Nominally democratic countries with rigged or otherwise uncompetitive elections are excluded, but there is no requirement of a free press or an autonomous legislature. In Adam Przeworski’s words, a democracy is “a system in which parties lose elections.” Countries are deemed democratic if and only if there are somewhat competitive elections. Recognizing this problem, many political scientists have followed Joseph Schumpeter in defining democracy as a system in which collective decisions are made through a competitive struggle for votes.
Countries with relatively little corruption and repression are likely to perform well on a number of other dimensions, but such a lack might have nothing to do with democracy’s institutional machinery. A definition like this clearly allows us to say very little about the desirability of democratic institutions as a set of inputs. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index uses such a “thick” conception, which contains categories not only for the functioning of the electoral system but also for civil liberties and effective governance. Since political competition is an intermediate goal of democracy, the minimalist conception of democracy picks out democracies that are at least moderately successful in a particular way. When we define democracy in terms of competition we make an implicit assumption that democracies are necessarily competitive. Rather, it emerges from the interaction of politicians, voters, and special interests given the rules defined at the first level. The degree of competition in an electoral system cannot be directly controlled. Such minimalists fail to recognize, however, that their own second-level definition is also an output rather than an input.
Minimalists insist the third level has no place in the definition of democracy, because it is an output. “Thick” definitions of democracy reference all three levels: A democracy needs particular institutional inputs as well as certain patterns of electoral competition and policy outcomes. At the third level, we have the policy decisions that emerge from this interaction. At the second, we have the interaction of political players within those rules-how voters vote and how parties and candidates compete with one another.
At the first level, we have the basic rules of the political game such as the electoral system and constitution. Political Systems: Inputs, Dynamics, and Outputsīroadly speaking, political systems can be defined at one or more of three levels: (1) institutional inputs, (2) political dynamics, or (3) policy outcomes. If any one of these conditions is routinely violated, the country is deemed undemocratic, or at least less democratic than countries that do meet the criteria. While some conceptions of democracy are even more restrictive, the broadest commonly accepted definition in contemporary political science has four criteria:įreedom of speech, association, and press andĮlected officials not unduly influenced by unelected groups such as the military or religious leaders. Under some definitions, democracy requires not only certain mechanisms for collective decision-making, but also liberal policy outcomes in various areas. Even critics offering a minimalist definition of democracy include outcomes in their definitions.īoth therefore stack the deck in democracy’s favor. That is, if we want to know whether promoting democracy in failed or authoritarian states is a good idea, we need to treat democracy as a set of institutional inputs analytically distinct from the effects of those institutions. This bias prevents a fair evaluation of the alternatives. The way scholars define and measure democracy, however, includes a bias. Thus, it seems everybody knows democracy is the best way to promote robust economic development, so the challenge is in finding the best way to promote democracy. But these same experts completely disregard alternative governance models, such as radical decentralization. Adherents of this position cite a large number of empirical studies, which show that democratic countries tend to perform better than autocracies across a variety of well-being indicators.ĭevelopment agencies and scholars therefore give democratization high priority relative to other anti-poverty programs. They argue that making leaders accountable to their citizens would promote good governance and remove the institutional barriers to economic development. Experts routinely tout democratization as the key to promoting freedom and prosperity in underdeveloped nations.
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