AP Comp Day 10 – democracy?
Goal – To understand that democracy has potential problems and
solutions. To understand that the cultural theory helps to understand
why people make the political choices they make.
1. Review S&K Democracy and Zakaria’s solution
2. Evaluate Carothers’ arguments
a. Identify and evaluate the 5 assumptions of the transition paradigm
b. Why may transition shift?
c. Choose 2 of his proposals - evaluate his reasoning &specific evidence
3. Issues of developing a comprehensive definition and explanation of
democracy (its different manifestations) and democratization.
A. What are the inherent contradictions within democracy as a type?
B. Why may democracy work in some countries and not in others?
C. Why may democracy take very different forms in different countries?
4. Free response AP Questions and scoring
5. Discuss Wildavsky – developing political preferences Which category best
describes the US polity?
6. How did Brooks use the cultural theory?
1. Make specific connections to Wildavsky specific cultures
7. Political development definition
S and K - Procedures of Democracy in a nation-state:
Elected officials make policy within constitutional limits
w/o veto from informal or unelected sources or from
super-sovereign influences from abroad
1. competitive, fair, free, non-coercive & regular elections
2. practically full universal suffrage
3. Practically universal right to run for office
4. Free and noncoercive right to expression
5. Free, widely available & multiple information sources
6. Civil society
S and K’s factors of feasibility for Democracy in a
nation-state are:
1. Agreement that electoral winners get to rule, but
winners cannot freeze out opposition
2. Citizens must follow rules, currently agreed to or not,
so long as there is legitimacy based partially on belief
that free elections will occur later “contingent consent”
3. There does not have to be consensus, just rule of law
consistent with the political culture or set of political
norms
4. Must be opportunity for alternation of power and
policy
Kesselman - Preconditions for consolidation
Transitional Democracies
Authoritarian
Electoral authoritarian
Illiberal
procedural
Substantive D
For a system to be typed as having transitioned from
authoritarianism through the transitional democracy types to
being a consolidated democracy, the system must have:
1. met the five conditions of democracy
a) Free fair elections
b) Freedom of political assembly
c) Regime has accountability based on fixed, knowable, transparent
procedures
d) Civil and political rights
e) Independent judiciary
2. Been in existence for some kind of length of time
3. Democratic practices that have become deeply ingrained and
the five conditions have been met relatively consistently
Carothers’ 5 Assumptions about Transition process
1. If a country is moving away from authoritarianism, it therefore must
be moving TO democracy
2. There are three distinct phases of transitions
1 – opening
2 – breakthrough
3 – consolidation
3. Elections are the key determining event that leads the breakthrough
into the 3rd phase
4. The underlying factors of society, economy, culture and history will
have very little impact
5. Democracy would lead to state-building which would enforce
democracy, but a functioning state was not important
2.b.Why might democratization shift?
a. Modernization increases value of gov’t action, leading to
corruption
b. Complacency of citizens
c. Rulers change rules to freeze out opposition
d. Non-elected officials use their clout to control elected
officials
e. Modernization leads to critical mass of relative deprivation
f. Crisis leading to demagoguery
Short-Answer Concepts: We suggest that you spend approximately 30 minutes
total on questions 1 through 5.
1. Describe the status of private property in China under Mao. Identify
and explain one policy undertaken by the Chinese government within
the past 30 years that contradicts that policy.
2. Define political ideology. Identify one political party that participated
in the 2006 presidential elections in Mexico and describe one central
element of its political ideology.
3. Colonialism had an impact on both the colonizer and the colonized.
Describe one example of how colonialism has shaped contemporary
politics in Nigeria. Describe two examples of how colonialism has
shaped contemporary politics in Great Britain.
4. Describe one feature of a bureaucracy in the context of an
authoritarian system. Explain how that feature you have described can
both help and hinder the effective implementation of public policy in an
authoritarian system.
5. Identify two countries in the AP Comparative Government and
Politics course—other than Iran—where religion serves as a source of
political legitimacy. Describe how religion confers political legitimacy in
each of the two countries that you have identified.
Conceptual Analysis: We suggest that you spend approximately 30
minutes on question 6.
6. (a) Describe one similarity and one difference between illiberal democracy
and liberal democracy.
(b) Identify an institution that would need to be changed to make an illiberal
democracy more liberal.
(c) Describe a change to the institution you identified in (b) that would
facilitate a shift from illiberal to liberal democracy.
(d) Explain why the change you described in part (c) would lead to a more
liberal democracy.
Wildavsky’s Cultural Model
• How does political culture develop?
Culture is defined as the shared values legitimating social practices. People
have relations they justify by rationalizing relative to values, and all values
exist to rationalize behavior
Thus culture (way of life) develops as a result of people rationalizing their
social behaviors consistent with shared values – further reinforcing those
values in practice if they support their way of life and changing those values
that do not support their way of life.
Political preferences are built into the political system based on making choices
about supporting or rejecting institutions/authority relative to how much
they advance the culture – I am for this or against this based on if it is
consistent with my shared values and rationalized behaviors.
Culture is also determined by conflict with other cultures. My culture is X
because it is not Y.
•How do people choose their political propensities?
People choose their preferences by answering two questions: Who
am I? and what should I do? and by evaluating if their active
choices have furthered their way of life. As they make more
choices and evaluations, they further know what they will want in
the future.
• How do people choose their political propensities?
Who am I? – part of a group or an individual
What shall I do? – follow a set of strict rules or have very few rules to
follow
Once these questions are answered, we can determine one of four main
cultures: Fatalistic, Hierarchic, Egalitarian, Individualistic
An individual w/ weak
group connections
Who am I ?A member of a group with
strong group connections
Follow a Fatalists –people cannot control Hierarchist – strong bonds put
bunch of their own lives as less
the group over the indie,
rules. connected indies because the justifying strict rules and
rules are imposed, thus no
What preferences what will be will be
shall I
do?
Individualist – self-regulated
Follow competition and cooperation
few rules amongst adults seeking
opportunities to be different
inequality b/c it is more
effective for supporting the
group
Egalitarian – voluntary strong
association with a group, the
group works because everyone
is equal and is willing to work
together as equals
Social cleavages etc.
people identify themselves as part of a group based on self-selected traits,
characteristics and factors
When one “group” has a conflict with another, it is a social cleavage
These can be cross-cutting cleavages, like gender or religion in the US.
This means that, regardless of other group identification, this one group trait
leads to conflict across other group traits. Gender for example, regardless if
people are poor, black, Jewish, urban, or immigrant, gender plays a significant
role in social and political conflict.
Other cleavages are cumulative. This means that conflict grows more
intense as more and more cleavages are added together.
•For example, in Northern Ireland, religion, region and wealth all go
together. Catholics are political weaker, their regions where they live
poorer and their families poorer.
•In the US, race, urbanization, poverty, gender all go together to further
exacerbate each of the other cleavages such that black, urban, women
are more likely to be poorer than almost anyone else in the US
Political development
Palmer – “Based on United Nations definition – achievement of stable
democracy that promotes well-being of its citizens in equitable,
humane and environmentally concerned way”
1. Full range of human needs – government must do more than rule –
it needs to promote the economic and social well-being of its citizens
– access to education, healthcare, housing, employment and a
“reasonable distribution of wealth”
1. Sometimes focus on national economic growth is mistaken for
improved quality of life
2. Uniform standard for comparing states with a stable criteria
3. Raises questions about relations between policies and cultural and
economic context – politics affects and is affected by environment
conditions and this definition allows us to ask questions about
stability w/o democracy, etc.
4. This definition is normative however and is biased in favor of
western standards with the state as the central actor – but states
are losing their monopoly
5. Definition of development, as a process, inevitably leads to the
conclusion that a world government is the goal – but this may not at
all be beneficial if one uses the historical cultural method of analysis