POLS 374 Foundations of
Comparative Politics
What Makes a Democracy?
Introductory Lecture
What Makes a Democracy?
• Democracy is an exceedingly important topic in the
world today. Any student of political science should
be concerned with questions concerning how
democracies emerge, how the are maintained, why
they sometimes fail.
• We should also be concerned about the quality of
democracy, even or especially in places—like the
United States—where democracy seems to be firmly
embedded.
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What Makes a Democracy?
• Before we can begin a discussion of “what makes a
democracy,” however, we must define the term.
• So, what is democracy? (Discuss)
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What Makes a Democracy?
• In the academic literature, democracy is
generally defined either formally (i.e.,
narrowly) or substantively (i.e., broadly), or
sometimes as a combination of the two.
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What Makes a Democracy?
• The formal definition of democracy is
straightforward. Here is one definition offered by
Anthony Giddens (2000), an eminent sociologist:
• “I would say democracy exists where you have a
multiparty system with political parties competing
with one another, free and non-corrupt voting
procedures to elect political leaders, and an effective
legal framework of civil liberties or human rights that
underlie the mechanisms of voting processes.”
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What Makes a Democracy?
• If we break Giddens’ definition down, we have three
readily discernable components of democracy:
 A competitive multiparty system.
 Free and non-corrupt elections.
 An effective legal framework of civil liberties or human
rights.
 To this list, we might add a fourth component: Universal
and equal suffrage (suffrage is simply the right or privilege
of voting).
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What Makes a Democracy?
• These four components constitute what many, but not
all, people would consider the minimum requirements
for democracy. But this raises an obvious question:
Are the “minimum requirements” enough?
• That is, is a country that has a competitive multiparty
system, free and non-corrupt elections, an effective
legal framework of civil liberties or human rights,
and universal suffrage a “real” democracy? Or is
something else required?
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What Makes a Democracy?
• There is no easy answer.
• Many scholars, though, argue that the formal
requirements (i.e., those we just discussed) of
democracy aren’t enough, because the formal
requirements of democracy don’t guarantee the
existence of genuine democracy.
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What Makes a Democracy?
• This is the point in some of the cartoons shown
earlier …
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What Makes a Democracy?
• David Held, to cite just one example, argues that a
justifiable account of democracy must be premised on
the principle of autonomy. As he explains it,
autonomy means:
 Individuals should be free and equal in the determination
of the conditions of their own lives; that is, they should
enjoy equal rights [and, accordingly, equal obligations] in
the specification of the framework which generates and
limits the opportunities available to them, so long as they
do not deploy this framework to negate the rights of others.
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What Makes a Democracy?
• To this, another scholar adds that democracy
should include “a bill of rights that goes
beyond the right to cast a vote to include equal
opportunity for participation and for
discovering individual preferences as well as
citizens’ final control of the political agenda.”
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What Makes a Democracy?
• Based on these views, we might even argue
that “real” democracy doesn’t exists even in
the United States.
• After all, with the influence of money and
power in American politics, it is sometimes
difficult to assert that citizens ultimately
control the political agenda or that they are
“free and equal in the determination of the
conditions of their own lives.”
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What Makes a Democracy?
• But this raises another key point: Is an
imperfect democracy still a democracy or is it
something else?
• There’s really no definitive answer to this
question. In this regard, we might say that
there is an unavoidably subjective element to
defining democracy.
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What Makes a Democracy?
• The debate about how to define democracy is
important and should not be glossed over;
however, for our purposes, a formal definition
of democracy may not only be justifiable, but
also necessary.
• Why?
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What Makes a Democracy?
• If we fail provide a reasonably narrow definition of
democracy, comparativists and other researchers will
face serious analytical difficulties, not the least of
which is that the dependent variable—the outcome
we are most interested in understanding—ends up
being anything we want it to be, or nothing at all.
• The upshot is that our analysis becomes meaningless,
for how can we say that certain independent variables
lead to democracy if we can’t say what democracy is?
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What Makes a Democracy?
• One last point: Some scholars argue that, even though
a formal definition of democracy may be limited, it is
still substantively meaningful.
• It is meaningful because, once the most basic
institutions, practices, and/or components of
democracy are established in a society, they almost
invariably create a “promising basis for further
progress in the distribution of power and other forms
of substantive equality.”
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What Makes a Democracy?
• With the foregoing discussion in mind, we can
now focus on the next big set of questions,
which are:
• How and why do democracies emerge?
• Why do some survive while others do not?
• Why do some thrive and become stronger over
time, while others just sort of limp along?
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What Makes a Democracy?
• There are, of course, many explanations put
forward about democratization. Equally
unsurprising, these explanations run the
theoretical gamut. Many are based on rational
choice, some on structural interpretations, and
some on culture. In addition, there are
mixtures of two or all three theoretical types.
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What Makes a Democracy?
Structural Approaches to
the Study of Democracy
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What Makes a Democracy?
• Let’s begin with a simple, but telling observation (an
observation, by the way, that researchers in the
rational choice school also generally accept): The
people (or the social class) that have predominant
control over economic resources in society are
generally not friends of democracy.
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What Makes a Democracy?
• Indeed, for the dominant groups in society, genuine
democracy represents a concrete threat to their own
interests, since, by its very nature, democracy gives
power to subordinate classes who constitute the large
majority of any society’s population.
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What Makes a Democracy?
• Think of it this way: If the majority of people in a
society are poor and exploited (which is often the
case), would they not be immediately tempted, in a
democratic system, to use their new-found and
overwhelming voting power to redistribute economic
resources and, ultimately, to undermine
permanently—if not destroy—the position and
privileges of the wealthy (or political and economic
elite)?
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What Makes a Democracy?
• More to the point, would not the elite be well
aware of this potential threat and, therefore, do
whatever they could to prevent democracy
from taking hold?
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What Makes a Democracy?
• The answer to both questions is clear: Of
course they would.
• It is largely for this reason that the authors
argue that political democracy inevitably
stands in tension with the system of social
inequality.
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What Makes a Democracy?
• Given the almost undeniable
tension between democracy
and social inequality,
Ruschemeyer et al. make a
basic assertion, one which
undergirds their entire
argument: Democracy is
above all a matter of power.
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What Makes a Democracy?
• By this they mean that democracy is not the product
of altruism or of morality. It is not a “gift” given to
the masses. Neither does democracy emerge merely
because society has become “too complex” or
modernized.
• Instead, it is almost always a product of political
struggle—a result of one or (more likely) several
hitherto excluded groups assiduously fighting to
breakdown barriers to their more complete
participation in the political process.
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What Makes a Democracy?
• The struggle for democracy, however, is also
highly conditioned. Specifically, transitions to
(and consolidations of) democracy are
conditioned—i.e., constrained and enabled—
by broad structural changes that reorder the
balance of power among different classes and
class coalitions in society. These structural
changes, in turn, are primarily, although not
exclusively, a product of capitalist
development.
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What Makes a Democracy?
• This leads to the authors’ central contention or
thesis: Capitalist development is related to
democracy because it shifts the balance of class
power, because it weakens the power of the landlord
class and strengthens subordinate classes.
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What Makes a Democracy?
• Key Point: For democracy to emerge,
subordinate classes must have sufficient
power to challenge the dominant classes.
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What Makes a Democracy?
• How is this a structural argument?
• Because capitalist development inexorably
creates the foundation for subordinate classes
to exercise power.
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What Makes a Democracy?
• The important theoretical question is how and
why this happens. Any guesses?
• The answer is actually pretty simple.
According to the authors, capitalist
development generally entails the an
increasing concentration of workers, all of
whom toil under the same general (and
generally exploitative and powerless)
conditions.
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What Makes a Democracy?
• As the authors explain it: “Capitalism brings
the subordinate class or classes together in
factories and cities where members of those
classes can associate and organize more
easily; it improves the means of
communication and transportation facilitating
worldwide organization; in these and other
ways it strengthens civil society and
facilitates subordinate class organization.”
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What Makes a Democracy?
• Class organization is key, for the power of workers
is maximized only when they can act in united
manner. As long as they are divided, they are weak
and will remain weak. But a united working class is
a powerful working class.
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What Makes a Democracy?
• Importantly, though, even a well-organized
working class is not always strong enough to
bring about change on its own. More often
than not, the working class requires class
allies: sometimes it’s the middle class, as in
Latin America, sometimes it’s small
independent farmers, as in Scandinavia,
sometimes it’s the bourgeoisie, as in France
and Britain.
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What Makes a Democracy?
• In almost all cases, according to the authors,
the working class remains the primary agent
of change because it is the working class that
is most consistently pro-democratic, while
the interests of other classes may vary
considerably (but even the working class may
not always be pro-democratic, as was the
case in Peron’s Argentina, 1946-55).
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What Makes a Democracy?
• While the role of the working class and the internal
dynamics of capitalism occupy center stage in the
authors’ argument, they also acknowledged a couple
of other important factors:
• The first is the structure of state and state-society
relations, and the relative power balance between
the state and social actors.
• The second factor, or power cluster, involves
international power relations.
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What Makes a Democracy?
• The structure of state and state-society relations,
and the relative power balance between the state
and social actors.
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What Makes a Democracy?
• International power relations
• During the cold war, especially, international
power relations were a key force in blocking
democratization, since dominant states like
the United States often directly supported and
helped strengthen dictatorships, as long as
they were anti-Communist (while the Soviet
Union supported anti-American regimes).
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What Makes a Democracy?
International power relations
• Indeed, in a few cases, the United
States even directly intervened to
help bring down democratically
elected governments in the
developing world for fear that
those governments would not
support US interests.
• Chile is a good example of this.
In this case, the United States
helped to overthrow Salvador
Allende, a democraticallyelected, but “Marxist,” political
leader.
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What Makes a Democracy?
• Important to understand, too, that these power
clusters are inter-related, as might already be
apparent.
• In the example of Chile, it should be clear that US
support of geopolitically important states affected
the structure of state-society relations, often in a
negative manner with regard to democratization.
US support also had a direct impact on class
relations within Chile--strengthening the capitalist
class, while weakening the working class.
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