The State-Democracy Nexus

Conceptual Distinctions, Theoretical Perspectives, and Comparative Approaches

Jørgen Møller, Svend-Erik Skaaning

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138652835
• eBook ISBN: 9781317227434
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The great dilemma of democracy revolves around the state. Historically, the state has played a crucial role as enforcer of liberal democratic constitutions, but it has also been used by autocratic rulers to entrench their rule. The state is thus a two-edged sword: It can both be the guarantee of democratic rights and a tool that can be used to suppress such rights. One corollary of this is that the influence of state structures on democratic development depends on who holds government power. But the opposite observation can also be made, as governments play an important role in shaping the state apparatus. The state and the regime are thus intertwined.

Against this backdrop, this book presents a series of attempts – authored by influential experts such as Francis Fukuyama and Gerardo Munck – to disentangle the relationship between the state and political regimes. The contributions differ in terms of their particular theoretical and empirical focus. But they share the assumption that three criteria need to be observed to achieve a better understanding of the state-democracy nexus. First, it is valuable to distinguish conceptually between different aspects of the state. Second, the potential relationships between democracy and these attributes of state should be carefully theorized. Third, the consequent propositions must be interrogated using comparative approaches. This book was originally published as a special issue of Democratization.

The state-democracy nexus: conceptual distinctions, theoretical perspectives, and comparative approaches

David Andersen, Jørgen Møller and Svend-Erik Skaaning

Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

The notion that the state and the political regime are conceptually distinct but causally intertwined figures prominently in Western political theory. It is all the more surprising that the potential relationships between the state and democracy have tended to be neglected in empirical research. To systematically interrogate the state-democracy nexus, we argue that three criteria must be fulfilled. First, it is necessary to distinguish conceptually between three distinct aspects of stateness, namely, monopoly on violence, administrative effectiveness, and citizenship agreement. Second, the theoretical relationships between each of these attributes and democracy must be considered. Third, the consequent propositions must be assessed using comparative approaches. We place the different contributions to this special issue in this framework.

Introduction

The great dilemma of democracy revolves around the state. Political liberty can only be effective, and stable, when it is backed by the power of the officialdom. In the words of Dahl: “[i]n the absence of a state, highly undesirable forms of coercion would probably persist”.¹ Historically, the state has played a crucial role as enforcer of liberal democratic constitutions, a necessary condition for both the initial development and the subsequent stabilization of democracies.² However, the state has also been the foot under which political liberty – indeed, any kind of liberty – has most often been squashed as autocratic rulers have used the state apparatus to entrench their rule. In the eloquent phrase of Fried, the state is “the place where liberty's greatest enemies lurk”.³

As political theorists never tire of arguing, the state is thus a two-edged sword: it can both be the guarantee of democratic rights and a tool that can be used to suppress such rights.⁴ One corollary of this is that the influence of state structures on democratic rights depends on who holds government power, that is, it depends on the character of the regime. But the opposite observation can also be made. The government not only uses the state apparatus to achieve its goals, it also plays an important role in shaping this apparatus.⁵ The state and the regime are thus inextricably intertwined. Nonetheless, scholars of comparative democratization have so far done little to untie the knot.

This special issue presents a series of attempts to deal with different aspects of the relationship between the state and the political regime. In this introductory article, we set out to frame the debate with particular emphasis on how the state may affect democracy and the conceptual issues involved in understanding these relationships. Essentially, we see the state as an instrument that may be used to stabilize any political regime. Both democracies and autocracies therefore crave attention for those interested in understanding the relationships between the state and the regime. On this basis, one might be tempted to refer to a state-regime nexus in a more general sense. However, as the emphasis of this special issue first and foremost revolves around the way the state affects democracy, we refer to the state-democracy nexus and only look at autocracy as an adjunct – the residual category or even mirror image of democracy. More particularly, to interrogate the state-democracy relationship, we advocate that scholars employ a minimalist conception of democracy as a regime in which the key government offices are filled through contested elections.⁶ This provides a crisp distinction between autocracy and democracy that does not make attributes pertaining to the state part of the definition of either regime type.⁷

We argue that three criteria need to be observed to achieve a better understanding of the state-democracy nexus. First, whereas it makes sense to retain a simple minimalist definition of democracy to avoid conflating the regime with the state,⁸ we argue that it is necessary to distinguish between three different aspects of the overarching concept of stateness: state monopoly on the use of violence, administrative effectiveness of the state, and agreement on who are the citizens of the state.⁹ These are conceptually distinct properties that are likely to affect political regime developments in different ways.

As a consequence, our second criterion is that the relationship between each of these properties and democratic developments needs to be theorized in a thorough manner. The state-democracy nexus involves a number of potential relationships as we can pair regime transition and regime stability with each of the individual properties of the state. More often than not, the direction, size, and even the sign (positive or negative) of these associations are theoretically disputed and therefore need to be scrutinized empirically.

For this reason, our third criterion is that single-case studies and temporal snapshots are insufficient to fully comprehend the multi-dimensional relationship between the state and democracy. A comparative approach – including both cross-spatial and cross-temporal comparisons – is needed to reveal the relationship between the state and democracy. At the end of this introductory article, we place the contributions to this special issue in this tripartite framework.

Mapping definitions of the state and stateness

Most of the key concepts of social science are characterized by ambiguity. The concept of the state is no exception. The first scholar to use the term state in the modern sense was Hobbes, in the preface to The Leviathan published in 1651.¹⁰ It was this modern, European version of the state that Weber¹¹ famously defined as the entity successfully claiming a legitimate monopoly on violence within a specified territory. This definition includes modern institutions such as the military, a police force, a bureaucracy, and courts protecting a legal system. While the definition of the state continues to be debated, the Weberian conception has become so established that scholars are more or less forced to use it as a frame of reference for their own definitions. Indeed, a large number of scholars have simply retained the Weberian definition, albeit with some important elaborations that they argue were underspecified by Weber.¹²

Whereas the concept of the state is old, the concept of stateness was only introduced by Nettl in 1968 to facilitate the measurement of the degree to which a modern state exists and, thus, to bring the state into comparative political analysis.¹³ After a slow start, the concept of stateness has become hugely influential and, today, it is probably the most prominent concept in state-centred, empirical research on democratic transition and stability.

However, though referring to Weberian thoughts about the state, Nettl did not explicitly define stateness. One might therefore argue that the introduction of the concept of stateness has increased the conceptual confusion rather than diminished it. This is illustrated by the fact that scholars following Nettl mean very different things when referring to stateness. To illustrate, Evans¹⁴ defines stateness as “the institutional centrality of the state” in terms of the “extent to which private power can … be checked by public authority”, that is, he construes stateness solely as a matter of capacity. Elkins and Sides¹⁵ instead argue that “Understanding stateness therefore entails attention to the attitudes and identities of citizens, in particular their attachment to the state”, that is, they perceive stateness solely to be a matter of legitimacy or cultural acceptance. Finally, Bratton and Chang¹⁶ define stateness much ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. The state-democracy nexus: conceptual distinctions, theoretical perspectives, and comparative approaches
• 2. State or democracy first? Alternative perspectives on the state-democracy nexus
• 3. Exploring the relationship between infrastructural and coercive state capacity
• 4. State capacity and the paradox of authoritarian elections
• 5. Meritocratic administration and democratic stability
• 6. State capacity and political regime stability
• 7. States and democracy
• Index