Political Order and Political Decay (66 page)

A central problem with any simple class-based analysis of democratization is that there were a number of cross-cutting issues that united people across class lines and blurred the class profiles of political parties. Among the most important were ethnicity, religion, and foreign policy. Thus the German Reichstag in the late nineteenth century contained parties representing the Polish and Danish minorities, as well as the Centre Party, which stood for Catholic interests and was itself divided into left and right wings. Issues like imperial policy and the building of a navy were conservative causes that drew working-class support. In Britain, there were sharp divisions over Irish Home Rule and empire that were often as important as class considerations in determining election outcomes. In the contemporary Middle East, Islamist parties tend to have a social base in the lower classes and in rural areas, but their overt message is based on religion rather than class.

Thus, while political parties may try to represent the interests of particular social classes, they are very often also autonomous political actors that can get power by mobilizing voters from different classes by shifting their agendas from economic ones to identity politics, religion, or foreign policy. They do not actually have to represent the true interests of the social classes that support them. At one extreme, the Communist Parties in Russia and China ended up being among the greatest oppressors of workers and peasants in human history. In the United States, the Republican Party, traditionally the bastion of business interests, gets substantial support from working-class voters who support it on cultural rather than economic grounds.

Like state bureaucracies, political parties are not simply robotic arms controlled by underlying social classes. Rather, they can exercise a great deal of choice in how they represent their constituents. Political parties are created by political entrepreneurs who organize followings around particular ideas and who then go on to organize real-world political machines. Successful Communist parties required the organizational genius of leaders like Vladimir Lenin to come to power. Conservative parties were animated by ideas about tradition, religion, monarchy, and stability. As their underlying social bases went into decline and they were forced to compete for mass electorates, some, like the British Conservatives, were able to change their agendas to make themselves appealing to middle- and working-class electorates. Others, like the Italian Christian Democrats, survived and prospered through their ability to organize vast clientelistic networks. Those conservative parties that failed to adapt to these new conditions of electoral politics were tempted to resort to nondemocratic methods for preserving their power, like the Argentine coup of 1930 (see chapter 18 above). Clientelistic party organization often went hand in hand with a personalistic political style, in which supporters were rallied around particular charismatic individuals like Juan and Eva Perón rather than around a coherent program. Organizational capacity was thus not something that could be readily predicted simply by looking at the strength of different social classes. It depended on historically contingent factors like leadership, personality, and ideas.

ECONOMIC GROWTH, SOCIAL MOBILIZATION, AND DEMOCRACY

Why did democracy spread, and why might it spread farther in the future? Democratic institutions are driven by multiple causes, but one of the most important centers on economic change. Economic growth is linked to democracy in a multistage process, as illustrated in
Figure 21
. Economic growth engenders social mobilization via the spreading division of labor, and social mobilization in turn produces demands for both rule of law and greater democracy. The traditional elites that dominated the old agrarian order frequently try to block entry of the newer groups into the system. A stable democratic system will emerge only if these newly mobilized groups are successfully incorporated into the system and allowed to participate politically. Conversely, instability and disorder will occur if those groups do not have institutionalized channels of participation.

In this context, ideas can still be very important, but they are related to changes in the other dimensions of development. For example, the idea of the universal equality of human dignity has been around for centuries, but in static agrarian societies it never gained much traction because such societies had an extremely low degree of social mobility. Peasants periodically revolted and challenged the political status quo. This could be sparked by some outrageous violation of their rights, or out of sheer hunger and desperation. But while individual leaders of such revolts might aspire to join the oligarchy, it never occurred to them to displace the class-bound system as such. Hence they never became true revolutionaries. The idea of social equality acquired a broad galvanizing power only when in parts of Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries an expanding capitalist economic system started reordering the social system. Modern capitalism both required and produced social mobility, and as a consequence demands for equality of access and opportunity expanded. There are thus multiple lines of causality linking social mobilization to democracy and the rule of law. Ideas were important and had their own autonomy—neither Adam Smith nor Karl Marx could be understood as a mere spokesman for the social class out of which he sprang—but receptivity to ideas was shaped by social context and deep economic changes.

FIGURE 21.
Economic Development and Democracy

Democracy emerged in Europe in gradual stages over a 150-year period, as a result of struggles among the middle classes, working class, old oligarchy, and peasantry, all being shaped in turn by underlying changes in the economy and society. The Marx-Moore framework, with a few emendations, remains basically sound. It is this story that I will flesh out in the following chapter.

 

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THE LONG ROAD TO DEMOCRACY

How European democracy advanced in the nineteenth century as societies changed; arguments against democracy before its triumph; how conservative parties often determined the nature of democratic advance

I told the story in Volume 1 of the rise of accountable government in England and the United States. Accountability was the result of what seems in retrospect to be the almost accidental survival of a feudal institution, the medieval estate or parliament, into the modern era. In the Middle Ages, taxing authority was vested in these estates, which represented the oligarchic layer of property owners in the society. In France, Spain, Sweden, Prussia, and Russia, the monarchy succeeded from the late sixteenth century on in undermining the power of the estates and consolidating absolutist rule. In Poland and Hungary, by contrast, the estates were victorious over the monarchy and created a weak decentralized political system that was soon militarily overwhelmed by foreign conquerors. Only in England was the power of the Parliament evenly matched against that of the monarchy. The former succeeded in fighting the latter to a standstill in the course of the seventeenth century, an impasse that eventually resulted in the constitutional settlement of 1688–1689, the Glorious Revolution.

Accountable government is not simply a matter of opposition groups overwhelming a government and forcing it to do their bidding. Throughout human history, out-groups have fought in-groups, and once they succeeded in displacing the power holder became the new oppressive ingroup. Accountable government, by contrast, means formal recognition of the principle of accountability to a broader public and the legitimacy of opposition. This is where ideas came to play a critical role. John Locke explained that the authority of all governments lay not in divine right but in their ability to protect the individual rights of their citizens. Governments are potentially the prime violators of those rights. He further argued that “no government can have a right to obedience from a people who have not freely consented to it”; what we today call legitimacy therefore flowed from the ability of a people to “choose their government and governors.” “No taxation without representation” and “consent of the governed” were the animating principles of the Glorious Revolution and of the American Revolution that took place less than a century later. The shift in understanding from the “rights of Englishmen” (that is, traditional feudal rights) to “natural rights” (universal rights held by all human beings) meant that these new revolutions would never simply be about the displacement of one elite group by another.

But even though the Glorious Revolution established the principle of parliamentary accountability, England was still very far from anything like true democracy at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Those sitting in Parliament were elected by a small, well-to-do part of the country, no more than 3 percent of the whole population as late as 1830. So the story of the arrival of democracy, as opposed to accountability, takes place in the centuries following the settlement of 1689.

Since the rule of law and democratic accountability can be conceived of as alternative means of constraining the government, it is not surprising that the two have been closely associated with one another historically and promoted in common. During the English Civil War, one of the biggest grievances of the parliamentary side against the king was the fact that he was trampling on the Common Law. The early Stuarts had prosecuted opponents through bodies of questionable legality like the King's Court of the Star Chamber. The parliamentary demands were that the monarchy be accountable to them on matters of taxation and that it act under the law. It is adherence to the rule of law that guarantees that an out-group that succeeds in displacing an in-group will not use its newfound access to power as a means of prosecuting its opponents in revenge.

Though the two components of liberal democracy that constrain the state—the liberal rule of law part and the democratic accountability part—are often associated, they remain conceptually separable. As noted in the last chapter, they tend to be championed by different social groups. This means that liberal democracy seldom arrived in a neat package but was introduced sequentially over time. It also makes the dating of the onset of democracy very difficult. When, for example, did the United States become a liberal democracy? Rule of law arrived much earlier than democracy, with introduction of the Common Law into the colonies well before the revolution and the Constitutional Convention. But equal access to the law still took centuries to implement. Though most Americans assume democracy arrived with the adoption of the Constitution in the late eighteenth century, the franchise was severely limited in 1787 and was progressively opened up to white men without property, African Americans, and women in a slow process that wasn't completed until ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Indeed, various constraints on voting by blacks in the South meant that full legal enfranchisement had to wait until passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

If we apply these different criteria of liberal democracy backward in time to the nineteenth century, we see that the democratization of Europe and other countries in the First Wave was an extremely protracted process.
Table 6
presents the dates on which different countries achieved various milestones with regard to expansion of the franchise, and indicates both the length of time required to get to universal suffrage and the variance across different countries. Besides limiting the franchise, authoritarian governments in nineteenth-century Europe did many other things to check democracy. Prussia, for example, adopted universal male suffrage in 1849, but under a three-tier voting system and an open ballot that wasn't abolished until 1918. Some countries like Britain, Italy, and Denmark had unelected upper houses that could veto or otherwise alter legislation. Many countries imposed restrictions on political organization, particularly on the part of new working-class groups operating under socialist or communist banners. Democratization in this period was not, moreover, a one-way process; some countries like France granted rights to their citizens, only to take them away with the return to power of authoritarian regimes, in a recurring cycle.

THE FRANCHISE

The European route to democracy unfolded in stages, punctuated by long periods of stasis or active regression. The simplest reason for this circuitous route is that Europe was not socially ready for democracy until the final third of the nineteenth century.

TABLE 6.
Expansion of the Franchise in Selected Countries
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