The Everyday Life of the State: A State-in-Society Approach

10. (Re)Creating Democracy through Practice: Insights from the Japanese Experience

159 10 (Re)Creating Democracy through Practice Insights from the Japanese Experience mAry AliCE hAddAd How do totalitarian regimes democratize? How does an undemocratic country transform its polity such that democratic values and practices become integral parts of its political culture? These are some of the most pressing questions of our time, and they are not easily answered by the current dominant approaches to the study of politics, which tend to divide the study of politics into studies of the state (government) on the one side and studies of society (everything that is not the government) on the other. By their very nature, totalitarian regimes strive to merge state and society : state institutions penetrate and co-opt social organizations in order to bend them to the wishes of the ruling regime; rulers and their cadres are often members of a single social grouping, whether family, clan, or sect, so their rise to power represents the co-optation of governmental institutions by one particular group. As daily newspaper headlines and considerable research attests, the process of democratization is a complex one requiring far more than adopting particular governmental institutions or social values. To understand how these kinds of regimes democratize, political scientists must move beyond old ways of inquiry. These questions are examined by looking at the case of democratization in postwar Japan through the lens of the state-in-society framework. The Japanese experience and the state-in-society framework can be used to develop a new 160 Mary Alice Haddad approach to the study of democratization, one that is particularly useful for explaining the democratization process outside of the West. When a polity sets out to create a new democratic form of government it begins with lofty ideas drawn from a multitude of political resources both foreign and domestic. Political leaders then take some of those ideas and create a set of institutional structures that are intended to embody them. Finally, political leaders and citizens begin to put those ideas into practice in their everyday politics. At this point, the momentum of political change reverses course—instead of flowing from the top to the bottom , it shifts and moves from bottom to top. After some time in the new political institutional structure, the practices of citizens, their civic leaders , and those in high politics will transform the original set of ideas to make them more compatible with the dynamic situation on the ground. Newer democratic ideas will be modified to accommodate deeply held political beliefs that predated the introduction of democracy. Traditional ideas will be adjusted to accommodate newer democratic ways of thinking and doing. Eventually, civic and political leaders will seek to modify the institutional structure to better reflect the political practices and ideas that have become prevalent in society. With the creation of a new institutional structure, the process begins anew. Every step of this process is contested, sometimes peacefully, sometimes violently. With a multitude of political values to choose from, leaders battle each other about which ones will be institutionalized and what form those institutions will take. Citizens and elites chafe as new institutional structures restrict and restructure old ways of doing things. Their resistance and their innovation to overcome aspects that they do not like take multiple forms, many of which are incompatible with one another. Societal groups compete for influence as they attempt to spread political practices consistent with their emerging value system. Savvy political entrepreneurs make the most of opportunities created by accidents and serendipitous occasions and promote their own visions of the future. Some of them succeed in having those visions take root in the popular consciousness; most fail. Both the content of policies and the process through which they come about have unintended consequences that may not even become apparent until decades later. The process is messy, painful, inspiring, and long—as the Japanese experience illustrates. 161 (Re)Creating Democracy through Practice StAtE-in-SoCiEty APProACh to thE Study of dEmoCrAtiZAtion The state-in-society approach articulated by Joel S. Migdal (2001a) can be used to develop a new approach to the study of democratization that is rooted in the mutually transformative interaction of state and society. This approach conceptualizes the state as embedded in rather than independent from its society. Migdal (1994, 2001a) advocates a process-oriented approach to the study of politics that explicitly examines the practices of a state in addition to the image it portrays...