Lecture 7- 30/04/2021

States and democracy

With only a few special exceptions, the entire surface of the world is divided between
states. Yet it is not self-evident that comparative politics should focus on states as the main
form of organised politics. After all, in the increasingly globalising world there are many
other forms of organisation that have a big impact on politics and on daily existence in
general. The European Union, Microsoft and al-Qaeda are more powerful than many states
and affect the lives of millions of people. If it is true that the European concept of the state is
in decline, then why should we try to understand the state and its actions when newer
political actors appear to be so important? Here we are going to start with the question of why
we continue to regard states as the most important building blocks of comparative analysis,
when some writers claim that they are being replaced in importance in an increasingly global
society.
The second problem is that even if we concentrate attention on states as a form of political
organisation, there are a great many of them in the world and they come in a huge variety of
shapes and sizes. Some are as old as France or as new as East Timor and Montenegro; some
are large like Canada and India or small like Estonia and Namibia; some are as rich as
Sweden or as poor as Mali. To cover all of them in a satisfactory manner is not possible so
we concentrate on democratic states. But how do we recognise a democratic state?
In theory, one of the defining characteristics of democracy is a form of government in
which the great mass of citizens can participate in political decision making and policy
making. Nevertheless, even in tiny communities, such as the classical city-state of Athens or
a Swiss commune of a few thousand people, it is very difficult to base government on the
direct political participation of many people. For this reason, government is usually in the
hands of a comparatively small number of elected representatives who are supposed to
exercise their power in the interests of the much larger number of people they represent.
Therefore, modern democracy immediately raises all sorts of questions about the ways in
which the elected representatives are to be held responsible and accountable to citizens, and
about the civil and political rights and duties of citizens that elected representatives should
respect and preserve. We can judge the state of democracy according to the degree to which
these civil and political rights are observed and the degree to which elected representatives
are responsive and accountable to citizens.
Democracies do more than guarantee formal civil and political rights, however. They also
accept responsibility, to a greater or lesser extent, for the welfare of their citizens: for the
young and the old, the sick and the disabled and the unemployed and the poor. Sometimes
their welfare services are extensive, sometimes minimal, but all democracies have adopted
them to some extent. Since support for the less-advantaged social groups is based on the
redistribution of resources among various groups, political decision making in welfare states
can be very complicated and controversial.
Why study states?
It is a paradox that the power and importance of states seems to be in decline at the very
time that states have captured almost every corner of the world's surface and when the
number of states is at an all-time high. Nonetheless, new technologies have made it possible
to locate the production of goods and services almost anywhere on the globe. Transport and
communications, and especially information technology (IT) have created a 'global village'.
Even wars are no longer restricted to conflicts between neighbouring states but involve
terrorist groups and special forces all over the world. As a result, the powers of states are
increasingly limited by growing international interdependencies and interconnections, and by
thousands of collective international arrangements and agreements that limit the freedom of
any one state to control its own affairs. The world, it is argued, is increasingly forming a
single system, a trend described as globalisation.
Part of the globalisation process involves the emergence of international organisations that
challenge the pre-eminence of states. The United Nations and the European Union are
perhaps the most conspicuous, but they are not alone, for there are other transnational
organisations such as the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA) and the
Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), as well as bodies such as the World Bank
(IBRD - International Bank for Reconstruction and Development), and the International
Monetary Fund (IMF). In recent decades a wave of new organisations known as non-
governmental organisations (NGOs) such as Greenpeace, Transparency International, and
Medecins Sans Frontieres have joined the long list of older organisations that include the
Catholic Church, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and the Red Cross that operate
on a world-wide scale to try to influence the policies and actions of states. Nor should we
forget the growth of huge and powerful multi-national business corporations (MNCs).
Microsoft is wealthier and more powerful than quite a few member states of the UN. If multi-
national companies, non-governmental organisations and international bodies are now
beyond full state control and regulation, then perhaps we should pay less attention to states
and concentrate on the really important and powerful actors on the world stage?
Could it be that the European state, first given its seal of approval in the Treaty of
Westphalia, is now as outdated as the horse and carriage? Though this idea may seem
realistic and up to date, it fails to take account of the fact that states are still the most
important single group of actors in politics. They continue to be sovereign within their own
territory, even if this sovereignty is now more limited and circumscribed by international
forces than it used to be. Even international terrorism is directed towards states and their
representatives. Moreover, genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against
humanity all are directly linked to states and struggles for state power and independence.
States have the main responsibility to protect their populations against those crimes. States
have governments with supreme power within their borders and international relations
continue to be conducted on this basis. Only states have the funds to bail out private financial
institutions in times of huge financial crisis, and only states have the necessary credibility to
offer their populations security in such times of crisis. In short, states remain pre-eminently
important, and they remain, therefore, the main focus and point of departure for the
comparative approach to politics and government.
States exist in such a huge variety of forms that we cannot deal satisfactorily with all of
them within the covers of a single volume. Therefore, we concentrate on that especially
important and increasingly widespread group of states that are democracies. Concentrating in
this way on democracies enables us to compare and contrast a group of similar states: we are
able to com- pare apples with apples, and not apples with oranges. At the same time, many of
the democracies are found in European, Anglo-Saxon and North American countries and,
therefore, these are inevitably overrepresented in our ana- lyses. We will return to this
difficulty in the Postscript.
The modern state and democracy
Mass political involvement transformed states into 'mass democracies' when the rights of
opposition were recognised and general suffrage granted. Stein Rokkan emphasised the fact
that the internal restructuring of the state converts subjects of the state into citizens,
collectively known as the 'masses' or 'the people'. But how do we distinguish between
democratic and non-democratic states in the first place? Usually, this question is answered by
referring to citizens' rights, elections and parliamentary accountability.
Citizens' rights
 Discussions about political power and the rights of citizens have always been at the centre
of debates about democracy. As the members of the French National Assembly confirmed in
August 1789, the struggle for political power is not an aim in itself. It is what can be done
with that power that matters. After all, Article 2 of the 'Declaration of the Rights of Man and
of the Citizen' published in Paris talks about the goal of all political institutions being 'the
natural and inalienable rights of man'. In a similar way, the Virginia 'Bill of Rights' -
published in 1776, thirteen years earlier than the French document - stressed the universal
nature of these rights. A first characteristic of democracies, then, is the acknowledgement that
it is not power but the protection of rights ('human rights') that is of prime concern.
Following this line of reasoning, the constitutions of many states start with an enumeration
of human rights before political institutions and powers are defined. Some constitutions even
borrow heavily from the documents published in Paris and Virginia in the late eighteenth
century.
The most common rights include:
- Freedom of speech and the press - Freedom of religion and conscience
- Freedom of assembly and association - Right to equal protection of the law
- Right to due process of law and to fair trial - Property rights to land, goods and money.
Protecting these rights is the first aim of democratic political systems. Apart from anything
else, they have a special political importance for both ordinary citizens and political leaders.
If human rights are protected, citizens and leaders can engage in peaceful political conflict
without fear of reprisals so that free competition for political power should result, on election
day, in government by those winning most popular support. Competition alone is not
sufficient to guarantee this, however; challengers must be allowed to join the struggle and
losers should not be victimised because they were on the losing side. In this way democracy
can gain the consent of losers and winners alike and so it can also be 'government of the
people, by the people, for the people', as the American president Abraham Lincoln (1809-65)
stated in his famous Gettysburg Address.
Elections and parliamentary accountability
The development of mass democracies began in a few countries in the nineteenth century.
The basic idea at the time was not that citizens should be directly involved in politics but
should rely on being represented by elected political leaders. The main political task of
citizens was to elect representatives who would govern on their behalf (representative
democracy). Although this was an important step towards democracy, it was not 'democracy'
as we would define it today. Only after long struggles between factions and competing elites
was it recognised that democracies must function with the consent of their citizens, and later
still with their active participation (participatory democracy). This meant that the principle of
parliamentary accountability to citizens came to be incorporated into the democratic ideal. It
was accepted in France in 1870, in Germany in 1918, but not until 1976 in Spain. In several
countries it took a long time before the new constitutional rules were realised in practice,
often because autocrats and elites had to give up their privileges first. The Dutch constitution
of 1848 formulates the principle of accountability, but it was not actually put into practice
until 1866.
Similarly, voting rights were extended only slowly and in stages. Several democracies
completed universal male suffrage in the nineteenth century, and many followed directly after
the First World War in 1918. But only in a few countries were men and women given voting
rights in the same year. In France, for instance, women had to wait almost a hundred years
(until 1946) before they had the same voting rights as men.
Democracy and the rise of democratic states
 The crucial importance of free political competition and a real chance of taking over the
powers of government are found in the definition of democracy applied by Freedom House,
which monitors political developments in the world, defines democracies as:
political systems whose leaders are elected in competitive multi-party and multi- candidate processes
in which opposition parties have a legitimate chance of attaining power or participating in power.
There is certainly no inevitability about a state becoming democratic, and many reasons
why non-democratic elites resist giving up or sharing power, but nevertheless the number of
democratic states is rising. If we use the definition presented by Freedom House we find that:
- In 1900, not one of the fifty-five states in existence could be called 'democratic'
according to current Freedom House standards. Even the most democratic, such as the USA
or Britain, restricted the voting rights of women or black Americans. Monarchies and empires
were the dominant state forms.
- The picture changed dramatically in the second half of the twentieth century. By 1950,
the total number of states had risen to eighty, and twenty-two of them could be characterised
as 'democracies', which meant that about 31 per cent of the world population was living under
democratic rule.
- After the decline of colonial rule in Africa and Asia, changes in Latin America, and the
collapse of communist rule in Eastern and Central Europe, the number of democracies rose to
119 states by 2000. At the beginning of 2008, some 47 per cent of the 190 or so states
respected a broad array of human rights and political freedoms and were labelled 'free' by
Freedom House. About three billion people - 46 per cent of the world's population - lived in
these states and enjoyed the protection of a broad array of political and human rights.
The twentieth century, then, was not only an age of devastating wars, genocide, bloodshed
and totalitarian ideologies; it was also the 'Democratic Century'. The democracy score
combines the two major characteristics of democracies mentioned earlier: the protection of
basic civil and political rights. Low-scoring countries are the most democratic.
Most refers to democracy as a system of government and use labels such as 'political
democracy' or 'liberal democracy' as synonyms for what are here called 'democracies' or
'democratic states'. The political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset provided one of the clearest
definitions, explicitly spelling out the main features of a democracy as a system of
government:
First, competition exists for government positions, and fair elections for public office occur at regular
intervals without the use of force and without excluding any social group. Second, citizens participate
in selecting their leaders and forming policies. Third, civil and political liberties exist to ensure the
integrity of political competition and participation.
Democracy is a variable, not a fixed phenomenon; it changes and develops over time, so
that what was regarded as good democratic practice a hundred years ago may not be now.
There are disputes about whether states differ in their degree of democracy or whether
democratic states can be clearly distinguished from other forms of government. Debates like
these remind us of the difficult problems of applying the abstract concept of 'democracy' to
actual political systems. Different measures and definitions give us different results when we
try to classify states as 'democratic' or not, or if we try to grade them on a continuum.
Nevertheless, the Freedom House and other approaches all agree: the number of democratic
states in the world has expanded since the mid-1970s. By now, democracy is widely accepted
as the preferred way to organise states.
Redistribution and the welfare state
As states move gradually towards political freedom and democracy, so they will be
confronted, as Rokkan points out, with growing citizen demands and a need to strengthen
national identification by redistributive policies. This helps to turn subjects of the state into
citizens of the state by giving every citizen a stake in public services and hence a sense of
common national purpose and identity. It also turns states into welfare states to a greater or
lesser extent.
Most democratic states are wealthy, though not all of them are, but what most of them
have in common is a rapid expansion of state activities since the Second World War. Even a
cursory look at economic trends in democracies over past decades shows a remarkable
growth of state spending and public employment. Many of them abandoned traditional
laissez-faire policies and free-market economics after the traumatic experiences of the Great
Depression of the 1930s and the post-war economic problems of the late 1940s. As they
increasingly accepted responsibility for the young and old, the sick and disabled, the
unemployed and poor, and for education, housing and pensions, these states developed into
welfare states.
The expansion of state activities can be illustrated with a few basic figures. For example,
average state revenues and expenditures among the industrialised countries rose from 26-27
per cent of GDP in 1960 to 45-47 per cent in 1997. On average, total spending of the twenty-
seven member-states of the European Union had reached almost 47 per cent of their GDP in
2006! Even more striking, the growth of public expenditure and public services are directly
linked to the consolidation of democracy in many states. State spending varies very
considerably from one country to another, but the longer a state is a democracy, the higher its
public spending is likely to be. Once a high level of spending is reached it becomes very
difficult to reduce the state's spending in a democracy: large parts of the population benefit
from these measures and it is hard to find a majority favouring cuts and reforms.
Although the upward climb in state spending levelled off in many countries after the early
1990s, state services of one kind or another continue to play a major role in the life of the
average citizen. The reverse side of this coin is, of course, that welfare states are also tax
states with state revenues growing almost as fast as public spending. As a result modern
states function as huge redistribution agencies collecting taxes and supporting parts of the
population in complicated ways. In this sense there is no escaping the state, its taxes and its
services in modern society. As the saying goes: in this life only death and taxes are certain.
Theories of state and society
As we saw in earlier lectures, modern political theories about the state fall into two very
broad categories: normative theories about what the state ought to do and empirical theories
about how the state actually operates and why it operates that way. We shall discuss
empirical theories now. As the relationship between democracy and state spending shows, the
nature and functioning of the state is closely related to the society it governs. In fact, one way
of distinguishing between different theories of the state is to look at how they conceptualise
the relationship between state and society. Broadly speaking, there are four major approaches
to the relationship between 'state' and 'society':
. State supremacy . State dependency . Interdependency . Separation and autonomy.
State supremacy
Some theories presume the supremacy or dominance of the state over society. According
to these theories, the state does not so much reflect the characteristics of broader society but
is independent of them and above them. This idea is found in legal theories that stress the
formal sovereignty of the state. Aristotle, for example, saw the state as a political community
'which is the highest of all, and which embraces all the rest'. According to this view the state
is a self-regulating and supreme power. It is not the product of society or the social and
economic groups within it; on the contrary, they are part of the state from which they arise.
Such theories are summarised under the label ‘Etatism’. Although some writers regard state
supremacy as a threat to individual rights and liberty, others reach very different conclusions,
regarding the state's main role as the preservation of law and order (the 'night watchman' role)
and the defence of the full independence of the private sector, whether individual or
collective.
The view that the state is an independent and dominant power has become more and more
problematic as we have gained a better understanding of government. At first sight, the huge
increase in the activity and powers of the modern state may, indeed, suggest that it invades
society as a conqueror that gains greater and greater control over the lives of citizens. But a
closer look reveals a more complicated development in which the relationship between state
and society is mutually interdependent: the state influences society and helps to mould it, but
society also creates the state, giving it powers but also setting limits on these powers.
Besides, states are not single or monolithic entities that control societies as a field marshal
might control his troops on a battlefield. They are highly complex 'communities' made up of
different institutions and organisations with their own histories and interest and expressing
the outcomes of all sorts of past and present political battles between competing social and
economic groups. Most political scientists today therefore do not see the state as something
'above' or controlling society, which leads us away from the notion of a dominant state and
towards the idea of an interdependent one.
State dependency
Some theories see the state not as a supreme agency that dominates society, but, quite the
opposite, as dependent on society, especially in its economic relations. Disputes about this
view of the state and its relationship with social and economic forces have a long and
complicated tradition in political analysis. The work of the German theorist Karl Marx (1818-
83) inspired the idea that the state is only and always the expression of the struggle between
classes in society - or, more specifically, that the power of the state is always an instrument of
the dominant class. According to Marx, the state is nothing more nor less than 'a committee
for managing the common affairs' of the dominant class. In modern society, this is the
capitalist class, who own and control the means of production. According to this theory, the
state is not a neutral referee that adjudicates between the competing interests of different
classes or social groups, nor is it an agency that is above and independent of society. It is, and
can only be, an instrument to strengthen the dominant position of specific groups in society -
in a capitalist society, this means the interests of the capitalist class.
Marxists argue about whether and to what extent the state can be independent of economic
forces and the interests of the capitalist class. The earlier writings of Marx argued that the
state is merely a 'superstructure' whose shape and power is the inevitable product of the
economic sub- structure. Later, Marx seems to have allowed for a degree of independence of
the state, and twentieth-century Marxists have picked up this idea. Usually they emphasise
particular 'structural tensions' in capitalist societies arising from the fact that modern states
have conflicting, and even contradictory, tasks. On the one hand they are expected to protect
the free market necessary for making profits but, at the same time, they are also expected to
maintain social order and ensure that the population is educated and healthy enough to
provide an efficient workforce. This means taxing business, which reduces profits. Another
tension results from the great increase in state activities, which overstretches and overloads
the state apparatus, and leads it into all sorts of activities that it cannot afford or perform well.
As a result, the state becomes increasingly intertwined with social and economic forces and
becomes increasingly dependent upon them. This leads us away from the notion of a
dependent state towards an interdependent one. A third set of theories stresses the
interdependence of state and society, or the relationships of exchange between them. In these
approaches the modern state has become ever more and ever deeper involved in social and
economic regulation. At the same time, as society has become increasingly complex and
differentiated it requires more state coordination, regulation and arbitration. These
developments are different sides of the same coin, and it is not possible to say that one causes
the other or that one dominates the other. They are mutually interdependent.
Neo-corporatist theories stress the close mutual dependency of state agencies, on the one
hand, and major economic interest groups on the other. In traditional variants of this
approach, trade unions and employer associations negotiate directly with state agencies about
economic policies. More recent theories of governance stress the participation of a wide
range and variety of organised social groups in making and implementing public policy of all
kinds.
Separation and autonomy
Finally, some theories depict state and society as distinct and autonomous areas, each with
its own rules and development, and each with its own imperatives and 'logic'. Deep social
forces produce social groups, interests and organisations that neither can nor should be
controlled or regulated by the state. Equally, the state cannot and should not be captured by
any particular interests or class (as the Marxists claim) because the state is a battlefield
occupied by many conflicting groups and interests. State activities have their limits, just as
social interests and organisations do, and to try to exceed these limits is to undermine the
democratic principles of a proper balance between the state and private interests. Pluralist and
civil society theories stress the need for an area of social life and organisation outside the
power of the state.
The four approaches are only a brief beginning to our analysis of state and society. We can
certainly conclude that modern states are characterised by complex connections with their
society, and that it is difficult to say which of the four approaches is the best. Each seems to
explain some aspect of the affairs of states better than the others. For instance, neo-corporatist
and pluralist approaches explain the rise of welfare states in the 1960s in those states where
welfare programmes and economic policies and practices were the result of close
collaboration between the state and powerful economic interest groups. However, the spread
of political dissatisfaction and frustration among large sections of society in some countries
after the 1960s seems to be better explained in terms of 'structural tensions' between an
increasingly active state that is also increasingly weaker in some respects. Only after looking
more closely at the multifarious institutions, structures and activities of the modern state can
we come to a more sensible judgement about the strengths and weakness of the various
theories.
What have we learned?
This chapter has dealt with the difficulties of characterising and defining states, and with
the historical development of modern states, especially democratic ones.
. Democracy is a variable, not a constant. Accepted ideas about what democracy is, and
how it operates, are changing as standards rise.
. Democracy is a contested concept but most definitions stress the importance of
universal citizenship with its accompanying political and civil rights and duties, political
competition for support in regular and free elections, and parliamentary accountability with a
mixture of representative and direct participatory democracy.
. Most democratic states are among the wealthiest in the world and hence they include a
disproportionate number in Europe, North America and the English-speaking world.
. Growing political demands among citizens lead to redistribution and to welfare states
that accept responsibility for the young and old, the sick and disabled, and the unemployed
and poor. Not all democracies have developed their welfare provisions to the same extent,
however.
. The number of democracies is still rising. Currently almost half of the world's states
and population can be labelled 'free'.
Lessons of comparison
 . Although states across the globe, from the strongest to the weakest, are increasingly
confronted with other powerful organisations, especially international business (MNCs), non-
governmental organisations (NGOs) and international agencies, they are still the most
important political actors in the world.
. States and societies are intimately bound together in a wide variety of different ways.
. Comparative theories of the state can be distinguished according to how they
conceptualise the relationship between state and society. Broadly speaking, there are four
main theories of state and society: state supremacy, state dependency, interdependency, and
separation and autonomy.