American Democracy

From Tocqueville to Town Halls to Twitter

Andrew J. Perrin

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780745674353
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Democracy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In this groundbreaking book, sociologist Andrew Perrin shows that rules and institutions, while important, are not the core of democracy. Instead, as Alexis de Tocqueville showed in the early years of the American republic, democracy is first and foremost a matter of culture: the shared ideas, practices, and technologies that help individuals combine into publics and achieve representation. Reinterpreting democracy as culture reveals the ways the media, public opinion polling, and changing technologies shape democracy and citizenship. As Perrin shows, the founders of the United States produced a social, cultural, and legal environment fertile for democratic development and in the two centuries since, citizens and publics use that environment and shared culture to re-imagine and extend that democracy. American Democracy provides a fresh, innovative approach to democracy that will change the way readers understand their roles as citizens and participants. Never will you enter a voting booth or answer a poll again without realizing what a truly social act it is. This will be necessary reading for scholars, students, and the public seeking to understand the challenges and opportunities for democratic citizenship from Toqueville to town halls to Twitter.

1

History and Theory of Democracy

What do we think of when we hear the term “democracy”?

For now, Abraham Lincoln’s famous phrase at Gettysburg – “government of the people, by the people, for the people” (Lincoln 1865) – is as good a place as any to begin. The most important feature of democracy is that the people’s ideals and preferences should direct decisions taken by government. A democratic government’s decisions should reflect the people’s desires. Simple, right? A closer look reveals that this concept actually raises more questions than it answers.

This book offers an unusual angle on democracy: a sociological angle. It owes much to political science, the discipline devoted to understanding and documenting political ideas, institutions, and behavior. But the book’s overall case is this: democracy is best understood as the back-and-forth interactions among citizens and institutions of government, structured through rules, ideas, and technologies. Citizens learn to act within constraints set by governmental and other powerful institutions and to use resources that are particularly useful with those institutions. Institutions, for their part – particularly democratic institutions – adapt to and structure citizens’ opportunities and desires for action: their “democratic imaginations” (Perrin 2006). The sociological perspective is uniquely helpful for understanding how institutions in general adapt to and help create their environments (Aldrich 1999) and how culture and society in general structure the opportunities, constraints, and imaginations for individual and group action. Less- and non-democratic societies have fewer opportunities for citizens to form into publics, to voice opinions and ideas, and to monitor and learn from the decisions and outcomes of their governments.

Democracy, in other words, is not only, or even primarily, a political phenomenon. It is also a deeply social, institutional, cultural, and historical phenomenon. This sociological treatment of it highlights the ways social, institutional, cultural, and historical forces interact with political ones to produce modern political democracy. Tocqueville understood as much when he identified democracy in Americans’ “habits of the heart”: the unstated assumptions, habits, and manners that made their everyday interactions different from the aristocratic ones of France (Tocqueville 2004 [1835]; Torpey 2006).

Looking back after a quarter-century, 1989 was a very good year for democracy. That spring, the world watched as pro-democracy students faced down government tanks in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China. Later that year, the authoritarian regimes of the old Soviet bloc ushered in unprecedented changes in openness and freedom in response to increasing international pressure and popular uprisings. In November of that year perhaps the most visible symbol of the Cold War – the Berlin Wall – was opened, and East Germans were allowed to visit West Berlin and West Germany freely. Meanwhile, another of the twentieth century’s thorniest problems – the apartheid regime in South Africa and its occupation of neighboring Namibia – was changing swiftly. Democratic leader Nelson Mandela’s release from prison was negotiated, as was Namibia’s independence. Largely successful democratic transitions in both countries followed. At the other end of the African continent, North and South Yemen unified into a single country in 1990, ushering in a widely discussed transition to democracy (Wedeen 2008). In short, in 1989 it looked like the world was moving swiftly toward increasing democracy, and that these new democracies would embody a newly energetic, creative view of democratic practice (Blokker 2009). In many ways that was true. The world of 1990 looked dramatically different for democracy than it had in 1988, though many of the same thorny questions that had arisen before 1989 remained unsolved. The demise of the Soviet Union and its allies left the door open for chaos and antidemocratic forces, with tragic results in several cases. And democratic uprisings elsewhere had to wait much longer. In December 2010, a wave of uprisings across the Arab world brought major changes to governments in that area, and conflict between autocratic leaders and the populations continues.

What does it mean for the world to move toward democracy? And how was the stage set for these sweeping changes? To start to unravel these questions, we turn toward a history of some of the key ideas and practices of democracy, particularly in the United States but around the world as well. We’ll then use that history to understand the turning point in 1989, the differences between kinds of democracy, and how we can best evaluate democracies’ performance.

A Partial History of Democracy

This is not by any means a full or comprehensive history of American democracy; there are far better such histories already written (e.g., Wilentz 2005). Instead, it offers a relatively brief examination of strains of thought and practice at the roots of democracy as we currently understand it. It pays particular attention to the history of American democracy, but since American democracy is thoroughly connected with practices of democracy worldwide, I include other connections and approaches when those are helpful to our understanding.

The roots of democracy can be traced as far back as ancient Athens, the first stable democracy, which flourished around 500 BC. By our standards, Athenian democracy was very exclusive: many people subject to the laws of the city had no voice in making those laws. These included people who were excluded because of sex (women), status (slaves), and wealth (debtors). Those who were allowed to participate assembled into large bodies to discuss and vote on important matters. Athenian democracy was notable for the fact that it was relatively direct: participating citizens had a direct impact on the decisions that were made. By contrast, modern democracy tends to be representative: participating citizens elect representatives whose job is to make those decisions. Citizens may communicate with, criticize, monitor, and even recall those representatives, but with certain exceptions they are not able to take the decision making into their own hands.

The term “democracy” itself comes from Greek, and probably emerged in Athens. The second part of the word, “-cracy,” means power. The first part, “demo-,” refers to the demos, or the people: the same idea Lincoln evoked over 2,000 years later at Gettysburg. In democracy, then, power is vested in the people. But which people? What if they can’t agree? How is power vested in the people? What if a majority of the people infringes upon the legitimate needs and rights of a minority? What if the people make the wrong decision for the common good due to misunderstanding, malice, selfishness, or ignorance? As democrats¹ wrestle with these questions, they bring innovative ideas to the table that refine the relationships between majorities and minorities, between rights, responsibilities, and publics. These innovations, in turn, form the practices and groups we think of as democracies and publics.

For centuries after the fall of Athens, democracy was not only out of favor but literally unthinkable throughout most of the world. It would be over 1,000 years before forms of modern democratic practices re-emerged in places like England and Venice in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It was several hundred more years before the European Enlightenment and the development of industrial capitalism gave rise to a wave of democratic revolutions across the West. These revolutions – in particular the American Revolution of 1776 and the French of 1789 – signaled a new way of conceptualizing the rights, responsibilities, and characteristics of a citizen. These eighteenth-century developments literally changed the world and set us on the path to current democratic practices.

Throughout the European Middle Ages, the authority of monarchs (kings and queens) and the lesser nobles who paid fealty to them was largely unchallenged. To be sure, questions of which royalty would rule over a given territory were very much open; but the idea that sovereignty could be held by anyone other than a sovereign was virtually unthinkable. Most people were subjects of the sovereign, and the normal mode of life was to live under the economic and political protection of the sovereign and provide him (or, rarely, her) with the products of agricultural life – crops, raw materials, etc. – in return. That slowly began to change as trade and transportation made business and commerce more possible, and by the eighteenth century the citizen became the way people understood their role in society. The citizen belonged to a state or culture, but was much less dependent upon the sovereign than subjects had been before. Whereas before, kings and queens provided comprehensive protection in return for comprehensive loyalty, citizens began to view the demands of the feudal monarchies as excessive. It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that citizen-traders’ frustrations with the monarchy were responsible for the invention of the modern citizen and civil society, two key elements of modern democracy.

The concept of citizen contains both a sense of belonging to a polity and obligation to it, and at the same time a sense of the practices of citizenship: participation, obligations, and civic duty. The element of civic duty is older, based on the idea that “the best form of state is based on two supports … : good civic behaviour and a republican form of state” (Heater 2004, 4). In other words, good government depends both on having strong democratic institutions and on having citizens who act responsibly and democratically. By the nineteenth century, the burden had shifted and citizenship was held out more as an obligation governments owed to their citizens, but the importance of educating citizens to be responsible members of the polity has remained and grown in recent years (Heater 2004, 5, 130–1).

These developments went far beyond the economic realm; they took place in the realm of culture as well. Literary and cultural worlds – previously reserved largely for nobles – were available more to the bourgeoisie, the ascendant class of people who depended on trade for their livelihood and cherished autonomy from the nobles. The lively intellectual atmosphere of eighteenth-century salons encouraged the discussion of matters of substance across lines of status and wealth: in Jürgen Habermas’ memorable phrase, “a public sphere constituted by private people putting reason to use” (Habermas 1962, xviii). This, in turn, “produced not merely a change in the composition of the public but amounted to the very generation of the ‘public’ as such” (Habermas 1962, 39).

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, when the Continental Congress met at Philadelphia they understood how new and remarkable the republic they were designing would be. But they probably had no idea just how enormous the forces they unleashed were. They were doing no less than putting into place a new way of imagining the relationship between a government and its people. In fact, the demands for democracy at that time were quite moderate by our standards. The representatives to the Continental Congress – like those who eventually made up the Constitutional Convention – were very much elites themselves: European, white, male landowners, many of them slaveholders, and many of whom knew each other through the elite institutions they frequented (Schudson 1998, 42–3). Furthermore, their complaints were rooted as much in economic liberty as they were in democratic representation. The colonists who carried out the famous Boston Tea Party of 1773, for example, were angry over the British monarchy’s assertion of its right to tax them (even though that system would have lowered the overall price of tea; Lepore 2010, 76–7). The protests over the monarchy’s right to tax the colonies without providing them a voice in Parliament – taxation without representation – helped cement the idea that the citizenry was separate from the monarchy and could have ideas, preferences, and interests at odds with those of the monarchy.

In the wake of the successful American Revolution, the high-minded debates between the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists worked through many of the thorny issues that became central to the design and practice of democracy. These were heady, high-stakes times. Although the so-called “Founding Fathers” were far from representative in the way we think of representation now, they shared a commitment to self-government and to the idea that the people could and should govern themselves. “The remarkable debate about sovereignty and liberty that took place between 1761, when James Otis argued the writs of assistance case, and 1791, when the Bill of Rights was ratified, contains an ocean of ideas,” writes historian Jill Lepore. “You can fish almost anything out of it” (Lepore 2010: 64). These ideas were not divorced from day-to-day concerns. Rather, the American constitutional designers debated the structures of government – elections, legislative bodies and rules, judiciary forms, rights – as ways of implementing ideas about self-government.

These debates took place through the publication of papers by the Founders – generally called the Federalist Papers and the Anti-Federalist Papers – in newspapers, pamphlets, and other available venues of the time. The papers are far from unanimous. They contain the intellectual back-and-forth of a remarkable group of people seeking to work out the contours of a new form of government, and there is great disagreement within them about the ways to balance it. They are far more than discussions about government structures; they are theories about the relationship of private, public, and governmental life, and how these three spheres are best balanced over time and across space.

It’s important to remember that, in the eighteenth century, the very concept of democracy was highly controversial. Edmund Burke, a British philosopher, observed the French Revolution’s insistence on popular sovereignty with great horror, arguing that durable virtues such as loyalty and morality should not be subject to the whims of the unsophisticated populace (Burke 1790 [1993]). However, the success of the French and American Revolutions put these views on the defensive. Indeed, the Federalists in the American debate, who were deeply influenced by Burke and his conservative allies, did not dispute the basic right of the people to govern themselves: the cornerstone of democracy. That ship, as they say, had sailed. The question was how self-government was to be set up, and with what rights, privileges, and protections.

The people allowed to self-govern were, of course, much fewer than our contemporary ideals of democracy dictate. The most important restriction the Constitution endorsed was allowing the continued practice of slavery, a monumental injustice and one that severely limited the reach of democratic representation. If people were allowed to own other people, how could those who were owned by others be understood to hold power (the -cracy in democracy)? The historic “three-fifths compromise,” in which American slaves were counted in states’ populations as three-fifths of their actual number, only compounded the problem by officially separating the people to be represented from the people actually allowed to participate in that representation. The decision to endorse slavery in the early Republic was an extension of what seemed “obvious” to scholars and democrats at the time: “The assumption of nonwhite intellectual inferiority was widespread” (Mills 1997: 60), although perhaps not universal. The need for compromise itself was an indication that questions like this were in dispute. Still, even those colonies that had outlawed slavery did not allow free African Americans to vote, suggesting that opposition to slavery did not necessarily imply a thorough commitment to equality or true democracy as we understand it now.

The compromise over slavery was only the most glaring of several exclusions that, from a twenty-first-century viewpoint, are obviously problematic. Women were not allowed to vote, a rule that would not be rescinded until the early twentieth century. Voting was restricted to property-owners, the belief of the Founders being that such men were the only ones sufficiently committed to and wisest about the common good of the society. So while the American Founders imagined a republic governed by the consent of the people – and, in so imagining, opened the door for an explosion of growth in democratic representation – their design was limited even as it provided the vocabulary and opportunity for extraordinary future democratic development. The limits, from our twenty-first-century vantage point, are clear. What made the design revolutionary was its future promise: the Founders evoked the idea of “the people” without explicitly defining it or putting clear boundaries on the concept. They thereby gave a gift to generations of future democrats who worked to expand, mold, and manipulate the idea of “the people.” Tocqueville predicted the expansion of voting rights long before it became the universal assumption, although he doubted the wisdom of it:

The more broadly voting rights are extended, the more one feels the need to extend them still further, for with each new concession, the forces of democracy increase, and its demands grow with its newfound power. The ambition of those who remain below the qualification level is spurred in proportion to the number who stand above it. At last the exception becomes the rule; concessions follow one upon the other, and there is no stopping until universal suffrage is achieved. (Tocqueville 2004 [1835], 64)

As sociologist Michael Schudson demonstrates, the Founders didn’t really trust the p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Content
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 History and Theory of Democracy
• 2 Voting, Civil Society, and Citizenship
• 3 Deliberation, Representation, and Legislation
• 4 Public Opinion, Policy Responsiveness, and Feedback
• 5 Media, Communications, and Political Knowledge
• 6 Democratic Culture and Practice in Postmodern Americas
• Notes
• References
• Index