Democracy and Association

Mark E. Warren

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780691050775, 9780691050355
• eBook ISBN: 9781400823925
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Tocqueville's view that a virtuous and viable democracy depends on robust associational life has become a cornerstone of contemporary democratic theory. Democratic theorists generally agree that issue networks, recreational associations, support circles, religious groups, unions, advocacy groups, and myriad other kinds of associations enhance democracy by cultivating citizenship, promoting public deliberation, providing voice and representation, and enabling varied forms of governance. Yet there has been little work to show how and why different kinds of association have different effects on democracy--many supportive but others minimal or even destructive.

This book offers the first systematic assessment of what associations do and don't do for democracy. Mark Warren explains how and when associational life expands the domain, inclusiveness, and authenticity of democracy. He looks at which associations are most likely to foster individuals' capacities for democratic citizenship, provoke political debate, open existing institutions, guide market activities, or bring democratic decision-making to new venues. Throughout, Warren also considers the trade-offs involved, noting, for example, that organizational solidarity can dampen internal dissent and deliberation even as it enhances public deliberation. Blending political and social theory with an eye to social science, Democracy and Association will draw social scientists with interests in democracy, political philosophers, students of public policy, as well as the many activists who fortify the varied landscape we call civil society. As an original analysis of which associational soils yield vigorous democracies, the book will have a major impact on democratic theory and empirical research.

Six

The Democratic Effects of Associational Types

THE DISTINCTIONS developed in the previous chapter begin to identity the democratic potentials of differently constituted and situated associations. The problem we are faced with, however, is the rather daunting complexity implied in these distinctions. Theory will not serve its purposes if it collapses into descriptive elaboration. Still, the reality is complex, and we do no favors to democracy if we oversimplify. From a theoretical perspective the point is to be precise enough to identify democratic potentials while general enough to see why associational kinds differ in these potentials. So what I attempt in this chapter is to strike a balance by developing a typology of associational kinds based on the differences that are important for democracy.

I proceed in two steps. In the first, I combine the distinctions from chapter 5 to produce a typology of associational types. In the second, more elaborate step, I relate these associational types to their potential democratic effects.

Dimensions of Associational Types

The first step is to combine the dimensions I developed in chapter 5 to generate possible associational types. With regard to the first dimension, ease of exit (which indicates the degree to which an association is voluntary), I rely on a somewhat limited range of possibilities, distinguishing whether ease of exit is relatively high, medium, or low. As I indicated in chapter 5, I am interested less in individuals’ chosen attachments to an association—which can be very powerful indeed—than I am in the extent to which an association controls resources necessary for security, livelihood, or identity (that is, whether there is a potential power relation) or the degree to which individuals are associated on the basis of biological necessary (as children are with their parents). That is, to what degree are the voluntary qualities of purely associative relations mitigated by other kinds of forces and circumstances? As it turns out, constraints on exit are highly variable, and a good number of associations include enough constraints to have an impact on democratic effects without exit being so costly as to make the association involuntary. So, including a category of “medium” ease of exit may seem like too fine a distinction—especiallyfrom the point of view of limiting complexity—but, in fact, many associations have this quality.

From my discussion of media embeddedness in chapter 5, I carry two more dimensions into the typology: the nature of the medium in which associative relations are embedded—social resources, money, or state power—and whether or not an association is vested in its medium. The final dimension consists of the six kinds of goods or purposes that have differing consequences for democratic effects, which I also discussed in chapter 5.

Even with simplifications in each dimension, these distinctions generate a large number of hypothetical types—more than can be handled intelligibly by discursive means. Instead, I present the results in table 6.1, which indicates the full range of hypothetical types generated by combining variations in these four dimensions.

Although I provide examples, these types are not descriptions of associations but rather ideal types generated by theoretical distinctions. I mean the notion of ideal type to be understood in Max Weber’s sense: as a theoretical construction generated for reasons of normative significance. Ideal types involve a selective accounting of those facets of reality that are significant according to some set of normative criteria—here, the dimensions of democracy I discussed in chapter 4. At the same time, ideal types presuppose a close relationship to structures of social action and reproduction—which I sought to accomplish by developing the ideal types according to the constraints and possibilities typical of the developed liberal democracies (chapters 3 and 5). Ideal types are not, however, causal claims, and therefore not directly explanatory. What they provide are theoretical expectations that relate to abstracted dimensions of associational relations. These expectations should, however, enable explanatory hypotheses that focus empirical investigations into causes. So what the typology does provide is a conceptual infrastructure that potentially relates these causes to normatively significant effects.

I emphasize this point because, in fact, there is no neat relationship between the types I present here and actual associations. Nonetheless, the typology is sufficiently detailed so that we can ask: Do associations exist that approximate these specific combinations of characteristics? Do they combine in ways that produce distinctive democratic possibilities or dangers? For this reason, I provide examples in table 6.1 of associations that might approximate these characteristics. My examples are simply illustrative, and they do not even begin to be exhaustive. Nor do I provide the empirical analysis that would be necessary to bridge the theory to actual cases—a project would go far beyond the purely theoretical aims of the analysis. The examples do, however, begin to show what a bridge between democratic theory and the terrain of association might look like.

Of the many hypothetical possibilities that exist, I can think of examples for fewer than one-third, or thirty-four types. In many cases, the empty locations represent theoretical impossibilities. For example, the cells representing membership in economic associations with low exit are empty because economic association can be made compulsory only through the use of directly coercive means, as in slavery or peonage. But in such cases, the medium of association would be political (in the sense of requiring direct coercion) rather than economic, where coercion may be present but mediated through market structures in ways that provide, on average, chances for exit. The most important example of this kind of relationship in the United States today is not slavery, but organized crime, although there remain cases in which workers—usually illegal immigrants—are subject to slavelike conditions.

There are other instances of theoretical improbability in table 6.1. Most of the nonvested social cells, for example, are empty because individuals usually regard the life into which they are socialized from an internal (that is, “vested”) point of view: they reproduce their culture, language, identity, and social relations by participating within them. The one important exception occurs when groups cultivate an oppositional consciousness among their members toward the culture that has defined them—as in gay and lesbian cultural groups, the Black Pride movement, and feminist consciousness-raising groups.

In still other cases, the dimensions are theoretically overdetermined, leaving some cells empty. Thus, the cells representing nonvested political associations with medium opportunities for exit are empty because the fact of nonvesting leaves associations with few resources for controlling exit up to the point of using extralegal violence. But such means of limiting exit also ten...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• One: Introduction
• Two: Approaches to Association
• Three: The Concept of Association
• Four: The Democratic Effects of Association
• Five: The Associational Terrain: Distinctions That Make a Difference
• Six: The Democratic Effects of Associational Types
• Seven: Conclusion: Democratic Associational Ecologies
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index