Problems Confronting Contemporary Democracies: Essays in Honor of Alfred Stepan

Chapter 8: Cautionary and Unorthodox Thoughts about Democracy Today

Cautionary and Unorthodox Thoughts about Democracy Today Juan J. Linz in collaboration with Thomas Jeffrey Miley I write from a disillusioned or at least realistic view of democracy. Some of you might at the end of this believe that I am not totally a bona fide democrat. I certainly do not embrace the National Endowment of De mocracy kind of ideology or the one that some American intellectuals and politicians are trying to sell. I am in some ways closer to Churchill in thinking that democracy is“the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.” He said that in November 1947 in the House of Commons. My thinking starts from a set of questions that we have to ask about a set of problems we have to confront, which we did not have to ask before the fall of the Berlin Wall. In addition, we have to ask questions about democracy outside of our Western world of established states, and I do not know if we have all the tools for that. In some ways the collaboration will have to be more with anthropologists and historians, perhaps, than sociologists. We could work with sociologists and with public opinion data, but that may be somewhat misleading. Against the Pan-Democratic Ideology We are living in a world in which all kinds of ideologies have been declining. Therefore there is room for something that I would call 8 227 “pan-democratic ideology.”It is the idea that democracy can solve all the problems of the world, that democracy always produces good results, that freedom is guaranteed by democratic institutions necessarily, and that all institutions of society should be democratized, and so on. We have to be very careful with those ideas and look at the pros and cons. Democracy in some contexts does not do what we might wish it to do. Over the past several decades, there has been an expansion and consolidation of democracy in a number of countries, which might have contributed to a hubris of believing in the universality of the process of democratization by whatever means. This has been accompanied by a flood of theoretical writings on democracy—many of them brilliant but in some respects misleading. This weakness of some theoretical perspectives indirectly contributes to serious political problems and even blunders. Responsiveness, Responsibility, and Accountability as Three Dimensions of Representative Democracy The basic premise from which I start is that any real rather than uto pian democracy is based on a mix of responsiveness, responsibility, and accountability. This assumes a commitment to govern in the interest of a collectivity rather than the exclusive interest of the rulers, and of a collectivity enjoying a reasonable amount of freedoms. In any democracy there is a different mix of these elements, institutions that privilege one or another dimension, although accountability is perhaps the only one that can, in principle, be assured through institutions like periodic elections. However, to identify democracy with any of those dimensions , undervaluing the others, would be a serious error of grave consequences. Unfortunately, contemporary democratic theory, the thinking and research about the quality of democracy, focuses on responsiveness to the neglect of responsibility. Too often when we talk about democracy, we are talking about one part of the word, which is the demos. Much of the thinking and writing about democracy is focused on the demos, in part, because we have the possibility of simpler indicators. We have the 228 | Juan J. Linz in collaboration with Thomas Jeffrey Miley possibility of public-opinion data, which I am not going to criticize. I served as president of the World Association of Public Opinion Research , and I certainly believe in public opinion research, but we should use it in the context of a much broader way of approaching the problems . But the demos in a sense is being made the sole focus. When you read some of the democratic audits for democratic performance and the efforts in that direction,they always focus on the participation of people, the opportunity for participation, the quality of the electorate having a chance to express itself, but the kratos, the people who rule in a democracy , are generally underanalyzed.1 Some definitions of democracy may be in some ways misleading. I quote among them some of those of my closest friends and teachers. Robert Dahl says that “a key characteristic of...