Designing Democratic Government: Making Institutions Work

Introduction

INTRODUCTION  Margaret Levi, James Johnson, Jack Knight, and Susan Stokes THE SPREAD OF democracy arguably is the single most significant political phenomenon of the past one hundred years. The Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen reports that when pressed to identify “the most important thing that had happened in the twentieth century,” he considered several alternative possibilities, but he “did not, ultimately, have any difficulty in choosing one as the preeminent development of the period: the rise of democracy.” Sounding a similar note, Freedom House issued a report proclaiming the twentieth century “Democracy’s Century.” There are good reasons for embracing pronouncements such as these. The spread of democracy may be a good in itself, but it also promises other goods. Theorists posit that people who live in democracies are freer to express their preferences and that officeholders are more likely to respond to these preferences ; that in democracy there is more room for meaningful debate and deliberation ; and that under the proper conditions democratic decisionmaking will produce fair and just social outcomes. Empirical research suggests that people who live in democracies, on average, earn higher wages, are freer to form organizations, enjoy a broader range of public services, are less likely to go to war or to suffer famines, and enjoy more responsive governments than do those who live under nondemocratic regimes. Yet it is clearer today than it has been for decades that the emergence of democracy is less a settled accomplishment than a precarious achievement. It hardly is controversial to say that today we not only witness struggles to establish minimally democratic arrangements in a numerous countries and regions around the world but also observe serious, ongoing struggles to defend democratic institutions from en- croachment and decline even where they once seemed to have been most firmly established. One might approach the topic of democracy as an ideal or as a set of behaviors . We have chosen to treat democracy as an institutional configuration that, however imperfectly, embodies ideals and constrains behavior. The simplest way to conceptualize institutions is as more or less centralized sets of rules that emerge from and subsequently structure social and political interaction . They are persistent means, usually combining formal and informal features, of coordinating ongoing social, economic, and political interactions. Typically they have a systemic quality such that in any particular institutional configuration, the composite institutions will hang together in a more or less coherent, if more or less arbitrary, fashion. As a result, the effects an institutional configuration might have on patterns of individual behavior will be complicated and difficult to analyze. It is important, however, to note that institutions often require that individuals act in ways that run counter to their immediate or even longer-term interests, commitments, and attachments. The institutions therefore must specify what can be done, by and to whom, for what purposes, and when, but also what happens when the rules are breached and who decides when they are. Ours obviously is a broad conception of institutions and how they work. When we turn our attention to the subset of democratic institutions our concern is with whether and how they embody such ideals and principles as competition , fairness, and accountability. We are concerned, too, with the ways they coordinate and constrain the participation of behavior of individuals and associations. In both respects, there are high, and rising, obstacles to full and meaningful democracy, in the United States and in other countries. This state of affairs raises numerous questions. What kinds of reforms are likely to promote elections that might accurately and legitimately express public preferences, in both new and established democracies? What political coalitions are likely to bring about such reforms? Under what conditions might such coalitions form? How do the mechanics of voting influence electoral outcomes? How can such mechanisms be improved or refined where they are found to hinder rather than facilitate robust participation and accurate counting of votes? What methods for establishing electoral districts avoid extremes of malapportionment and encourage competition? How ought competing notions of representation inform these systems? What is the role, empirically or normatively, of collective actors and organizations such as labor unions, social movements, and corporations in democratic politics? Can democratic institutions be introduced from abroad and flourish in deeply divided societies? Finally, can democratic institutions flourish in societies with few democratic traditions? Each of these key questions is animated by the premise that it is important to mobilize political participation in ways that 2 DESIGNING DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENT [3.133...