NGOs under Pressure in Partial Democracies

Kenneth A. Loparo, Chris van der Borgh

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780230368347
• eBook ISBN: 9781137312846
• Topic: Economia
• Subtopic: Economia dello sviluppo

Over the past decade, international human rights organizations and think tanks have expressed a growing concern that the space of civil society organizations around the world is under pressure. This book examines the pressures experienced by NGOs in four partial democracies: Guatemala, Honduras, Indonesia and the Philippines.

1

Pressures on Civil Society in Partial Democracies

1.1 Introduction

The focus of this study is on pressures experienced by NGOs in a particular type of regime: partial democracies. This chapter starts with a discussion about this category of political context. In the literature on democratization, partial democracies have been given different names, with most authors arguing that this type of regime should not be seen as “on its way” to a full or consolidated democracy, but rather a type of regime in its own right. There is, however, an ongoing debate about what makes a democracy partial. Where should the boundary between “full” democracies and “partial” democracies be drawn? What different subtypes of partial democracy can be distinguished? Using a broad definition of partial democracies, we understand them as regimes where civil and political rights are recognized in the constitution, but where the liberties are not fully guaranteed or respected in practice. In addition, we argue that in order to understand and analyze pressures on NGOs in partial democracies, it is necessary to take into account both the formal and informal sources of power in a society.

There is a growing literature addressing the phenomenon of partial democratization, but there is still relatively little knowledge about the space of civil society organizations in these regimes. Are some sectors under more pressure than others? Why is this case? How and when are the limitations and pressures experienced? And how do civil society organizations respond to such limitations? Before touching upon these questions in the empirical analyses of chapters 4 and 5, we have a closer look at the notion of civil society. This notion, despite the fact that it is notoriously slippery, still holds currency in the discourses of development and democratization. It is based on the normative claim that individuals have civil liberties and political rights, and that these should be protected by law. Thus, pressures on civil society organizations are considered a violation of these rights and the result of an unwillingness and/or incapacity of the state to guarantee their protection. As Edwards (2004) has noted, civil society simultaneously refers to the very existence of associations, the ideal of the “good society” and the interactions and debates in the public sphere. For this study, a definition of civil society that incorporates all these dimensions is too broad. We understand civil society in terms of their associational existence. We do, however, take into account normative claims made by governments and organizations about the very concept of civil society and the role that these discourses play in the perception of pressures. Furthermore, we use the term “arenas” to look at the different public spheres in which those organizations operate. Finally, we return to the discussion of how to explain pressures on civil society. In the Introduction, we addressed several existing explanations for pressures experienced by civil society and explained how our approach diverges from these existing focuses of research. Based on our framework, this chapter closes with a discussion of tentative explanations of pressures on political space in partial democracies.

1.2 Partly free, partly democratic?

The term “partial democracy” has emerged from the literature about the third wave of democratization, with many authors questioning the usefulness of a strict dichotomy between authoritarian and democratic regimes (Diamond, 2002; Croissant & Merkel, 2004; Epstein et al., 2006; Morlino, 2008).¹ Partial democracy refers to countries where some democratization has taken place, however it has not led to full democracies, but rather to “partial democracies” or “hybrid democracies” (Chandler, 2000, p. 9; Carothers, 2002; Morlino, 2008, p. 2). This implies that regimes are not transitioning toward democracy, but “got stuck somewhere in the assumed democratization process,” as Carothers (2002, p. 10) puts it. Different adjectives have been placed in front of the word democracy, including “fragile,” “defective,” “pseudo,” “hybrid,” “deficient” or “illiberal” (Zakaria, 1997; Chandler, 2000; Merkel, 2004; Morlino, 2008; Schmitter, 2010). In most definitions of partial democracies, the “duality of democratic regimes and constitutions” is emphasized (Blinder & Obando, 2004, in Pearce, 2006, p. 15). Pansters (2009, p. 4) points at the ambivalent relationship between the formal institutional and judicial frameworks on one hand, and the more informal political-cultural practices and rules on the other. Croissant and Merkel (2004, p. 2) argue that one of the defining characteristics of partial democracies is the existence of “de jure political rights, civil liberties, institutions of constitutionalism and the rule of law [while] de facto restrictions, usually informal ones, curb the effective working of the formal rules and significantly distort their value.” Thus, partial democracies have (some of) the features of democracies in combination with non-democratic features. This implies that looking at partial democracy requires us to look at the democratic institutions and to also look beyond them.

The concept of democracy itself is slippery and fundamentally contested, both in “real life” and in academia (Held, 1987, p. 3). Although there is no consensus on the concept and the ideal of democracy, most definitions of partial democracy take existing models of liberal democracy as a point of reference. This is a form of democracy that, in its most narrow form, was defined by Schumpeter as, “that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote” (quoted in Chandler, 2000, p. 8). Participation and (electoral) competition are central in this definition, and elections are usually considered the key test of democratic institutionalism (Chandler, 2000, p. 8). In addition to these criteria of representative democracy, the contemporary mainstream definitions generally also include civil liberties (especially the freedom of speech and association). It is argued that these liberties need to be guaranteed and protected under the rule of law in order to make competition and participation meaningful (Sorenson, 1993, p. 13).

This ideal of liberal democracy is an important benchmark for a broad range of actors in the countries selected for this study. These actors include international organizations, NGOs, popular movements, political parties and governments that adhere to the characteristics of this particular type of democracy. Thus, the practices and discourses of democracy that evolved in Western societies have been adopted on a broad scale or serve as a source of inspiration for groups. While the general characteristics of liberal democracy are an important benchmark for many groups involved, this is not to say that there is a consensus about the ideal form of democracy or the workings of existing democracy. Social and political actors can disagree about the best form of democracy (e.g. the rules of the electoral process or the architecture of democracy), while assessments of the actual workings of institutions and outcomes of the democratic process differ as well. For example, groups that support the democratic ideal may become disillusioned and claim “more” or “better” liberal democracy, or a “different” or “direct,” “participatory” or “popular” democracy. At the same time, conservative sectors in society – for instance, economic or religious elites – may tacitly or openly resist more democratic rules of the game. Hence, liberal democracy and its claims for transparency, civil liberties, and political participation are the main point of reference in discussions and practices of democratization found in the countries under study. However, it still is a contested idea and practice.

In the academic literature, the concept of partial democracy suggests that it is possible to objectively assess democracy, counting some as “established” or “full” democracies and others as “partial” democracies. Such a qualification is, however, never value free. It is on the basis of particular normative criteria about what democracy should look like that selected empirical manifestations of the actual democracy are assessed (Dahl, 1989, p. 7). In Dahl’s view, democracy is an ideal that has not been reached in reality: “no large system in the real world is fully democratized.” Polyarchy or polyarchical democracy is the term he uses for democracies as they truly exist (Dahl, 1971, p. 8). A polyarchy is a political order characterized by citizenship of a high proportion of the adult population and the rights of the citizens “to oppose and vote out the highest officials in the government” (Dahl, 1989, p. 220). Dahl identifies seven institutions that must all exist in order to qualify as a polyarchy: elected officials, free and fair elections, inclusive suffrage, the right to run for office, freedom of expression, alternative information, and associational autonomy (ibid., p. 221). Dahl argues that regimes can mature over time into full polyarchies, acknowledging that this is likely to be a long process. Interestingly, according to Dahl (1971) the first moves of democratization will be in the direction of greater inclusiveness of citizens within the political process and/or the opening up of spaces for contestation without leading to the ideal type of “full-polyarchy.” The third wave of democratization indeed led to the widespread recognition that new democracies did not necessarily meet the ideal type of polyarchy. This provided reason to make a distinction between democratic transition and consolidation; the first phase including the introduction of new democratic institutions and holding elections; the second implying the routinization and internalization of democratic practice in social, institutional and psychological life (Chandler, 2000, p. 8).

However, as mentioned, the assumption that countries are gradually moving forward toward full democracy is increasingly questioned. The idea that the process may actually stop somewhere “in between” the old regime and the democratic ideal type became more widely accepted. A common way to deal with the in-between type of democracy was to begin to distinguish “degrees” of democratization. A well-known example of this is the Freedom House Index. This index makes a distinction between electoral democracies that are solely based on the existence of a limited number of political rights, and liberal democracies that also take into account civil liberties, the functioning of the government and the rule of law (Freedom House, 2012a, pp. 29, 34–35). Countries that are classified as electoral democracies are thus not automatically liberal democracies. For the measure of liberal democracy, Freedom House uses a series of indicators, covering the fields of political rights and civil liberties and scoring these two fields on a scale of one (highest) to seven (lowest).² The average of these scores determines whether countries are scored as either free (1,0–2,5), not free (5,5–7,0) or partly free (3,0–5,0) (ibid., p. 33).³

Merkel (2004, p. 35) argues that the Freedom House data on which the organization bases its rankings are “sufficient for trend reports and the development of first hypotheses, but for in-depth comparative analyses with a small sample, they are not refined enough.” Adding more complexity to the Freedom House model, he aims to identify the different ways in which states can have developed or regressed into partial democracies. He argues that liberal democracies are both internally and externally “embedded.” The “external embeddedness” of democracy refers to factors that are conducive to democratization: the socio-economic context; the civil society; and the degree of international integration (Merkel, 2004, pp. 45–48). With regard to the “internal embeddedness” Merkel refers to several “partial regimes” that together constitute – as a kind of building block structure – an “embedded democracy.” These partial regimes (a term that should not be confused with partial democracy) are the electoral regime, political rights, civil rights, the division of power and horizontal accountability, and the effective power to govern (Merkel, 2004, pp. 37–41). The electoral regime is “a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for democratic governing” (ibid., p. 38). The electoral regime needs to be “embedded” in the other regimes. Working democracy thus requires all these different regimes (ibid., 2004, p. 48). Together they guarantee the “normative and functional existence” of democracies. Merkel argues that, “if one partial regime is damaged in such a way that it changes the entire logic of a constitutional democracy, one can no longer speak of an intact embedded democracy” (ibid., p. 48). Depending on the partial regime that is (most) affected, different types of defective democracy can be distinguished (ibid.). Merkel distinguishes three: “exclusive democracy” that lacks the right to universal suffrage; “domain democracy” where certain domains of power are not in the hands of elected representatives; and (the most common type) “illiberal democracy” where the constitutional state is incomplete or damaged (ibid., p. 49).

The Freedom House Index on liberal democracy and Merkel’s categorization of defective democracies are based on broader definitions than the notion of Dahl’s polyarchy. What distinguishes them from Dahl’s definition is that they take into account the internal organization of the state, while Merkel also refers to the very capacity of the state – in particular to the existence of a functioning rule of law (Bogaards, 2009, p. 408).⁴ Indeed, liberal democracy assumes the existence of a state that can protect civil liberties and political rights of its citizens. And, as Tilly (2007, p. 16) asserts, “some of the Freedom House political rights and civil liberties [ . . . ] would mean nothing without substantial state backing.” In many young democracies, the nature and characteristics of the state are substantially different from the states in which (and in relation to which) liberal democracy developed. Tilly (2007) therefore emphasizes that an analytical distinction should be made between degrees of state capacity, on one hand, and the degree of democracy on the other.⁵ In Tilly’s definition, democracy is about, “a class of relations between state and citizens,” while statehood is about the capacity of the state to implement or enforce its political decisions (Tilly, 2007, pp. 13–15). Relating these two dimensions leads to four ideal typical crude regime types, depicted in Figure 1.1: high-capacity democratic, low-capacity democratic, high-capacity authoritarian and low-capacity authoritarian (ibid., p. 19). This is a crude categorization, and one might see the two axes as continua so that countries can be positioned anywhere in the field that is formed (while their position in this field is always subject to change). Obviously, the two variables used only give a rough indication of state capacity and degree of democracy. Just like democratic “deficits” come in different forms (Merkel, 2004, p. 49), state capacity is a broad category subsuming different types of weakness. States can be weak in different sectors. For example, some may be strong on military capacity and weak on service delivery, while others are weak on both (Rice & Patrick, 2008). The type of regime represented in this study can be placed somewhere in the middle of this figure: medium-state capacity, and partially democratic.⁶

Degree of democracy State capacity	Authoritarian	Democratic
Stronger states	High-capacity undemocratic	High-capacity democratic
Weaker states	Low-capacity undemocratic	Low-capacity democratic

Figure 1.1 State capacity and democracy

Source: Adapted from Tilly (2007, p. 19).

The distinction made by Tilly is useful for this study because public politics takes a different form in the different regime types. Tilly uses the term “public politics” to describe a broad range of transactions between states and citizens that “visibly engage state power and performance” which includes, among other things, “elections, legislative activity, taxation, as well as different forms of collective contention” (Tilly, 2007, p. 12).⁷ In the lower capacity democratic regimes, the state is relatively weak. This is often accompanied by a higher involvement of illegal and semi-legal actors in public politics and usually higher levels of lethal violence (ibid., p. 20). In these contexts the number of conflicts in which the state is only “peripherally involved” is generally higher (ibid., pp. 163–164). Hence, the public sphere in weak- and medium-capacity democratic states differs fundamentally from that in strong-capacity democratic states. This position of countries in the “capacity-democracy space” is not fixed, but rather, very likely to change. Regimes can both democratize and de-democratize; while state capacity can increase or decrease.

In this study, in line with the current understandings of democratic transition and consolidation, partial democracies are viewed as a separate regime type. They are not necessarily on their way toward the presumed ideal of full liberal democracy. In addition, there are different ways in which a democracy can be defective as conceptualized by Merkel. Clearly, the strength of the state is an important factor in explaining these defections, which is made explicit in Tilly’s two-by-two model that takes degrees of democracy and state capacity as variables. However, Tilly (2007, p. 13) emphasizes that in order to understand how (virulent) conflicts play out in society one also needs to look beyond state capacity and take into account the prevailing non-state forms of power and the “coalitions, rivalries, and confrontations among major political actors outside of the state.”⁸ The existence of different sources of power, both state and non-state, that influence and “contend with each other” (Migdal, 2001, p. 12) need to be taken into account. Religious groups, multinational corporations or national economic elites can build up power positions that challenge or capture the power of the state. Furthermore, non-state actors, like militias, warlords or organized criminal groups can also undermine or capture the state by accumulating power (coercive or other). Non-state groups, or in Tilly’s words (2007, p. 139) “autonomous power centres,” do not merely challenge the state from the outside. Rather, they also cooperate with or control agencies of the state itself. Thus, elites may maintain or build up powerful positions in society, while they relate in complex ways to the state apparatus. Writing about Southeast Asia, Case (2009, p. 256) argues that the new democracies (like Indonesia and the Philippines) “merely reconfigure old patterns of authoritarian rule” in which new and old elites defend “reserve domains” using patronage networks. They are able to do this in a variety of ways, either by controlling political parties and legislative bodies, as well as by capturing positions in bureaucracies. Similar arguments have been made about the Honduran and Guatemalan cases, where new elites such as drug traders and international corporations have entered the political scene. This can readily lead to new, and often competing and less stable, interest constellations (Briscoe & Rodriguez Pellecer, 2010).

This also draws attention to the fundamentally different ways of “doing politics” in different regime types. The importance of political culture and the dominant norms and values in a society are widely acknowledged to influence democratization processes and the working of the state as such. Writing about Latin America, Sznajder and Roniger (2003, p. 325) argue, “new constituencies committed to the ideal of rights have emerged,” adding that “this does not obliterate the reliance on political mediation and clientelism.” Claus Offe argues that the “copied and transplanted institutions that lack the moral and cultural infrastructure on which the ‘original’ can rely, are likely to yield very different and often counter-intentional results” (in Chandler, 2000, p. 9). In a similar vein, based on their work on Africa, Chabal and Daloz (2006, p. 29) argue, “there is little political institutionalization in the sense that Weber defined it and that whatever institutionalization has taken place follows the logic of informal political relations that prevailed afterwards.” They argue that studying the “actual exercise of power in those countries [ . . . ] needs to take into account the personalized concept of politics.”⁹ In this regard, studies about (neo-)patrimonialism and patronage have pointed at the fact that different forms of domination (the patrimonial or “personalized” form and the legal-rational form) are interwoven (Erdmann & Engel, 2007; Guliyev, 2011). This is of particular importance for partial democracies where personalized forms of politics can be very important. Chabal and Daloz (2006, p. 29) argue that democracy is permeated by these forms of politics and that in the case of Africa democratic institutions “have adopted the logic and rigors of clientelism and not, as so often proclaimed, the reverse.” While an important characteristic of partial democracies is the coexistence and interweaving of different forms of power, this takes place “wit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Pressures on Civil Society in Partial Democracies
• 2. Pressures on Political Space of NGOs
• 3. National Contexts: Partial Democratization and Civil Society
• 4. Political Space under Pressure: Trends and Patterns
• 5. Responses to Pressures: Defending, Claiming and Negotiating Political Space
• Conclusion
• Annex 1 – Overview of Interviews Conducted
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index