History
Expansion of Democracy
The expansion of democracy refers to the broadening of political participation and rights within a society. This often involves extending voting rights to previously disenfranchised groups, such as women, minorities, and lower-income individuals. The expansion of democracy has been a key theme in many historical movements and has led to more inclusive and representative forms of government.
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3 Key excerpts on "Expansion of Democracy"
- Nancy Bermeo, Deborah J. Yashar(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
Notably, democracy was originally an exclusively elite, white, male affair; European democracies expanded voting rights only gradually – over decades if not generations. In contrast, by the time democracies spread to developing countries, universal suffrage was integral to democracy’s meaning. 40 Today’s democracies are more inclusionary (nearly all adult citizens have the right to vote), entail more rights (not just civil and political but some degree of social), and are more closely monitored for accountability, transparency, and corruption. Contemporary democracies require the construction and functioning of a broader range of democratic 40 Adam Przeworski, “Conquered or Granted: A History of Suffrage Extensions,” British Journal of Political Science 39, 2 (April 2009), 291–321. Parties, Movements, and the Making of Democracy 15 institutions. As such, democracy today is not just democracy “plus”; it is arguably a different conceptual beast. Contemporary transitions face the more demanding and dramatic challenge of extending all rights to all people at the moment of regime change. 41 Since democracy’s content and scope have expanded and led to higher thresholds, we should not continue to presume a mono-causal material pathway to democracy. Those seeking to match theory and empirics should consider that different waves of democracy might follow different pathways (given higher stakes and a more diverse set of stakeholders). Second, democracy’s expanded scope maps onto a more compressed timescale for later democratizers. Earlier democracies tended to experi- ence more episodic and gradual transitions, as emphasized by Capoccia and Ziblatt. In some cases, democratization involved centuries-long pro- cesses entailing the gradual weakening of central power as elites struggled against the monarchy and maneuvered to create elite-centered parlia- ments, a separation of powers, and the distinction between public and private power, among other changes.
eBook - PDFWrestling with Democracy
Voting Systems as Politics in the 20th Century West
- Dennis Pilon(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- University of Toronto Press(Publisher)
28 The political science penchant for debating these ideal-type defini-tions of democracy, justified either normatively or pragmatically, has produced many nuanced arguments for the different models. But it has largely failed to provide an effective guide for exploring questions of democratic origins or change. Those keen to explain voting system re-form need to look elsewhere. From Definition to Context: Historical Struggles over Democracy In a series of publications, Lawrence Whitehead has encapsulated the enduring problems associated with trying to “define” democracy: the concept is both historical and political. As he points out, attempts to “fix” what democracy means procedurally usually lead to absurd or meagre results. For instance, defining democracy as full suffrage, a common shorthand approach to the problem, would arguably discount Switzerland as a democracy until 1971 (when women were enfran-chised nationally) and the United States until 1965 (when the federal Voting Rights Act assured the voting rights of Blacks in the South), re-sults that hardly seem satisfactory. This focus on an inventory of “what democracy is” also ignores the more substantive aspects of democracy, like whether all citizens enjoy the social rights to participate effectively or even protect their civil and political rights. For Whitehead and oth-ers, concerns over the substance of democracy, rather than simply its procedures, explains the shifting parameters of the concept at different times and in different places. 29 As Cammack notes, “Liberal democracy is a conjunctural historical phenomenon, explicable in terms of its struc-tural conditions of emergence and reproduction, and their interaction with its own institutional dynamics.
eBook - PDFWho Elected Oxfam?
A Democratic Defense of Self-Appointed Representatives
- Laura Montanaro(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
These arguments for the capacity of representation to enable inclusion break down the conceptual opposition between representation and par- ticipation – an important advance – but largely remain committed to identifying political representation only in democracies with electoral democracy. Political theorists were by no means unique in this respect: they were following a general trend that was still little questioned within politics and political science. Indeed, most political scientists agreed with Schumpeter (1947): democracy is electoral representation (Huntington, 1991; Linz, 1978; Lipset, 1959; Pennock, 1979; Przeworski, 1991; Przeworski, Stokes, and Manin, 1999). In the wake of the cold war, the historical distinction between representative government and democracy collapsed, and thinkers began to argue that the sine qua non of modern democracy is election (Huntington, 1991). This was a procedural defini- tion of democracy, to be sure, but one that captured a common-sense understanding of the term. In his seminal work on democratization, Democracy Transformed: Self-Determination as Self-Legislation 23 Samuel Huntington (1991) argued that defining democracy in terms of elections is a minimal definition that captures the idea that non-demo- cratic systems are unelected and without widespread and meaningful voting rights. With this definition of democracy, the Athenian ideal of self-determination as self-rule gave way to an ideal of self-determination as a self-legislating people in which one is simultaneously the author and the subject of the laws, mediated by elected representatives and institu- tions (Bohman, 2007: 21). Electoral Democracy and Representation Defining modern democracy as electoral led to a preoccupation with formal procedures of authorization and accountability within nation- state–based representative democracies.
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