These arguments stressed the experiences and values of ordinary citizens as the bases for democracy without specifying the process through which transitions might occur or giving much attention to the possible reluctance of elites to give up power. Boix , Acemoglu and Robinson , , and Zak and Feng argue that democratization is more likely when the income distribution—which tends to even out as countries reach high levels of development—is more equal. Elites, according to Acemoglu and Robinson , are willing to cede some power rather than risk the costs of revolution when they expect democracy not to lead to extremely redistributive taxation.
Boix expects a linear relationship between equality and the likelihood of democratization. An empirical challenge to these arguments is that evidence of more equal income distributions in democracies is at best mixed Bollen and Jackman There is little evidence that the current set of recalcitrant dictatorships is made up of countries with especially unequal income distributions.
In the post-Second World War period, longer-lived dictatorships excluding monarchies have more equal income distributions than brief ones.
Boix and Rogowski argue that capital mobility, which also tends to rise with development, also contributes to democratization.
When capital is mobile, it can flee in response to high taxes. Knowing that, democratic governments are expected to refrain from taxing heavily; so elites need not fear democracy.
Where capital mobility is low, as in countries with predominantly agricultural economies, and income unequal, however, elites should be unwilling to negotiate democratization. Models of the interactions between ruling elites and others that may lead to democratization can be divided into two categories depending on their basic assumptions about who the relevant actors are and what their goals are.
They also assume, as do many economic models of authoritarian politics, that the key policy decision that determines the level of redistribution is the level of taxation on domestic capital. It is assumed that the median voter, who is poor, prefers high taxes in order to redistribute wealth. The more unequal the income distribution, the poorer the median voter and thus the more confiscatory the tax rate can be expected to be in a democracy.
In these models politicians are perfect agents of societal interests, and political leaders do not maximize their own revenue distinct from the revenue of the elite group they represent.
An alternative conception of autocracy assumes that the most important division in society is between the rulers sometimes simplified to a single dictator and the ruled.
They assume that rulers maximize their own income from tax revenue at the expense of both rich and poor ruled. Rulers thus set taxes at the highest rate that does not deter economic effort by citizens. In these models, rulers offer increments of democracy when doing so can increase the credibility of their promises to provide public goods and other policies that will increase economic growth and thus benefit both rulers and ruled North and Weingast ; Weingast ; Escriba Folch Alternatively, democratic institutions may be offered as a means of directly increasing revenues Levi ; Bates and Lien ; Rogowski Bueno de Mesquita et al.
In all these models, the ruled care about growth and the share of their own production they are allowed to keep. Taxation is not seen as a means of redistribution in favor of the poor, but rather as a means of enriching rulers.
Rulers become rich by ruling; they do not rule because they were rich before achieving power. They cling to power in order to continue collecting revenue from the productive population under their control, not to protect themselves from redistributive taxation. The main p. Both of these approaches offer some insights into the process of democratization.
These models, like large-N studies of democratization to date, have implicitly assumed that a single model will explain democratization in all times and all circumstances. As noted above, Boix argues that income equality and capital mobility reduce elite fears of democracy, the first because it reduces expected redistribution by popular governments and the second because it provides capital holders with an exit option if taxes become confiscatory. This is a seminal contribution to the literature on democratization because it provides plausible microfoundations for the observed correlation between development and democracy.
Other laudable aspects of the research include a serious effort to test the argument and the inclusion of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century democratizations in the analysis. Virtually all other quantitative studies of democratization have looked only at the post-Second World War period because of data limitations. Boix has made a huge effort to overcome those limitations. The Boix study has not resolved all debates, however, in part because the empirical support for the argument is somewhat ambiguous.
On the positive side, income inequality has a substantial effect on the likelihood of democratization in a dataset that covers —90 and thus excludes most African democrati-zations. We do not know if the result would change if a number of transitions in poor African countries were added.
The percentage of family farms, used as a proxy for inequality in the historical tests, has a negative effect on the probability of transition, contrary to expectations. One of the measures of capital mobility, average share of agriculture as a percentage of GDP, fails to produce expected results. Other indicators used to measure capital mobility have strong effects but ambiguous interpretations.
The ratio of fuel exports to total exports, for example, is a plausible indicator of capital mobility. Average years of schooling is used as a measure of human capital, which is more mobile than physical capital, and Boix finds a positive relationship between education and democratization. Many other analysts have found this relationship, however, and attributed it to the propensity of more-educated citizens to demand democracy.
The argument fits well with the stylized facts of West European democratization, however, and redistributive changes followed democratization in Western Europe as this argument would predict Lindert Further tests of this argument deserve to be important items on the research agenda of students of democratization.
Its predictions are complicated, however, by limiting the threat of revolution to periods of recession. In this argument, when the rich are threatened by revolution which only occurs during recession , they can grant redistribution without changing the political system, grant democracy as a way of making the commitment to redistribution credible, or repress.
Redistribution without regime change is not credible to the poor because they know that they cannot maintain the threat of revolution after the recession is over. According to Acemoglu and Robinson, democratization is a more credible commitment to maintaining redistribution over a longer time period.
Why the poor should accept democratization as credible when even the model allows the rich to stage coups if they are dissatisfied by the later tax rate is not clear. The introduction of recessions, which vary in both intensity and frequency, substantially complicates making predictions about the effects of inequality on elite behavior. Equality makes democratization less threatening to elites, but how they react to inequality depends on the seriousness of the threat of revolution and the cost of repression.
Frequent recessions, however, increase the likelihood that the elite can credibly offer redistribution without democratization because frequent recessions allow the poor to threaten revolution often, thus enforcing the bargain. So intense recessions destabilize dictatorships leading to democratization, revolution, or repression, but frequent recessions lead paradoxically to stable authoritarianism with redistribution.
In contrast to the Boix argument, Acemoglu and Robinson expect income inequality to lead to unstable regime changes, not continued authoritarianism. One of p. The model seems to be a plausible simplification of events in much of Latin America and in a few other developing countries. It does not fit most of the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Africa, or Asia, where fear of redistributive taxation is not a plausible reason for resistance to democratization since substantial portions of productive assets were state or foreign owned for much of the late twentieth century.
State elites who control a large portion of productive assets may certainly fear loss of power since it will dispossess them, but they will not suffer less dispossession because the income distribution is more equal.
Acemoglu and Robinson do not offer systematic empirical tests of their arguments so we cannot assess their fit with the real world. Models linking democratization to inequality seem highly plausible initially, but the empirical investigation of the relationship between regime type and income inequality does not offer strong support for their basic assumptions. Nor does empirical investigation of the relationship between democracy and redistribution. If these arguments were correct, we would expect to find the remaining dictatorships in the world more unequal on average than democracies, but Bollen and Jackman find no relationship between democracy and inequality.
Przeworski et al. They find a stronger relationship between inequality in democracies and democratic breakdown, which might explain any relationship that exists between democracy and equality if one does exist , but does not support the idea that equality makes democratization more likely.
The models also assume that the main reason elites fear democracy and ordinary citizens want it is that they expect it to lead to redistribution. LIndert has shown that the expected redistribution occurred in Western Europe after the first steps toward democratization were taken, but Mulligan, Sala-i-Martin, and Gil show that contemporary democracies do not on average distribute more than dictatorships.
Income distribution varied greatly among late twentieth-century dictatorships. Many, both communist and noncommunist, expropriated traditional elites and redistributed income and opportunities through land reform, much increased public education, and industrialization policies that led to the movement of large numbers of people out of agriculture and into factories.
It is hard to imagine that elites in these kinds of authoritarian regimes would be motivated by a fear of greater redistribution. They would fear loss of their own power and wealth, but not via redistributive taxation.
Income equality would not reassure them. This approach to the study of democratization, which owes much to seminal articles by North and Weingast and Olson , sees rulers as maximizing their own individual revenue via taxation and citizens as sharing a desire for productivityenhancing policies and public goods, regardless of whether they are rich or poor. In this image of politics, taxes redistribute wealth from citizens to rulers, not from rich to poor.
Rulers may want revenue in order to pursue wars, to buy support in order to stay in power, or for personal consumption; their reason does not affect the logic of the argument.
Rulers are motivated by their desire for revenue to offer public goods and a tax rate that does not reduce investment or effort. Consequently, they are the ones most likely to be accommodated when the ruler offers an institutionalized form of participation in return for their cooperation. As in the Boix argument, democratization becomes more likely as capital becomes more mobile, but the reason for the relationship changes.
The more mobile capital, according to Bates and Lien , the harder it is to tax without contingent consent and thus the more likely the ruler will offer representative institutions.
In democracies, the selectorate is the enfranchised population, and the winning coalition is made up of those who voted for the winning party or coalition, that is, roughly 50 percent of the selectorate. In single-party authoritarian regimes, the winning coalition is the small group of actual rulers, and the selectorate is made up of all members of the ruling party. In military regimes, the winning coalition is the junta and the selectorate is the officer corps.
They do not discuss reasons for different authoritarian institutional choices. If enough members of the ruling coalition defect because they are dissatisfied with their share, the ruler is overthrown. Citizens outside the winning coalition benefit only from the public goods provided when the winning coalition is too large to be maintained by private goods alone.
Residents and sometimes members of the selectorate may hold demonstrations or join rebellions to challenge rulers who tax them too heavily or provide insufficient public goods, but rulers in this model always respond with repression. If revolutionary challengers win despite repression, the new rulers face the same incentives that other rulers do to narrow the winning coalition and keep resources for themselves. In other words, revolutions and popular uprisings in this model do not threaten redistribution or lead to democracy.
Instead they lead to a seizure of power by a new leader and winning coalition who maximize their own wealth at the expense of those they exclude. One of the most useful and empirically realistic points made by Bueno de Mesquita et al.
Thus democracy cannot arise as a response to popular uprising in this model. Instead, it arises when the members of the winning coalition can benefit themselves by expanding its size. Members of winning coalitions are cross-pressured when it comes to the size of coalition they prefer to be part of. Their individual share of private goods is larger when the coalition is smaller, but the ruler keeps less for himself and provides more public and total private goods when the coalition is larger.
In the model, the winning coalition has a tipping point at the size at which it prefers to increase further. Once that happens, democracy will eventually follow.
This model, like those described above, portrays democratization as elite led. In the Bueno de Mesquita et al. They are not responding either to a challenge from the excluded or to the threat of capital strike.
Models that emphasize conflict between revenue-maximizing rulers and politically powerless citizens capture elements of reality in many recent transitions in developing countries. Once the changes in the international economy provoked by the debt crisis had rendered state interventionist development strategies unsustainable, many authoritarian governments were forced to begin liberalizing their economies.
In order to attract private investment to replace state investment that could not be sustained without foreign inflows, governments had to offer more predictable policies and certain public goods conducive to private investment Roberts As noted by North and Weingast , Acemoglu and Robinson , Escriba Folch , and others, policy promises made by dictators inherently lack credibility. Dictators can increase the credibility of these promises by creating institutions p. Democratic institutions such as legislatures and multiparty electoral competition can create those constraints if the commitment to the institutional change is itself considered credible.
If the institutions benefit both the ruler, by increasing revenues, and the ruled, by increasing productivity or welfare, then the institutional bargain is self-enforcing and thus credible. These models, in other words, provide a reason for expecting institutional bargains to be more credible than offers to provide desired policies in the absence of institutional change, which the Acemoglu and Robinson model does not. These models thus suggest intuitions about why democratization and economic liberalization tended to vary together in the late twentieth century Hellman Prior to the debt crisis of the s, governments had a choice between relying primarily on state investment or private investment.
Since the s, the state investment strategy has become unworkable except possibly in countries reliant on the export of oil or other high-priced natural resources.
The emphasis on the interest differences between rulers and ruled and on redistribution in favor of rulers as a central fact of dictatorship fits well with what we know about many of the dictatorships referred to as personalistic, sultanistic, or patrimonial by different authors.
These models do not accommodate the role that popular uprisings have played in many late twentieth-century democratizations, however.
Moreover, most of these models are very abstract, and most tests of them have been narrowly focused or open to multiple interpretations. Some features of late twentieth-century democratization have not found their way into models, though they have been included in large-N statistical studies. The correlation between reliance on oil exports and authoritarianism, for example, has been found repeatedly.
In developing countries, oil is usually state owned or owned by foreign multinationals and taxed heavily. Whether it is state owned or not, the government draws its revenues largely from natural resource production, not from taxation on domestic wealth holders. A large mostly descriptive literature on the effects of oil on politics exists Karl ; Chaudhry ; Anderson ; Crystal Yet, I know of no model that has grappled seriously with state ownership of productive resources and its effect on the struggle over democratization.
All models assume a capitalist economy with private domestic investors as important actors. During the third wave of democratization, however, most transitions affected authoritarian regimes in which state investment was high.
In many, foreign investment also played a large role, and revenue from foreign aid was more important than revenues from taxation in some. Many observers have suggested that international forces, such as the diffusion of democratic ideas and pressure from international financial institutions to democratize, have affected transitions, especially since the s.
Earlier quantitative studies found it hard to document these influences, but Gasiorowski and Gleditsch and Choun show that the proportion of democratic neighbors increases the likelihood of transitions to democracy in neighboring countries, lending some support to the diffusion argument.
Jon Pevehouse shows that membership in regional international organizations in which most other members are democratic increases the likelihood of democratization. Elections tend to affirm strongmen by giving them a popular mandate for their regime, but their respect for democracy ends the day after the election.
Beating strongmen means not giving them a position of power to abuse in the first place, or by denying them a mandate and voting them out of power. Ultimately, the best way to protect democracies against becoming a dictatorship is to continue embracing democratic practices. Voters need to make conscientious electoral choices that reject candidates or political groups that threaten to undermine the democratic process. Maintaining democracy requires voters to become yet more steadfast in their empathy towards others and participating in national politics with a frame of mind towards cooperation and understanding.
The Renew Democracy Initiative, Inc is a c 3 not-for-profit organization. Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.
Ways Dictators Come to Power in a Democracy Dictators may rise to power in a democracy through several ways. Political Radicalization and Social Desperation Democracies are characterized by lively but peaceful debate between a variety of political parties and interest groups.
Representatives of the Nazi Party first two left , German Centrist Party middle , the Social Democratic Party middle-right , and the Communist Party far right canvassing before the Elections, the last free elections before the rise of Nazi Germany. Credit: HistoryToday After six years of recovery and even some economic prosperity for Germany, the Great Depression of once again threw Weimar Germany in a desperate economic state, prompting many German voters to seek radical political options, including National Socialism.
Apathetic and Alienated Voters Democracies can also fall into dictatorships when voters become politically apathetic, thereby withdrawing themselves from participation in the political process. Hungary Hungary, as many political observers have noted over the past decade, is a profound case of democratic decline towards illiberalism, if not an outright march towards authoritarianism.
Credit: BBC. List of Dictatorships Which Arose from Democracies Poland: Germany: Austria: France: Spain: Brazil: Chile: Nicaragua: , Present Venezuela: Present How to Stop Dictatorships From Coming to Power in a Democracy Perhaps now more than ever, citizens in democratic countries must work to prevent the encroachment of dictatorial politics into democracies. Democracy with Danny. OUR team. Twitter Instagram Linkedin Facebook Youtube. Join the Frontlines of Freedom!
Say "Alexa, enable the Pew Research Center flash briefing". It organizes the public into nine distinct groups, based on an analysis of their attitudes and values.
Even in a polarized era, the survey reveals deep divisions in both partisan coalitions. Use this tool to compare the groups on some key topics and their demographics.
Pew Research Center now uses as the last birth year for Millennials in our work. President Michael Dimock explains why. About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. But culture evolves, and there is no intrinsic reason why non-Western cultures cannot develop emancipative values. Indeed, the evidence shows that with modernization, they are doing so, albeit from different starting points and at different paces.
If these people take action in favor of what they believe democracy is, it may not actually serve democracy. In stark contrast, support for democracy can be counted as genuine when it is found occurring together with emancipative values, because these values turn people against any form of autocratic domination over their beliefs and actions. Whether a country attains or sustains democracy will of course depend on the power balance within the elite between pro- and antidemocratic actors.
But a key element in this elite-level power balance is how much public support each camp can rally behind its goals. The more widespread emancipative values become, the more mass support will shift away from antidemocratic forces and toward prodemocratic forces. Therefore, the attainment, sustenance, and deepening of democracy all become more likely as emancipative values gain momentum on a mass scale. Available data from around the globe support this argument by revealing how astoundingly close the correlation is between authoritarian-versus-emancipative values and autocratic-versus-democratic regimes these days see the upper diagram in OA-Figure 3.
Admittedly, in the absence of experimental control this evidence does not reveal the underlying causal mechanism. But whatever that mechanism might be, the tightness of this relationship is undeniable and gives us a striking reason for thinking that regime-culture congruence is real.
By no coincidence, some years later all these countries made transitions to democracy. Originally a domain of classical-liberal philosophers, emancipative values began to catch on widely when mass-scale economic progress profoundly improved the living conditions of ordinary people, giving them access to previously unknown goods, services, and opportunities, not to mention the prospect of upward social mobility through educational merit.
Once people have learned to plan for themselves, they no longer want to be told what to think and do. This psychological awakening activates in people a drive toward freedom from external domination, which is a natural response of the human mind to existential opportunities that enable individual growth.
For this reason, once people experience enabling conditions, the promotion of emancipative values requires no ideological program or orchestrated strategy. Over the past several decades, modernization has generated the existential conditions—rising living standards, falling mortality rates, and declining fertility, as well as expanding education and other aspects of cognitive mobilization—to ignite human potential and trigger the shift to emancipative values.
Only a shrinking number of global trouble spots remain excluded from this generally progressive trend. Modernization tends to foster emancipative values, but autocrats do not always stand helpless in the face of it.
Today, as they have before, they try to redirect the consequences of modernization by writing a new script about what it means to be modern. The structure of power in the world today differs dramatically from what prevailed in the aftermath of the Cold War. Chinese and Russian leaders propagate an explicitly illiberal script of modernity, couched in cultural tales of non-Western geopolitical identity and destiny.
This is not the first time that Enlightenment values have faced a challenge from powerful global actors. While fascism and communism have been trashed by history, populist authoritarianism now competes with liberal democracy for the claim to be the better version of modernity. The extent to which ruling elites succeed in feeding allegiance cults indeed diminishes the translation of cognitive mobilization into emancipative values, thus slowing down the liberating consequences of modernization.
However, the emancipatory effect of cognitive mobilization is still apparent lower diagram of OA-Figure 6 , and turns out to be stronger than the forces acting counter to it. In a nutshell, illiberal scripts with their authoritarian versions of modernity can slow but not stop the emancipative effects of modernization.
The evidence cited above suggests that time is not on their side. Across most of the world, and dramatically in China, living conditions continue to become more enabling of human empowerment. This will sooner or later bring emancipative values to the fore and lay the basis for democratic change. The evidence in Figure 1A and Figure 1B supports this conjecture. The global dynamics of democracy versus autocracy move with an intriguing simultaneity.
On the one hand, democracy oscillates in recurrent cycles, but along an ascending trajectory. In other words, no matter how democracy is faring globally, countries with more emancipative values fare better. This simultaneity can only exist because a twofold regularity in global regime dynamics prevails.
We can describe it as follows: 1 During global democratic up swings, countries with more widespread emancipative values are more likely to follow the trend and shift toward democracy; and 2 during global democratic down swings, countries with more widespread emancipative values are less likely to follow the trend, and instead will tend to withstand pressures to move away from democracy.
0コメント