Rational Choice and Democratic Government

A Sociological Approach

Tibor Rutar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000440881
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Democracia

Drawing on a range of data from across disciplines, this book explores a series of fundamental questions surrounding the nature, working and effects of democracy, considering the reasons for the emergence and spread of democratic government, the conditions under which it endures or collapses – and the role of wealth in this process – and the peaceful nature of dealings between democracies. With emphasis on the 'ordinary' voter, the author employs rational choice theory to examine the motivations of voters and their levels of political knowledge and rationality, as well as the special interests, incentives and corruption of politicians. A theoretically informed and empirically illustrated study of the birth and downfall of democracies, the extent of voters' political knowledge and ignorance, the logic of political behaviour in both open and closed regimes, and the international effects of democratic rule, Rational Choice and Democratic Government: A Sociological Approach will appeal to scholars with interests in political sociology, political psychology, economics and political science.

1

Against romanticizing democracy

DOI: 10.4324/9781003172574-1

Introduction: the historical peculiarity of mass democracy

Life in a stable, cushy liberal democracy is taken more or less for granted by many people in the West. Not only that, we tend to assume without questioning the moral superiority of democracy over other political regimes.

Our obliviousness to how weird and uncommon democracy in general, and liberal democracy in particular, has actually been in human civilization is in one sense not very surprising, as most Western countries have simply not experienced any other form of government in decades. Multiple generations have grown up in consolidated democracies. Likewise, the moral status we ascribe to this system is, on the face of it, quite deserved. Liberal democracies provide the most expansive and robust political and civil rights in the world. The former include such seemingly obvious amenities as free and fair elections, the right to assembly, and a realistic chance of opposition winning in electoral competitions. The latter encompass fundamental rights of free and independent media, of freely practising one’s religion (or nonreligious beliefs), of free expression in general, the rule of law, and so on. However, when stepping back a bit and taking a more historical perspective, we immediately and quite painfully come to recognize that none of this is as obvious, self-evident, or secure as it might at first seem.

The first observation about the obviousness of democracy is, as I have already intimated, the quickest to collapse. Even though it is true that today many parts of the world (not relegated solely to the West) are filled almost to the brim with democracies, these regimes nevertheless represent less than 50% of all countries and less than 40% of the world’s population.¹ Most people, even today, still live in non-liberal and simply non-democratic, i.e. autocratic, regimes. Furthermore, mass democracy appears as an even scarcer and more fragile phenomenon if we look back in time. Since the emergence of first pockets of human civilization around 5,000 years ago and right up until the late 19^th century, illiberal autocracy was practically the only ubiquitous way in which states were governed. So, both spatially and temporally liberal democracy is the opposite of being obvious or given. It is a great, massive exception.

Of course, the fact that until very recently almost all states were authoritarian does not mean that all societies for the past few thousand years had also suffered the same fate. There existed quite a few ‘early democracies’, as David Stasavage has called them.³ These were almost without exception relegated to small-scale tribal societies, such as the Iroquois and Huron Indians, or the Germanic tribes in Europe. Moreover, they were very different from the more familiar mass representative, rights-protected democratic regimes of the modern era. To take just one important difference, there were no formal elections of leaders and universal adult suffrage was absent. What usually happened is that the leaders had to consult with, and thus yield some decision-making power to, local councils or assemblies. Even the most well-known case of early democracy, that of Ancient Athens, which was truly exceptional in the extent to which power was shared with, and ordinary people participated in, the assemblies, nevertheless remained small-scale compared to neighbouring regions. We should also not forget that it was not even a question whether women and slaves could enjoy the same civil and political right that men did.

To anticipate a major theme of the book, these exceptions to the general rule of historical authoritarianism in state societies might seem to some to invalidate one of my central claims, which is that rulers primarily do what benefits them and that they are reluctant to share power with others. In fact, they do not invalidate it. It is precisely the small-scale nature of previous examples, or the leader’s need to create a popular army (Athens), or the necessity of gathering local-level economic information for purposes of taxation – information that can only be reliably provided by community councils –, that are responsible for the leaders’ reluctant decision to relinquish some of their power to the people.⁴ In sum, democratic states are not the natural form of large-scale human civilization.

Figure 1.1 The number of electoral and liberal democracies in the world, 1900–2000

Source: OurWorldInData²

But what if we limit our gaze to the 21^st century? Surely today, as we have already seen, things are different than in the past. State-mandated bondage is much less common than it once was. Political freedom is much more widespread. Mass democracies are finally flowering all over the world. Even here, however, there is no automaticity and obviousness.

In the last 14 years, since 2006, the world’s democratic share has actually declined. In 2006, Freedom House counted almost 47% of all existing countries as ‘free’. By 2018 this had dropped to 44%. And we are not only talking about one peculiar year here but a larger trend. A trend which, if we take account of the latest data, has turned for the worse and became somewhat worrying. In 2019, the share of ‘free’ countries dipped a further one-and-a-half percentage points to 42.5%. Freedom House classifies all countries as fitting one of their three master categories: ‘free’, ‘partly free’, and ‘unfree’. The ‘free’ include all liberal democracies and a few non-liberal, electoral democracies that are nevertheless close to being liberal. The remaining two categories capture all other weaker non-liberal, electoral democracies, and all non-democratic, straightforwardly autocratic systems.

This ‘democratic recession’, as Larry Diamond has termed the phenomenon, does not only mean that democracies in the 21^st century are vanishing but also touches upon the degree of freedom in the world more generally (see Figure 1.3; higher score denotes lower quality of freedom and fewer rights).⁶ In the past decade and a half, political and civil rights have been diminishing all over the world and in all sorts of regimes. Freedom has been on a downward slide both in older, consolidated democracies, such as the United States of America, as well as in autocratic states the likes of Russia and China.

Figure 1.2 Share of democratic (‘free’) countries in the world, 2006–2019

Source: Freedom House⁵

Figure 1.3 Average rate of freedom in the world, 2006–2019

Source: Freedom House (higher score means less freedom)

Even if we only focus, laser-like, solely on the West in the 21^st century, liberal democracy is still not wholly obvious. Two trends are most important in this regard. The first concerns the degree of political and civil rights in long-standing democracies, which has taken a hit in the past few years. Of the 41 states that Freedom House consistently tagged as ‘free’ between 1985 and 2005, 22 have seen their democracy score go down in the mid 2010s. The most salient case is the United States, the oldest liberal democracy in the world. In 2010, the US scored 94 (out of 100), while today it hovers around 86 (see Figure 1.4).

The second trend has to do with the shift in beliefs of ordinary people in the West regarding how pleased they are with living in a democracy as well as how important such a regime is for them. In 12 Western countries, younger generations of people – those born in the 1970s and 1980s – have lower approval rates of living in a democracy than older generations. In 18 Western countries, youth thinks of democracy as less important than older people – those born in 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Both trends are in effect in, for example, Slovenia, Australia, Canada, Cyprus, Japan, the US, Britain, and Norway.⁷

Figure 1.4 Democracy score in the US, 2010–2018

Source: Freedom House

Even so, we should be careful with how we think about this. Some researchers who study the democratic recession and wax apocalyptic about it tend to exaggerate its extent.⁸ I think they are wont to forget at least three important empirical facts and one theoretical, or methodological, point. The facts are that, first, even though today there are fewer democracies in the world than 14 years ago – and not just one or two fewer – it might still be too early to say that the drop was extremely dramatic (see Figure 1.2). In fact, putting the year 2019 aside for a moment, the share of democracies had quite consistently hovered around 46 % and 44 % since 2006. We shall see what the years 2020 and 2021 bring. A further deepening of the recession, stalling, or perhaps a reverse?

Second, and more importantly, if we compare the number of contemporary democracies with that of the late 1980s or even the early 1990s, we clearly see that the state of democracy today is still happier than it was then – even including the year 2019 (see Figure 1.5). The same goes for the average rate of freedom in the world (see Figure 1.6).

Third, the decline in attitudinal approval and importance of democracy among the youth is statistically significant only in some countries and not others. For example, the approval of democracy is down only in half of the Western countries considered by that study.⁹ Furthermore, we need to remind ourselves that the current generations of young people have, on average, much more liberal attitudes compared to the youth from previous periods.¹⁰ According to a recent study of policy ideology among European mass publics, attitudes regarding homosexuality, abortion, women’s emancipation, immigration, etc., have been shifting in a more liberal direction since the 1980s – most markedly in young people.¹¹ I gather from this that even though today’s youth is, in some countries, less thrilled about democracy – what is at least partially a function of them not experiencing anything else and taking it for granted – their other attitudes about human rights are shifting away from those of would-be authoritarian leaders or their supporters.

Figure 1.5 Share of democratic (‘free’) countries in the world, 1980–2019

Source: Freedom House

Figure 1.6 Average rate of freedom in the world, 1985–2019

Source: Freedom House (higher score means less freedom)

But to my mind the most important point is theoretical – one that will act as a guiding thread for the next chapter and the book as a whole. The democratic recession can be seen as catastrophic, inexplicable, and fundamentally disconcerting primarily by those who either knowingly or not subscribe to a particular, naïve theory of democratization which turns out on closer inspection to be fatally flawed. There are at least two general forms this theory can take.

According to one telling, the forward march of democracy throughout the world in the 20^th century has been something almost akin to a natural force, all but inexorably bearing down on everything in its path. With the rise of Reason and Enlightenment in the previous centuries, so the story goes, democracy as an idea has finally had the chance to germinate and spread first in Europe and then elsewhere, being adopted by political elites, intellectuals, merchants, city-dwellers and so on. Now it is expected, sooner rather than later, that it should take hold virtually across the world and, once established in practice, put to rest other bad political ideas and experiments. Democratic government was only a matter of humans reaching their intellectual maturity.

The other story has it that the period between 1989 and 1991 was somehow a historical turning point which, after we had crossed it, should – again – sooner rather than later lead to the triumphant democratic dismantling of dictatorships across the world. This variant of the theory similarly holds that, once established, democracies should be virtually impregnab...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• 1. Against romanticizing democracy
• 2. Wealth – the path to freedom?
• 3. Voters are not dumb, but we do not know much
• 4. Politicians Are People, Not Angels
• 5. For and against democratic peace
• 6. Conclusion: Fukuyama's ‘The End of History?' in social scientific retrospective
• Bibliography
• Index