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Processes and Mechanisms of Democratization

Author: C Tilly
Date: 2003
Size: 16 pages (225 KB)

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Summary

How is the process of democratisation best defined? What are the necessary conditions for successful democratisation? This study from Columbia University attempts to specify the various conditions and processes that promoted or blocked democratisation in different parts of Europe between 1650 and the present. It identifies possible mechanisms in democratisation and specifies likely conditions affecting their emergence.

Aristotle described democratisation as a perversion. In a constitutional government, when the majority substituted its particular interest for the community's general interest, self-serving rule of the many - democracy - resulted. Aristotle's theory provides an exemplary model of theoretically coherent explanation of contemporary democratisation. It goes beyond mapping the initial conditions and sequences of events that constitute paths to democracy. It actually features causes and effects. Explanation requires identification of recurrent causal mechanisms that democratise a polity, plus specification of conditions that affect emergence of those mechanisms.

Democratisation does not follow a single path, and is unlikely to have universally applicable, necessary or sufficient conditions. A political process analysis of democratisation defines it as movement toward broad citizenship, equal citizenship, binding consultation of citizens and protection of citizens from arbitrary state action. High levels of all four elements depend on a significant degree of state capacity.

A variety of changes activate mechanisms that, in turn, generate incremental alterations in public politics, inequality and networks of trust.

• Changes in inequality and of trust networks have independent effects on public politics.
• Regime environment also produces occasional shocks in the form of conquest, confrontation, colonisation or revolution.
• Such shocks accelerate the standard change mechanisms, thus causing relatively rapid alterations of public politics, inequality and networks of trust.
• Whether incremental or abrupt, those alterations interact.
• Under rare but specifiable conditions, those alterations produce democratisation.
• Democratisation is a special condition of public politics.

Monitoring of change should focus on democracy promoting mechanisms rather than on public opinion or election results. The arguments challenge political designers to study those mechanisms and to invent devices that will activate them less brutally than conquest, confrontation, colonisation and revolution. Most of all, self-descriptions of political leaders in ostensibly democratising countries should be mistrusted.

• Analysts of democratisation must shift their gaze from necessary and sufficient conditions to causal sequences, from static comparisons of multiple cases to dynamic analyses of transformations, from epidemiology to physiology.
• Researchers must sort out, refine, augment and codify the miscellaneous democracy-promoting mechanisms so casually proposed here.
• We must examine whether the three arenas of public politics, inequality and trust-sustaining networks interact to promote democratisation in something like the manner sketched here.
• The place of shocks associated with conquest, confrontation, colonisation and revolution deserves much more systematic attention.
• Someone must synthesize these many elements into partial but verifiable causal models of concrete democratisation processes.
• At that point, researchers can reconsider such vexing questions as the relationship between democratisation and interstate war by looking at causal mechanisms instead of elusive correlations.

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Source: Tilly, C., 2000, 'Processes and Mechanisms of Democratization', Sociological Theory, vol. 18, no. 1, pp. 1-16