Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
64 lines (43 loc) · 3.7 KB

Democracy.md

File metadata and controls

64 lines (43 loc) · 3.7 KB
Error in user YAML: (<unknown>): found character that cannot start any token while scanning for the next token at line 1 column 9
---
bibtex: @book{
        author={Tilly,Charles},
        year={2007},
        title={Democracy},
        publisher={Cambridge University Press},
        address={Cambridge},
        abstract={"Democracy identifies the general processes causing democratization and de-democratization at a national level across the world over the last few hundred years. It singles out integration of trust networks into public politics, insulation of public politics from categorical inequality, and suppression of autonomous coercive power centers as crucial processes. Through analytic narratives and comparisons of multiple regimes, mostly since World War II, this book makes the case for recasting current theories of democracy, democratization, and de-democratization."--BOOK JACKET.},
        keywords={Democracy},
        isbn={0521701538; 9780521877718; 0521877717; 9780521701532},
        language={English},
        url={www.summon.com},
}
---

Democracy

Charles Tilly 2007

"Democracy will then turn out to be a certain class of relations between states and citizens." p12

"Democracy is a good in itself, since to some degree it gives a regime's population collective power to determine its own fate." p6

There are four types of definitions of democracy:

  • constitutional: "concentrates on laws a regime enacts concerning political activity." p7
  • substantive: "focus on the conditions of life and political a given regime promotes." p7
  • procedural: A narrow range of governmental practices that determine if a regime is democratic. p8
  • process-oriented: "identify a minimum set of processes that must be continuously in motion for a situation to qualify as democratic." p9 (see Dahl 1998:37-38)

A regime is the set of relations between states and citizens. p12

We can judge the degree of democracy by assessing "the extent to which the state behaves in conformity to the expressed demands of its citizens." p13

So "a regime is democratic to the degree that political relations between the state and its citizens feature broad, equal, protected, and mutually binding consultation." p14

"State capacity means the extent to which interventions of state agents in existing non-state resources, activities, and interpersonal connections alter existing distributions of those resources, activities, and interpersonal connections as well as relations among those distributions." p16

Democratization (and de-democratization) are altered by: p23

  • increasing integration of trust networks into public politics
  • increasing insulation of public politics from categorical inequality
  • decreasing autonomy of major power centres from public politics.

Note Machiavelli (1940 111-112) echoing Plato: monarchy disintegrates into tyranny, aristocracy into oligarchy, and democracy into licentiousness. But the best constitutions balance all three p28

Tilly's outlines the precursors to democracy: (p29)

  • merchant oligarchies
  • peasant communities
  • religious sects
  • revolutionary moments

Power can be divided in a regime by either dividing it between members, rotating members through office, or sharing it collectively. p30

"Even during its recent history, democracy has been a precarious and reversible form of rule" p33

Quoting Nancy Bermeo (p39).

Though citizen passivity made the dismantling of democracy earlier, it is undeniable that democracies studied here where brought down by their own political elites.

Tatu Vanhanen computes an index of democratization as the product of the share of non winning party votes and the proportion of the population voting. p41

"It will take a thoroughgoing process-oriented analysis of democratization and de-democratization to provide coherent answers to such questions [the how and why of democracy]" p50