Why Democracies Flounder and Fail

Remedying Mass Society Politics

Michael Haas

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319740706
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Democracy is in crisis because voices of the people are ignored due to a politics of mass society. After demonstrating how the French Fourth Republic failed, wherein Singapore's totalitarianism is a dangerous model, Washington is enmeshed in gridlock, and there is a global democracy deficit, solutions are offered to revitalize democracy as the best form of government. The book demonstrates how mass society politics operates, with intermediate institutions of civil society (media, pressure groups, political parties) no longer transmitting the will of the people to government but instead are concerned with corporate interests and have developed oligarchical mindsets. Rather than micro-remedy bandaids, the author focuses on the need to transform governing philosophies from pragmatic to humanistic solutions.

Part I

Democracy and Mass Society

Democracies today are losing a “New Cold War” against authoritarian regimes, especially China and Russia, as well as the campaign to eradicate international terrorism. During the Cold War, the United States and other industrial capitalist states promoted the virtues of democracy and won the war of ideas against the communist bloc. During the first Cold War, therefore, there was little need to perfect democracy, with the exception of the United States, lagging far behind in the early years, passing laws establishing voting rights for minorities and welfare state medical benefits. Those complaining of elite democracy were silenced during the Cold War in order to maintain the illusion that it was a superior political system.

When the first Cold War ended, democracy was supposed to spread everywhere (Fukuyama 1992), but many efforts floundered and failed (Huntington 1991). The attempts to impose democracy on Afghanistan and Iraq are now regarded as failures. In what has been called the “New Cold War” (Lucas 2008), Russia has been undermining democracies while China has provided a model of remarkable economic progress without democratic reforms (Bell 2015). Meanwhile, the United States continues to prop up dictators in the Middle East, providing a rationale for terrorism (Moghaddam 2006; cf. Buzan 2006). And democracy itself is in crisis because voters now appear to be seeking narrow self-interest above the national interest in a global economy. When governments are in gridlock, as the French Fourth Republic was and Washington now is, the reputation of democracy itself is tarnished. Such a democracy can no longer serve as a model for the world until fundamental problems are solved. Complacent acceptance of the democratic status quo, which characterized first Cold War thinking, is no longer acceptable.

To improve the image of democracy, a new theory appears to be needed in order to explain why democracies flounder and fail. But in fact that theory, known as the Mass Society Paradigm, was developed long ago. During the Cold War, it was suppressed as somehow subversive of the needs of the time. But now that paradigm needs to be better understood—which is the purpose of the present volume.

Crises are inevitable in any form of government due to internal and external problems, but democracies strive for perfection more than other regime types. Much writing emerged about the crises of democracy in the 1890s and the 1930s, and there was even a pessimistic book on the subject in the mid-1970s (Crozier et al. 1975). Today, the main internal problem is that democracy is falsely equated with procedural elements, particularly surrounding elections, while the main external problem confronting democracy is globalization, which appears to have pitted nationalists against cosmopolitans in a deadlock involving diametrically opposed interests vying for public support.

Regardless of the causes or effects, the discourse on democracy today lacks a coherent, comprehensive picture of the situation. Most analyses focus on micro-phenomena, such as why legislatures are unproductive in the face of crisis. And there is a lack of clarity on what “democracy” is. The present volume, therefore, has undertaken the task of developing a metatheory of democracy, long forgotten, by explicating the Mass Society Paradigm. Democracy—rule by the people—is a difficult form of government to sustain because people are supposed to be the source of ultimate sovereignty, whereas they are usually very far from the institutions of government, constituting what may be called “the masses.” How the masses of ordinary people can influence government has perhaps been the most important political question throughout the ages. They can do so directly and effectively in small communities; but if they try to directly influence governments in large countries, the result can be frustration. Forms of democratic crisis include the descent into civil wars, coups, and gridlock. The first two represent the failure of democracy; the third is floundering—an inability to resolve important societal questions that may ultimately bring down democracy itself. Of course, a failed or floundering government may be conquered by another, but that is a matter of interstate warfare, which is not within the scope of the present volume.

Some scholars have attempted to study how democracies survive civil wars quantitatively, without analyzing the inner workings of democratic governments (Reynal-Querol 2005; Gleditsch et al. 2007). Although they have identified patterns across many cases, their only significant findings are that civil wars are more likely in incipient or weaker democracies, economically less developed countries, multiethnic societies, and presidential majoritarian systems. Such superficial correlations beg the question about what is really going on within democracies that descend into civil wars.

Since the masses rarely influence governments directly, they are likely to have an indirect impact through intermediate institutions outside government, which in turn can represent their interests to demand government action. The intervening bodies are known collectively as “civil society” (media, political parties, and pressure groups). The people may also rely on judicial and legislative institutions, sometimes with significant powers allocated to them apart from the executive branch by constitutions. But when the intermediate entities serve their own interests rather than representing the masses, the result will be unrest. If the masses in a democracy are unable to influence either civil society or the government itself, then democracy will flounder and might even be abolished by a coup d’état.

Accordingly, Chap. 1 explains the history and meaning of the concept of democracy, deconstructing the term into its components. A history of constitutions, separation of powers, and other elements of democracy is then followed by alternative definitions of democracy and critiques of democracy.

Chapter 2 presents the history of the development of the Mass Society Paradigm. The aim is to explain how a democracy (or any other political system) can work for or against the people who are governed. Understanding the difficulties in making democracy function, thus, requires an examination of the interstices of democratic societies, which are exposed in the chapter. The chapter ends by identifying why mass societies are dangerous to democracy and the people.

© The Author(s) 2019

Michael HaasWhy Democracies Flounder and Failhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74070-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Democracy: Components and Types

Michael Haas¹

(1)

Los Angeles, CA, USA

Michael Haas

End Abstract

Democratic government—or any form of government—is not required unless humans congregate in such a way that task differentiation becomes necessary to sustain the community. An allocation of powers to service a community can be democratic or undemocratic, but the strong and rich have tended to dominate throughout most of human history. The idea of democracy, as presently understood, only arose relatively recently and its development is fascinating.

Some scholars utopianize “tribal democracy” (Paley 2002), which has been claimed to have existed in pre-Babylonian Mesopotamia around 2100 bce (Jacobsen 1943: 159–72) and in certain parts of India from 1500 to 400 bce (Robinson 1997: 22–23; Keane 2009: xi). However, the best evidence indicates that democracy first existed, albeit for fleetingly, in city-states of Greece, where the idea arose that the people, not the elites, should determine the actions of governments. The idea of democratic rule has now become an aspiration for humanity.

But democracies are difficult to form. Some democracies are overthrown in coups by authoritarian, elite-run cliques. Others suffer civil wars. Many flounder, struggling like fish placed on dry land or elephants dancing on the edge of a precipice, nearly collapsing because the people are unable to communicate with those who run the government supposedly on their behalf.

There are many examples of democracies floundering, as itemized in Appendix A. Among the most prominent cases are the difficulties faced in forming coalition governments after World War II in Belgium, Fourth Republic France, Italy, Spain, and Thailand. More recently, efforts to create democracies in Afghanistan, Egypt, and Iraq have been unable to pass the test of political inclusiveness. As for Nepal, nine months of disagreement between political parties delayed the delivery of vital humanitarian relief pledged by sources worldwide after the massive earthquake of 2015 (Hammer 2016). But the more surprising example is the United States, where moderates in the two main political parties have had a majority of votes in Congress (Haas 2012b: ch. 7), yet compromise legislation has rarely been passed.

Something is very wrong when countries that value the idea of democracy cannot put their ideals into practice and thus allow the will of the people to prevail. As the present volume will demonstrate, one reason for such problems is the mistaken belief that the forms of democracy necessarily produce the substance of democracy. A politics of mass society exists when ordinary persons cannot make their voices heard because intervening institutions of civil society (interest groups, media, political parties) are either nonexistent or serve their own interests in pressuring government rather than representing the will of the people. “Pseudo-democracy” exists when a country has procedures of democratic government but lacks substance—that is, when government fails to carry out the will of the people. The most important question within democratic theory is to determine the conditions for achieving substantive democracy, but that question is rarely asked (cf. Miller and Stokes 1963; Clausen 1973; Jacobson and Carson 2016; Sinclair 1997: 231; Dengwerth 2014). Instead, there is a tendency to tolerate mass society politics, which is dangerous because pseudo-democracies can easily fail, and human suffering is exacerbated when the needs of the people are ignored.

Accordingly, the present volume addresses democratic theory from a long-neglected perspective. First, the term “democracy” needs to be defined in terms of its major components, as in the present chapter (cf. Terchek and Conte 2000). Second, alternative types must be identified in order to discover why the term “democracy” means different things in different cultures. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Back Matter