In Search of Democracy

Larry Diamond

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317411369
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book evaluates the global status and prospects of democracy, with an emphasis on the quality of democratic institutions and the effectiveness of governance as key conditions for stable democracy. Bringing together a wide range of the author's work over the past three decades, it advances a framework for assessing the quality of democracy and it analyzes alternative measures of democracy. Drawing on the most recent data from Freedom House, it assesses the global state of democracy and freedom, as of the beginning of 2015, and it explains why the world has been experiencing a mild but now deepening recession of democracy and freedom since 2005.

A major theme of the book across the three decades of the author's work is the relationship between democratic quality and stability. Democracies break down, Diamond argues, not so much because of economic factors but because of corrupt, inept governance that violates individual rights and the rule of law. The best way to secure democracy is to ensure that democracy is accountable, transparent, genuinely competitive, respectful of individual rights, inclusive of diverse forms and sources of participation, and responsive to the needs and aspirations of ordinary citizens. Viable democracy requires not only a state that can mobilize power to achieve collective goals, but also one that can restrain and punish the abuse of power—a particularly steep challenge for poor countries and those with natural resource wealth.

The book examines these themes both in broad comparative perspective and with a deeper analysis of historical trends and future prospects in Africa and Asia,. Concluding with lessons for sustaining and reforming policies to promote democracy internationally, this book is essential reading for students and scholars interested in democracy, as well as politics and international relations more generally.

1 Introduction In search of democracy

DOI: 10.4324/9781315685175-1

Most careers owe much to chance, and mine as a scholar has been no exception. My entry in 1975 into the Ph.D. program in sociology at Stanford University coincided with the beginning of what Samuel P. Huntington would dub, a decade and a half later, the “third wave” of global democratization.¹ I did not choose to study democracy because it was fashionable at the time. In fact, during the second half of the 1970s, socioeconomic development was the predominant focus of comparative politics and sociology, and the most popular theories of the day explained underdevelopment in terms of economic dependence or structural inequality in the “world system,” using neo-Marxist frameworks. While this drew my interest briefly late in my undergraduate career and early in my graduate career, I was always suspicious of structurally deterministic theories that appeared to absolve political and social actors of responsibility for their choices and behavior. Moreover, my moral and intellectual passion had always revolved around democracy, and although it was something of a passé subject in sociology in the late 1970s, I nevertheless resolved that that is what I wanted to study.

As I began in 1977 to formulate a dissertation topic, one fundamental and timeless issue gripped me: Why do some countries have democratic forms of government and others not? Embedded in this question were many others. From my childhood, which coincided with the decolonization of Africa, I had a long-standing interest in the politics of developing countries. In particular, I wondered: What explains the relative success of democracy in some postcolonial countries and its failure in others?

My starting point in attacking this question was to read widely and distill a substantial literature on what could loosely be called “the conditions for democracy.”² I was deeply influenced by classic works such as Seymour Martin Lipset’s Political Man, Robert Dahl’s Polyarchy, Almond and Verba’s The Civic Culture, and Juan Linz’s The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes, as well as the work of Alex Inkeles on political culture and modernization, particularly his pathbreaking Becoming Modern. ³ All of these were reflective to one degree or another of the liberal, pluralist tradition, which viewed democracy as a political system of competition that required not only active citizen participation but also moderation, compromise, and restraint. Of course, this perspective stood diametrically opposed to the Marxist emphasis on “heightening the contradictions” and thus the necessity of class conflict and even violent revolution. My philosophical commitment to liberalism and my intellectual commitment to pluralism were viewed by many of my social science peers in graduate school and in my early academic career as quaint and naive at best (some no doubt saw them as reactionary). The prevailing thrust of theorizing about developing countries at the time took one of two forms. The first affirmed the need for a modernizing “developmental dictatorship,” like that in South Korea and Taiwan, to manage and steer development without the supposed handicaps of a free press, a demanding civil society, a mobilized trade union movement, and so on. The second asserted the need for revolutionary withdrawal from the economic and political structures of the global capitalist system, which were seen as determined to, or even needing to, repress, distort, and extract wealth from the periphery of the world system in order to sustain the dominance of its capitalist core (mainly the United States and Western Europe).

I went in a different direction. I developed a comprehensive theoretical inventory of the “conditions for democracy.” Some of these were economic and social, relating to the level of development, the extent of inequality, the size of the middle class, the class structure more broadly, and the availability of a wide range of autonomous intermediate groups, in essence a civil society. Some of these had to do with the broader structure of cleavages in society, the extent of ethnic, linguistic and other identity conflicts, and whether cleavages coincided with and reinforced one another or instead cut across and softened one another (the latter being one of Lipset’s most important theories). Some of the variables concerned political structure and institutions—the structure of the party system (and how it mapped on to social cleavages), the degree of party system institutionalization, the role of the electoral system in shaping the party system and the political incentive structure, and (following Lipset, and in a different way Arend Lijphart⁴) whether power was decentralized, particularly in some kind of federal structure that was capable of managing identity cleavages and inhibiting the excessive concentration of power. Deeply influenced by Linz’s study of democratic breakdowns, and subsequently by the work of G. Bingham Powell,⁵ I looked for institutional arrangements that could preempt political polarization and extremism (as in the rise of antisystem parties and what Linz called the “politics of outbidding”). Given the prominent role of the military in ending many fragile democracies and then slowing democracy’s return, I found it necessary to learn something about the military as an institution, and the way that militaries varied in their norms, structures, and incentives either to intervene or to remain aloof from politics.

I was fascinated and even consumed by this rich literature on what I came to term years later “the facilitating and obstructing conditions for democracy.” However, I also continued to be uneasy with purely deterministic approaches. Studying the cases of democratic breakdown in the Linz and Stepan four-volume series on democratic breakdowns,⁶ I became (and remain to this day) convinced that the failure of democracy is not foreordained, and that within the various social and institutional constraints, actors act, making choices that can doom or possibly sustain democracy. This underscored for me the importance of studying political culture to glean some further understanding of the norms and behavioral orientations that might shape the choices of political elites as well as mass actors. And it propelled me in my own research toward mostly qualitative work—grounded in historical analysis and field research—to attempt to understand and reconstruct the actors, processes, incentives, and constraints that shaped democratic success or failure.

For my doctoral dissertation I decided to assess and in a certain way “test” theories of the causal determinants for democracy. I proposed to my thesis advisors a comparative historical analysis of three different national experiences with democracy: one where democracy had been successful for some time and then failed (Chile); one where it emerged after decolonization and took root, however imperfectly (India); and one where it crashed and burned a few years after independence (Nigeria). My advisors persuaded me that three historical cases would be too much for one dissertation, and so I reluctantly dropped the Chilean case and wrote a thesis prospectus scoping out what I expected would be a comparative analysis of India and Nigeria. When that paper reached 140 pages, my thesis advisors persuaded me that I had better drop down to one case, or I would wind up with a 1,000-page dissertation. Very reluctantly again (as I had become thoroughly engrossed in India’s political development), I shed another case. And then I wrote a 1,200-page dissertation on Nigeria. Thus was launched, for a time at least, my career as a Nigeria expert, and the special fascination and affection I have developed with the African continent.⁷

Why—when forced to choose—did I settle on the Nigerian case? One reason is that I had spent a month in Nigeria (in December 1974) on a six-month study trip throughout the developing world, in the year between my undergraduate and graduate study. I was instantly drawn to the country: its openness and dynamism, its formidable complexity, its boundless possibilities, and yet the scarring legacy of a ghastly civil war that had followed the breakdown of its constitutional democracy in January 1966. The largest country in Africa (with more than a fifth of the entire population of Sub-Saharan Africa), it was also in the midst of an oil boom that was lifting it up to regional leadership as one of Africa’s richest countries. Just before I began graduate school in the fall of 1975, a group of military officers overthrew the sitting (and by then sit-tight) ruling general, Yakubu Gowon, and announced a program of transition back to civilian democratic rule. I felt it was crucial to understand why democracy had failed in Nigeria’s First Republic if the Second Republic was to have a chance of succeeding. And there was no existing academic study that systematically analyzed the whole experience of the First Republic in order to explain its failure.

As I began reading about Nigeria’s political history, I encountered a remarkable book, Nigerian Political Parties: Power in an Emergent African Nation, by the political scientist Richard L. Sklar.⁸ A riveting and deeply informed account of the emergence of political parties during the final decade of colonial rule (the 1950s) in Nigeria, the book was significant most of all for its theoretical perspective, which built on the work of the Italian political theorist Gaetano Mosca and his concept of a “political class.” For Sklar (and before him Mosca) the political class was not what it is glibly perceived to be in the news media today, as simply the collection of rotten and self-interested politicians (though rotten many of them were in Nigeria, and self-interested they always are everywhere to some degree). Rather, the emerging dominant class was “political” in the sense that government power became the primary instrument for the accumulation of personal wealth and status, so that even those outside of government office, in “private” business, needed access to government licenses and contracts in order to thrive. The state dominated the economy and held all the keys to the golden kingdom; thus the immortal phrase of Ghana’s founding president, Kwame Nkrumah, “seek ye the kingdom of politics and all else shall be added unto you.”

In researching the emergent structure of political alignment and conflict during the last decade of colonial rule and then the succession of polarizing political crises that rocked and destroyed the First Republic (1960–1966), I found affirmation for many elements of the pluralist theoretical tradition in which I was trained. Nigeria’s First Republic was crippled with a famously unworkable federal system, with only three (later four) constituent units. Moreover, the regional boundaries were drawn in such a way that a different ethnic group was dominant in each region, and each dominant ethnic group then formed its own political party. As a result, the cleavages of ethnicity, region, and party—which intelligent institutional design could have steered into crosscutting currents—fell into one broad chasm of bitterly reinforcing antagonism. Any conflict involving one of these three cleavages almost immediately invoked the other two, and the succession of conflicts along this grand line of cleavage progressively polarized politics to the point of total distrust and dysfunction.

But there was still another puzzle to resolve. Why were Nigerian politicians so intent on winning and retaining political office that they would use any methods, embrace any allies, destroy any opponents, and impose any price on society in order to ensure their “victory” at the polls? To simply say that there had not yet emerged a culture of compromise and tolerance, or what Dahl called a “system of mutual security,”⁹ was hardly a satisfying answer. Neither was I ready to rest content with the simplistic but popular notion at the time that democracy was doomed in Nigeria, and in most of Africa, because of its primordial ethnic differences (in a word, “tribalism”). Here is where class analysis and the concept of “political class” became essential to comprehending the trajectory of Nigeria, and indeed of postcolonial Africa more broadly. Because the colonial legacy was heavily statist (and perverse in many other respects that I documented), and because the economy was so poorly developed, the state controlled or regulated virtually all the means for social advancement and wealth accumulation. It was not just the salaries and perquisites of elective office. The bulk of the country’s cash income flowed through the state. Winning elections meant controlling who would get access to this wealth; who would get appointive government jobs, military commissions, scholarships, contracts, loans, and licenses. Government office also provided the leverage to ensure admission of one’s children to elite schools, and thus the transmission of membership in the dominant class to the next generation. The alternative to being at the table for this distribution of state booty was not a quiet, comfortable middle-class life, but rather grinding poverty. This explained much of the desperation of political life.

Utilizing the state to accumulate wealth and enter the dominant class was not limited in time and place to postcolonial Africa. It must have figured prominently in the state formation process in late nineteenth-century Italy, for example, because the Italian political scientist Gaetano Mosca was heavily preoccupied with the process as he wrote these memorable lines in his 1896 classic, The Ruling Class:

If all moral and material advantages depend on those who hold power, there is no baseness that will not be resorted to in order to please them; just as there is no act of chicanery or violence that will not be resorted to in order to attain power, in other words, in order to belong to the number of those who hand out the cake rather than to the larger number of those who have to rest content with the slices that are doled out to them.¹⁰

This dependence of class on power had two huge and destructive consequences for Nigeria’s tentative democracy. First, no party or indeed individual could afford to lose an election. As the late Claude Ake put it in his extraordinary presidential address to the 1981 conference of the Nigerian Political Science Association, “a desperate struggle to win control of state power ensues since this control means for all practical purposes being all powerful and owning everything. Politics becomes warfare, a matter of life or death.”¹¹ And second, that warfare took the form of ethnic and regional conflict, not only because these lines of cleavage tapped people’s most strongly felt identity, but also because politicians recognized that these identities could be easily mobilized on the path to power, and that doing so would distract attention from the politicians’ own self-interested behavior. Thus the second consequence: the pervasive use of political office for personal and group enrichment bred a pattern of endemic corruption that gradually alienated the public as a whole even as it mobilized specific constituencies. As I showed in my study of the First Republic, resentment of corruption was an important parallel narrative sapping and ultimately destroying the legitimacy of the First Republic.

In search of big comparisons

I had never wanted or intended to be an Africanist per se. While I became deeply caught up with the drama and promise of Sub-Saharan Africa, I had always viewed my core intellectual interest as the one I had hoped to pursue for my doctoral dissertation—the comparative study of democratic success and failure. Early in my postdoctoral career, while I was finishing up an intense and formative year in Nigeria as a Fulbright Visiting Lecturer at Bayero University, Kano, I sketched a plan to return, in what I thought would be a manageable way, to the book I had wanted to write from the beginning. By then it was clear to me that I would not have the time—or in any case, as a young (untenured) professor, I could not assume the risk—of writing by myself a multicountry (and certainly very multiyear) comparative study of experiences with democracy. So instead I drafted a vision and a framework for an edited project that would recruit prominent country experts to write chapters tracing and explaining different national experiences with democracy in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. As I was preparing to leave Nigeria amid the chaos of another rigged election, and shortly in advance of another military coup that I was privately and grimly expecting, I sent my plan to my former dissertation advisor, Marty Lipset. I sought his comments, and more importantly his collaboration with me on this new project. Lipset loved the idea, and asked me if I would mind his making it a troika by drawing in one of his first graduate students, Juan Linz. Having been so deeply influenced by Linz’s classic study of democratic breakdowns, I was thrilled.

So began the most rewarding and impactful intellectual collaboration of my life. Over the subsequent year Lipset and Linz and I met, reflected, debated and refashioned the framework into a rigorous and comprehensive conceptual, theoretical, and methodological agenda. We laid out a definition of regime types (including the important category of pseudo-democracy, or what are now called “hybrid regimes”) and we offered an inventory of potentially relevant theoretical variables. We asked each case study author first to recount the major experiences with democratic and nondemocratic government in each country, and the characteristic conflicts and tensions in each regime; then to explain the fate of each regime, why it persisted or fell; then (third) to offer a summary theoretical judgment of the most important factors explaining the experience with democracy in the country; and then finally to ponder the future prospects for democracy in the country. In all, 26 case studies were produced in three regional volumes covering Africa, then Asia, then Latin America.¹²

The project yielded one of the greatest successes but also the most acute embarrassment of my scholarly career. The three regional volumes had a considerable impact on the discipline of comparative politics, focusing attention back from time-bound political processes (of breakdown and transition) to the longer-term historical legacies, structural conditions, as well as political and institutional choices that have shaped democratic outcomes over the long run. The v...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Frontmatter
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction In search of democracy
• Part 1 The dynamics and foundations of democracy
• Part 2 In search of democracy in Africa
• Part 3 In search of democracy in Asia
• Part 4 Promoting democracy Policy implications
• Appendix
• Index