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ways of conceptualizing democracy that help situate the argument I make in the remainder of the
dissertation: 1) Institutional Democracy, which sees democracy as a specific kind of
governmental regime; 2) Justificatory Democracy, which sees
democracy as a method of
legitimating rules and rulers; and 3) Radical Democracy, which sees democracy as an ideal that
is in tension with the state and other forms of concentrated power. After articulating the basic
weaknesses of institutional and justificatory invocations of democracy, I elaborate what I take to
be radical democracy’s core commitments and argue for the
merits of this approach to
democracy.
Institutional Democracy: Democracy as a Governmental Regime
First, democracy is conceptualized as a type of governmental regime. In this
conceptualization, democracy is defined a set of institutional arrangements, usually including
some combination of: competitive elections, universal suffrage, guarantees of basic civil
liberties,
constraints on executive power, and peaceful transfers of power (Dahl 1971;
Przeworski et al. 2000; Munck and Verkuilen 2002). Such a perspective can be traced to
Schumpeter’s (1948, 269) definition of democracy as an “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.” This is the dominant way of understanding democracy within
empirical political science and is a useful way of conceptualizing and distinguishing existing
political systems around the world. The widely used Polity IV data-set, for example,
enables
users to a) make meaningful interstate comparisons, identifying the level of democracy or
authoritarianism in governments around the world, and b) make meaningful intrastate
comparisons, identifying the level of democracy or authoritarianism in a single government over
time (Marshall and Jaggars 2010).
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While there is real value in being able to measure governmental regime type on the basis
of institutional arrangements, as a way of defining democracy it is deeply problematic
and leads
to serious normative difficulties. At times, this approach seems to follow the logic of: “We know
that the U.S. and Western Europe is democratic, so let’s identify the basic traits of these systems
of government and then look around the world for governments that share those characteristics.
We can then identify how democratic any government is in relation to our ideal types.” And,
indeed, according to this conceptualization of democracy some actually-existing governments,
including the United States, are “fully democratic” (a 10 out of 10) and have been since 1945,
when the data begins (Marshall and Jaggers 2010). This is problematic for two reasons. First,
there is no variation over time despite major social, economic and political changes that have had
real effects on the quality of
democracy in this country, including the Cold War and the Red
Scare, the Civil Rights Movement, the Watergate Scandal, and more recently, the Patriot Act and
the War on Terror. Second, the implicit assumption is viewing the U.S. as a “fully democratic”
country is that the democracy in the U.S. is as good, rich, or developed as it could possibly be.
To hold that the meaning of democracy is fully actualized in the governmental
regime ruling the
United States today is both theoretically absurd – consider, for example, that most people spend
the majority of the waking hours of their adult lives in workplaces that much more closely
resemble authoritarian governments than democratic ones – and, moreover, is unable to account
for widely-held concerns (briefly discussed earlier) about the representativeness and
accountability of our governmental institutions.
In addition, an influential framework within the empirical
study of democratization
argues convincingly that the transition to democratic regimes occurs when elites concede to
competitive elections as way of co-opting political opposition and avoiding more revolutionary
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changes in their society’s power structure (Acemoglu and Robinson 2006; Boix 2003). This
makes for a quite compelling framework for analyzing transitions from authoritarian regimes to
democratic ones. However, in doing so, it suggests that democratic regimes (i.e. regimes with
competitive elections and other institutional features discussed above) are
not
actually the
embodiment of “rule by the people,” but rather an effective way for elites to maintain political
and economic power in spite of democratizing and redistributive demands.
For all these reasons,
I conclude that democracy cannot and should not be reduced to set of governmental institutions.
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