What Democracy is… and is not

If we are to walk the road to democracy, the first step would be to cast aside illusions and call a spade a spade

Is Pakistan a democracy?

This question surfaces routinely in media discourse and drawing room discussions, often in the wake of some government scandal or failure, and it lingers for a bit. We know we’ve had elections, we have a parliament, but at the end of the day we are also deeply unhappy and well aware that we are not marching proudly into some bold new future.

Our discourse on democracy is unfortunately limited to wishy washy feel-good statements along the lines of ‘democracy takes time’, ‘the worst democracy is better than dictatorship’, ‘dharnas hurt democracy’, ‘mid-term elections may derail democracy’, etc. Our politicians constantly remind us that democracy is under threat. The conversation is also completely binary, its democracy versus dictatorship, democracy versus the army, democracy versus theocracy, etc. There is no room here for the subtleties of Plato, Jefferson, or de Tocqueville.

But this is to be expected. Democracy is an abstract concept, of which we have no real experience. We don’t have a home-grown philosophical tradition that we may actually reason about democracy from scratch. For us, democracy is not a holy grail, but rather, a sacred cow, something we don’t really understand, but we speak of with awe simply because it’s one of those things.

Let’s consider some first principles by way of a story:

Samuel Huntington, writing in 1991, described the advent of democracy in three waves: the First Wave began with Jacksonian democracy in the United States in the 1820s and resulted in 29 democracies emerging in the world. The end of the Second World War heralded the Second Wave, peaking in 1962, with some 36 democracies. The Third Wave, beginning in 1974, was a tidal wave: Central and Latin America came into the fold, the Iron Curtain was torn down, and the Soviet Union was dismantled, resulting in well over 100 ‘democratically’ governed nations in the world today.

And this is when things got really really interesting for political scientists: many of these newer ‘democracies’ had parliaments, constitutions and regular multi-party elections; in short, all the shiny, glittery trappings of democracy. But on the other hand — and the reason for referring to them within quotation marks — unlike established democracies, they also had electoral fraud, concentration of power, rampant corruption and flagrant human rights violations. These abominations clearly had no place in a democracy… and yet here they were. It was like an anomaly in a science experiment, it just didn’t make any sense.

This dilemma inspired tons of academic papers on what exactly makes democracy tick. One of the most influential, from 1991, bears the provocative title “What Democracy Is… And Is Not”. In this paper, Philippe Schmitter and Terry Karl from Stanford proposed a revolutionary new definition: “Modern political democracy is a system of governance in which rulers are held accountable for their actions in the public realm by citizens, acting indirectly through the competition and cooperation of their elected representatives.”

Reading this three or four times, letting it sink in, we may compare this to the ubiquitous Lincoln formulation, “of the people, by the people, for the people”. It is not hard to see that this new definition — while essentially saying the same thing — is infinitely more powerful. And, of course, infinitely more dangerous.

As per Schmitter, democracies consist of three principal actors: rulers, citizens and representatives. Accountability is the magic elixir here, channelling downward from rulers to citizens via representatives. We may imagine three different coloured circles on a board, arranged in a top-down hierarchy, connected by red arrows flowing downward. Other political systems, monarchies, oligarchies, autocracies, plutocracies, etc. can be drawn up in similar diagrams. Schmitter emphasises that it is this specific configuration, this unique way that accountability connects the actors in our original diagram, which differentiates democracy from all other systems.

Placing accountability at the heart of democracy was a radical and controversial step at the time, but it has since then decisively influenced the field. In a later paper, Schmitter justifies the choice: “We wanted a definition that was not dependent upon a specific institution or set of institutions, that was not uniquely liberal or excessively defensive in its presumptions, that was neither exclusively procedural nor substantive in its content, and that could travel well across world cultural regions.”

It makes absolute sense: rulers doing silly things like terrorising opposition members, wiretapping journalists, undermining institutions and fostering a culture of corruption, these are all simply manifestations of a common phenomenon, the lack of vertical accountability.

A natural question arises here: isn’t democracy all about elections? We’ve actually had two in a row now.

Terry Karl dubs this the electoralist fallacy, i.e., mistaking the electoral component of democracy for democracy itself. It’s a very common mistake. This notion is now well known in political science circles, and countries which suffer from this illusion — pretend democracies like ours with all the organs and rituals of democracy, but precious little accountability — we are electoralist states. Electoralism is essentially authoritarianism dressed up in the clothes of democracy.

Schmitter recalls sifting through the literature for a workable definition of democracy: “None of those in widespread use in the burgeoning literature on democratisation fit our, admittedly demanding, bill of particulars ... All of these focused too single-mindedly on the regular conduct of elections that (allegedly) offered citizens a choice between alternative set of rulers (with no attention to the relations of citizens and rulers leading up to the holding of such presumably ‘free and fair’ elections or to those prevailing after such episodic events). Indeed, many of the more theoretically inclined scholars who relied on such a definition seemed embarrassed in doing so and excused themselves by arguing that, even though elections are not the only manifestation of democracy, they were easy to measure…”

Intellectual laziness is only part of the problem though. Modern life has a tendency to obscure the living breathing reality of transcendental ideals. A decade after his ground-breaking work, Schmitter speculates about academics who met his initial paper with hostility: “To epistemological positivists, the concept [of accountability] must have seemed too abstract and vague to be quantifiable and, therefore, not worth being taken into consideration — especially, when something much more concrete and observable (the holding of contested elections) was readily available.”

Hopefully, this long-winded story goes a little way to qualifying Pakistan’s democratic credentials. Hopefully, it also gives us some sense of direction, illuminating the road we need to take. And if we are to walk this road, the first step would be to cast aside illusions and call a spade a spade. And this particular spade is still far from a democracy.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 24^th, 2015.

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