Part 3 of 4
From modernization and political development to democratization: theoretical development in the function of policy developmentThe shift from supporting authoritarian regimes to promoting polyarchy led many intellectuals and academicians who had previously distanced themselves from policies seen as hypocritical or morally objectionable into an enthusiastic embrace of the new modalities of intervention. At the same time as "a democratic miracle sweeping the world" became standard phraseology in US foreign policymaking circles, "democratization" became a veritable boom industry on US campuses and for academic publishers. By the early 1990s, a whole new body of literature on "transitions" and on US "democracy promotion" had become established in government circles, policy planning institutions and mainstream academia.47 Much of this literature is value-laden and steeped in implicit analytical and theoretical assumptions in such a way that the distinction between those who are writing from the outlook of a policymaker or power-holder, and those who are writing from the viewpoint of social science inquiry, often becomes confused.48 A critique of "democratization" literature, particularly those works which interface closely with the policymaking community, sheds important light on theoretical and practical aspects of the new political intervention, and also demonstrates how ideology and political practices become rationalized in intellectual activity, which in turns forms the basis for developing the ideological dimensions of hegemony.
There is an underlying continuity between modernization and political culture/political development theories of the 1950s and 1960s, and democratization theories of the 1980s and 1990s. The former constitute the theoretical forerunners of the latter and the development of both has involved a close association between the US state and US academia. Links include generous government funding for research projects, conferences which bring policymakers and intellectuals face-to- face, and studies which either originate in universities and become standard materials used by policymakers, or which originate in policy planning institutes tied to the policymaking process and become standard materials used in universities. This is the case, for example, with two of the most widely cited and circulated volumes: Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Prospects for Democracy, a four-volume collection, edited by Guillermo O'Donnell, Philip C. Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead, and Democracy in Developing Countries, another four-volume series, edited by Larry Diamond, Juan J. Linz, and Seymour Martin Upset. Both were commissioned with the intent of informing US policy and policymakers, and are considered standard references in government and academia on "transition to democracy."49 There are direct and indirect mechanisms which mediate the relations between organic intellectuals and state policies, including, but not limited to, a revolving door between posts in universities, posts in the US government, and posts in government-linked but nominally private policy planning institutes, similar to (and overlapping with) the corporate government revolving door. In turn, literature originating in the government-university nexus has a natural advantage in establishing dominance and authority in the field. It sets the frame of reference for general treatment of the issue, defines the parameters of debate and circumscribes research agendas. In this way, it achieves a certain intellectual hegemony. 50
It was no coincidence that John W. Burgess, founder of the first department of political science in the United States, explained in 1890, at the beginning of a decade which began extra-territorial US expansion, that the new discipline of political science would help "the civilized states" to "undertake the work of state organization" for the populations of the colonial and semi-colonial regions who were "in a state of barbarism or semi-barbarism."51 The "manifest destiny" and the "civilizing mission" to which Burgess referred reflected racial and colonial theories that provided crude justification for the imperial policies of the United States and the other Great Powers in the era of modern colonialism, from late last century through to the World War II. But the relation between intellectual labor and policy development became considerably more sophisticated after the War. Modernization theories that emanated out of the US social sciences were closely associated with the rise of the United States as the dominant world power and with the emergence of "Third World" protagonists on the world stage, involving simultaneous processes of decolonization and of the reconstruction of world order after the War.
Modernization theory, and its twin cousins, political culture and political development theories, were grounded in the structural-functionalism of sociologist Talcott Parsons and political scientist David Easton that dominated the US social sciences in the postwar years, with its embedded system-maintenance and social order biases.52 Modernization theory argued that all societies were moving along a continuum from "traditional" to "modern," and "development" meant the process of movement down this continuum. The more developed countries were seen as further advanced along the road, while the underdeveloped countries were "late comers" who were behind but on the same path as the developed countries. The sharp inequalities between nations in an asymmetric international order were to be explained by factors internal to each country and region, particularly to the "traditions," the "anti-modern" attitudes and other impediments located in the cultures of the backward regions, while the colonial experience was not of consequence. Third World countries would be helped along the felicitous path of capitalist economic development with US (and other Western) aid and investment.Political development and political culture, as concomitants of economic modernization, were seen as two sides of the same coin. The first was the ensemble of political roles, institutions, and actions, and the second, the attendant values, beliefs, and attitudes that underlie political behavior. Modernization would bring about a change in the "political culture" of the developing population, defined along the lines of Parsons's "pattern variables," away from "traditional" values which impede progress and towards "modern" values which facilitate development.
As agents of "modern" values, a "modernizing elite" would steer countries down the road to development. This "enlightened" elite, by definition, would need to hold power and be insulated from any popular pressures from below. "The need for elite power requires that the ordinary citizen be relatively passive, uninvolved, and deferential to elites," explained political scientists Gabriel Almond and Sydney Verba in The Civic Culture.53 And just as a country modernizes economically by moving through a continuum of economic stages, it would move through a continuum of political stages which the developed capitalist countries had already passed through, in the build-up of political structures, particularly of state structures.
An analysis of the political development literature reveals that the emphasis, at times explicit, at times implicit, was on order, and on the capacity of political institutions to perform the function of the maintenance of order. David Easton's "input-output" model constituted the basis for political development theory: inputs are demands and supports for the political structure and the social system, and outputs are the consequent system performance (taxes, legislation, etc.).54 In the middle there are Easton's "capabilities" and "conversion process" and Parsons's "maintenance" and "adaptive" functions of the political system. The goal is to develop the capacity for the political system to absorb demands, prop up supports, and augment "output." This is to be based on two "developmental processes" - structural/role differentiation and the secularization of values. The normative end goal is to maximize the capacity for system maintenance (social order). The political system has the function of compelling compliance in a social order, and political science assumes as its primary problem the establishment and maintenance of political structures capable of assuring the stability of a social order. The questions addressed in Easton's construct are: How might the political system, the instrument which compels compliance, survive? How might it fulfill its function most effectively? How might the political system absorb "stress" from the larger "social system" in such a way that social order is not threatened?
Political development becomes the study of how to manage or change the political system in such a way as to maximize the ability of the state to reproduce the social order and the relations of domination therein.The political development literature sought to dissect how political systems in the Third World could be constructed which would most effectively perform the role of shielding the prevailing social order from demands that could not be met from within that order.55 This involved "state-building," "nation-building," "institution-building," "bureaucracy-building," and so forth.
Subordinate groups who challenged elites were responsible for disorder. But if the goal of political development was to achieve stability, the concept of social order was not neutral. Social orders involve winners and losers. Stability is not necessarily a condition in the general welfare; it places a normative premium not on order per se, but on maintenance of the prevailing social order.
Strong governments and political institutions, which were the objective of political development, were not just better able to create declared "public interests," but also to thwart, or deny, collective interests of popular classes.56 Political development theories approximate Mannheim's notion of "bureaucratic conservatism," whereby specific social interests are attained through forms of political organization, yet these interests are concealed under the implicit assumption that a specific order is equivalent to order in general.Modernization theories guided the thinking of policymakers at
the State Department's Agency for International Development (AID) and the non-military aspects of such US undertakings as the Alliance for Progress and economic development programs in Vietnam, in which economic development through US aid and investment was to have removed the political basis for radical movements and for more fundamental changes. Political development theory also became incorporated into foreign policy through development programs in the Third World.
"Political development is anti-Communist, pro-American political stability," explained an AID official.57 The assumptions of modernization theory continue to provide theoretical guidance for, and legitimization of, the economic dimensions of US foreign policy, and particularly the neo-liberal model and its notion that the unfettered operation of transnational capital will bring about development. However, political development theories have undergone major modifications which have helped to theoretically inform the shift to "democracy promotion." The problem with the earlier political development strategizing was that it focused almost exclusively on the state as the locus of social power and the arena for the reproduction of the relations of domination. Gradually, in the social sciences, the focus began to shift to civil society as the principal site of social control. This new focus was congruent with the shift in US policy towards the new political intervention. I return to this point later.
From power of the people to polyarchyDefinitions of concepts are not theoretically neutral and are not simply the result of individual taste or preference of the writer... Definitions of concepts are also mandated by the dominant usages in a group or society, made authoritative by dictionaries, by sanctions against the "wrong" usage. And definitions are also part of the hegemony of language itself, the "deep structure" of meanings buried in the foundations of social order. To broaden the classic statement of Marx, the ruling ideas of an age are not only the ideology of its ruling class but also the vocabulary of dominant elites.
-- Robert Alford and Roger Friedland [58]
Democracy means only that the people have the opportunity of accepting or refusing the men who are to rule them.
-- Joseph Schumpeter [59]
Democracy is what philosopher W. B. Gallie terms an essentially contested concept.60 This refers to a concept in which different and competing definitions exist, such that terms themselves are problematic since they are not reducible to "primitives." Each definition yields different interpretations of social reality. In and of themselves, these terms are hollow and their meaning is only discernible from the vantage point of the social and theoretical context of their usage. By their nature, these terms involve implicit assumptions, are enveloped in ideology, and are therefore subsets of broader discourse which sets the framework of the social-political or theoretical agenda in question. Each essentially contested concept comes to have multiple and internally contradictory meanings which are given to it by specific class and group interests with a stake in its definition. Ideological positions, or more precisely, the intersubjective expression of vested class and group interests, are often ensconced in what is presented as scientific, objective discussion of democracy. Analysis should thus uncover these assumptions and their relation to interests.What US policymakers mean by "democracy promotion" is the promotion of polyarchy, a concept which developed in US academic circles closely tied to the policymaking community in the United States in the post-World War II years (the word was first coined by Robert DahI 61). Polyarchy refers to a system in which a small group actually rules and mass participation in decision-making is confined to leadership choice in elections carefully managed by competing elites. The pluralist assumption is that elites will respond to the general interests of majorities, through polyarchy's "twin dimensions" of "political contestation" and "political inclusiveness," as a result of the need of those who govern to win a majority of votes. It is theoretically grounded in structural-functionalism - and behind it, the positivist focus on the separate aspects and the external relations of things - in which the different spheres of the social totality are independent, each performing systems maintenance functions and externally related to each other in a larger Parsonian "social system." Democracy is limited to the political sphere, and revolves around process, method and procedure in the selection of "leaders." This is an institutional definition of democracy.
Political scientist Samuel Huntington notes that the classic definition of democracy as power/rule by the people - rooted in the original Greek, power or rule (eralos) of the people (demos) - and "its derivatives and applications over the ages" have "sharply declined, at least in the American scholarly discussions, and have been replaced by efforts to understand the nature of democratic institutions." Huntington concludes: "Democracy has a useful meaning only when it is defined in institutional terms. The key institution of democracy is the selection of leaders through competitive elections."62 In turn, polyarchy has been conflated to the staple definition of democracy in both "democratization" and "democracy promotion" literature.63
The concept of polyarchy is an outgrowth of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century elite theories developed by Italian social scientists Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto. On the one hand, these theories were developed to legitimize the rapid increase in the concentration of wealth and political power among dominant elites, and their ever-greater control over social life, with the rise of corporate capitalism. On the other hand, democracy, by the late nineteenth century, had ceased being an instrument of this industrial elite against the old feudal oligarchy and was instead becoming a vehicle for the demands of those it dominated. In the latter part of their careers, Mosca went on to argue that "democratic" rather than fascist methods are best suited to defend the ruling class and preserve the social order, whereas Pareto went on to embrace fascism as the best method. This split, on the basis of a shared commitment to preserving the social order, constitutes an historical analogy to the debate in US foreign policy-making circles over whether "democracy" or authoritarianism in the Third World is actually the best method of preserving international order. "In perceiving the insight underlying the apparent paradox that democratic methods prudently used can enhance the strength and stability of a ruling class, Mosca solved his problem," notes political scientist Peter Bachrach. "But before his theory could be successfully integrated within the context of modern democratic theory, the theory of democracy itself required a radical revision."64 That radical revision took place in US academia in the post-World War II years.
The institutional definition embodied in polyarchy came to substitute, at the level of mainstream Western social science, the classic definition of democracy. Despite the emergence of the earlier elite theories, the classic definition had been fairly well established until the post-World War II period. This redefinition thus coincided with a worldwide upsurge of democratic aspirations and movements in the wake of the defeat of fascism and the breakup of the old colonial system. Behind the birth of dozens of newly independent nations, the spread of democratic and national liberation movements, and several successful Third World revolutions were struggles over what new social and political systems would replace the crumbling colonial order. The redefinition of democracy also took place alongside the postwar construction of a new international system and the emergence of the United States as the undisputed world power.
It began with Joseph Schumpeter's 1942 study, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, in which he rejected the "classical theory of democracy" defined in terms of "the will of the people" and "the common good." Instead, Schumpeter advanced "another theory" of democracy: "institutional arrangements for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people's vote."65 This redefinition gave "democratic" content to the anti-democratic essence of Mosca's and Pareto's earlier elitism theories, thus providing for their legitimization. According to Huntington, the debate between the institutional and the classical definition of democracy went on for several decades after World War II, and was concluded with the publication of Robert Dahl's Polyarchy in 1971.
In its Parsonian-Schumpeterian version, the polyarchic definition of democracy is equated with the stability of the capitalist social order. By definitional fiat, power is exercised in the general welfare and any attempt to change the social order is a pathological challenge to democracy. "The maintenance of democratic politics and the reconstruction of the social order are fundamentally incompatible," states Huntington.66 There is no contradiction in this model in affirming that "democracy" exists and also acknowledging massive inequalities in wealth and social privilege. The problem is posed as to how these inequalities might negatively affect the maintenance of "democracy." Therefore, the notion that there may be a veritable contradiction in terms between elite or class rule, on the one hand, and democracy, on the other, does not enter -- by theoretical-definitional fiat -- into the polyarchic definition. At best, the polyarchic conception leaves open the possibility as to whether "political democracy" may or may not facilitate "social and economic democracy." In contrast, I am arguing that polyarchy as a distinct form of elite rule performs the function of legitimating existing inequalities, and does so more effectively than authoritarianism.Historian Raymond Williams holds that a class perspective on the politics of language is necessary, since "many crucial meanings have been shaped by a dominant class."67 Sociologists Robert Alford and Roger Friedland argue that "concepts come to be part of dominant or subordinate paradigms. Clusters of terms come to control discourse when a particular school of thought dominates a university department, a professional association, or a government agency." As such, "paradigms of inquiry become part of the substructure of meanings, which may disappear into the underpinnings of a discipline as its ideology."68
The polyarchic definition of democracy, which is only one variant of an essentially contested concept, has come to enjoy hegemony, in the Gramscian sense, in social scientific, political, and mass public discourse.THE PRINCIPLES OF NEWSPEAKNewspeak was the official language of Oceania and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism. In the year 1984 there was not as yet anyone who used Newspeak as his sole means of communication, either in speech or writing. The leading articles in the Times were written in it, but this was a tour de force which could only be carried out by a specialist. It was expected that Newspeak would have finally superseded Oldspeak (or Standard English, as we should call it) by about the year 2050. Meanwhile it gained ground steadily, all Party members tending to use Newspeak words and grammatical constructions more and more in their everyday speech. The version in use in 1984, and embodied in the Ninth and Tenth Editions of the Newspeak Dictionary, was a provisional one, and contained many superfluous words and archaic formations which were due to be suppressed later.
It is with the final, perfected version, as embodied in the Eleventh Edition of the Dictionary, that we are concerned here.
The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought — that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc — should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever. To give a single example. The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as ‘This dog is free from lice’ or ‘This field is free from weeds’. It could not be used in its old sense of ‘politically free’ or ‘intellectually free’ since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless. Quite apart from the suppression of definitely heretical words, reduction of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself, and no word that could be dispensed with was allowed to survive. Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum.
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984), by George Orwell
Separating the political system from the socioeconomic order: promoting polyarchy and promoting free marketsIdeological development is a process in which ideological positions are constantly modified in an effort to render them internally logical and self-consistent in the face of logical inconsistencies and contradictions in material reality (empirical fact). The labor of organic intellectuals involves resolving logical inconsistencies and offering solutions to real social contradictions.
Uncovering the inner ideological core of intellectual production is not achieved by focusing on the reasoned forms of this thought, but rather on the unreasoned assumptions and preconceptions that underlie -- and belie -- its own external (surface) logics.
Creating an institutional theory of democracy was an intellectual and ideological attempt to resolve once and for all the intrinsically contradictory nature of democratic thought under capitalism, in which one side stresses the sanctity of private property, and therefore legitimizes social and economic inequalities and privileges which rest on the monopolization by minorities of society's material resources, while the other side stresses popular sovereignty and human equality. A similar effort to resolve ideological contradictions springing from real social contradictions took place in the evolution of modernization and political development theory into democratization theory. This intellectual movement paralleled change in policy, from promoting dictatorship to promoting polyarchy, as a response to the real material contradiction of the crisis of elite rule in the Third World.
But democratization theory exhibits manifold logical and empirical inconsistencies which become glaring once we study each of its component parts in their interconnections and uncover its antinomious essence. In this way we are able to demonstrate the relation between democratization theory, the promotion of polyarchy, globalization, and real social contradictions in emergent global society.
The antinomy in democratization theory is located in its theoretical construct, in Alford and Friedland's "superstructure of meaning," but not in substructure of meaning. The antinomy disappears once we uncover the ideological discourse concealed in the construct or in the political practice which it legitimizes.
For example, Adam Przeworski describes democracy as "a particular system of processing and terminating intergroup conflicts." Democracy "thus constitutes an organization of political power ... as a system, it determines the capacity of particular groups to realize their specific interests." He separates the political from the socioeconomic system by positing the former as a neutral forum theoretically capable of pendular swings between antagonistic social and economic interests. "The distribution of the probability of realizing group-specific interests -- which is nothing less than political power -- is determined jointly by the distribution of resources that participants bring into conflicts and by specific institutional arrangements."69 The political system and the state become chameleons, or clothes that fit any class or group which tries them on. Society is multi-class but power is determined in a "classless democracy" as process: political power is deposited in a democratic state through which classes and groups may withdraw or utilize their share of power in accordance with their resources and their organizational capacity. But the distribution of material resources is determined in the socioeconomic sphere, and the particular distribution will determine the relative strength of groups and group access to political power. The extent of democracy should therefore directly correlate to the extent in which material resources are distributed in an egalitarian fashion, but this proposition is excluded by definition from the construct.
Przeworski acknowledges that democracy is a means for securing ends, an organizational form of the dispute for power as the ability to realize social and economic interests. What makes this "democracy" is that intergroup conflict is processed and terminated by established rules of procedure and a juridical structure. Internal coherence would require the construct to demonstrate how procedure and juridical structure are in the first place established, since these are not pre-given. Such established rules and procedures are, in the Gramscian explanation, those which the dominant classes are able to impose once they have achieved hegemony. Having achieved this hegemony, consensual arrangements are at play for the resolution of conflict without transgressing a given social order. To demonstrate a fit between internal logic and empirical reality, and therefore achieve consistency, Przeworski's construct would have to problematize how the distribution of material resources and the arrangements for the resolution of intergroup conflict are derived. This remains theoretically external to the construct itself and its implicit consensus theory. Its substructure, hence, legitimizes as "democratic" immanent inequalities in the social order.
The antinomy in democratization theory is the separation of the political system from the social order, in turn justified by the institutional definition of democracy and theoretically grounded in structural-functionalism, which separates the "internal" from the "external," and the political from the social and economic spheres of society, conferring a functional autonomy to each subsphere. For instance, Diamond, Linz, and Lipset affirm that democracy "signif[ies] a political system, separate and apart from the economic and social system... Indeed, a distinctive aspect of our approach is to insist that issues of so-called economic and social democracy be separated from the question of governmental structure."70 An antinomious argument is one in which its inconsistencies or contradictions become apparent only when conclusions are drawn from the synthesis of two propositions which are reasonable in isolation from one another. The separation of the political from the socioeconomic allows for apparently reasonable propositions regarding either sphere; the inconsistencies in both only become apparent in the synthesis.
Central to democratization theory is an inconsistent argument: first, it separates the social and the economic from the political sphere, and then it turns around and connects the two by claiming an affinity between democracy and free-market capitalism! Huntington argues, for example:
The exit from power of rulers who lose elections means that limits must exist on what is at stake in controlling government. If winning or losing was an all-or-nothing affair, those in power would have overpowering incentives to suppress opposition, to rig elections, and to resort to coercion to remain in power if it appeared they had lost an election. Hence government cannot be the only or even the principal source of status, prestige, wealth, and power. Some dispersion of control over these goods -- what Dahl calls "dispersed inequalities" -- is necessary. The most important issue here concerns economic power... In all democracies, private ownership of property remains the basic norm in theory and in fact... The existence of such private power is essential to the existence of democracy... Political democracy is clearly compatible with inequality in both wealth and income, and, in some measure, it may be dependent upon such inequality... Defining democracy in terms of goals such as economic well-being, social justice, and overall socioeconomic equity is not, we have argued, very useful. [71]
Huntington unambiguously connects the economic and the political spheres: dispersed inequalities, private property, a free market, etc., are required for the maintenance of a "democratic" political system. Despite his claim to do so, he does not, therefore, limit democracy to the government structure, or to process centered around competitive elections! Neither does Przeworski. And Diamond, Linz, and Lipset, despite their stated definition of democracy as "a political system separate and apart from the economic and social system," similarly assert that "democracy" requires capitalist free markets.72
All theory, to acquire social scientific status, must demonstrate logical consistency and empirical verification. Democratization theory fails on both accounts. It argues against any linkage between the political and the socioeconomic system, but then validates itself by making just such a linkage. This is its logical inconsistency. The very theoretical construct precludes from the empirical terrain on which the theory is based the relation between wealth and power, and therefore precludes either empirical verification or falsification of the pluralist assumption on power by examining this relation.
Empirical evidence demonstrates that those who hold wealth in society exercise political power directly, through their inordinate influence over (or direct participation in) the state apparatus, and indirectly, through their dominant position in economic institutions and the organs of civil society. This is its failure of empirical verification.Having exposed the antinomious essence of democratization theory, what concerns us now is its connection to hegemony, which resides in the relation of intellectual thought to the transnational elite project. Promoting polyarchy and promoting neo-liberal restructuring has become a singular process in US foreign policy.
The AID explains that promoting polyarchy in the latter part of the twentieth century "is complementary to and supportive of the transition to market-oriented economies."73 (Since the promotion of capitalism and of polyarchy are seen as symbiotic in US policy, it is therefore more precise to qualify the policy as promoting capitalist polyarchy.) If democracy is only "a system of government, separate and apart from the economic and social system," as democratization theory maintains, yet policymakers assert that promoting polyarchy and promoting free markets are inseparable, there is an evident disjuncture between this theory and actual US policy. The discrepancy is an extension of the contradictions already identified in democratization theory and reflects its legitimating function. It is not dispersed inequalities, free markets, the exclusion (from democracy) of economic well-being, social justice, socioeconomic equity, and so on, which enhance democracy, as the theory suggests. Rather, the polyarchic concept of democracy which the United States promotes is an effective political arrangement for legitimizing and sustaining inequalities within and between nations, which, we have seen, are deepening under global capitalism, and therefore of utility to dominant groups in an asymmetric international order.
If the political sphere is separated from the socioeconomic and democracy limited to the former then these inequalities and international asymmetries are of little concern to democratization in the Third World (or only of concern insofar as they threaten the stability of the social order). If democracy is limited to "a system of government," then enormous concentrations of wealth and power in "private" institutions such as transnational corporations are not relevant to "democracy." Discussions of democratization are extraneous to those of transnational power relations, elite domination, hegemony, international asymmetries, and US interventionism. Beyond its legitimating function, mainstream democratization theory, as we shall see below and in the following chapter, also provides technical solutions to practical problems of domination in global society by contributing intellectual precepts to the policy of promoting polyarchy. Its legitimating function is made easier owing to the hegemonic status of the polyarchic definition of democracy. But polyarchy competes with alternative definitions.
Polyarchy versus popular democracyAs an essentially contested concept, polyarchy competes with concepts of popular democracy. Although, in distinction to polyarchy, there is no fully elaborated theory of popular democracy (a situation which strengthens the hegemonic status of the polyarchic definition), an abundance of literature is available on the subject and on the debate over democracy.74 The various concepts and views on popular democracy are traceable to the literal, classical Greek definition of democracy as the rule, or power (cratos), of the people (demos), and rooted in Rousseauian-Marxist traditions. They posit a dispersal throughout society of political power through the participation of broad majorities in decision-making. The model conjoins representative government to forms of participatory democracy that hold states accountable beyond the indirect mechanism of periodic elections. Popular democracy is seen as an emancipatory project of both form and content that links the distinct spheres of the social totality, in which the construction of a democratic political order enjoys a theoretically internal relation to the construction of a democratic socioeconomic order.
Democratic participation, in order to be truly effective, requires that democracy be a tool for changing unjust social and economic structures, national as well as international.
In sharp contrast to polyarchy, popular democracy is concerned with both process and outcome (although a fully elaborated theory of popular democracy would have to address such issues as the institutional structures of popular democracy and the relation between process and outcome).
Popular democracy is thus distinguished from the polyarchic focus on process only, and from the focus of the statist models of the former Soviet bloc on outcome only (and the concept of popular democracy should not be confused with the types of political system that developed under the former Soviet bloc).
Elitism theories claim that democracy rests exclusively on process, so that there is no contradiction between a "democratic" process and an anti-democratic social order punctuated by sharp social inequalities and minority monopolization of society's material and cultural resources. Under the polyarchic definition, a system can acquire a democratic form without a democratic content. Popular democracy, in contrast, posits democracy as both a process and a means to an end -- a tool for change, for the resolution of such material problems as housing, health, education, access to land, cultural development, and so forth. This entails a dispersal of political power formerly concentrated in the hands of elite minorities, the redistribution of wealth, the breaking down of the structures of highly concentrated property ownership, and the democratizing of access to social and cultural opportunities by severing the link between access and the possession of wealth. It includes acknowledging the public (social) character of "private" institutions in civil society such as universities, cultural establishments, and transnational corporations, holding them accountable, and thoroughly democratizing their operation. Democracy begins with respect for human rights, civil liberties, the rule of law, and elections, and includes the outlawing of racial, ethnic, gender, and other forms of discrimination. These should be seen in the model of popular democracy, not as democracy in itself, but as "pre-conditions" for processes of democratization, which unfold to the extent that structures are developed which allow for participatory democracy, for the direct participation of majorities in their own vital affairs, "upwards" from the local, grassroots level. It is what Carl Cohen refers to as the "breadth, depth, range" of democracy.75The locus of power in both models is civil society: formal political structures regulate the instruments of the state, and democracy (however so defined) limits the powers of the state vis-a-vis civil society, in distinction to authoritarian coercive domination, and to statist models of the former Soviet bloc. Relations between the state and civil society theoretically take on the same form under both polyarchy and popular democracy -- power flows "upwards" to the state. This is why state managers and organic intellectuals who have developed "democracy promotion" argue that the powers of the state should be limited vis-a-vis civil society in intervened countries, and why they emphasize developing the organs of civil society in these countries.
The contradiction between polyarchy and popular democracy is not expressed in the degree to which the organs of civil society are able to influence local and national affairs, but in whether elite or popular sectors have achieved hegemony in civil society, and in the degree to which these organs are themselves democratic institutions that popular majorities are able to utilize in their own interests. In polyarchy, the state is the domain of the dominant classes, while the popular classes are incorporated into civil society under the hegemony of the elite -- which is the formula for the exercise of consensual domination. Popular democracy involves participatory mechanisms for popular sectors to subordinate and utilize the state in pursuit of their interests, with mobilization in civil society as the principal form in which political power is exercised.
Elections are meaningful components of popular democratization to the extent that mechanisms of participatory democracy linked to formal representative structures allow for accountability and control by the population over those elected. Under polyarchy, "political inclusiveness" (polyarchy's "first dimension") is limited to the right to vote, and mass constituencies have no institutional mechanisms for holding elected officials accountable to them and to the platforms upon which they are elected. Polyarchy theory claims that democracy requires that those elected be insulated, once they take office, from popular pressures, so that they may "effectively govern." If rulers deviate from the "course of action preferred by the citizenry," according to this reasoning, they are to be held accountable by being voted out of office in subsequent elections, since accountability is defined as nothing more than the holding of elections76. Polyarchy not only limits democratic participation to voting in elections, but focuses exclusively on form in elections. The polyarchic definition of "free and fair" elections are those which are procedurally correct and not fraudulent. Equality of conditions for electoral participation is not relevant to whether elections are "free and fair." These conditions are decidedly unequal under capitalism owing to the unequal distribution of material and cultural resources among classes and groups, and to the use of economic power to determine political outcomes. But economic considerations are excluded by definition from the polyarchic conception, in which "political contestation" (polyarchy's "second dimension") means the juridical right, not the material ability, to become a candidate and vie for power in elections. Equality of influence, as Miliband has noted, "is in fact an illusion. The act of voting is part of a much larger political process, characterized ... by marked inequality of influence. Concentration on the act of voting itself, in which formal equality does prevail, helps to obscure the inequality, and serves a crucially important legitimating function" (emphasis in original).77 This legitimating function accounts for polyarchy's electoral fixation.
Behind essentially contested concepts are contested social orders. Popular democracy and polyarchy rest on antagonistic notions of what a democratic society resembles. In popular democracy, ultimately, a society is democratic to the extent that popular majorities are able to impose their sovereignty -- popular sovereignty properly conceived does not refer to a "general interest" but to the interests of popular classes -- that society is governed by the "logic of the majority." Under polyarchy it is the inverse: sovereignty is exercised by dominant minorities, but under conditions of hegemony (consensual domination). Terms vary: in mainstream social science consensual domination is "liberal democracy," while critics have coined such phrases as "limited democracy," "restricted democracy," "controlled democracy," or "low-intensity democracy." Class (or popular versus elite) sovereignties are at the heart of worldwide social struggles unfolding under globalization. As is illustrated in the case studies, broad popular movements tended to put forward the model of popular democracy in their demands and in their alternative visions for organizing postauthoritarian societies. In contrast, elites sought capitalist polyarchy as the goal of anti-dictatorial struggles.
An exploration of the contradiction between polyarchy and popular democracy raises two questions. First, to what extent do processes of popular democratization run up against constraints inherent in the capitalist mode of production? Private appropriation of the social product is in the last instance the social relation which underpins the separation of real from formal power, and democratic form from democratic content.
Without doubt, implementation of the full model of popular democracy requires the supersession of capitalism, and I return briefly to this issue in the conclusion. But the question may be a relative one: just how much popular democratization is possible within the limits imposed by capitalism is not clear. However, it is not theoretical reflection that motivates masses of people to demand the democratization of their life conditions. Perceptions of individual and collective interests and the dynamics of mass consciousness are as important in this regard as structural analysis of political economy.
Democratization struggles are played out at the level of intersubjectivities not as contradictions between modes of production or social orders, but as concrete struggles for practical change in daily life. Democratization struggles take on a dynamic which is autonomous of historic contradictions between modes of production. The global economy generates pressures under which subordinate groups mobilize and dominant groups tend to shift from coercive to consensual forms of domination. But the outcome to societal struggles against authoritarianism in peripheral and semi-peripheral regions of the world system is not predetermined.
The second question raised is to what extent does a polyarchic political system itself constrain popular democratization? Polyarchic political systems tend to set boundaries in which social struggles unfold whose parameters do not transgress the social order. Polyarchy plays a legitimating function for an increasingly cohesive transnational elite that seeks to legitimate its rule by establishing formal democratic institutions. And ideology as a material force establishes patterns of conduct which fix limits on social action. But the problem is not just ideological. Polyarchy also place enormous institutional constraints on popular democratization. Polyarchy as the political institutionalization of social relations of power limits state accountability to periodic elections. Between elections groups who control the state are free to pursue their agenda without any accountability and insulated from popular pressure. The polyarchic state may legitimately employ repression against popular sectors that transgress legality when the demands they place on the state are not met (they usually are not). Thus while authoritarianism insulates but does not legitimate elite rule, polyarchy performs both functions. Attempts to challenge elites within the bounds of polyarchic legality run up against the vastly superior resources of the elite. The structural power of transnational capital in the global economy gives political and ideological power to elites tied directly and indirectly to transnational capital, and also gives the transnational elite "veto power" over local states which by chance of circumstances are captured by popular sectors. This structural power combines with the institutions of polyarchy and provides an immanent class advantage to those who command superior resources. These ideological, institutional and structural constraints to the democratization of social life under global capitalism are mutually reinforcing. They lend themselves to non-coercive mechanisms of social control and, therefore, to elite hegemony. The case studies tend to support these propositions.The notion of national sovereignty requires theoretical rethinking in light of globalization. In an interdependent world economy, in which autarky, besides being undesirable in terms of restricting development possibilities, is not possible, the issue is not "economic independence." Rather, it is how popular majorities whose locus of political life is still the nation-state may take advantage of economic interdependence to develop autonomous economic spaces. Popular democratization ultimately depends on international conditions which are beyond the control of individual nations. However, the conjoining of formal political (state) sovereignty and popular sovereignty in society, springing from internal popular democratization, constitutes the terms under which majoritarian social groups organized in nations and groups of nations may struggle for greater equity in the international order. The utilization of political sovereignty to secure greater equity between nations and greater control over national resources involves struggles over redirecting surpluses and stemming the outward drainage of wealth towards the centers of an asymmetric world economy. Shifts in the correlation of forces towards the popular classes within nations and regions, conjointly at the level of state and civil society, have deep repercussions for international relations and changes in world order. This is what Gramsci meant when he wrote: "77 international relations precede or follow (logically) fundamental social relations? Any organic innovation in the social structure... modifies organically absolute and relative relations in the international field too."78 Modifications in the international political economy, including the creation of more symmetric relations among peoples and regions, begin with basic changes in social relations of the type envisioned by popular democracy.
Despite the open-endedness of these issues, the implications of substituting this literal or classic definition of democracy with the institutional definition embodied in polyarchy are vast. By limiting the focus to political contestation among elites through procedurally free elections, the question of who controls the material and cultural resources of society, as well as asymmetries and inequalities, among groups within a single nation and among nations within the international order, becomes extraneous to the discussion of democracy.
It should be clear that promoting popular democracy constitutes a profound threat to the interests of dominant classes in the United States and the centers of the world system and their junior counterparts in the South. When US policymakers and organic intellectuals speak of "promoting democracy," they do not, as a matter of course, mean promoting popular democracy. But more than this, they mean the suppression of popular democracy, in theory and in practice.