1. Industrialized Democracies

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3. Democracy and the Big Questions
Assumptions
Take democracy for granted
Think democracy is the best type of regime
Existing democracies need not be improved
Most readers of the text either live or study in an advanced industrialized democracy, which leads many of us to make one or more of the following assumptions, all of which are problematic and should be raised (if not dispelled) at the outset. First, we tend to take democracy for granted. Second, we think democracy is the best type of regime humans can create. Third—and perhaps most dangerous of all—we assume that existing democracies cannot and need not be improved in any significant way.
Seen from another perspective, those assumptions can get us in trouble because they keep us from even asking big questions about the industrialized democracies at all, precisely because they have been so successful for such a long period of time.
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4. Thinking About Democracy
The bottom line
People cannot directly govern
Rights
Basic freedoms of speech, religion, association, and the press
Political and human rights
Democracy comes from the two ancient Greek words for rule by the people. Literally speaking, there cannot be a democracy in which the people directly govern today’s complex societies. Beyond that, there is little agreement among political scientists about what democracy means.
Most definitions of democracy start with the basic freedoms of speech, religion, association, and the press. The reason for doing so is easy to see: how can people effectively participate in making the decisions that shape their lives unless those rights are guaranteed?
Political rights are defined in different ways. Many countries enshrine them in their constitutions. Human rights are affirmed in the first paragraphs of the French Fifth Republic’s constitution and in Germany’s Basic Law. Even where they are not included in the constitution as in Great Britain, which does not have a written constitution, they are deeply engrained in the culture.
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5. Thinking About Democracy
Competitive elections
The rule of law
Capitalism and affluence
Civic society and civic culture
Just as important is the requirement that the government be chosen through regular, free, and fair elections. Simply holding elections is not enough. Mexico, for example, has held elections for all key offices since the 1920s. However, for seventy years, the opposition had no
realistic chance of winning the presidency or more than a handful of seats in the national legislature because of the way the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) rigged election after election. The United States is unique in having only two major
parties. However, minor parties can help determine the outcome of an election. Every other industrialized democracy has more parties
that matter.
Related to civil liberties is the reliance on the rule of law. Political and other forms of behavior are governed by clear and fair rules rather than by the personal and often arbitrary exercise of power. What people can and cannot do is specified in the constitution and by ordinary laws. As a result, they can expect to be treated fairly by the government both in their routine dealings with the state (e.g., tax collection) and on those rare occasions when they come up against it (e.g., after being accused of a crime).
Most—but by no means all—political scientists assume that democracy can only survive if it is accompanied by an affluent and capitalist economy. There is no denying that the industrialized democracies are the richest in the world. That wealth allows almost all of their
citizens to have access to basic health care, which translates into a low infant mortality rate and a long life expectancy. In fact, it is that wealth that adds the adjective “industrialized” to the phrase used to describe this kind of democracy.
With the upsurge in protest movements of the 1960s and the more uncertain economic times since then, academic interest in a civic culture and civil society waned. The last few decades have certainly seen declining support for politicians and interpersonal trust. With the
attempt to spread democratic regimes elsewhere in the world, however, there has been a resurgence of interest in how such factors can psychologically bind people to their states and make it hard for “anti-system” protests to gain legitimacy.
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6. Table 2.1 Women in Parliament 2011: Selected Countries, in Percent
Note: Sweden and the Netherlands were included in the table, although they are not covered in the book, to illustrate the range of results one finds.
Source: International Parliamentary Union, Accessed April 15, 2011.
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7. Which Countries Are Democratic?
Key Questions
Why did democracy first emerge?
Why did democracy become established in late 20th century?
Why is there so much debate about public policy?
Why don’t people question regimes/democracy?
The questions the text asks about democratic countries flow directly from the five criteria:
■ Why did democracy first emerge in these countries?
■ Why did democracy only become firmly established in many of them during the second half of the twentieth century?
■ Why is there so much debate about public policy in the industrialized democracies these days?
■ Why has that debate not reached a point where many people question their regimes or democracy itself?
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8. The Origins of the Democratic State
The evolution of democratic thought
Thomas Hobbes
Laissez-faire capitalism
John Locke
Suffrage rights
Photo: Museum of London/Imagestate RM/PhotoLibrary
Suffragettes demanding the right to vote.
By the late 1700s, pressures to move toward what we think of today as democracy had been building for two hundred years. Individualism, capitalism, Protestantism, the scientific revolution, and the exploration of the “New World” gave birth to new ways of thinking as different as Newtonian physics and Calvinist theology, all of which left previously powerless people clamoring for a greater impact on the decisions that shaped their lives. Many of the most innovative thinkers of that era devised ideas that might seem obvious today but which then were revolutionary. Near the top of any such list was the belief that society is composed of independent individuals
who pursue their own interests and desires. For many of those new thinkers, the “state of nature” they formed was fraught with danger. Freed from the shackles of feudalism and other social hierarchies, individuals would become more creative and productive. However, many of these thinkers, most notably Thomas Hobbes (1586–1679), also realized that such individuals and the groups they formed would put new demands on the weak monarchies of the late feudal period. Hobbes worried anarchy would follow if people were left to their
own devices, which he famously labeled the “war of all against all.”
In the century after Hobbes’ death, the individualistic side of these new ways of thinking came to the fore. It was, thus, no coincidence that the American Revolution began in the same year that Adam Smith’s most famous book extolling economic freedom, The Wealth of Nations, was published. At that time, many of the same people started demanding political as well as economic freedom. Their views crystallized as laissez-faire capitalism. Derived from a French phrase meaning “allow to do,” laissez-faire theory calls for a government that stays out of economic life as much as possible because the “invisible hand” of the market supposedly allocates resources in the most efficient possible manner.
Not even the most enthusiastic supporters of democracy or the free market wanted to get rid of government altogether. They shared Hobbesian fears about the state of nature and John Locke’s (1632–1704) belief that the most important thing government could do was to protect life, liberty, and property.
Over the course of the nineteenth century, popular pressure forced elites to adopt and, in some cases, strengthen democratic institutions. In the United States, most white men had become eligible to vote by the 1840s. All French men gained it with the creation of the Second Republic in In Britain, the right of men to vote expanded gradually, culminating in the Reform Act of 1918, which removed all property qualifications and income restrictions. Women’s suffrage rights followed more slowly. An Act of Parliament extended the right to vote to all women in American women gained the vote with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in French women only got the right to vote after World War II, although there had been women cabinet members before the war. The Swiss were the last industrialized democracy to grant women the vote, in 1971.
Photo: Museum of London/Imagestate RM/PhotoLibrary.
British suffragettes demanding the right to vote in 1909.
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9. Table 2.2 Key Turning Points in the Development of Industrialized Democracies
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10. The Origins of the Democratic State
Four crises
Four great transformations:
Creating the nation and state
Defining the role of religion in political life
Handling pressures for democracy
Managing the industrial revolution
Nowhere was democracy built quickly or easily. Even where democratization occurred with a minimum of turmoil, it was accompanied by wrenching political fits and starts. In most countries, that included revolutions and periods of authoritarian rule during which democracy seemed a distant and unachievable goal. For the industrialized democracies, there were some common challenges, the most important of which were four great transformations that divided each of them in different ways and helped chart their trajectory toward democracy—and often away from it as well:
■ Creating the nation and state.
■ Defining the role of religion in political life.
■ Handling pressures for democracy.
■ Managing the industrial revolution.
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11. The Origins of the Democratic State
Four crises
Development of nation and state
Protestant reformation
World War II
Cold War
In places where democracy developed the earliest, such as Great Britain or the United States, those divisions were resolved relatively easily. That happened in part because they were spread out over three centuries or more, which allowed their leaders to reach something approaching closure on each one before the next crisis appeared on the horizon.
The situation was quite different in the countries that had more trouble democratizing. There, these historical crises left lasting divisions in which the crises coincided to the point that leaders had to cope with two or more of them at the same time.
The first one involved the state itself. For a number of reasons too complicated to go into here, the modern state only came into existence during the seventeenth century. National identity developed even more slowly. Nowhere did either happen smoothly. Where the development of state and nation were at odds, the political conflict was particularly difficult.
Strangely enough, the second and even more divisive crisis helped forge the modern state. During the sixteenth century, the Protestant reformation divided most of Europe. Rulers had to choose between the once dominant Catholic Church and the new Protestant sects. In those days, once a ruler decided which faith to observe, almost everyone followed suit. The Reformation led to the fiercest wars Europe had ever seen. They pitted Catholics against Protestants and strengthened the emerging states whose rulers had to raise, equip, and feed huge armies in order to fight the wars and finance colonial expansion, which was one of their byproducts. The last of them was the Thirty Years War that ended with the Treaty of Westphalia, which many international relations experts claim was the beginning of the modern state.
It was only after World War II that we can say that democracy was firmly entrenched in the industrial democracies. The rise of fascism and the carnage of the war led many to question whether it would ever be possible to sustain a democracy in Italy or Germany. In fact, concerns about the breakdown of democracy in interwar Europe prompted social scientists to conduct research on political culture and other previously poorly understood forces that could reinforce or undermine democracy.
The start of the cold war led the United States and its allies to take steps to erase those doubts. It took less than a generation for leaders in those countries to use American political and economic help in creating affluent, democratic regimes. Meanwhile, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and other countries became partners in the struggle to contain what many feared would be global communist aggression.
Now, it is safe to say that democracy is secure in all of these countries.
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12. Political Culture Three conclusions
People see their regimes as legitimate
Scholars have examined dimensions of democratic political culture
Political culture rarely determines what people do
Today’s political scientists are returning to the impact of political culture in a more nuanced way. Although we are far from reaching a consensus about it, three conclusions have been made from more recent research.
First, in successful democracies, most people have a deeply felt sense that their regimes are legitimate and accept the “rules of the game.”
Second, more recent scholars have dug more deeply than Almond and Verba did in their book The Civic Culture into the dimensions of a democratic political culture.
Third, political scientists also have come to realize that political culture rarely determines what people actually do.
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13. Political Participation
Left and right
Catch-all parties
New divisions
Realignment
Party identification
Photo: Paul Schutzer/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images.
A panoramic view of the hundreds of thousands of nonviolent protesters at the 1963 March on Washington for civil rights.
Most analyses of political parties start with their position on what political scientists call the Left–Right spectrum. On the Left today are the remnants of the communist parties and also the social democratic parties. In Europe, the Liberals were one of the two major British parties until the 1920s, and the Radicals were France’s most influential party under the Third and Fourth Republics (1875–1958). Today, the British Liberal Democrats win votes mostly from the wealthy and had been out of government for decades before joining the Conservative-led coalition government after the 2010 election.
The favorability ratings of democratic politicians around the world are at an all time low in part because the partisan divides grow out of old issues that are often not the ones most people focus on today.
Today’s political parties are also having problems because of the way they go about doing their job. They have become what one political scientist in the 1960s called catch-all parties, because they literally try to “catch” voters from the entire political spectrum rather than from the narrower ideological niches of their prewar predecessors.
Although the names of the most important political parties look quite similar to those of forty years ago, the coalitions of voters they attract has changed through what political scientists call realignment. Until the 1960s, most people had a strong sense of party identification, which led them to vote for the same party from one election to the next. Strength of party identification has dropped dramatically since the 1960s. As a result, voters are far less loyal to any one party than they used to be, which has made election
results a lot more volatile. Among other things, that has led voters in the last few years to vote incumbents out of office whichever side of the political spectrum they are on.
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14. Table 2.3 The Changing Meaning of Left and Right
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15. Greens and National Front Greens
TYPE OF PARTY
COUNTRY
Great Britain
France
Germany
COMMUNIST
---
PCF
PDS
SOCIALIST
Labour PS
SPD
LIBERAL
Liberal Democratsa c
FDP
CHRISTIAN DEMOCRATIC
CDU
CONSERVATIVE
Conservative
UPMd
OTHER
Regionalb
Greens and National Front
Greens
Table 2.4 Main Types of Political Parties by Country
a. Liberal to 1983; Liberal-Social Democratic Alliance 1983–87, Liberal Democrats 1988 on.
b. Nationalist parties of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
c. The French Radical and Christian Democratic parties have disappeared. See Chapter 5.
d. Most recent party representing the Gaullist movement.
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16. Figure 2.1 Political Participation in Flux: Two Versions
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17. Political Participation
Interest groups
Political protest
Occupy Wall Street
Tea Party
Interest groups promote just about every possible position on just about every imaginable issue in the industrialized democracies. Because there are so many interest groups, political scientists have tended to concentrate on the ones that have been the most influential over the last few decades, especially labor unions and business groups. The largest and best organized groups usually have easy and even privileged access to decision makers, something we will see mostly clearly for business and union leaders in what political scientists call corporatist states.
Groups that do not enjoy easy access to elite decisionmaking circles often choose to either turn to the “streets” or drop out of political life altogether because they “know” they can’t make a difference. Because they are not active, political scientists have a hard time studying the sullen nonvoters who shun all forms of political activity. Therefore, we will concentrate on organized protest movements instead.
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18. The Democratic State Presidential and parliamentary systems
The rest of the state
Bureaucracy
Iron triangle
The most important thing to understand in this respect is that there are two main types of democratic systems— presidential and parliamentary. Both are based on the key democratic principle that free and competitive elections determine who governs. However, their markedly different ways of putting democratic theory into practice lead to equally markedly different kinds of policy outcomes. It is actually misleading to speak of presidential systems in the plural because there really is only one of them— the United States. Presidents in many other democracies are elected and exercise considerable power on their own. However, only the United States has a marked separation of powers, which Americans often call checks and balances. Parliamentary systems are very different. No two are the same, but all share one key feature with the Westminster system in Britain on which they were based. There is little or no separation of power. Instead, legislative and executive authority are fused. Although the president has some independent leeway in hybrid systems that combine the presidential and the parliamentary models, countries other than the United States adhere to some version of the principles and procedures discussed in the rest of this section.
All kinds of governments today have to deal with highly technical issues for which few legislators have anywhere near enough expertise. As a result, two groups have pivotal roles in any state— senior civil servants in the bureaucracy and the interest groups mentioned earlier.
Because their professional technical expertise is almost always needed, senior civil servants have become policymakers in their own right. Their role in the decision-making process poses problems for democratic theory because they are not elected and it is hard to hold them accountable whatever institutions a particular country uses. This is especially true in countries where the business, bureaucratic, and partisan elites overlap so much that scholars speak of them as an iron triangle.
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19. Figure 2.2 The President and Congress
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20. Figure 2.3 The Parliamentary System
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21. Table 2.5 The British General Election of 2005
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22. Table 2.6 The French Chamber of Deputies, 1951
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23. Public Policy The interventionist state Foreign policy
U.S. most active state
Photo: CHRISTIAN CHARISIUS/Reuters/Corbis.
German parents picking up toys for their children at a government-funded day care center.
The industrial revolution made it more and more difficult for a capitalist economy to supply public goods, especially those that involved social equality. Democratic states found that they had little choice but to act in order to overcome what economists call market failures. By the start of the twentieth century, these failures included overcrowded and filthy cities, widespread poverty, and pollution, all of which led people—especially those on the Left—to demand change. In one form or another, that led to the creation of an interventionist
state throughout the industrialized world. What they do, who is covered by their programs, and how they do it varies from country to country. Nonetheless, all industrialized democracies provide more than rudimentary services in:
■ Health care
■ Education
■ Income support
■ Unemployment compensation
■ Pensions and other programs for senior
In foreign policy, the United States has by far the most active state. As the world’s one remaining superpower, it could hardly be otherwise. Historically, the other industrialized democracies included in this book have been among the world’s great powers, but since World War II, their relative standing has been reduced. The United States was drawn into its dominant international role slowly if not always reluctantly. Today, it is safe to say that there is no foreign policy issue that is beyond Americans’ interests, at least as they perceive them. American policy abroad today reflects not only its position as a superpower but also the ideological and structural differences that long antedate the Obama presidency.
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24. The Media Two conclusions:
Easier but more confusing to find out about politics
Citizen views may differ from politicians and media moguls
Although the term never appears in the classic texts, the media have always been a key component of the real world of democracy. Given their importance, it is surprising to see how little research political scientists have conducted on their role. Nonetheless, it does seem safe to reach two conclusions.
First, for some people, it is getting easier, but also more confusing, to find out about politics at home and abroad. Second, average citizens view the world in their own terms, which may be quite different from those of either the politicians or media moguls.
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