Introduction

In this chapter, we discuss various issues that arise in thinking about policy determination in nondemocracy. For our purposes, the most basic distinction between a democracy and a nondemocracy is that the former is a situation of political equality: each citizen has one vote. As a result, in democracy, the preferences of all citizens matter in the determination of the political outcomes. In nondemocracy, this is not the case because only a subset of the people, an elite, has political rights. In principle, this could be any subset. Soviet socialism claimed to be the dictatorship of the proletariat and did not even consider “dictatorship” a word with pejorative connotations. Similarly, the dictatorship of Juvenal Habyarimana in Rwanda between 1973 and 1994 might be considered the dictatorship of a particular ethnic group, the Hutu. In Brazil between 1964 and 1985, there was a military dictatorship, with bureaucratic authoritarian and corporatist tendencies; this regime emphasized industrialization while also protecting the economic interests of the relatively rich and avoiding any radical – particularly agrarian – reforms. In contrast, the dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko in The Congo between 1965 and 1997 was a highly personalistic, kleptocratic regime, in which the main use of state power was to enrich Mobutu and his entourage. Despite these differences among nondemocracies (see Linz and Stepan 1996 for an influential taxonomy), our purpose is to emphasize the major difference between democracies and nondemocracies that we see as the extent of political equality.