DEMOCRACY IN EUROPE

Democracy in Europe

Democracy in Europe

Introduction

Even today, visibly viable democracies remain a minority among European forms of rule. Like tyranny and oligarchy, democracy is a kind of regime: a set of relations between a government and persons subject to that government's jurisdiction (Downing, 2002: p64). (A government is any organization, at least partly independent of kinship, that controls the principal concentrated means of coercion within a delimited territory or set of territories.) The relations in question consist of mutual rights and obligations, government to subject and subject to government. A regime is democratic to the extent that:

regular and categorical, rather than intermittent and individualized, relations exist between the government and its subjects (for example, legal residence within the government's territories in itself establishes routine connections with governmental agents, regardless of relations to particular patrons);

those relations include most or all subjects (for example, no substantial sovereign enclaves exist within governmental perimeters);

those relations are equal across subjects and categories of subjects (for example, no legal exclusions from voting or officeholding based on property ownership prevail);

governmental personnel, resources, and performances change in response to binding collective consultation of subjects (for example, popular referenda make law);

subjects, especially members of minorities, receive protection from arbitrary action by governmental agents (for example, uniformly administered due process precedes incarceration of any individual regardless of social category).

Thus democratization means formation of a regime featuring relatively broad, equal, categorical, binding consultation and protection. Summing up variation in all these regards, we can block out a range from low to high protected consultation (Aminzade, 2003: p56). Any move toward protected consultation constitutes democratization; any move away from protected consultation, de-democratization. These are obviously matters of degree: no polity anywhere has ever conformed fully to the five criteria. Hence to call any particular polity democratic means merely that it embodies more protected consultation than most other historical polities have.

Defining Democracy

Why stress such abstract standards when we might simply check for familiar constitutional arrangements, such as legislative assemblies, contested elections, broad franchise, and the like? Certainly any social historian of European democracy must pay close attention to the extensive constitutional innovations that occurred in these regards after 1750. Yet three facts speak against the adoption of straightforward constitutional tests for democracy: the origins of most democratic practices in undemocratic regimes; the frequency with which ostensibly democratic constitutions remain dead letters; and the contingent, erratic emergence of democratic regimes from struggle (Markoff, 2006: p98).

According to Markoff (2006) a democracy is a political system in which all adult citizens have the opportunity to participate in decisions affecting their interests. The more significant and comprehensive these opportunities are, the greater the level of democracy: political theorists discuss, in these terms, the “widening” or “deepening” of democratic decision-making. Ultimately, this extension of the democratic principle can lead to the questioning of the “political” category itself and its relationship to social choices determined by a market economy. However, within widely shared conceptions of liberal democracy , the economy is not a realm of civic self-determination, while ...