This assignment is a take-home essay assignment of 2 questions, 2 pages each

Beyond ‘Democratic Consolidation’ An Alternative Understanding of

Democratic Progress Steven Friedman

Abstract: For almost two decades, the survival prospects and authen- ticity of new democracies has been assessed through the democratic consolidation paradigm which seeks to assess whether democracies are ‘consolidated’. But an examination of the paradigm shows that it is vague, teleological and ethnocentric and measures new democra- cies against an idealised understanding of Northern liberal democra- cies rather than offering a plausible means of assessing longevity or democratic progress. Its inadequacy is further demonstrated by apply- ing it to the South African case. The article thus argues for a new approach which rejects the consolidation paradigm’s assumption that some democracies (those of the North) are a ‘finished product’ and acknowledges both that all democracies are incomplete and that each will show uneven progress, so that older democracies will lag behind newer ones in some areas of democratic quality while surpassing them in others.

Keywords: democracy, consolidation, teleology, critique, quality, alternative.

The emergence of a host of new democracies in Africa and elsewhere has stimulated understandable interest in testing whether societies which call themselves democracies really are democratic and whether they will remain democracies in form. What is far less understandable is the prism through which these questions are currently addressed – the notion of ‘democratic consolidation’.

This concern to assess new democracies assists understanding by moving beyond the ‘fallacy of electoralism’– the notion that a coun- try has ‘become democratic’ simply because it holds elections. The limits of an ‘electoral democracy’ which offers the vote but not the freedoms and the right to choose which must accompany it are now

Theoria, March 2011 doi:10.3167/th.2011.5812602

widely acknowledged (O’Donnell, 1994; Levitzky and Way 2002; Schedler 1998: 93; Schedler 2002; Joseph 1998). But if elections are not enough to establish a society’s democratic credentials, what is? How do we tell whether a country has ‘become democratic’ in sub- stance rather than merely in form?

The dominant approach through which scholars try to answer this question is the ‘consolidation’ paradigm, a successor to the ‘transi- tion’ literature of the 1980s which studied how authoritarian regimes in Latin America, Southern and then Eastern Europe became ‘uncer- tain’ democracies (O’Donnell and Schmitter 1986). It was logical that scholars who had studied a process in which fragile formal democ- racy emerged out of authoritarianism would turn to trying to under- stand whether the democratic promise of the transitions would be realised and sustained. This raised two questions – whether and under what circumstances the new formally democratic orders would sur- vive as formal democracies and whether and how they would become ‘real’ democracies. In one view, interest in consolidation arose ‘to describe the challenge of making new democracies secure’ – later, some scholars came to equate democratic consolidation ‘with com- pleting democracy, with supplying its missing features’ (Schedler 1998: 91, 94). So ‘consolidation’ is meant to tell us whether ‘uncer- tain’ democracies can become ‘certain’ by determining both whether they are sure to survive and the extent to which they have graduated from ‘partial’ to ‘full’ democracies.

This approach remains dominant in much scholarly writing about new democracies – a random search of current political science liter- ature throws up scores of articles assessing the prospects for ‘consol- idation’ in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The notion remains a key element in the approach of Northern democracy promotion strategies (Carothers 2002); to cite but one example, in mid-2010, Freedom House, a key resource for American democracy promotion, published a study of 32 new democracies lamenting the limited progress towards ‘consolidation’ (Dizard and Walker 2010). Despite a limited attempt in the middle of the previous decade, of which more below, to use the notion of ‘quality’ to assess democratic progress, the ‘consol- idation’ approach remains firmly entrenched as the dominant prism through which new democracies are evaluated.

And yet an examination of the ‘consolidation’ approach shows that it does not enable us to tell a ‘certain’ from an ‘uncertain’ democracy. It cannot provide sure guides to democracies’ survival prospects, while its attempt to sort out the finished product from the aspirant

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democracy is vague, teleological and ethnocentric, concerned less with trying to understand new democracies than with testing whether they are progressing towards an idealised representation of the democracies of North America and Western Europe.

The Limits of Consolidation

Literature on consolidation shows a far greater propensity to use the term than to define or critically examine it. This failure to specify the meaning of consolidation has been noticed not only by sceptics but by those who believe it does offer a useful way of understanding democ- ratic prospects. In 1998, Andreas Schedler observed of ‘consolidation’:

At this point, with people using the concept any way they like, nobody can be sure what it means to others, but all maintain the illusion of speaking to one another in some comprehensible way. While ‘democratic consoli- dation’ may have been a nebulous concept since its very inception, the conceptual fog that veils the term has only become thicker and thicker the more it has spread through the academic as well as the political world (1998:92).

He warned that if scientific advance depends on participants sharing a common understanding of key terms, ‘the study of democratic consol- idation, at its current state of conceptual confusion, is condemned to stagnation’(1998: 92). A decade later, no greater conceptual clarity has been attached to ‘consolidation’. And yet it has become the dominant prism through which the prospects of new democracies are viewed.

A Question of Attitude?

Perhaps the most used definition of democratic consolidation is Juan Linz’s and Alfred Stepan’s ‘only game in town’, a state of political being in which ‘none of the major political actors consider that there is any alternative to democratic processes to gain power...’ Linz and Stepan 1996; Linz 1990: 156). Similarly, Adam Przeworski sees it as a condition in which ‘no one can imagine acting outside democratic institutions’, or, in the language of game theory, ‘democracy is con- solidated when compliance … constitutes the equilibrium of the decentralized strategies of all the relevant forces’ (1991:26). Both views see the attitudes of political actors as the test for ‘consolida- tion’. Other formulations see the degree of ‘institutionalisation’ of formally democratic polities as the measure of their progress towards

Beyond ‘Democratic Consolidation’ 29

‘consolidated’ status (Mainwaring, O’Donnell and Valenzuela 1992). This seems to move beyond the sentiments of political actors by focusing on the degree to which opposition parties or institutions such as the courts have become entrenched, but it arrives at the same end point as the two sentiment-based formulations: institutions only can be said to be ‘institutionalised’ when the rules which underpin them are ‘widely shared and deeply rooted’ (O’ Donnell 1996:40).

In all these formulations democratic consolidation is a recognition in society that there is no alternative to democracy. The formulation appears sensible, but is less useful than it seems. The relationship between values or beliefs on the one hand, and democracy on the other, is hotly contested – even questions of how to measure beliefs are the subject of intense disagreement (Welzel and Inglehart 2006; Teorell and Hadenius 2006). More importantly, it is not clear who is meant to regard democracy as ‘the only game in town’ – political elites, citizens, or both? References to ‘major political actors’ imply that it is the elites who need to accept that there is no alternative to democratic rules. But some studies in the ‘consolidation’ framework measure not elite attitudes but those of citizens (Bratton and Mattes 1999). The answer would tell us whether the ‘consolidation’ approach understands democracy as a system sustained by citizens or by elites. If the future of democracy depends on elites citizens are largely reduced to bystanders, and the consolidation approach is entirely compatible with ‘democratic elitism’ which sees democracy as a means of regulating competition between elites rather than a system which enables vigorous citizen participation in public debate and decision-making (Avritzer 2002: 11-54). It may also require a less demanding test of whether a democracy is ‘consolidated’: if only elite attitudes matter, formal democracy may endure even if most citizens have doubts about its worth, particularly if the doubters are not strong enough to act on their misgivings. By contrast, an understanding of democracy’s survival prospects which insists on citizens’ recognition of its necessity would require far greater social consensus on democ- racy’s merits and would make ‘consolidation’ the product of a length- ier and more complex process than would an acceptance by elites that they have no other options. Who must see democracy as ‘the only game in town’ is, therefore, a fundamental question. And yet the con- solidation literature does not provide an answer.

And how do we know when those who are meant to recognise that there is no alternative to democracy have done so? It is fairly easy to establish when democracy is not ‘the only game in town’: its oppo-

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nents are often vocal and visible. Where there are large anti-system parties – as in Weimar Germany – or military officers who demon- strate scepticism about democracy’s merits, as in Indonesia or Spain during their early democratisation processes; the preconditions for consolidation can be assumed to be absent. But, today, these explicit signs of democratic fragility are more the exception than the rule. Democracy has achieved an almost hegemonic value among political actors; even those who have severe doubts about it feel obliged to endorse it. In most formal democracies, therefore, it may be difficult to find elites who would say that there are alternatives to democracy even if they believe there are. The ‘consolidation’ approach is sur- prisingly vague on how we might distinguish the attitudes of those who feel it expedient to claim that democracy is the only ‘game in town’ from those who really do see it as the only feasible way of ordering politics.

Przeworski’s use of game theory implies that we might separate the wheat from the chaff by focussing less on expressions of democratic goodwill than on the strategic calculations of political actors. But how do we know whether those whose calculations tell them to opt for democracy now will continue to settle for it if circumstances change, as they always do? If we accept game theory’s assumption that parties are motivated purely by strategic calculations (which many students of politics would dispute), it may, in theory, be possible to use a strate- gic analysis to determine the circumstances under which the parties in a new democracy with the power to derail the system might decide to do so. But Przeworski’s definition is not meant to tell us how to work out the circumstances under which democracies might collapse – it purports, in part, to tell us how to determine when democracy’s sur- vival is secure. So it must be able to explain more than the prevailing equilibrium which lead parties to choose democracy and to stick with it for the time being. It would also need to demonstrate that, under current conditions, there are no conceivable future circumstances in which their calculations might shift enough for them to abandon com- pliance with democracy’s rules. But an equilibrium achieved under one set of circumstances cannot be said to apply to all future possible sets of circumstances and, if there are any future circumstances which might persuade key parties to abandon compliance, democracy can- not be said to have become a permanent fixture. It is hard to imagine how it might be possible to assert that there are no conceivable future circumstances in which key parties would abandon compliance. There is no polity of which we can say that compliance with democ-

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ratic rules will always remain the strategic choice of all actors who can threaten democracy and there never will be. If enduring strategic equilibrium is the test, no democracy can ever be ‘consolidated’.

Similar objections can be raised to the ‘institutionalisation’ approach mentioned earlier. In this view, the issue is less people’s attitudes than whether particular ways of doing things become rou- tinised. Thus a recent study of African democratisation asserts:

Democracy, above all, is a system of rules and procedures by which lead- ers, groups, and parties compete for power, and in which free and equal people elect representatives to make binding decisions. A consolidated democracy is one in which these arrangements develop into permanent, consistent, and autonomous institutions governed by justiciable rules (Mattes and Bratton 2007:192).

The obvious problem is how to establish which rules have become permanent and which have not. Mere constitutionalisation cannot be enough since constitutions can be changed or ignored. But what, then, is? What test would we use? The authors do not say.

Some scholars of ‘consolidation’ do purport to move away from pure subjectivity by suggesting criteria other than politicians’ or citi- zens’ attitudes. A detailed attempt to describe the ‘tests’ of whether a democracy is ‘consolidated’ is offered by the authors of a study of Southern European ‘late democratisers’ who identify these properties of a ‘consolidated’ democracy: alternation in power between former rivals; continued stability in times of economic hardship; ‘successful defeat and punishment of a handful of strategically placed rebels’ sta- bility in the face of a ‘radical restructuring of the party system’; and the absence of politically significant anti-system parties or move- ments (Gunther, Diamondouros and Puhle 1995: 12-13).

The final criterion is merely a restatement of Linz’s, Stepan’s and Przeworski’s precondition and is subject to the same objection: if there are no significant anti-democratic forces now, how do we know they will not emerge later? The rest may be useful summaries of the pressures which faced the new Southern European democracies, but it is hard to justify them as a test for others or as an indication of democracy’s likely longevity. On its own, alternation of power is not, despite its popularity among consolidation theorists, a necessary test – if it were, post-World War II Japan and Italy or India for some thirty years after independence would not qualify; neither would Sweden for decades after the 1930s.1 Since virtually all the new democracies con- tinue to survive, at least in form, stability in the face of economic

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hardship would qualify virtually all new democracies as ‘consoli- dated’ while defeat of ‘strategically placed’ rebels would deny ‘con- solidated’ status to any new democracy unfortunate enough to lack the required rebels. Similarly, if a ‘radical restructuring’ of party systems means introducing multi-party competition, all new democracies qualify by definition. If it means something else, it is unclear why democracies which have neglected to alter their party systems and are therefore unable to show the required degree of stability after doing so should be any less ‘consolidated’. Nor are we shown why an ability to achieve the listed tasks now will enable these democracies to survive. These criteria are a set of ex post facto descriptions of difficulties which have faced a few new democracies. The authors show neither why these criteria should be useful elsewhere nor whether the democ- racies which they study will survive.

The ‘consolidation’ literature, because it provides no coherent way of determining the circumstances under which reversals might occur, cannot tell us whether democracies are fated to survive. While, after World War II, no established Northern democracy has reverted to authoritarianism, it is trite to point out that democratic progress can be reversed, as it was before World War II when several European democracies collapsed in the face of authoritarian pressures (Bermeo 2003); in the global South in the more recent past: Pinochet’s rule in Chile followed a long period of democratic government; India’s fifty- year democratic experience was interrupted, albeit briefly, by Indira Gandhi’s state of emergency. More controversial – and topically – some might see the erosion of civil liberties in the United States and Great Britain in pursuit of the ‘War on Terror’ as one among several signs of democratic decline in older democracies.

The ‘consolidation’ literature is aware of this, for warnings that ‘consolidated’ democracies can break down are often sounded by scholars working in this paradigm – indeed, the literature includes analyses of ‘deconsolidation’: Venezuela is a frequently cited (and controversial) example (Mc Coy and Smith 1995). But, if ‘consoli- dated’ democracies can be ‘deconconsolidated’, what does ‘consoli- dation’ literature tell us about any democracy’s survival prospects? If the answer, as logic suggests, is nothing, one of the original goals of ‘consolidation’ has been lost. The problem is not a design flaw which could be remedied by finding more sophisticated methods of deter- mining which democracies are certain to endure. It is impossible to establish which democracies are certain to endure because none are: ‘democracy … is an always fragile conquest that needs to be defended

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as well as deepened. There is no threshold of democracy that once reached will guarantee its continued existence’ (Mouffe 1993:6). And so there is no way in which formal democracies can be divided into those which are sure to survive and those whose futures remain uncer- tain.

False Certainties: The Quest for Completion

If the ‘consolidation’ literature cannot perform its original task of telling us when democracies are ‘safe’ can it not at least tell us whether formally democratic orders have become ‘real’ democracies?

For one celebrated scholar of ‘consolidation’, Samuel Huntington, electoral alternation is the key to whether a democracy is ‘consoli- dated’– consolidation literature cites approvingly his ‘two turnover’ test which proposes that a democracy is ‘consolidated’ only when two ruling parties have lost power after a defeat at the polls: ‘if the party or group that takes power in the initial election at the time of transi- tion loses a subsequent election and turns over power to those election winners, and if those election winners then peacefully turn over power to winners of a later election’ (Huntington 1991:267).

A first objection is that this assumes, rather than demonstrates, that circulation of elites rather than the vigour of citizen participation or any other democratic criterion we might wish to propose deter- mines whether a democracy has become a ‘finished’ product. In this view a democracy in which elites replace each other after election is by definition more ‘complete’ than one which has not experienced the required turnover but in which it can be shown that government decisions are likely to reflect citizens’ wishes – or, indeed, that insti- tutions enjoy high degrees of popular legitimacy. Thus democracies such as Japan, Italy and India would have been condemned to ‘uncon- solidated’ status for decades after their transitions in the 1940s, while Weimar Germany, with its frequent alternation in power, would pre- sumably have been viewed as consolidated – despite its fragility and the fact that political competition was often expressed in violent street clashes.

A second, suggested earlier, is that this ‘test’ may apply to new democracies those standards which it would not use to measure older ones. Sweden would not have passed the ‘two turnover’ test for decades during the twentieth century as elections routinely returned the same coalition to power. But no literature of which this author is

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aware has suggested applying the ‘two turnover’ test to Sweden. It is difficult to understand why a test based on criteria the validity of which has not been demonstrated but which expects some democra- cies to submit to measures from which others are exempt should pro- vide a reliable guide to democracy’s survival prospects or the degree to which formal democracies are substantively democratic.

‘Consolidation’ literature lacks a specified theory of how democ- racies may be sustained and of how we could tell a ‘completed’ democracy from one which is not. This may betray a bias identified by Guillermo O’Donnell:

Furthermore, this mode of reasoning carries a strong teleological flavour. Cases that have not ‘arrived’ at full institutionalization, or that do not seem to be moving in this direction, are seen as stunted, frozen, protract- edly unconsolidated, and the like. Such a view presupposes that there are, or should be, factors working in favour of increased consolidation or insti- tutionalization, but that countervailing ‘obstacles’ stymie a process of change that otherwise would operate unfettered (1996:37).

A particular end point is assumed, without argument, to be normal and natural and failure to achieve it is considered pathological. That it may be possible for different democracies to reach different end points and remain democratic is not considered.

This does not assume that progress towards democracy is held to be inevitable – if it was, there would be no set-backs to analyse. Thus Schedler, while agreeing that the consolidation approach is distinctly teleological, notes that teleology does not need to assume ‘some kind of automatic or “natural” progression’ towards a goal but can refer rather to ‘some normative goal or practical task’ (1998: 95). It would then describe where democracies ought to be heading without assert- ing that they are bound to arrive. This would raise obvious questions about who decides where democracies ought to be heading and on what grounds. But the questions do not arise since the ‘consolidation’ teleology suggests that ‘consolidation’ is not just a desired goal but a ‘natural’ end point which democracies reach unless they are aberrant. Rather than seeing democracy as a hard-won goal, it sees it as a ‘nor- mal’ state of political being to which all formal democracies are, or ought to be, evolving. By implication, some democracies (which are not subjects of ‘consolidation’ scholarship) are the norm, others are aberrant unless they can be shown to be on their way to becoming the norm. Their ‘normality’ is judged by the degree to which they are seen to approximate to the democratic exemplars: to differ is to be deviant.

Beyond ‘Democratic Consolidation’ 35

This explains why the ‘tests’ which rely on the achievement of demo- cratic consensus fail to offer a coherent theory of how it may be main- tained. The consensus is considered ‘normal’, its absence aberrant, despite copious evidence that consensus on democratic norms is everywhere difficult to achieve and preserve.

This leads to some perverse conclusions, one of which is that sta- bility can be portrayed as enduring instability if the polity in question does not conform to the democratic standards of ‘consolidation’ scholars : Schmitter and Karl (1994) point out that some polities are said to be in a state of ‘protracted unconsolidation’ for two decades! The possibility that they may have reached an equilibrium, but one not to the liking of consolidation scholars, is ignored, presumably because there is a particular sort of equilibrium which, in the implicit view of the ‘consolidation’ approach, denotes that a democracy has ‘made it’ and so, even if a democracy can be shown to have achieved a range of desirable goals – such as maintaining peace over two decades – it will not be considered ‘consolidated’ unless it reaches the state posited by the paradigm. While the ‘consolidation’ literature does not specify that equilibrium, it is clear that it has one in mind.

The assumption that democracy has a ‘natural’ endpoint might set back progress in new democracies by encouraging us to take for granted that which democracies can achieve only after long and painful effort, and, therefore, to see conflicts which produce democ- ratic gains as setbacks. There is nothing normal or natural about the democratic idea that political power-holders should accept limitations on their power imposed by the electorate, courts or the media. This becomes rooted in society, if at all, only after a series of tests in which power-holders have faced restraints on what they may do, resist them, but then agree to accept them, often after bitter battles. Nor is this true only of new democracies – U.S. President Roosevelt’s 1937 threat to appoint new judges to the Supreme Court to prevent the court frus- trating his New Deal legislation is but one example (Leuchtenberg 1963). If we assume that the smooth functioning of democratic insti- tutions is a natural state and that societies which have not yet achieved it are aberrant, we will fail to understand progress in new democracies because we will be forever judging them by standards which no democracy can meet: for example, conflicts in which power-holders resist being held to account but then grudgingly submit could be (mis)understood as a crisis, rather than as progress.

But what if the ‘consolidation’ teleology were simply to propose a goal which democracy ought to try to reach, rather than to impose a

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quest for ‘normality’ which turns out to be highly abnormal because it applies to very few societies? Schedler’s formulation, teleology as a desired goal rather than as an assumed endpoint, is hard to fault in principle: ‘consolidation’ scholars are as entitled as anyone else to hold opinions on the goals to which democracies ought to aspire. But these views only can contribute to the debate if they are proposed not as unchallengeable truths but as opinions which need to be subjected to critical scrutiny. This in turn requires that they specify in detail their visions of where new democracies ought to head and engage in open debate on them, supporting their positions with evidence and argument. But we have noted that the ‘consolidation’ literature is oddly reluctant to spell out precisely how we would recognise a ‘con- solidated’ democracy if we saw one. Nor is it possible to distinguish between the finished democratic product and its imitations unless that product is defined – yet much ‘consolidation’ literature lacks a clear definition of democracy and a defence of the author’s understanding of the term (Schedler himself does take this further in principle by specifying ‘liberal democracy’ as his telos and specifying some of its characteristics. But his treatment falls significantly short of a detailed specification and defence of his desired end point). We are not, there- fore, told what the exemplars are to which new democracies ought to be headed and why they are so worthy of emulation. The effect is to close off debate on desirable and reachable goals by simply imposing, without justification, assumptions on what democracy should do and how it should look. The effect is not Schedler’s hoped-for focus on agreed normative goals but a distraction of attention from a much- needed debate on the criteria to which democracies ought to aspire.

Making ‘Them’ Into ‘Us’

By specifying ‘consolidation tests’ the literature is making implicit claims about the nature of ‘consolidated’ democracies: Huntington’s test may indicate that democracy is meant to be a system in which regular alternation of elites occurs, while Linz and Stepan appear to see agreement among (unspecified) social actors on a set of rules for regulating political competition as the key. What the literature does not tell is why these, or any other, criteria should determine whether an ‘uncertain’ democracy has become ‘certain’.

Why would an influential body of literature, which has shaped the way democracy is viewed by most analysts and is the work of schol- ars accustomed to defining their terms and defending their positions, not bother to spell out, in coherent fashion, the features of a ‘com-

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pleted’ democracy? The reason lies, surely, in the third weakness of the ‘consolidation’ literature: its ethnocentric bias. Liberal democ- racy as practised in the North, or, more accurately, an idealised ver- sion of it2, is simply assumed to be the optimal form of regulating and organising democratic politics and, therefore, the goal towards which all democracies should evolve. It is no accident that the democracies of the North are never subjected to the ‘consolidation’ test: they are assumed to be ‘consolidated’ because ‘consolidation’ is a synonym for ‘becoming a Northern democracy’ (or some scholars’ notion of a Northern democracy). And it is this assumption which explains why ‘consolidation’ literature assumes that there are some democracies whose democratic status is irreversible because, whatever vicissitudes democratic polities may have to endure elsewhere, those in the North are assumed to be inviolable. The teleology’s implicit exemplar of the ‘normal’ democracy is clearly its authors’ understandings of Northern democracies in which the many flaws and challenges which beset them are assumed not to exist.

Even if we were to accept that democracy has reached some sort of perfected state in the North, how would new democracies know which exemplar to follow? Is corporatism (Schmitter1985; Cawson 1986) undemocratic because it bypasses elected legislatures or the quintessence of democracy because it includes important con- stituencies in decisions? And, given the importance of ethnic differ- ence in Africa, does the consociationalism advocated by Arend Lijphart (1977) on the strength of the Dutch and (increasingly trou- bled) Belgian experience propose a path away from or towards democracy? There are many more examples which illustrate that a range of democratic forms is found in the North and that there is therefore no prototype of democratic form to which democracies seeking ‘consolidation’ can aspire.

A plausible explanation for this omission is that most consolida- tion writers do not believe any definition is needed of the democracy which is in need of consolidation since all know that the desired end point is an ‘ideal type’ of Northern liberal democracies. Philippe Schmitter, noting the tendency of treatments of new democracies to generate a plethora of terms denoting their deficiencies in contrast to the assumed virtues of the older ones, observes: ‘Usually without specifying the grounds for such a negative judgment, it is just taken for granted that these democracies are inferior to existing Western democracies and that they have a long way to go before they can pos- sibly catch up to such exalted “models” of political behavior’ (Schmit-

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ter 2003:11,12). To slightly distort a famous opinion on pornography by former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, the consolida- tion specialists do not need to define democracy since they (and, by implication, we) know it when they see it.3 And they see it almost exclusively in North America and Western Europe.

In sum, consolidation literature does not tell us how to establish whether a democracy is consolidated but assumes a democratic norm against which ‘late democratisers’ should be measured without defin- ing it or demonstrating why it should be seen as an appropriate demo- cratic end state and it assumes, rather than demonstrates, that the telos is an undefined variant of liberal democracy in the North. It is not unfair to boil much of ‘consolidology’ down to a desire to establish (in the North) when and how ‘they’ will become ‘us’ or (in the South) how ‘we’ will become ‘them’.

By dividing democracies into those which are ‘consolidated’ and those which are not, the ‘consolidation’ approach ignores the extent to which a gap between the rules and reality, between full citizenship and its limitation or denial in practice, remains a feature of democ- racy in many Northern societies. The most celebrated example is post World War II Italy – it was this gulf between formal democ- racy’s promise and its abridgement in practice in the Italian South which prompted Robert Putnam’s study of the preconditions for and implications of ‘civic virtues’ (see Putnam 1994). Until relatively recently machine politics also existed alongside democratic institu- tions in the United States: in the United Kingdom, long periods of single-party rule in local government (Green 1981) in some regions entrenched patterns of corruption which eroded the value of univer- sal citizenship. Since the gap between promise and reality exists to varying degree in all democracies, setting a standard to which we expect democracies to aspire would be defensible only if it was stressed that no democracies had yet achieved them. But that is impossible within the ‘consolidation’ framework because there would then be no consolidated democracies.

If popular participation in democratic politics is a feature of ‘con- solidated’ democracies, the U.S. is unconsolidated. Nor do the imper- fections of democracy in the U.S.A. end there. It is worth asking whether a Southern democracy whose President’s election hinged on a dispute over faulty voting machines in a state of which his brother was the governor would qualify as ‘consolidated’. It is a safe assump- tion that, if the state in question was Burundi or Nepal, it would not. And yet that is precisely how the 2000 U.S. presidential election was

Beyond ‘Democratic Consolidation’ 39

decided. This is by no means the only example of the United States’s recent failure to meet liberal democratic norms. It has practiced detention without trial following the tragedy of 11 September 2001: inmates were held without charge for over six years,4 longer than any- one was ever held without trial by apartheid South Africa. That most basic of democratic rights, the vote, is not guaranteed to all adults since some states impose voter registration criteria which are seen to place unreasonable obstacles in the way of people seeking to vote, in particular racial minorities and the poor (Cohen 2008). Nor is the United States the only manifestly imperfect Northern democracy. If an unelected legislative chamber is a disqualification, Britain’s House of Lords disqualifies it from the ranks of ‘consolidated’ democracies. Britain, too, of course, has introduced detention without trial for up to twenty-eight days.5

Even if we ignore these deviations from liberal democratic norms the view that current Northern democratic form is the ‘finished prod- uct’ is not the subject of consensus in those societies themselves – appropriately so, since the free speech which democracy confers also entails the right to question the democratic credentials of democra- cies. Critiques by Northern theorists, written within the democratic paradigm, may not reflect mainstream thinking but do confirm that it is by no means automatic to assume that current Northern form is an unquestioned realisation of the democratic ideal (Barber1998; Sandel 1998). Given these realities, dividing democracies into the ‘consoli- dated’ and ‘unconsolidated’ resembles more a prejudice than a tool of analysis. Far from offering us a normative ideal, enabling a more effective critique of the gap between democratic form and substance in the South, the assumption that some democracies represent an end- point closes off debate about democratic substance, preventing us from examining what it is to which we aspire when we yearn for an enduring democratic future.

It could, in the consolidation literature’s defence, be argued that the standards implied by it remove a frequent complaint of African democratisers – that influential Northern opinion is content to endorse ‘second grade’ standards for African democracies while demanding ‘first grade’ standards in their own countries. But mea- suring African, or any other, democracies against an abstract ideal and perpetually pronouncing them inadequately ‘consolidated’ is as nor- matively counter-productive as it is analytically unhelpful since it obstructs analysis of, and debate on, the democratic progress which is achievable in current conditions. To insist that Africa should not be

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content with ‘second best’ is only useful if it begins a debate on the meaning of best and the processes entailed in approximating it. Proposing criteria which are realised only in the authors’ own (often undeclared) conception of their favourite North American or Western European democracy and are challenged by some within that democ- racy – ensures that the debate proceeds in wilful disregard of concrete conditions in new democracies and of the possibility that democracy can look very different in its diverse homes.

In reality, no democracy is ever completed , a point which was not lost on Robert Dahl, who called his study of formal democracy ‘poly archy’ because he believed democracy to be a goal to which all ‘established’ democracies aspire but none achieve (1971). Schedler tries to rescue ‘consolidation’ from this problem by inviting us to understand it not as a means of distinguishing between complete and incomplete democracies but as a measure of ‘democratic deep- ening, a task which is never completed’. The logical conclusion is that: ‘In this sense, no democracy will ever be “fully consolidated”’ (1998:105). It is hard to see how the ‘consolidation’ approach could adopt his suggestion and still retain its raison d’être. Both in its aca- demic form and its frequent appearances in policy-oriented litera- ture, ‘consolidation’ has been f irmly focussed on an attempt to discern a spurious democratic completion. This is precisely why ‘consolidation’ emerged as an object of study and this remains its defining rationale. The more modest approach of seeking to under- stand ‘consolidation’ as a never completed process in which democ- racy deepens and is always a work in progress would, even if it chose to use the same word, fundamentally break with the paradigm. The ‘consolidation’ approach can be rescued in the way Schedler pro- poses only by so changing its parameters that it would become unrecognisable.

Another credible attempt to preserve ‘consolidation’ as a usable concept, but shorn of its implied assumption that there are ‘certain’ and ‘uncertain’ democracies, is Philippe Schmitter’s view that it ‘involves getting people to compete and cooperate according to mutually acceptable rules – ones that are acceptable to the politicians who are competing (and cooperating) with each other and … to the citizens who are also competing and cooperating with each other via their representatives’ (2003:15). This is an elaboration of Linz’s and Stepan’s ‘only game in town’ but one which is explicit about the need for both citizens and elites to endorse the rules. It is more specific in that it does not refer broadly and vaguely to the need to accept a

Beyond ‘Democratic Consolidation’ 41

political system but concentrates solely on the rules which govern political competition. It is thus more precise as to that to which actors are required to give their endorsement. It is also far more mod- est in its implied claims than much of the ‘consolidation’ approach. It requires not that rules be ‘the only ones in town’ but that they be accepted as the most appropriate means of regulating competition and cooperation. It is also of particular interest to those new African democracies in which electoral outcomes are often the subject of dispute among politicians.

Schmitter’s approach is meant to serve, therefore, more as an account of the minimum required if democracy can be said to have taken root sufficiently to have reasonable survival prospects. But whether it achieves that goal is open to question: Mozambique con- tinues to operate as a democracy despite the fact that Renamo rejected the 1999 election result and has boycotted the National Election Com- mission (AWEPA 2000). More importantly, does acceptance of the rules mean agreement on their form, the way they are committed to paper in constitutional and legislative documents, or acceptance that in practice they are implemented fairly? If the former, there are few if any democracies, including those in which electoral outcomes are not accepted by losers, in which the rules of competition and cooperation are not accepted in principle. If the latter, disaffection in the U.S. about electoral outcomes (scepticism about the 2000 presidential election or about the fairness of electoral districts, for example)6, would raise doubts about its consolidation. Schmitter’s formulation is, therefore, a useful reminder of one of the challenges facing new democracies, but it is hard to see its use as a test of whether democ- racies have crossed a necessary threshold.

Since there is no possibility of achieving consensus on the features of a ‘completed’ democracy and since, even if agreement could be reached, all existing democracies will fall short of the ideal, the dis- tinction between ‘finished products’ and ‘democracies in the making’ is untenable and we need an understanding of democratic progress which sees all democracies as incomplete.

An Illustrative Case: South Africa

The weaknesses of the ‘consolidation approach’ are illustrated by a brief discussion of current South African realities.

South Africa has very quickly met some of ‘consolidology’s’ prime requirement, democratic consensus. Broad support for the constitution covers the entire political spectrum, with white-led parties, and much

42 Steven Friedman

of the white citizenry, regularly denouncing those government deci- sions which they dislike as ‘unconstitutional’. Perhaps most significant is the repeated acceptance by all parties of the rulings of the Constitu- tional Court even where, as in its 1996 test of the constitutional docu- ment and in several subsequent cases, it has presided over cases in which it was asked to resolve political disputes in ways which would inevitably reduce one of the protagonists to a loser. The attitude of key political actors is perhaps best expressed by the reaction of then gen- eral secretary of the IFP (Inkatha Freedom Party) Ziba Jiyane, to the Court’s 1996 ruling dismissing his party’s hoped-for changes to the constitution: ‘If the court rules that pigs can fly, then they fly’ (Centre for Policy Studies/National Business Initiative 1997:8).

Citizens’ attitudes to democracy are more complex, but enthusiasm for voting has remained high by international standards and survey evidence shows that most citizens regard democracy as preferable to other systems of government and that the percentage is rising (Afro- barometer 2004). Heated conflict over macro-economic policy has not prompted any attacks on the constitutional framework. The near- est approximations to forces who doubt formal democracy, social movements who organised an election boycott in 2004 (Greenberg 2006:150), routinely frame their demands in the rights-based lan- guage of the constitution and their members seek engagement with elected government: ‘Meaningful participation in official decision- making processes is also important to members of the movement’ (Greenberg 2006:145). Democracy is ‘the only game in town’ and South Africa passes Linz’s and Stepan’s test of a fully consolidated democracy with flying colours.

But consensus on political rules does not mean that democracy is irreversible, still less that South Africans now enjoy full democratic citizenship in practice. Because politics is primarily an expression of identities, of which race is primary, the ruling ANC’s virtual monop- oly of the majority black vote insulates it from electoral challenge and, in the view of many of its critics, weakens pressures for account- able and responsive government (Giliomee and Simkins 1999). While civil society remains vigorous it is largely the preserve of an elite (White, Dlodlo and Segooa 1995; Friedman 1993). Associational life is also racially divided, weakening both the influence of that section of civil society which is largely white-led and the capacity of black- led associations to hold government to account. The result, despite continued support for democratic institutions, is a sharp gap between the concerns of the elite and those of the grassroots (Charney 1995;

Beyond ‘Democratic Consolidation’ 43

Tomlinson 1999). Consensus on political rules is not matched by an equivalent social consensus on core goals and values (Project Manzi 1995) which might make possible a common search for solutions to social and economic challenges (Baskin 1999) and might ensure that democracy is underpinned by the ‘sense of community’ which Dankwart Rustow held to be essential to democratic survival (1970). These realities inhibit the degree to which the form of liberal democ- racy offers most citizens substantive access to political decisions. Par- ticularistic power, which rests strongly on patronage, has at times grafted itself onto elected local government (Gotz, 1997).

The threats to democracy have been overstated to illustrate the argument. A nuanced analysis would reveal that many of the trends mentioned here are uneven, less pronounced than this treatment has suggested, and in some cases waning. But they are cited less to pro- vide an analysis of South Africa than to illustrate that the most widely used test of consolidation – the ‘only game in town’ – fails to describe a society in which democracy can be said to be ‘consolidated’ only in an abstract model which proves incapable of describing political con- straints and challenges.

If the ‘consolidation’ approach invites complacency on some South African democratic challenges it suggests unfounded pessimism on others. Thus, while Huntington’s ‘two turnover’ test is rarely applied explicitly, many influential mainstream analyses see the repeated wins of the African National Congress (ANC) at the polls as evidence that democracy is unconsolidated because its ‘dominance’ removes vigor- ous electoral competition (Giliomee and Simkins1999; Giliomee, Myburgh and Schlemmer 2001). The ‘dominant party’ framework, with its assumption that South African democracy remains limited as long as the governing party is not defeated at the polls, remains the prism through which mainstream scholars concerned about ‘consoli- dation’ tend to view South Africa.

It is trite to point out that electoral competition introduces an important source of accountability into a democratic system: common sense would dictate that politicians who are worried about losing the next election are likely to be more accountable to voters. But life is often more complicated than common sense might suggest: there may be elements other than electoral competition which inject account- ability into a political system. Thus a government assured of winning the next election(s) but unable to govern without the support of key sections of society may f ind itself forced to remain accountable despite its electoral dominance (Friedman 1999). The ANC may dom-

44 Steven Friedman

inate the polls, but not society, and so it must account to those whose power it is obliged to recognise. The limits to its power are cultural as well as instrumental – the desire to disprove widespread white assumptions of black incompetence is a powerful spur to account- ability (Friedman 2006). This ensures a democratic system far more vibrant than a stress on electoral outcomes to the exclusion of other, equally important, factors, would suggest.

A concrete example of ways in which the assumptions of the ‘con- solidation’ approach can obscure progress is offered by debate sparked in late 2007 and early 2008 by attacks on the judiciary by the ANC, designed to prevent a successful prosecution of its president Jacob Zuma (African National Congress 2008). Both threats to the independence of the judiciary were averted: the ANC executive, led by Zuma himself, affirmed its commitment to the rule of law and the right of the courts to try him (ANC 2008a) and also affirmed its confidence in the courts after a meeting with the chief justice and his deputy.7 Later, charges against Zuma were withdrawn but Cape Judge President John Hlophe, accused of trying to influence judges to find for the president, failed to win a seat on the bench of the Con- stitutional Court.

Some responses to the events saw them as a cause for deep con- cern because judicial independence was challenged. Others saw them as an important sign of progress: the independence of the courts had been aff irmed and an independent chief justice and Constitutional Court bench was appointed despite pressures to the contrary. The first view is consistent with the teleology of the ‘con- solidation’ literature: societies in which politicians accept their accountability to the law are the norm and those where this is ques- tioned are deviant. But this ignores the reality that nowhere has accountability to the law by politicians been a natural state: it must always be established by precedent, often after clashes between the political and judicial authority. Progress towards accountability is made when these conflicts are resolved in its favour – the conflicts should thus be seen not as setbacks, but as tests which, if passed, move society closer to an enduring democracy. The ‘consolidation’ teleology, in this form, sets unreasonable standards for progress and so prompts social actors to see an advance as a setback, diverting attention from democratic possibilities and the strategies needed to realise them.

In sum, the notion that there is an abstract ideal by which all democracies may be judged to determine whether they have com-

Beyond ‘Democratic Consolidation’ 45

pleted the journey from aspiration to completion ignores and exag- gerates both the threats to South African democracy and its advances, blinding us to pitfalls and progress. The fault lies not with the way in which the approach is applied to South Africa but with the approach itself.

A Retreat of Sorts?

It will be evident from this discussion that the consolidation approach has not been entirely unchallenged; questions were raised about it from within the paradigm more than a decade ago. During this period events have also given some cause for pause among proponents of the paradigm since ‘consolidation’ has proved to be more elusive than its protagonists expected. Thus, some years ago, the doyen of democracy promotion studies, Thomas Carothers, queried whether new democ- racies were headed towards ‘consolidation’ (2002) while, as noted above, Freedom House is perturbed at the failure of new democracies to ‘consolidate’ in the hoped-for fashion (Dizard and Walker 2010). But, given that the first doubts about the approach were voiced almost fifteen years ago and events have proved disappointing even for those who remain convinced of its merit, it is striking how little it has shifted since then: most current discussions of consolidation continue to rely on the literature cited here and there has been little attempt to revise or discard the concept (Haynes 2003; Mbadlanyana 2009).

A partial exception has been an attempt by two important ‘consol- idation’ scholars, Larry Diamond and Leonardo Morlino, apparently to break with the paradigm by proposing, in 2005, the use of ‘demo- cratic quality’ as an appropriate means of evaluating the ‘goodness’ of a democracy. They acknowledged widespread dissatisfaction in the established democracies and one of their stated aims is to answer the question: ‘How can the attempt to avoid deficiencies of democracy avoid becoming paternalistic exercises in which the established democracies take themselves for granted as models and so escape scrutiny?’ (2005:ix) This breaks with the consolidation paradigm in several ways. The def ining features of a ‘good’ democracy are defined and defended, allowing debate. Specifying the qualities of an ideal democracy, as this work does, allows established democracies to be subjected to the same tests as do newer ones and does not neces- sarily claim that any democracies are ‘finished products’.

46 Steven Friedman

But this does not mean that the consolidation paradigm’s hold has been broken. The authors seem to see ‘quality’ not as an alternative to consolidation but as a complement to it: ‘reforms to improve democ- ratic quality are essential if democracy is to achieve the broad and durable legitimacy which marks consolidation’ (Diamond and Mor- lino 2005: ix). The relationship between consolidation and quality is not specified and so both the vagueness of the reliance on consolida- tion and the notion of a democratic endpoint remain and are subject to all the objections of its predecessors. Thus they describe the rule of law, defined in part as a state in which the law is ‘fairly and consis- tently applied to all citizens’ (Diamond and Morlino 2005: xiv), an end point which is almost as difficult to achieve as is one in which all citizens enjoy an equal say in all decisions and which few if any democracies have ever achieved, as essential to democratic consoli- dation. Consistent with the consolidation approach, they do believe that the term ‘good’ democracies describes not an aspirational end- point but the properties of existing polities: ‘“Good” democracies balance the liberal, democratic and republican traditions … remind- ing us that democratic quality is a flexible and pluralistic concept, shaped by the normative choices of society’ (Diamond and Morlino 2005: xxiii). The language seems to break with the consolidation par- adigm, but the claim that there are democracies which have achieved the exacting criteria by which the authors propose to measure demo- cratic ‘goodness’ resurrects the consolidation paradigm in new lan- guage. It is significant that all the case studies discussed in the book which is the locus classicus of this approach are new democracies; the language may not exonerate established democracies, but the implicit pecking order is retained.

Freedom House’s 2010 study of new democracies also departs from the norm by acknowledging, as do Diamond and Morlino, that estab- lished democracies have not attained perfection. But, instead of assum- ing the superiority of established democracies, this work asserts it:

It is important to note that ‘middle ground’ countries are not the only ones having difficulty achieving deeper reforms. Over the past several years, obstacles to improved democratic governance have been rising in mature and developing systems alike. Trust in key institutions in the United States and European Union countries has plummeted. Established democracies are dealing with vexing problems related to fiscal manage- ment, social welfare, and the quality of government more generally. The economic crisis is forcing officials and policymakers to choose from a menu of unpalatable options, stirring doubts in the minds of citizens about

Beyond ‘Democratic Consolidation’ 47

the governability of their countries. But the more resilient institutions of mature democracies provide a greater margin for error, and the primacy of citizens’ voices in reform discussions is generally assured. By contrast, the hurdles and risks faced by developing countries are far more daunting (Dizard and Walker 2010:4).

The acknowledgement that ‘mature’ democracies may not be perfect is unusual as is the recognition that a work which studies the state of democracy only in new democracies needs to explain itself. But that is the extent of the departure from the approach criticised here. That the institutions of the older democracies are ‘resilient’ is stated but not argued while the claim that ‘the primacy of citizens’ voices in reform discussions is generally assured’ is flatly contradicted by a 2005 survey finding that only thirty-seven per cent of respondents in North America and thirty-one per cent in Western Europe believe their countries are governed by the people’s will (Gallup Interna- tional 2005) (a finding which also puts into perspective the recent claim that a ‘powerful indicator’ of the ‘lack of consolidation’ in Latin America is survey evidence that only thirty-two per cent of those polled have confidence in the legislature, and only twenty-one per cent trust the political parties) (Ugarte and Ziccardi 2009:7). This apparent departure from the consolidation paradigm repeats its biases more explicitly.

That the internal challenges of scholars, a growing awareness that democracy in the North is suffering a crisis in confidence, and the poor progress of new democracies towards the desired telos, have not prompted a substantial re-evaluation of the ‘consolidation’ approach is perhaps as remarkable as this paradigm’s initial failure to defend its assumptions. Clearly, the assumptions of democratic superiority in the North are so deeply ingrained among scholars that ‘consolidation’ has remained largely frozen in time for a decade, a concept which few define, fewer feel a need to justify and even fewer accept as a duty to rethink despite its manifest flaws and biases.

The Democratic Journey

The arguments assembled here have sought to show that democracies cannot be divided into ‘consolidated’ and ‘unconsolidated’ variants of the species. Because there are always gaps between democratic form and substance, between promise and concrete reality, and there

48 Steven Friedman

always will be, we best understand societies’ attempts to deepen democracy and make it more sustainable if we place them on a con- tinuum along which all are moving further towards, or away from, an always unattainable democratic ideal. Democracy is, in this view, never completed and the search for it is a journey which democratic societies must always undertake in the sure knowledge that there is no reachable destination.

Even this formulation over-simplifies for it implies that it is always possible to declare each democracy further from or closer to the democratic ideal. In reality, established democracies may lag behind newer ones on key democratic indicators – such as voter participa- tion – while exceeding them on others. This further unsettles the notion of a ‘consolidated’ democracy by pointing to the potential for seemingly ‘complete’ democracies to retain very ‘incomplete’ fea- tures. Precisely because all democracies are engaged in an ever- incomplete journey, it is inevitable that all will be found wanting in some areas of democratic performance. For Northern democracies, this warns against a complacency which assumes a completed demo- cratic task. For those in Africa, it suggests a continuing need to aspire to higher democratic standards but not those set by an often-roman- ticised image of Northern democracy. This in turn opens the way for a search for institutions and conventions which match local realities in the context of agreed democratic values, rather than an attempt to approximate those of the North.

But, if the ‘consolidation’ literature fails to tell us how to recognise progress towards or retreat from the democratic ideal when we see it, what criteria ought to be applied to judge whether societies – or par- ticular features of their political order – are becoming more or less democratic? A full discussion of this issue is offered elsewhere (Friedman 2007). For now, it is, hopefully, enough to suggest that, by debating rather than assuming democracy’s nature and properties, by seeing it as a goal to which all formally democratic societies aspire but which none ever reach, by therefore seeing all democracies, regardless of age and pedigree, as works in progress and recognising that democracies which are further down the road on some criteria will also be laggards on others, we can achieve an understanding of democratic progress which avoids relativism by specifying clear goals, but does not create a hierarchy of complete and incomplete democracies which undervalues progress in new democracies and assumes it in older ones.

Beyond ‘Democratic Consolidation’ 49

STEVEN FRIEDMAN is Director of the Centre for the Study of Democ- racy at Rhodes University and the University of Johannesburg. He researched and wrote widely on the South African transition to democracy both before and after the elections of 1994 and has, over the past decade, largely written on the relationship between democ- racy on the one hand and social inequality and economic growth on the other. His publications include Building Tomorrow Today (1987), The Long Journey: South Africa’s Quest for a Negotiated Settlement (1993) and The Small Miracle: South Africa’s Negotiated Settlement (1994, with Doreen Atkinson). He is currently studying the theoreti- cal underpinnings of current understandings of democracy in an attempt to generate new perspectives which are relevant to current democratic realities.

Notes

1. These are, of course, all ‘dominant party’ democratic systems which are regarded as stable democracies. See Pempel 1990.

2. Schedler notes a tendency to compare Southern democracies with ‘a more or less rosy picture of established Western democracies’ (1998:100).

3. Stewart said he could not define pornography but ‘I know it when I see it’ (Faigley and Selzer, 2001:540).

4. To name but one example, Sami al-Haj, a Sudanese camera-man working for the al Jazeera television channel, was released from the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in May 2008 after being detained without charge for six years. ‘Al-Jazeera cameraman home from Guantanamo’ Sydney Morning Herald May 2, 2008 http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/aljazeera-cameraman-home-from- guantanamo/2008/05/02/1209235136671.html.

5. Travis 2007. As the title indicates (‘U.K. terror detention limit is longest of any democracy’), the report claims that British law allows for longer periods of detention than does the United States, a strange claim given the fact that Guan- tanamo Bay detainees have been held without charge for years.

6. ‘Where partisan bodies are able to draw electoral districts to their own advantage (as in the United States, where this gerrymandering is performed every decade by state legislatures …), they are likely to do so in ways that will promote parti- san and incumbency advantage’ (Diamond and Morlino 2004:13).

7. ‘ANC does about-turn over Moseneke’, comments Mail and Guardian, 17 Jan- uary 2008 http://www.mg.co.za/articlepage.aspx?area=/breaking_news/breaking_ news__national/&articleid=329935&referrer=RSS.

50 Steven Friedman

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