Saturday, December 24, 2011

Charles Boix

Realists are right in claiming that democratic life is possible only when certain, mostly material conditions are in place. But, in acting like the drunkard that searches for his lost keys only under the lamppost — that is, by looking at the easy-to-measure variable of income — they have missed the true nature of those conditions. It is, rather, excessive economic inequality, particularly in agrarian countries and in nations rich in oil and other minerals, that exacerbates the extent of social and political conflict to the point of making democracy impossible. In an unequal society, the majority resents its diminished status. It harbors the expectation of employing elections to drastically overturn its condition. In turn, the wealthy minority fears the outcome that may follow from free elections and the assertion of majority rule. As a result, it resorts to authoritarian institutions to guarantee its social and economic advantage. By contrast, in societies endowed with some relative social and economic equality, inhabitants are willing to accept the inherently uncertain results of free elections — that is, they are willing to agree to be temporarily reduced to the status of minority and to be governed by the party they oppose.
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Before the irruption of commercial and industrial capitalism in modern Europe, most wealth was fixed in the form of farmland and mines. A few agrarian communities (mountainous Switzerland, Norway, or Iceland) were equal and democratic. But most pre-industrial societies were (and are) characterized by the combination of inequality, authoritarianism and underdevelopment.
Authoritarianism is pervasive in an agrarian economy for a simple reason. In a Hobbesian world infested by bandits and generalized war, autocrats are a standard, reasonable mechanism to enforce peace and to protect the peasant population against plunder and death. Still, the price of authoritarianism is inequality. In exchange for protection against bandits like themselves, rulers such as the Bourbons, the Tudors, or the Sauds seize an important part of their subjects’ assets. For example, at the death of Augustus (14 A.D.), the top 1/10,000 of the Roman Empire’s households received 1 percent of all income. In Mughal India around 1600 A.D., the top 1/10,000th received 5 percent of all income. In fact, the annual income of the Indian emperor was the equivalent of the wage of about 650,000 unskilled workers.

4 comments:

  1. Charles Boix
    University of Chicago

    The Roots of Democracy
    by Carles Boix
    Equality, inequality, and the choice of political institutions

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  2. Broadly speaking, there are today two competing schools of thought on the underlying forces that have pushed for and delivered democracy around the world — and which, for the sake of brevity, we may choose to label as “idealist” and “realist.” Both are, however, mistaken.

    Idealists, who currently seem to enjoy the media’s ear, explain today’s democratic momentum in a way that is strikingly similar to how past democratization waves were portrayed by their contemporary publicists. The triumph of democracy, the argument goes, is rooted in a universal yearning, intimately connected with the best part of human nature, that should lead to blossoming liberal institutions once we knock down the stifling cliques and institutions of the past. To support their claim, they point to the impressive strides made by democracy in recent decades. By 2000 there were around 100 democracies — almost twice the number in 1989 and about three times as many as there were just after World War II (see Figure 1). More recently, even after the effects of the fall of the Berlin Wall seemed to have run their course, democracies have kept cropping up at a steady rate. A few African countries have held democratic elections. Georgia and Ukraine have recently joined the democratic pack. Iraq has had free elections. And the stirrings of the Iraqi election have been recently felt in Lebanon.

    The majority of mankind may indeed wish to live under free institutions. Recent surveys put at two-thirds the proportion of those that claim to prefer democracy to any other regime in each and every continent. But a look at history tells us a more cautionary tale about the chances of democratic progress. Figure 1 shows that still today, only slightly more than 50 percent of all sovereign states have a democratically constituted government. That proportion is not very different from the share of democracies in the peak years of 1920 and 1955. Those two bright moments, which came along with the spread of Wilsonian ideas in Europe and then again with the first lights of decolonization, faded quickly. Moreover, a substantial number of today’s nominal democracies are not performing as well as they should. There is little doubt that democracy has triumphed in most of the Western world. Yet democratic practices appear fragile in the core of the former Soviet Union and in Latin America. And they remain elusive in most of sub-Saharan Africa and in the Middle East. In short, we are still far away from having reached the end of history, crowned with liberal politics.

    Rejecting the idealist account, realists insist that democracies do not arrive in deus ex machina fashion — and certainly not as a mechanical outcome of the introduction and spread of new ideas around the world. As scholars have pointed out repeatedly, democratic stability is well correlated with economic development. At least since World War II, as per capita income has gone up, so has the chance a country will be democratic. Whereas only 20 percent of countries with a per capita income of $1,000 have been democratic since 1950, about 40 percent with $4,000 and 90 percent with $11,000 or more have. Furthermore, no democracy has collapsed in any country with a per capita income over $7,000.

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  3. Yet even these seemingly robust results are, upon further reflection, weak and unconvincing. First, the threshold of development at which democracy becomes likely has varied over time. Before 1945, 90 percent of all countries with a per capita income of $4,000 were democracies (versus 40 percent afterwards). Or, to put it differently, nineteenth-century Norway and Switzerland were democratic with a per capita income not dissimilar to what many less developed countries have today. Second, there are glaring exceptions to the relationship between development and democratic regimes. Germany and England had similar incomes but experienced very different political fortunes in the 1930s. India is a democracy in spite of its economic performance. Most oil countries are rich but impervious to liberal institutions. Last but not least, there are still no good explanations for how economic development boosts the chances of democracy. In short, we need to push further our inquiry about the roots of democracy.

    Realists are right in claiming that democratic life is possible only when certain, mostly material conditions are in place. But, in acting like the drunkard that searches for his lost keys onlyunder the lamppost — that is, by looking at the easy-to-measure variable of income — they have missed the true nature of those conditions. It is, rather, excessive economic inequality, particularly in agrarian countries and in nations rich in oil and other minerals, that exacerbates the extent of social and political conflict to the point of making democracy impossible. In an unequal society, the majority resents its diminished status. It harbors the expectation of employing elections to drastically overturn its condition. In turn, the wealthy minority fears the outcome that may follow from free elections and the assertion of majority rule. As a result, it resorts to authoritarian institutions to guarantee its social and economic advantage. By contrast, in societies endowed with some relative social and economic equality, inhabitants are willing to accept the inherently uncertain results of free elections — that is, they are willing to agree to be temporarily reduced to the status of minority and to be governed by the party they oppose.

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  4. http://www.hoover.org/publications/policy-review/article/6588

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