurs. None of the officeholders could be professional, since, if professionals are involved, they will always manage to take over and transform democracy into an oligarchy (Hansen 1999: 236, 308). The Greeks knew nothing about the ‘career politician’ – the politician making his living from politics – although statesmen such as Themistocles, Pericles, and Demosthenes dominated the Athenian polis in different periods.

In practice, maintaining direct democracy without an administrative apparatus was impossible. Nevertheless, in order to be able to respect the amateur principle as much as possible, the Greeks applied an approximation in the form of a rotation principle based on drawing lots. In every part of the civil service, the citizens took turns attending to the public offices. These offices were usually held for a relatively brief period of time, and the appointment was normally decided by lots drawn among the candidates who volunteered. Athenian democracy was thus a ‘democracy by sortition’, where the citizens took turns ruling one another. Indeed, the core characteristic of Greek popular rule is to be found in the use of lot, which was seen as the only genuinely democratic principle. Tellingly, Aristotle categorizes the elections of magistrates as oligarchic (Manin 1997: 41–42; Russell 2004 [1946]: 183–184).

The amateur principle did of course have its limits. The appointment of generals (strategoi), for example, was not subject to the rotation principle. Here, skill was the ultimate requirement, particularly in times of war. But the pivot of the democratic polis was the absolute political equality of the citizens as guaranteed by direct participation in legislative and court proceedings (Held 2006: 27). The modern distinction between state and society in general and civil servants and citizens in particular was therefore not especially crisp in the Greek city-states. Some scholars have even argued that there was no general distinction drawn between citizens, politicians, and civil servants (e.g., Holmes 1979). As Held (2006: 14–15) writes:

The principle of government was the principle of a form of life: direct participation. And the process of government itself was based on … free and unrestricted discourse, guaranteed by isegoria, an equal right to speak in the sovereign assembly … Accordingly, the ancient democratic polis can be thought of as an attempt to enable men of different backgrounds and attributes to express and transform the understanding of the good through political interaction … Decisions and laws rested, it was claimed, on conviction – the force of the better argument – and not mere custom, habit or brute force.

Other scholars have argued that – in practice – the polis of Athens operated with distinction between public and private eerily similar to modern practice (e.g., Hansen 1998: 86–95). However, this distinction was not founded in the existence of individual human rights as it is in the modern liberal conception (see Holmes 1979: fn. 118). In that sense, the ancient Greek understanding of democracy differed significantly from the modern liberal understanding, which allows private persons to remain private persons as political participation is voluntary (Holmes 1995: 31). Modern representative democracy, so to speak, makes no demands on the political vigilance of citizens.⁶ Indeed, the negative conception of liberty expressly includes the freedom not to get involved in politics (Holmes 1979, 1982). Instead, modern democracy rests on a much more indirect control principle, namely that the citizenry have the right to elect and dismiss the government should they wish to do so.

In this context, it is telling that the Greek word for private person, idiōtēs,⁷ would attain the meaning ‘uneducated or ignorant’ (hence the English ‘idiot’) in late vulgar Latin. For the Greeks, political participation defined democracy. Democracy had no meaning without participation, and this is probably where the observations made by Constant and Berlin about the distinction between ancient liberty or positive liberty as opposed to the modern negative liberty have most purchase (cf. Posner 2003: 144). Notice in this connection that Constant’s distinction was anchored in the argument that modern liberty only became possible as a consequence of the disjunction between state and society following the Reformation. In Antiquity, where no such dividing line existed, individual rights against the encroachment of the state on society made little or no sense (Holmes 1982: 54–56).

A controversial ideal

Instead of distinguishing between state and society, the Greeks distinguished between public and private. What was public concerned the polis – a community of citizens (politai) only. Thus a basic di...