Models of Democracy:
An Introduction
1
There is a striking paradox to note about the contemporary era: from
Africa to Eastern Europe, Asia to Latin America, more and more
nations and groups are championing the idea of democracy; but they
are doing so at just that moment when the very efficacy of democracy
as a national form of political organization appears open to question.
As substantial areas of human activity are progressively organized on
a regional or global level, the fate of democracy, and of the independent
democratic nation-state in particular, is fraught with difficulties. (Held
1998, 11)
Many recent contributions on democracy start – like David Held’s above
– by mentioning a paradox. On the one hand, the number of democratic
countries in the world is growing – according to Freedom House, from
thirty-nine democracies in 1974 to eighty-seven countries free and democratic,
and sixty partially free, in 2011 (Freedom House 2012). On the
other, there is a reduction in the satisfaction of citizens with the performances
of ‘really existing democracies’ (Dahl 2000). Some scholars even
suggested that the third wave of democratization risks developing into
economic wars and armed conflicts (see, in particular, Tilly 2004). Certainly,
research on quality of democracy by Larry Diamond and Leonardo
Morlino (2005) pointed at the low quality of many democratic regimes.
The question ‘Can democracy be saved?’ became central in the recent
political debate faced with a most serious financial crisis, as well as apparent
institutional incapacity to address it. Not only have these developments
triggered harsh societal reactions and calls for politics to come back
2 CAN DEMOCRACY BE SAVED?
in, but also the austerity measures to address them have accelerated the
shift from a social model of democracy, with its development of the
welfare state, to a neoliberal one, that trusts free-market solutions.
As we will see in this volume, to understand this paradox it is necessary
to distinguish between different conceptions of democracy, both as
they have been theorized and as they have been applied in real-world,
existing democratic institutions. As Robert Dahl observes about the idea
of democracy, ‘Ironically, the very fact that democracy has such a lengthy
history has actually contributed to confusion and disagreement, for
“democracy” has meant different things to different people at different
times and places’ (2000, 3).
In this volume, I shall in fact contrast four models of democracy,
assessing the challenges and opportunities that recent social, cultural and
political changes represent for them. If we want to save democracy, we
have in fact to acknowledge its contested meaning, as well as the different
qualities that are stressed in different conceptions and practices of
democracy. Saving democracy would mean going beyond its liberal
model, broadening reflection on participation and deliberation inside and
outside institutions. This would imply looking at the same time at normative
theories as well as at empirical evidence on different models from
the liberal one. Referring to research I carried out on social movements,
but also to other scholars’ work, I aim to discuss general challenges and
opportunities for democracy. In this chapter, I will start this journey first
of all by introducing different conceptualizations of democracy, which
will then be discussed in depth in the rest of the volume.
Conceptions and practices of democracy:
an introduction
The search for a shared conceptualization of democracy in political
science was for a long time oriented towards procedural criteria which
mainly considered free, competitive and periodic elections as a sufficient
indicator for the presence of democracy. The choice of a minimalist definition
of democracy was justified at the time with reference to the ease
of its empirical operationalization. Normative definitions – which look
at the ability of democracies to produce a government ‘for the people’,
realizing its wishes and preferences – are instead considered difficult to
apply in empirical research:
How may we see to what extent certain real problems are close to,
or far away from, the ideal ‘correspondence’ or responsiveness postulated
as necessary?...How is it possible to pinpoint the ‘wishes’ or
MODELS OF DEMOCRACY: AN INTRODUCTION 3
‘preferences’ of citizens? Who is entitled to express them without
betraying or modifying them? Is it only the ‘preferences’ of the majority
that count? But should a democratic regime not also protect minorities?
How, then, do we measure the ‘correspondence’ or responsiveness,
that is the ‘congruence’? (Morlino 1996, 84)
More recently, however, it has been observed that a minimalist, procedural
definition is not, in reality, the only empirically verifiable one. As
Leonardo Morlino (2011) has argued, all the different ideals of democracy
can be operationalized in the sense that adequate empirical indicators
can be found to determine whether, according to a specific definition,
a country at a particular moment in time is democratic or not. It should
be added that definitions of democracy are always changing, linked as
they are to specific problems (theoretical and empirical, scientific and
real) that emerge and change in different historical periods.
In addition, every definition of democracy necessarily has a normative
dimension. As rightly observed by David Held, empirical theories of
democracy, focusing on the meaning normally attributed to the term,
have thus tended to normatively legitimate that specific conception:
Their ‘realism’ entailed conceiving of democracy in terms of the actual
features of Western polities. In thinking of democracy in this way, they
recast its meaning and, in so doing, surrendered the rich history of the
idea of democracy to the existent. Questions about the nature and
appropriate extent of citizen participation, the proper scope of political
rule and the most suitable spheres of democratic regulation – questions
that have been part of democratic theory from Athens to nineteenthcentury
England – are put aside, or, rather, answered merely by reference
to current practice. The ideals and methods of democracy become,
by default, the ideals and methods of the existing democratic systems.
Since the critical criterion for adjudicating between theories of democracy
is their degree of ‘realism’, models which depart from, or are in
tension with, current democratic practice can be dismissed as empirically
inaccurate, ‘unreal’ and undesirable. (2006, 166)
It could be added that, over time, the research focus on representative
institutions has produced a partial vision of the real functioning of existing
democracies.
If a large part of political scientists’ attention has been concentrated
on democracy, this does not mean that a unanimously accepted definition
of the concept exists. There is no doubt that the concept of democracy
is not only ‘stretched’ but also contested. In a recent APSA-CP Newsletter
symposium dedicated to conceptualization, Thomas Koelbe (2009)
rightly lamented the use and abuse of the concept of democracy to
4 CAN DEMOCRACY BE SAVED?
describe a plethora of different political systems, and indeed a basic
disagreement on its conceptualization.
Different types of definitions of democracy do in fact exist. The classical
normative definitions underline the legitimizing role of citizens.
Democracy is power from the people, of the people and for the people:
it derives from the people, belongs to the people, and must be used for
the people. Those general principles are, however, combined in very different
ways. Charles Tilly (2007, 7) has distinguished four approaches
to democracy in the social sciences:
• A constitutional approach concentrates on laws a regime enacts
concerning political activity...
• Substantive approaches focus on the conditions of life and politics
a given regime promotes...
• Advocates of a procedural approach single out a narrow range of
government practices to determine whether a regime qualifies as
democratic...
• Process-oriented approaches...identify some minimal sets of processes
that must necessarily be continuously in motion for a situation
to be considered as democratic.
If we look at actually existing democracies, we can generally observe
that they in fact combine different conceptions. Representative institutions
are flanked by others. As Pierre Rosanvallon has recently noted,
‘the history of real democracies cannot be dissociated from a permanent
tension and contestation’ (2006, 11).1
Indeed, the democratic state needs
not only legal legitimacy through respect for procedures, but also the
trust of its citizens. In the evolution of ‘really existing democracies’ this
has meant that, alongside the institutions that guarantee electoral
accountability (or responsibility), there is a circuit of surveillance (or
vigilance) anchored outside state institutions (2006, 11). A public sphere
developed from the encounter between the state’s search for efficiency
and the intervention of civil society seeking to express requests and
rectify mistakes (Eder 2010). Placing emphasis on elections often ends
up obscuring the need for critical citizens who make governors accountable.
Thus, ‘When the electoral institution is chosen as the institution
characterising democratic regimes the much more important presence of
a sphere that is both public and distinct from the regimes is obscured.
Deprived of this, deprived that is of open public discourse, and despite
being governed by persons regularly elected, such a regime could only
misleadingly be called democratic’ (Pizzorno 2010, xiii).
Rosanvallon suggested that democracy needs not only legal legitimation,
but also what he calls ‘counter-democracy’, that is ‘a specific,
MODELS OF DEMOCRACY: AN INTRODUCTION 5
political modality of action, a particular form of political intervention,
different from decision making, but still a fundamental aspect of the
democratic process’ (2006, 40). In the historical evolution of democratic
regimes, a circuit of surveillance, anchored outside state institutions, has
developed side by side with the institutions of electoral accountability.
Necessary to democratic legitimacy, confidence requires defiance, in the
sense of instruments of external control and actors ready to perform
this control; in fact, democracy develops with the permanent contestation
of power. Actors such as independent authorities and judges, but
also mass media, experts and social movements, have traditionally exercised
this function of surveillance. The latter, in particular, are considered
as most relevant for the development of an ‘expressive democracy’ that
corresponds to ‘the prise de parole of the society, the manifestation of
a collective sentiment, the formulation of a judgment about the governors
and their action, or again the production of claims’ (2006, 26).
The definition of democracy also changes over time. Through selfreflexive
practices, democracy is in a permanent process of definition and
redefinition (Eder 2010, 246). Although extremely young as an institution
(just a few decades old in the majority of states, if we take universal
suffrage as a fundamental condition), democracy does have a long history
as a subject for reflection (Costa 2010). If electoral responsibility was
privileged in the historical evolution of the discourse on really existing
democracy, today the challenges to procedural democracy bring our
attention back to other democratic qualities (Rosanvallon 2006).
Democracies are also varied. Different democratic qualities have been
intertwined in the construction of diverse typologies. Political scientists
have often looked at different arrangements in terms of functional and
geographical distribution of power, involving more or less centralization
in public decision making. Other scholars have pointed at the varying
capacity of democratic states to implement their decisions. Tilly has, for
instance, classified political regimes on the basis of some of their capacities:
‘How wide a range of citizens’ expressed demands come into play;
how equally different groups of citizens experience a translation of their
demands into state behaviour; to what extent the expression of demands
itself receives the state’s political protection; and how much the process
of translation commits both sides, citizens and the states’ (2007, 13).
Not one, but four models
Noting the diversity between different conceptions and practices of
democracy, my aim in this volume is not to reconstruct various ideas
of democracy, but rather to analyse the way in which they have been
6 CAN DEMOCRACY BE SAVED?
prefigured by different actors, as well as translated into requests and
proposals, thus penetrating and transforming real democracies, and so
the democratic state. From this point of view, in addressing the question
‘Can democracy be saved?’, the original contribution I wish to develop
in this volume lies in the combination of normative theory with empirical
analyses of how some conceptions have developed and have inspired
concrete institutional changes.
Throughout the analysis, some general considerations will emerge on
the status and content of the liberal model of democracy. If this is dominant
today, it is, however, challenged by other conceptions, variously
discussed as participatory democracy (Pateman 1970; Polletta 2002),
strong democracy (Barber 2003), discursive democracy (Dryzek 2000a),
communicative democracy (Young 1996), welfare democracy (Fitzpatrick
2002) or associative democracy (among others, Perczynski 2000).
In the intense debate in normative theory, we can single out two
dimensions of democratic conceptions that are relevant for our reflections.
The first dimension refers to the recognition of participation as an
integral part of democracy; a second one looks at the construction of
political identities as exogenous versus endogenous to the democratic
process. In political theory from Dewey to Habermas, it is often observed
that the principle of representation is balanced by the presence of participatory
spaces, and the majoritarian principle, central to liberal definitions
of democracy, is in various ways, balanced by the presence of
deliberative spaces.
First of all, a general mantra of discussion on democracies in so-called
‘empirical theories of democracy’ is that democratic institutions are
representative. While the ideal of democracy as government of, by and
for the people stresses the source of all power in the citizenry at large,
democratic institutions are called to restrict the number of decision
makers and select them on the basis of some specific qualities. A distinction
is in fact usually made between the (utopistic) conception of a
democracy of the ancients, in which all citizens participate directly in the
decisions about the public goods, and a (realistic) democracy of the
moderns, where an elected few govern. The volume and complexity of
decision making in the modern state is often quoted as imposing severe
constraints on the participation in public decisions of the many and,
especially, of the normal citizens, often considered as too inexperienced,
if not too emotional, to have a say in the choices which will affect them.
Electoral accountability should then give legitimacy to the process, by
allocating to the citizens-electors the power to prize or punish those in
government, every once in a while (see chapter 2).
If the liberal theories have underlined delegation, or electoral accountability,
this has, however, been considered to be insufficient in other
MODELS OF DEMOCRACY: AN INTRODUCTION 7
theorizations (see chapter 3). In particular, so-called participatory theories
have affirmed the importance of creating multiple occasions for
participation (Arnstein 1969; Pateman 1970). Elections are in fact, at
best, too rare to grant citizens sufficient power to control the elected.
Additionally, elections offer only limited choices, leaving several themes
out of the electoral debates and citizens’ assessment. More and more,
elections have been seen as manipulated, given the greater capacity of
some candidates to attract financial support, licit or illicit, as well as to
command privileged access to mass media. In parallel, the quality of
decisions could be expected to decline with the decline in participation,
as the habit of delegating tends to make citizens not only more apathetic,
but also more cynical and selfish. Participation is instead praised as a
school of democracy: capable of constructing good citizens through
interaction and empowerment.
Not only delegation, but also majoritarian decision making has been
criticized. A ‘minimalist’ view of democracy as the power of the majority
has been considered not only as risky in terms of thwarting the
rights of the minorities, but also as reducing the quality of decision
making. As there is no logical assumption that grants more wisdom to
the preferences which are (simply) more numerous, other decisionmaking
principles should at least temper the majoritarian one (see
chapter 4). In normative debates, deliberative theories have in fact promoted
spaces of communication, the exchange of reasons, the construction
of shared definitions of the public good, as fundamental for the
legitimation of public decisions (among others, see Miller 1993, 75;
Dryzek 2000a, 79; Cohen 1989, 18–19; Elster 1998; Habermas 1981,
1996). Not the number of pre-existing preferences, but the quality of
the decision-making process would here grant legitimacy as well as
efficacy to the decision. By relating with each other – recognizing the
others and being recognized by them – citizens would have the chance
to understand the reasons of the others, assessing them against emerging
standards of fairness. Communication not only allows for the
development of better solutions, by permitting holders of different
knowledge and expertise to interact, but would also change the perception
of one’s own preferences, making participants less concerned with
individual, material interests and more with collective goods.
Participation and deliberation are in fact democratic qualities in
tension with those of representation and majority decisions, and are
alongside these in a precarious equilibrium in the different conceptions
and specific institutional practices of democracy.
Crossing the dimensions of delegation versus participation and majority
vote versus deliberation, I single out four different models of democracy
(see table 1.1) that I will refer to in the following chapters.
8 CAN DEMOCRACY BE SAVED?
Table 1.1 Conceptions of democracy
Majority vote Deliberation
Delegation Liberal democracy Liberal deliberative democracy
Participation Radical, participatory
democracy
Participatory deliberative
democracy
Liberal democracy privileges – as mentioned – delegation and the
majority vote. The assumption is that deciding on public issues is too
complex a task to be left to the mass of citizens. Their task is rather
to legitimize the power of an elected elite. As power originates, indeed,
from the people, they are expected to exercise it, as electors, at specific
moments. Electoral campaigns should be able to inform the citizens
about past performances and political programmes, as well as personal
skills, of candidates; elections should allow the citizens to choose those
who will then govern for an allocated time-span. The fear of losing
power at the coming elections should make the elites in government
sensitive to the people’s judgement. The distinctive institutions of Dahl’s
polyarchal democracy are in fact based upon the presence of officials
elected in free, fair and frequent elections, as well as freedom of
expression and association and alternative sources of information
(Dahl 1998).
Moreover, in liberal democracy, even if with some caveats, the majority
wins. This means, decisions are made by measuring the degree of
support for opposing views and allocating the victory to those who are
more numerous. In principle, ideas, interests, preferences and/or identities
are assumed to develop outside the democratic process, which channels
them inside the political system. Decisions are then made on the
basis of measurement of the support for each of them among the citizens.
The legitimizing principle is ‘one head, one vote’. In Anthony Downs’
(1957) influential version, democracy works as a market where politicians
aim at collecting votes, and citizens have (exogenously generated)
preferences. While, of course, interests differ, a broad consensus is
assumed among compatible interests, and conflicts tend to be considered
as negative, as they risk overloading the system (Crozier, Huntington and
Watakuni 1975). The actors carrying conflictual interests are seen as
anti-systemic (Sartori 1976).
This liberal conception of democracy, however, does not sufficiently
reflect the real functioning of democracy in any periods of its existence.
As we are going to see, in the rest of this volume, really existing democracy
incorporates institutions based upon different principles of legitimation.
Referendums, considered as a residual vestige of direct democratic
MODELS OF DEMOCRACY: AN INTRODUCTION 9
procedures, are spreading, and so are institutions based on principles of
restricted delegation or including representatives chosen by lot (see, e.g.,
chapter 9). Moreover, that conception is partial as it implicitly looks at
the public institutions as the only democratic arena. Research on social
movements, but also on political parties, called instead for attention to
be paid to the many arenas in which democratic forms are based upon
different principles from the liberal ones. Mechanisms of institutional
accountability, through control by the people as the source of democratic
legitimacy, require (many and varied) societal institutions that work as
channels of political communication and socialization to the public good.
Not only (negative) controls but also (positive) stimuli have to come from
the citizens continuously if good decisions are to be made. Along the
same lines, research on the long processes of first democratization stressed
the importance of non-electoral circuits for the functioning of the democratic
state. The influence of protest in regimes with restricted electoral
participation did not operate through elections, even though the parliaments
were targets of claims-making. In fact, in their concrete evolution,
the existing democratic states and societies have amended the idealtypical
principles of liberal democracy, mixing them with others, linked
to other conceptions of democracy.
The liberal conception of democracy has been, first of all, challenged
by a participatory one. Recognizing the existence of deep conflicts in
society, the theorists of participatory democracy have stressed the importance
of involving citizens beyond elections (Arnstein 1969; Pateman
1970; Barber 2003). Participation in different forms and in different
moments of the democratic process is in fact considered as positive both
for individuals, who are socialized to visions of the public good, and
for the very political institutions, as it might lead to increased trust
and support for them. Challengers to the elites, in particular – from the
labour movement to the most recent indignados – have nurtured a
participatory vision, extending the forms of legitimate political involvement
well beyond the vote. Conceptions of democracy as open participation
tend, in fact, to limit the functions of delegates and instead
expand (assembleary) arenas for decisions open to all. Moreover, the
space for politics broadens in participatory visions, as democracy is
considered as fundamental not only in parliaments, but also in civil
society organizations: from parties to social movements, from working
places to neighbourhoods. While collective identities are still, as in the
liberal model, formed outside of the democratic process, and might lead
to conflictual interests, agreement on the basic principles of decision
making is a precondition for managing those conflicts peacefully.
Beyond the set of criticisms addressed to delegation, there is also one
addressed to the principle of the majority vote. A second alternative to
10 CAN DEMOCRACY BE SAVED?
liberal conceptions of democracy has, in fact, stressed the importance of
the communicative dimension. Decisions are, in this sense, not made by
counting votes, but rather through the more complex process in which
opinions are formed. While liberal democracy assumes a political market
in which candidates try to sell their products to electors, who already
have their preferences, the liberal-deliberative conception of democracy
is most attentive to the way in which those preferences are formed. The
assumption is, in fact, that decisions are more legitimate and, additionally,
better, the more interests and collective identities emerge – at least
in part – throughout a high-quality deliberative process. In Habermas’
(1981) theorization, deliberation should be based on communicative
rationality, through an exchange of opinion based on reasons. While the
extent to which deliberation implies the actual building of consensus is
debatable (Dryzek 2010), good communication certainly implies a recognition
of the others’, and an open-minded assessment of one’s own,
reasons. With this in mind, the theorists of deliberation have looked at
the ways in which preferences are formed within democratic institutions
(Dryzek 2000a, 79). Even though the decision process often ends up with
a vote, democracy should not, however, be identified with the principle
that the majority wins over the minority. What counts as democratic is
rather the possibility, during the democratic process, for holders of different
points of view to interact and reciprocally transform each other’s
views. Empirical research on deliberative democracy has looked at deliberation
within political parties (Teorell 1999), parliaments (Steiner et al.
2004), public journalism (Dzur 2002), cyberspace (Dahlberg 2001;
Gimmler 2001), the European public sphere (Schutter 2002; Chalmers
2003), citizens’ juries (Smith and Wales 2000), deliberative pollings
(Fishkin 2003), referendums (Uhr 2000) and social movement organizations
(della Porta 2009a and 2009b).
Combining both criticisms of the liberal conceptions of democracy,
a fourth model of democracy stresses participative-deliberative qualities.
In political theory, the feminist critique of Habermas has, in fact, stressed
the importance of looking not only outside public institutions, but also
beyond a mass-mediatic public sphere, creating places in which the
weakest groups in particular can be empowered. Free spaces, with highquality
communication, are here considered as fundamental for the
formation of collective identities. Not the bourgeoisie, but rather the
subaltern classes are seen as the carriers of this democratic vision. The
most recent waves of social movements, in particular, from the global
justice movement to Occupy Wall Street, tried to put these norms into
practice, by creating public forums, open to the participation of all citizens,
in which a plurality of opinions is represented. The public sphere
is here considered as a conflictual space, but there is also a reflection
MODELS OF DEMOCRACY: AN INTRODUCTION 11
on the conditions for the formation of collective identities during the
democratic process.
This volume
In what follows, I aim to bridge theory and empirical evidence, debates
on democracy and debates on social movements, in order to look at the
normative characteristics of these four different models, but also at their
historical evolution. In this sense, I will seek to move beyond the gap
that exists between normative theory and empirical studies, responsible
for a lack of comparative studies, informed by theory, on democratic
innovations (Smith 2009, 8; also Shapiro 2003). That gap is linked to
the separation between the institutional analysis of democracy and the
analysis of democratic principles, as if they belonged to two different
worlds (Beetham 1999, 29). I will try, therefore, to contribute to the
dialogue between normative theories and empirical explanations, whose
absence, or at least weakness, has been seen as a considerable obstacle
to progress in the analysis of democracy (Smith 2009, 9).
As will be seen, not only the conceptions but also the institutions of
democracy themselves have been transformed to include, with differing
levels of tension and in different balances, diverse understandings of
democracy. After presenting the challenges to the liberal model (chapter
2), I will introduce conceptions and practices of participatory and deliberative
democracy (chapters 3 and 4, respectively), with particular attention
to the role of social movements as promoters of another democracy.
Later on, I will address the use of new media in the search for new
forms of participation and deliberation (chapter 5), the challenge of
building a global democracy (chapter 6), and the contribution of social
movements to the democratization process (chapter 7). Chapters 8 and
9 look at two, very different, state responses to social movement challenges,
in the forms of protest policing and institutional experiments
aimed at innovating democracy.