Political Order and Political Decay (68 page)

The fact that the Communist solution to the problem that Marx, Mosca, and Pareto identified—continued elite dominance despite the advent of formal democracy—ended in failure does not mean that the original critique was entirely wrong. Democratic procedures like regular elections and press freedoms do not guarantee that the people will be adequately represented. (I will return to this problem in chapter 31 and in Part IV below.)

The argument that uneducated people could not exercise the franchise responsibly was vulnerable to the spread of mass public education, which most European societies began to implement toward the end of the nineteenth century. The same was not true for novel antidemocratic arguments based on biology. After publication of Charles Darwin's
On the Origin of Species
in 1859, a school of “scientific” racism sprang up to explain and justify not just the ongoing colonial conquest of non-European peoples but also the failure to grant equal rights to blacks, immigrants, and ethnic minorities. Women as well were held to be insufficiently rational to be granted the vote, and in any event destined by their biology to be unqualified for male workplace occupations.
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It is important to note that all of these nineteenth-century antidemocratic arguments accepted many of the modern conceptual foundations underpinning democracy. They granted the notion that governments should be accountable to citizens, and that all citizens capable of exercising good political judgment ought to have the right to political participation. Where they differed from contemporary norms was in their assessment of the ability of different classes of individuals—the poor or propertyless, the uneducated, blacks and other racial and ethnic minorities, women—to responsibly exercise political power. This meant that they were vulnerable to certain empirical facts: when society did not disintegrate as a result of extending the franchise to workers or to women, or when poor people or blacks could be educated and rise socially, it became much harder to maintain principled arguments in favor of their continuing political exclusion.

Very few contemporary politicians would dare to make overt arguments in favor of franchise restrictions, or for qualifying voters on the basis of education or income. This is particularly true in a country like the United States where franchise restrictions have corresponded to racial hierarchy.

But echoes of virtually all of these nineteenth-century conservative arguments remain in contemporary political discourse. It is common, for example, for elites to complain about democratic voters choosing “populist” policies. From their perspective, democratic electorates do not always choose well: they may choose short-term demands over long-term sustainability; they often vote on the basis of personality rather than policies; they sometimes vote for clientelistic reasons; they may want to redistribute income in ways that will kill incentives and growth. In the end, these fears do not amount to a convincing argument for systematic franchise restriction. As in the nineteenth century, elites are often good at dressing up their own narrow self-interest as universal truths.

But voters in democracies don't get things right all the time either, especially in the short term. Moreover, it is not clear that the solution to contemporary governance problems lies in ever-higher levels of popular participation. As political scientist Bruce Cain argues, most voters simply do not have the time, energy, or expertise to devote to the careful study of complex public policy issues. When higher levels of democratic participation are encouraged by putting more issues before voters through mechanisms like public referenda, the result is often not the accurate representation of popular will but the domination of the public space by the best-organized and most richly resourced interest groups.
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The creation of merit-based bureaucracies, ultimately accountable to the public but protected in many ways from the vagaries of democratic politics, is one expression of the concerns raised in these now-forgotten arguments against the spread of democracy.

CONSERVATIVES IN CHARGE

Both classical Marxists and contemporary economists have reduced the struggle for democracy to a fight between the rich and the poor, in which the poor organize and threaten the rich with the objective of redistributing wealth and income to themselves. Democracy emerges when the threat is severe enough that the rich make concessions with regard to political rights and outright redistribution.
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The middle classes can make alliances in either direction, but more often than not they are bought off by the rich to support at most very limited democracy. Any arguments regarding justice or legitimacy are merely “superstructure” masking hard economic self-interests. In the Marxist version of this story, the rich never concede enough to bring about true democracy; this happens only after a violent seizure of power by the poor. A statistical study by Adam Przeworski shows that most franchise extensions were in fact undertaken in response to popular mobilizations, and that democracy was therefore conquered rather than granted.
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But conservative social groups can interpret their self-interest in a variety of different ways, some of which are much more conducive than others to nonviolent transitions to democracy. The reason why liberal democracy was peacefully consolidated in Britain by the third decade of the twentieth century when compared to places like Germany and Argentina (not to speak of Russia and China) had much to do with the tactical behavior of the British Conservative Party. The Conservatives at the beginning of the nineteenth century were the party of the old landed elite, comparable to the parties representing the Junkers in Prussia or the large estate owners in Argentina. But instead of trying to resist spreading social and political mobilization through violence or authoritarian rule, the British Conservatives reinterpreted their own self-interest in ways that permitted preservation of their political power while allowing expansion of the franchise.

Britain was one of the slower European countries to fully democratize. Franchise expansion stretched out over three major reform bills in 1832, 1867, and 1884. As noted in Table 6, universal adult male suffrage did not arrive until 1918 and female suffrage took until 1929.
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The 1832 Reform Act could indeed be seen as a worried conservative response to threats and agitation coming from below as a result of economic change. But the 1867 and 1884 Acts, which genuinely democratized Britain, were the work of a Conservative prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, and a Liberal one, William Gladstone, who were operating not under the threat of imminent revolution but under a rather different political calculus.

Virtually all contemporary observers were agreed that the “Great” Reform Act of 1867 was not driven by grassroots agitation. There was a sense on the part of the elites that “silent changes were taking place in the minds of members of the working classes, not unlike movements of the earth's crust,” and there was a general expectation that the 1832 reform would be followed by subsequent political initiatives. It was not the Liberals led by Gladstone who brought about this shift, but his Conservative archrival Disraeli who introduced a radical reform bill that led to an immediate doubling of the franchise.
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Disraeli's motives have been debated ever since. Many of his fellow Conservatives denounced him as a traitor to their class interests, or at best an opportunist who in the heat of a political struggle broke with principle. Historian Gertrude Himmelfarb has argued, however, that Disraeli's actions sprang from a different kind of principle, a belief that the Tories were a national party representing a natural order in which the aristocracy and the working class were allies. The Tory creed had an impetus toward democracy because of “the belief that the lower classes were not only naturally conservative in temperament but also Conservative in politics.”
20
In other words, the views expressed by Burke in the previous century that the conservative oligarchy could “represent” the interests of the whole nation were not just an ideological smokescreen hiding class interest; it was a view that people of Burke's social class genuinely believed.

And it was not just the wealthy Tories who believed it. After accepting a second expansion of the franchise in 1884, the Conservatives went on to dominate British electoral politics for much of the next generation. Disraeli was right: many working-class and poor rural constituents voted for the Tories in subsequent elections, despite their class interests. (This is a phenomenon familiar to Americans in the early twenty-first century, where many working-class voters prefer Republican candidates despite the toll that Republican economic policies like free trade and de-unionization have taken on their incomes.) The Conservatives represented a set of values revolving around church, tradition, monarchy, and British national identity that had appeal for working-class voters, and were able later to shift the agenda to other issues like foreign policy. This allowed the Tories to change their social base: it was no longer the party of large landowners but of a rising urban middle class. On certain issues (for example, protection of property rights) these voters sided with the old oligarchy, but on others the new middle-class electorate accepted arguments being put forth for an expanded franchise. These trends combined with a great penchant for political organization to make the Conservatives a winning party.
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The British pattern of democratization being initiated by elite parties rather than pushed from below by grassroots mobilization was not unique. Political scientist Ruth Collier notes that the kind of top-down process she labels “electoral support mobilization” drove the “ins” to enfranchise the “outs” in Switzerland, Chile, Norway, Italy, and Uruguay, as well as in Britain. These cases illustrate the way institutional arrangements can become self-reinforcing: once the principle of electoral politics is established under a limited franchise, incumbent parties can attempt to stay in power by seeking new voters, shifting to new issues, and reaching out across class lines.
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Some elite groups, of course, chose not to play by democratic rules, but turned to the army or nondemocratic forms of mobilization to protect their interests. This is what happened in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and '30s, Argentina in 1930, and many other Latin American countries in the wake of the Cuban Revolution in 1959. Which path they chose to take depended on any number of factors: whether Conservatives believed they could retain control of a democratic opening; how united they were; how united and therefore threatening the democratic forces were; and what elites in other countries had done. The newer industrial middle class tended to be more open to change than the old landed oligarchy, not just because its capital was more mobile but also because it was more urbanized, better educated, and more likely to rub shoulders with other cultural and international elites bearing more progressive ideas. Ideas and norms shaped material interests: the British landed upper classes were far more ready to let their daughters marry wealthy up-and-coming commoners than were their Prussian Junker counterparts, and much more willing to be persuaded by Whiggish notions that the spread of education and literacy would make it safe to permit their working-class countrymen the right to vote.
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Unfortunately, the story of democratization in most of Europe did not end with gradual and peaceful franchise extensions. For Europe as a whole, the national question took precedence over the class question as the continent was engulfed in two world wars. The solidarity of the Second Socialist International was undermined as the working classes in Germany, Austria, Britain, France, and Russia lined up behind their respective governments in August 1914. In many countries, including Britain, full adult male suffrage had to await the end of the Great War in 1918 when the sacrifices of the working classes in the trenches made it morally impossible to deny them the vote. The defeat of Germany and Austria in the war led to the abdication of the German emperor and the creation of the Weimar Republic, and the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

But while the political structures of the old authoritarian order were dismantled, the social bases of the political right in Central and Eastern Europe were not eliminated. The old landed oligarchies continued to exercise power behind the scenes through their influence over the civilian bureaucracy and the army. The middle classes, whose savings and security were destroyed in the postwar inflation and economic turmoil, were ripe for recruitment into the new Fascist parties that sprang up in the 1920s. The working classes, for their part, had been radicalized by the war and by the recent example of the Bolshevik Revolution, and were recruited into new Communist parties with little commitment to liberal democracy. The ensuing polarization hollowed out the political center in Germany, Austria, and Italy, facilitated the rise of Hitler and Mussolini, and paved the way for World War II. It was not until the second half of the twentieth century that stable liberal democracy finally spread throughout Western Europe, and not until the collapse of communism in 1989–1991 that it was extended into Eastern Europe as well. The European road to democracy was long indeed.

 

29

FROM 1848 TO THE ARAB SPRING

Origins of the Arab Spring; differences and similarities between the contemporary Middle East and nineteenth-century Europe; religion and nationalism as alternative routes to political mobilization

The Arab Spring began in January 2011 with the self-immolation of a Tunisian street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi, which brought down the dictatorship of Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali and triggered a cascade of uprisings that spread to Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Bahrain, and Syria, and threatened the stability of every regime in the region. Bouazizi, according to press reports, had his produce cart confiscated on several occasions by the police; when he went to protest, he was slapped and insulted by police officials. Denied recognition of his basic dignity, he doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire, eventually dying of his burns two weeks later. His story, broadcast around the Arab world, evoked sympathy and outrage, and proved to be the trigger for a major political revolution.