Democratization
Democratization
EXPLANATIONS OF DEMOCRATIZATION
Democracy has widely become the norm within the international community. To promote democracy around the world is not only a key goal of international organizations such as the World Bank, but it is also on the foreign policy agenda of many European and North American countries. Nevertheless, democracy is a notoriously vague and encompassing term. It is often used as a synonym of whatever is desirable in a state, such as good governance and democratic values of elites and citizens. Illustrative of the lack of consensus about its meaning are the results of a survey finding that 150 different studies used more than 550 subtypes of democracy (Collier and Levitsky 1997).
CONCEPTS
Despite this lack of consensus, most political scientists and policy makers use the minimalist definition of democracy described in Robert A. Dahl’s 1971 book, Polyarchy. According to this definition, democracy is a system of government in which citizens choose their political leaders during periodic free and fair elections, thereby giving those leaders the right to rule after the elections. There are two main theoretical dimensions of democratization: competition among political parties for the people’s vote on the one hand, and inclusive suffrage and political participation on the other hand. South Africa’s apartheid government (1948–1994) was competitive but not inclusive, because the vast (black) majority was excluded from the right to vote. Regimes in the People’s Republic of China and North Korea are inclusive but not competitive, because one political party dominates political life completely. Only regimes with both competition and inclusive suffrage can be classified as a (minimal) democracy.
Democratization is the process whereby a country adopts a democratic regime. Dankwart A. Rustow (1970) distinguished four different phases. During the first phase national borders, national unity, and a coherent national identity must emerge, before democratization can occur. The second “preparatory” phase is characterized by political conflicts between old and new elites in which the new ones demand more influence in national politics. During the “decision phase,” key actors, such as the political parties, must accept a fundamental set of democratic rules and practices. Finally, basic democratic institutions and the rules of the game are established in the “habituation phase.” Each phase is the result of different causal processes. Given their different causes, it is useful to separate them.
Moreover, scholars often distinguish the phases of “transition” to and “consolidation” of democracy from each other. Transitions are defined as the interval between the dissolution of the old regime and the installation of a new regime, while the essence of consolidation is in defining and fixing the core rules of democratic competition. It should be noted, however, that there is a huge debate about the exact meaning of both terms in the democratization literature (Schedler 1998).
TRENDS OF DEMOCRATIZATION
Democratization is a relatively recent phenomenon. Although some Greek city-states had democratic characteristics, modern—or minimal—democracy dates only from the late nineteenth century. Since the publication of Samuel P. Huntington’s influential 1991 study of democratization, The Third Wave, scholars have come to take for granted the notion that the spread of democracy has come in waves. A wave of democratization is defined as a group of transitions from nondemocratic to democratic regimes that occurs within a specified period and that significantly outnumbers transitions in the opposite direction.
During the so-called first wave of democratization between 1893 and 1924, New Zealand, Australia, the United States, and many countries in western Europe made a transition to democracy. The regime changes to authoritarianism during the second reverse wave after 1924 reflected the rise of the ideologies of communism and fascism. A second short wave began after World War II (1939–1945) and continued until approximately 1960. Allied occupation promoted the installation of democratic institutions in West Germany, Japan, and Finland. Costa Rica, Chile, and Uruguay were the Latin American states that adopted a democratic system during this period. There is no clear second reverse wave, but the 1960s and 1970s can better be described as an intermezzo, in which transitions to both nondemocratic and democratic regimes occurred (Doorenspleet 2000). In this period, for example, Colombia and Venezuela became democratic. By contrast, the polarized Chilean democracy was overthrown by a military coup led in 1973 by General Augusto Pinochet (1915–2006). Military coups in Uruguay and Argentina ended democracy in these countries as well.
The third wave began in southern Europe in the 1970s in Portugal, Greece, and Spain. Then it spread to Latin America—to Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, El Salvador, Uruguay, Honduras, and Brazil. This wave of democratization also affected some Asian countries in the late 1980s, such as the Philippines and South Korea. The so-called fourth wave since 1989 was overwhelming and global. At the end of the 1980s, the wave swept through Eastern Europe. The 1990s saw widespread rapid collapse of nondemocratic regimes in Africa, and more than a dozen democracies emerged. The decade after the cold war was a fruitful period for democratization around the world.
EXPLANATIONS OF DEMOCRATIZATION
Nevertheless, many countries remained authoritarian. So, why do some countries democratize whereas others do not? According to modernization theories, which became dominant in the late 1950s, democratization is less likely in poor countries. If less-developed countries are not able to undergo this political modernization process, it is caused by a low level of socioeconomic development in the country. Each less-developed country would have to follow the same path already traversed by the now developed and democratic countries. After the publication of Seymour Martin Lipset’s 1959 article, “Some Social Requisites of Democracy,” many statistical studies showed that there was indeed a positive correlation between development and democracy. India, with its democratic regime and low economic development, is always brought up as an important exception to this general pattern, though. Moreover, studies of the 1990s show that modernization theory can explain democratic consolidation, but not transitions to democracy (Przeworski and Limongi 1997).
As a reaction and alternative to the modernization approach, the dependency and world-system theories emerged in the early 1970s in Latin America (Bollen 1983). The underdevelopment of Latin America was attributable to its reliance on the export of primary products to the industrial states of the capitalist system, and it was argued that Latin America had been turned into a satellite of the capitalist metropolises of Europe and North America. This approach states that a country’s position in the world system, located in either the dominant rich core or impoverished subordinate periphery, is an important determinant of democracy. According to this approach, if a country is not able to become democratic, this is due to external factors—rather than internal domestic factors.
In addition to economic development and international dependency, cultural influences, ethnic divisions, the type of religion, and historical institutional arrangements have been mentioned by researchers as important structural explanations of democratization. According to actor-oriented theorists, however, regime transitions are not determined by structural factors, but are shaped by what principal political actors do as well as by when and how they do so. In their 1986 study Transitions from Authoritarian Rule, Guillermo O’Donnell, Philippe C. Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead abandoned their earlier structuralist perspective and began to focus on the role of elites. They emphasized that elite dispositions, calculations, and pacts largely determine whether or not an opening to democracy will occur at all. Strategic interaction between elites from the state (political parties, the military, and political leaders) and elites from the society (social movements, civil society groups, and intellectuals) establishes the mode of transition and the type of regime that emerges afterward. In “transitions from below” mounting popular pressures and mass mobilization eventually lead to regime change, while in “transitions from above” political and military rulers respond to crises by introducing democratic reforms whose timing and substance they hope to control.
Since the early 1990s, democratization scholars emphasize that the described approaches complement rather than contradict each other, and suggest that a comprehensive theory of democratization should include not only structural but also actor-oriented factors.
DEMOCRATIZATION AND WAR
Democratization processes seldom follow an easy, smooth path. On the contrary, violent conflicts and wars often occur in democratizing states. Conflict can be prevented more easily in very nondemocratic regimes on the one end (because these regimes are willing and able to suppress dissent) and in democratic regimes on the other end (because these regimes recognize minority rights and try to conciliate, thereby reducing dissatisfaction and conflict). Democratizing countries, however, are situated in a dangerous phase in which conflict is very likely.
Not all democratic transitions are dangerous, but the chance of war rises especially in those transitional states that lack the strong political institutions that are needed to make democracy work, such as an effective state and organized political parties (Mansfield and Snyder 2005). The most important reason for this is that political leaders try to use nationalism or ethnic identity as an ideological motivator of collective action in the absence of effective political institutions. Then politicians have the incentives to resort to violent nationalist or ethnic appeals, tarring their opponents as enemies of the nation or the ethnic group, in order to prevail in electoral competition. When political institutions are strong, though, war can be prevented. This is particularly crucial in ethnically divided countries. A stable democracy is impossible in a country without strong political institutions.
SEE ALSO Democracy; Democracy, Indices of; Dependency; Elite Theory; Ethnocentrism; Huntington, Samuel P.; Nationalism and Nationality; War; World Bank, The; World-System
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bollen, Kenneth A. 1983. World System Position, Dependency, and Democracy: The Cross-National Evidence. American Sociological Review 48 (4): 468–479.
Collier, David, and Steven Levitsky. 1997. Democracy with Adjectives: Conceptual Innovation in Comparative Research. World Politics 49 (3): 430–451.
Dahl, Robert A. 1971. Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Doorenspleet, Renske. 2000. Reassessing the Three Waves of Democratization. World Politics 52 (3): 384–406.
Huntington, Samuel P. 1991. The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Lipset, Seymour Martin. 1959. Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy. American Political Science Review 53 (1): 69–105.
Mansfield, Edward D., and Jack Snyder. 2005. Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
O’Donnell, Guillermo, Philippe C. Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead, eds. 1986. Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Prospects for Democracy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Przeworski, Adam, and Fernando Limongi. 1997. Modernization: Theories and Facts. World Politics 49 (2): 155–183.
Rustow, Dankwart A. 1970. Transitions to Democracy: Toward a Dynamic Model. Comparative Politics 2 (3): 337–363.
Schedler, Andreas. 1998. What Is Democratic Consolidation? Journal of Democracy 9 (2): 91–107.
Renske Doorenspleet