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4 Democracy, Diversity, and Leadership paul m. sniderman The problem of “diversity” was once thought to be a distinctively American problem—An American Dilemma, Myrdal called it. It was not, of course, that intolerance was thought to be peculiarly American. Hitler, after all, was in his heyday as Myrdal wrote. The issue of race was a peculiarly American problem precisely because of the American commitment to equality. It was the contradiction between the commitment to equality and the intolerance, not the intolerance itself, that set America apart. There has been a loss of moral innocence—or more exactly, the loss of a sense of moral superiority—since the civil rights movement stalled in the 1960s. This loss has been the result of a scissors change: on the one side, elevation of the standards of tolerance; on the other, exacerbation of the problem of intolerance. As Nardulli observes in the preface to this volume, “democracy enjoyed unparalleled prestige at the close of the twentieth century.” One result is that a commitment to tolerance and inclusion of ethnic and immigrant groups has become a pledge of liberal democracy generally, not merely the American variant. Like all pledges, observance has been uneven. But, at least in the first world, it has become a standard to which governments expect to be held. Expecting more is one blade of the scissors; needing to do more is the other. Democratization has meant the collapse of alternative forms of rule as much as the establishment of new ones. One consequence has been incentives for emigration; another has been a loss of control over immigration. The results have been profound socio-demographic change in the first world, including Western Europe. i-xii_1-180_Nard.indd 51 2/6/08 4:27:13 PM 52 . paul m. sniderman The waves of immigration have raised a series of diversity challenges. Western Europe is not the only area confronting these challenges; it’s just the most obvious. Most countries in Western Europe have no tradition of immigration. Indeed, rather the reverse: most have been homogenous over many dimensions and many years. Against this homogenous background, immigrants are more distinctive than they otherwise would be—not so distinctive as blacks in America, but strikingly so all the same. Differences in dress, language, publicly visible social practices—even, for many, color—set them apart, as does the practice of a religion at odds with established, dominant religions. Even more so than the practice of religious difference, the establishment of a secular culture sets such groups apart from the mainstream. My objective is to see what light issues of diversity in Western Europe throw on the dynamics of democratic responsiveness. In particular, I want to explore two ideas. The first is quite general; the second, quite specific. The general idea has to do with the direction of influence in liberal democracies . Politics works bottom-up—at any rate democratic politics does just so far as it is democratic. Citizens have problems that concern them and objectives they wish to accomplish. Politicians respond under the pressure of electoral incentives, choosing policies that match public preferences. Electoral responsiveness is coarse, not fine-grained, to be sure. It would be unreasonable to suppose that politicians match the electorate’s policy preferences detail-by-detail; unreasonable, for that matter, to suppose that the public has policy preferences worked out in detail. But there is a public mood—a broad orientation to the dominant set of issues1 of the time—and politicians can track changes in it.2 It is worth emphasizing that the bottom-up story of democratic politics is not necessarily a story of politicians as passive agents. They must anticipate changes in the public mood and produce policies to capitalize on them. Moreover, the bottom-up story does not necessarily rest on a view of politicians as blank ciphers. They have preferences of their own. But the engine driving the process is the need of politicians to win votes, hence their need to advance policies they anticipate will match the public’s mood. Thus, influence in democracy runs from the electorate to politicians, at least in the long run. I believe that one version of the bottom-up story is likely to be correct in the long run. But it does not follow that the bottom-up story is correct over the short run. On the contrary, I want to suggest that democratic politics also works “top down,” with influence running from political leaders to the public...

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