What Is Democratisation?
Democratisation refers to processes by which societies move from authoritarianism to minimal democracy or even substantive democracy. Such processes have never been linear or free from hazards, and the emergence of a genuinely democratic system can require several decades.
It is generally agreed that a basic precondition for democratisation is the existence of civil society organisations able to promote democratic values, ideas and behaviours and to challenge state power. A further precondition is the existence of political and cultural changes that make it possible for a majority of citizens to grasp and accept democratic values and practices as non-threatening, compatible with their traditional referents of identity and beliefs about what constitutes the ‘common good’. Without such favourable civil-society and cultural conditions, any effort to promote democratisation within a society may produce only a form of manipulable procedural democracy.
These are not easy conditions to create, and attempts to force them to happen by external pressure or by domestically promoted revolution have rarely succeeded. Most regimes that have been forced to promote democratisation have done so on a selective, exclusive and largely procedural basis, and have frequently reverted to different forms of authoritarian rule once the pressure was removed.
It has also been widely believed that economic development, with its concomitant high levels of literacy and education, is another necessary condition for democratisation. In particular, a number of studies have found that primary and secondary education are powerful determinants of democratisation. But recent studies have questioned these findings. For example, Keller (2006) finds that the effects of education on voting and other democratisation measures are diminished when income is controlled for, so the impact on democratisation is much smaller than previously reported. And while higher education is associated with greater democratisation, this effect is diminished when the level of education is adjusted for socioeconomic status (see table below).
Other studies have suggested that a variety of other factors are important. Some have focused on the role of war, in particular the link between war and democratisation. Others have looked at the importance of investment in education and training, with OECD studies showing that those who invest in secondary and higher education have a larger democracy index than those who do not. But in general, the evidence on these variables is weak and contested.
What is clear, however, is that analysts of democratisation need to shift their gaze from analysing necessary and sufficient conditions to examining the many causal sequences involved in transformations from autocracy to democracy. Those who study social change should focus more on identifying and tracking the many democracy-promoting mechanisms that activate incrementally, in three arenas – public politics, inequality and networks of trust – to produce a democratising effect. And they should endeavour to invent devices that will activate these mechanisms less brutally than conquest, confrontation, colonisation and revolution have done in the past. This will be challenging but it is necessary. A full understanding of these causal sequences will ultimately help to inform the development of a better theory of what a democratising process actually is.
Democratisation refers to processes by which societies move from authoritarianism to minimal democracy or even substantive democracy. Such processes have never been linear or free from hazards, and the emergence of a genuinely democratic system can require several decades. It is generally agreed that a basic precondition for democratisation is the existence of civil society organisations able to promote democratic values, ideas and behaviours and to challenge state power. A further precondition is the existence of political and cultural changes that make it possible for a majority of citizens to grasp and accept democratic values and practices as non-threatening, compatible with their traditional referents of identity and beliefs about what constitutes the ‘common good’. Without such favourable civil-society and cultural conditions, any effort to promote democratisation within a society may produce only a form of manipulable procedural democracy. These are not easy conditions to create, and attempts to force them to happen by external pressure or by domestically promoted revolution have rarely succeeded. Most regimes that have been forced to promote democratisation have done so on a selective, exclusive and largely procedural basis, and have frequently reverted to different forms of authoritarian rule once the pressure was removed. It has also been widely believed that economic development, with its concomitant high levels of literacy and education, is another necessary condition for democratisation. In particular, a number of studies have found that primary and secondary education are powerful determinants of democratisation. But recent studies have questioned these findings. For example, Keller (2006) finds that the effects of education on voting and other democratisation measures are diminished when income is controlled for, so the impact on democratisation is much smaller than previously reported. And while higher education is associated with greater democratisation, this effect is diminished when the level of education is adjusted for socioeconomic status (see table below). Other studies have suggested that a variety of other factors are important. Some have focused on the role of war, in particular the link between war and democratisation. Others have looked at the importance of investment in education and training, with OECD studies showing that those who invest in secondary and higher education have a larger democracy index than those who do not. But in general, the evidence on these variables is weak and contested. What is clear, however, is that analysts of democratisation need to shift their gaze from analysing necessary and sufficient conditions to examining the many causal sequences involved in transformations from autocracy to democracy. Those who study social change should focus more on identifying and tracking the many democracy-promoting mechanisms that activate incrementally, in three arenas – public politics, inequality and networks of trust – to produce a democratising effect. And they should endeavour to invent devices that will activate these mechanisms less brutally than conquest, confrontation, colonisation and revolution have done in the past. This will be challenging but it is necessary. A full understanding of these causal sequences will ultimately help to inform the development of a better theory of what a democratising process actually is.