The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (68 page)

 
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The official organizing and decision-making principle of the Communist Parties. Formally, the centralist aspect was asserted via the subordination of all lower bodies to the decisions taken by higher ones. Democracy consisted in the fact that the highest body of the Party was its congress to which delegates were elected by local organizations. In theory at least, therefore, although Party members were bound to carry out a policy once it had been adopted, there was room for democratic input in the pre-congress discussion and elections. In practice, criticism of Party leaders under any circumstances was considered disloyal and grounds for expulsion. Moreover, particularly where Communist Parties were in power, dependence of those below on higher Party officials for promotions and benefits effectively eroded democratic decision-making. Occasionally, Party leaders such as Stalin , Khrushchev , and Gorbachev , would seek to revive the ‘democratic’ aspect of the principle in campaigns against rivals in the leadership or those undermining the centre in the apparatus. However, the stability of the system and the interests of those at the grass roots were so adversely affected by such campaigns that they tended to be either of short duration or to spin out of control.
SWh 

 
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The Democratic Party in the United States traces its history back to the Democratic-Republican coalition which supported Jefferson's presidential campaign of 1800. The Democratic-Republicans were strong in rural, southern, and western areas, opposed to the Federalists, led by John
Adams
, whose strength was in the industrial and trading north and east. The party was refounded as the Democrats by Andrew Jackson , President from 1829 to 1837, the first frontiersman to be elected President. In the years leading up to the Civil War, therefore, the Democratic Party was a coalition of rural and frontier interests against urban and industrial interests. As most of the United States was rural and it had an enormous frontier, the Democratic coalition won most federal elections. Some have seen the raising of the slavery issue in national politics in the 1850s, associated with the foundation of the
Republican Party
, as a deliberate attempt by the persistent losers to break up this Democratic coalition and thereby gain power. If so, it was successful, but at the cost of a civil war. The Civil War united rich and poor in the South behind the Democrats, and therefore when Southern whites were fully enfranchised after 1876 ( see also
civil rights
) the South became a Democratic one-party state in federal and many state and local elections.
The Democrats suffered a setback in the 1896 presidential election when they were captured by a western faction under W. J. Bryan , which campaigned for an inflationary coinage of silver in order to relieve debtors. This campaign, of which
The Wizard of Oz
is an allegory (Dorothy's slippers should be silver, as in the book, not ruby, as in the film), recreated the Democratic Party of Jefferson and Jackson , but by now America was less rural and the party was correspondingly less successful. The next big change in Democratic fortunes came between 1928 and 1936, when the urban poor were consolidated and Northern blacks were brought into the fold for the first time, by the welfare policies of F. D. Roosevelt's
New Deal
. This began a period of Democratic hegemony in federal politics which lasted until 1968. Since then, scholars are unanimous that the ‘New Deal alignment’ has died, but unclear as to what has taken its place. The Democratic Party is hegemonic in the House of Representatives until 1994, usually but not always controls the Senate, but between 1969 and 1993 controlled the Presidency for only four years (1977–81).
The New Deal coalition was extremely broad. In particular, it embraced most black Americans and most white racist Americans. Though they could agree on welfare policy, they obviously could not agree on race policy. Neither the executive nor the legislature could therefore move decisively in favour of
Civil Rights
until the Congress elected in 1964, where, in the wake of the assassination of President Kennedy , the Democrats had a majority so large that it did not depend on the South.
American parties are much weaker than parties in most European regimes. In most states, anybody who wishes may announce that he or she is a Democrat or Republican, vote in that party's
primary election
, and run for office, acquiring the party label if successful in a primary (or, in some states, in a caucus). The parties do have some control over their members in Congress, especially in the allocation of committee places. Even here, however, seniority of membership of Congress remains important (though less important than it once was). Conservative Southern Democrats tend to hold safe seats and therefore easily gain seniority. However, this effect is fading:

(1) because incumbent members of the House of Representatives, of either party, are usually able to hold on to their seats for as long as they wish unless toppled by scandal, and sometimes even then; and
(2) because conservative Southerners are now more likely to vote Republican than Democrat.

 
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In general, a label for any person or group who advocates the pursuit of socialism by democratic means. Used especially by parliamentary socialists who put parliamentarism ahead of socialism, and therefore oppose revolutionary action against democratically elected governments. Less ambiguous than
social democracy
, which has had, historically, the opposite meanings of (1) factions of Marxism, and (2) groupings on the right of socialist parties.

 
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The process of becoming a
democracy
. The word was first used by
Bryce
in 1888. Bryce identified the process as beginning with the
French Revolution
. If democracy is equated with the
franchise
, the first wave of democratization was a slow one, spreading from France and some states in the United States in the 1790s to most of the industrialized world by 1914. But ‘wave’ is a poor metaphor for a process that was not one-way during this period: in both France and the United States, there were times during which the franchise contracted. If democracy is taken to be something wider than the franchise, it is hard to pin down whether or not the nineteenth century saw democratization. In particular, some regimes became more liberal between 1789 and 1914, and some became less; no overall balance sheet is possible.
After both the First and Second World Wars, there were wavelets of democratization. The first was encouraged by Woodrow
Wilson's
championing of self-determination and the second by independence movements in ex-colonies. However, the rise of fascism rolled back the first; and the failure of the ‘Westminster model’ in former colonies rolled back the second. A so-called Third Wave of democratization started to roll in the late 1970s, and has brought democracy to a number of countries in Latin America, Africa, and the former Soviet bloc. There is no common cause of these events. There is a statistical association between democratization and economic liberalization, but no agreed chain of causation. Likewise, democratization is not the same as political liberalization, although either may help to lead to the other.
The word has also been used to describe the process of giving more control to the employees or clients of voluntary and corporate bodies.