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14 - How Do Transitions to Democracy Get Stuck, and Where?
- from PART III - PATHS OF POLITICAL CHANGE
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- By Boris Makarenko, Institute of Contemporary Development, Andrei Melville, National Research University–Higher School
- Edited by Adam Przeworski, New York University
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- Book:
- Democracy in a Russian Mirror
- Published online:
- 05 June 2015
- Print publication:
- 21 May 2015, pp 268-297
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Summary
THE PROBLEM
As we all may still remember, the early 1990s was a unique period of almost universal “democratic optimism.” Indeed, this was an apogee of the “third wave” of democratization. In the political discourse, there was near dominance of a linear, kind of “vectorial” perception of global political trends: from the breakdown of various forms of autocracy to liberal democracy and market economy. It was as if, with the collapse of Communism, only one universal political goal and one anticipated political end result of global dynamic remained on the agenda – liberal democracy and free market economy.
There seemed to be only one dominant political trajectory of democratization that should be pursued by all nations of the world: Karl Marx “upside down,” or Communist Manifesto per contra: all nations sooner or later will become liberal democracies – some earlier, others later.
The world was perceived as flexible and “plastic” – you can “craft” (not “breed”!) democracy (Di Palma 1991) as you know “the” proper institutional design and can master appropriate political engineering. Democracy was perceived as a universal value and model with a specific invariant (though maybe not the concrete form) that would fit all nations despite all their differences in history, culture, levels of development, and so on (Sen 1999).
However, twenty years since then, the world looks very different. As if after a global political “big bang,” we can see and experience an incredible multiplicity of political trajectories – kinds of “receding political galaxies” rushing in all possible directions and defying traditional regime typologies. Hopes or illusions about one single, uniform vector of global political development – from authoritarianism to democracy – are practically forgotten.
There is much talk nowadays about the “democratic rollback” (Diamond 2008a), “authoritarian diffusion” (Ambrosio 2010), “democratic stagnation,” “postdemocracy” (Crouch 2003), threats of degeneration into ochlocracy, and “audience democracy” (Manin 1997). Democratic accomplishments of previous decades are considered as “lexical victories” of democracy (Dunn 2010).
7 - The Role of Elections in Democracy
- from PART II - DEMOCRACY IN A RUSSIAN MIRROR
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- By Boris Makarenko, Institute of Contemporary Development
- Edited by Adam Przeworski, New York University
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- Book:
- Democracy in a Russian Mirror
- Published online:
- 05 June 2015
- Print publication:
- 21 May 2015, pp 130-146
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- Chapter
- Export citation
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Summary
WHY ARE ELECTIONS IMPORTANT?
7.1.1 Not Limited to Competition …
While democracy cannot be reduced to elections or explained solely by elections, very few questions about democracy can be answered without referring to elections. If politics is about making decisions and implementing them, elections are the first decision: they determine who entrusts in whom the power of making these decisions through an institutionalized procedure and for a given period of time.
Murray Edelman (1964, 3) characterized elections as a ritual act: voting is the only form in which most citizens ever participate directly in government – (elections) give people chance to express discontents and enthusiasm, to enjoy a sense of involvement. This ritualism is in fact the primary function of elections. As the wheel of history kept rolling, elections were replacing divinity of a monarch as the principal act of legitimation of authority as absolute monarchy was giving way to constitutional monarchies and republics. Voting for the same ruler or assembly symbolized belonging of a person to the same polity and reinforcing the sense of national unity, which in Rustow's (1970) observation is the main precondition of democracy. Elaborating on the same notion, Rustow (1970, 56) noted that the people cannot decide until somebody decides who the people are. No matter how much hypocrisy authoritarian rulers apply in praising the elections they have won as a democracy, at least until a certain point, most people believe that through elections, they demonstrate and/or confirm the unity of their nation. And, to the contrary, mass protests against unfair elections, such as “color revolutions” or protests in Moscow and other Russian cities after the Duma elections in December 2011, are a sure indication of a serious crisis of the legitimacy of the political regime.
Until recently, “throwing the rascals out” was not predominant function of elections.