On Democracy's Advantage
Often forgotten, yet fundamental.
There are many claims made about democracy. Democracy helps economic growth. Democracy safeguards property rights. Democracy protects rights generally. Democracies don’t fight wars with each other. Democracies don’t fight wars of aggression. Democracies fight wars that they can win. Democracy comes to better political decisions. Democracy comes to more moderate political decisions. Democracy comes to stable political decisions more easily. Democracy creates more reasonable politics. Democracy ensures the majority of the people are happy. Democracy ensures minorities of the people are happy. Democracies promote liberty. Democracies promote freedom. Democracies promote equality. Democracies promote equity. Democracies promote good governance. Democracy ensures the consent of the governed. Democracy ensures the government consents to the general will of the people.
Some of these claims are well-supported by long research traditions. Others are likely to be causally spurious or empirically suspect. Still others are sometimes true, sometimes false, and sometimes it very much just depends.
These sorts of statements, or assertions, about democracy are often instrumental - that is, the status of a polity being a democracy does something (or does something more often than not, if we think probabilistically), and that something happens to be good. And sometimes the assertions are normative, about the process inherent in democracy, or democratic decision-making, or cultivating particular political cultures that are good, or valuable in themselves, regardless of outcome. There is quite a selection of arguments to pick from, which is of course very sensible, as democracy is the regime we live in - and we would like to believe that regime is good, after all.
Unfortunately, we really do make too many claims about democracy, especially as we also tend to do so without a crisp sense of what democracy is (that is, what the concept of democracy entails). And of all the claims on offer, there’s one that’s fundamental to democracy as a regime - and a core structural advantage it has over most other systems on offer. And it happens to be one we sometimes forget, or don’t quite grasp its full ramifications. When we recall what we really mean when we refer to a polity as a democracy (and crucially stripped of normative baggage, hopes and dreams), we helpfully recover this.
What Is Democracy?
When we speak of democracy in the modern world, we speak of representative democracy. That is, a system of government in which the people elect those who then rule over them. This is much to the chagrin of Classical accounts, which would say that ‘democracy’ is only when the people rule themselves directly (that is, they self-govern). Outside of New England town meeting or Switzerland’s governance-by-referenda, this does not reflect what we mean when we talk about democracy. If we are to be strict Classicists, we would say that modern democracy is rather a form of inclusive, electoral oligarchy. Those who say this outright today tend to imply that this is a negative, but structurally that simply is what democracy is, and has been, since its inception at the birth of the modern world - which happens to coincide with the initial decades of the United States, the first stable democracy of modernity. This is actually-existing democracy, and as that’s what we care about most of the time, that’s what we should focus on.
Critics who point out that modern democracy is a kind of oligarchy miss the point. They will say that all societies produce elites, and elites govern re vera, not the people. Yes. And so what? The elites that rule democracies are different from all others that govern all other forms of political order, precisely because they are dependent on the popular electorate in a way no others are.
Modern democracy has a particular - and curious - structural form. We can call this ‘electoral democracy,’ and we can define it crisply: a political system in which the apex decision-making political actors are chosen through a competitive struggle for the people’s vote by way of multiparty competition in regular elections under broad suffrage in which outcomes are uncertain. This is different from every other kind of political regime in history.
This difference is very meaningful. It means that power flows from the bottom up (from the electorate to the elected), both philosophically and in its very mechanisms of responsibility and accountability. It means that the privileged elite are forced to compete for the divided attention of the non-elite, and must do so at regular intervals. It means the legitimacy of the system is bound up in its reflection of the popular will, or wills. It means the great symbolic touchstones of the regime are elections, popularity, competition, assemblies of the people’s representatives, and the top figure or figures which act in their name.
The reader will note what this conceptualization of democracy does not state. It does not state dogmatically that electoral democracy will produce any of the outcomes noted in the first paragraph. But we note that it often does, or sometimes does, or perhaps we wish it did, and believe it should.
Of all the many potential statements of what democracy does, there really is one single output that we’re quite confident about. It’s not a particular normative value. It’s not the usual instrumental outputs either. Democracies in some places and at some times may indeed produce lovely things, or good things, or necessary things. But for every case in favor, there are cases against, or caveats that must be made, or allowances that must be nuanced, or other helping factors that also may explain the same.
Democracy’s true advantage is a system-level one. And this advantage works at the level of political order. Democracy is the second-best way to ensure political succession that humankind has ever devised. And as the first-best cannot currently be instituted, it is by default the best guarantor that exists. And as successful, peaceful political succession is the most important thing a given political order does, this matters quite a bit.
Democracy and Political Succession
Political succession is the regular transfer of political power from one person to another, or from one group to another. Successful political succession means that the polity will continue on, without undue disruption, over decades and over generations. Successful, and peaceful, political succession means that there is not a civil war whenever a new leader or leadership group takes over. It means that the societal order upon which individuals, families, and communities rely will not be undone by repeated regime changes. It means that investments in the polity - whether that is a business’ capital, a civic group’s purpose, or a person’s life choices, will not be thrown under the bus at every change of the guard at the top. It means that everyone knows what will happen the day after tomorrow. Political economists call this a credible commitment to the future. All social decisions rely on credible commitments, as uncertainty on this count means that other, usually suboptimal choices will be made instead to hedge bets. This is one reason why the concept of the rule-of-law, also a system-level mechanism for ensuring credible commitments in contracts and judicial procedures, is often associated with democracy (although that is a different question).
The best means of ensuring political succession in history is hereditary monarchy. From the moment a monarch’s heir is born, everyone knows who will succeed. Everyone also knows who will come after that, should that heir die early or prove incapable, through an explicit hierarchy of close family relations. Primogeniture is the best variant of hereditary monarchy, although other mechanisms also work, albeit less well and with a greater likelihood of political instability at the moment of succession. The core benefit of monarchy in this vein is that the lines of authority are clear and the trajectory of the political order is stated clearly for all to see. Of course, we do not build new monarchies at this junction in the 21st century, and for other reasons most of us would not accept the imposition of a new one in any case. Perhaps that will change again one day, but the case remains to be proved.
Democracy thus happens to be the next-best thing for political succession. The structure is utterly different, but the mechanical regularization of succession is blessedly similar. The political order of electoral democracy tells us when the succession question is raised - once every scheduled national election, conditional on term-limits and the prerogatives to shift the calendar within fairly minor temporal bounds. It tells us who is in the choice-set for successors - the parties and individuals competing in those elections, who publicly claim their case to rule for all other elites and all citizens - and even all foreign observers - to see. And it allows all members of the polity to assess for themselves what any potential change would mean, what the stakes of the change would be, and how long it would take for those reassessing the wisdom of that change to express their disapproval again and make a bid for a new change.
This dynamic is a tremendous gift, and it sits at the core of electoral democracy. It is also not easy. No one said it would be easy. Competition can make people stressed, mad, or disillusioned. Elected elites are not guaranteed to be virtuous, or smart, or on-the-level. There are many reasons why it could fail. It happens, however, that there are many more reasons why other systems have even more trouble with succession, as they have the same problems, and then some.
If you are disinclined to this second-best means of ensuring regularized political succession, there’s one other model - and one that is not deemed archaic like hereditary monarchy. It is the authoritarian party-state. That too can develop systems of succession that are internally credible in their commitments to peaceful power transfer and regular elite turnover. Keeping succession within such a party requires a great deal of trust within it, it requires institutionalized mechanisms for this sort of succession, and it requires that party to maintain its claim to be the sole source of political legitimacy over long periods. It happens that this is also hard to do, and much harder to do than the average democracy attempting the same thing. There are many more mediocre, but successful democracies than successful party-states.
Why Democracy’s Succession Advantage Matters
The political succession mechanism of democracy is tremendously useful. It’s hard to establish, and can break, of course. But we can look around the world of the last hundred or so years, and it remains a remarkably constant benefit, relative to others on offer. Most other systems fail dismally on this account. And the most common alternative systems are also the ones with the worst track-records with succession. Why is this the case? Well the other common systems are military juntas, personalist dictatorships, and electoral authoritarian regimes.
Military juntas are short-lived things, and they don’t offer succession benefits. Militaries, very few exceptions, do not even want political power for very long - they are not keen on being blamed when things go sideways. The question of what comes after the coup is usually answered with a transition to something else. And once you have one coup, it often puts a country down a path for further coups later on. This is not a recipe for long-term political succession.
Personalist dictatorships (and we can use ‘dictatorship’ broadly in this sense) also don’t handle succession well, although at least they do political stability much better, so long as the same ruler is still in power. But the personalist ruler has perennial problems with finding heirs. Naming a heir instantly creates the potential for a counter-elite to form around the heir, and waiting around for the original leader to die can stretch on beyond patience. That personalist regimes tend to centralize power heavily around the leader also means that the promise of ultimate power falling into new hands is quite alluring - incentivizing coups, rebellions, and plotting to upset the political order. Personalist regimes last much longer than juntas, in most cases, but they tend not to last very long once the original leader dies before regime breakdown hits.
Electoral authoritarian regimes come in many flavors, and some have managed political transition better than others. The usual rule of thumb is that the more the regime looks like an authoritarian party-state - that is, with a strong, institutionally-dominant political party with internal mechanisms for advancement and less personalized leadership - the better it will fare. Most electoral authoritarian regimes don’t have this luxury, as it’s hard to build institutionalized political parties. And it’s easy for an electoral authoritarian regime to slip into full personalization. Electoral authoritarian regimes with weaker parties (but with effective coercive apparati) often find this is their fate, or if they are so weak (we sometimes term these ‘hybrid regimes’ or ‘competitive authoritarianism’) they run the risk of accidentally losing their own election or triggering mass protests that can lead to regime change. Succession is thus troubled here as well.
There is an interesting development for some longstanding electoral authoritarian regimes of note here, where the regime personalizes but seeks hereditary solutions to its succession problem. Azerbaijan has followed this model, other Central Asian states have been toying with it, and Belarus seems potentially to be on the way as well. The hyper-personalized Syrian party-state has had success too. In essence, this is an attempt to bootstrap the logic of hereditary monarchy on top of a modern authoritarian political order. We shall only see over time whether this is a real solution.
Other, particularly successful electoral authoritarian regimes have moved farther into the party-state model, but it’s very hard right now to make the claim of sole sovereign rule that communist and nationalist parties used to do in the early-to-mid 20th century. So they sit with dominant, institutionalized parties and hope it works well enough. Mexico under the PRI is always the key example, but current cases such as Tanzania’s CCM regime also have kept things together in this manner. But core mechanisms here, such as sustained party-building and power-sharing with vice-presidents or oversized cabinets, are promising but difficult to achieve. Party-states do it better, but we only have a few cases to work with and they’re mostly legacy regimes formed from major revolutions and armed struggle.
This leaves us with where we started: a ranking of hereditary monarchy, electoral democracy, and variations on the old party-state model as the best chances for successful political succession. It also points to the key power of institutionalization - building regular mechanisms that openly and credibly state who is ruling, who will rule, and how that rule is chosen in an iterative process through time.
Varieties of Democracy?
What about among democracies, however? Does this second-best mechanism work for all democracies? Are some better than others? This brings us to the tricky term ‘liberal democracy.’ It is intentionally unused here for two reasons. First, its definition has changed over time, and that definitional shift has accelerated in the last few decades. For a long time, liberal democracy was for many just another way to say electoral democracy, or perhaps one with American-style, Madisonian checks-and-balances in particular.
This is no longer the case, and people who refer to liberal democracy - especially in an idealistic or normative way - tack on a plethora of extra institutions and mechanisms to qualify, most of which are ‘countermajoritarian’ - or explicitly designed to dilute the political power of the electorate as exercised by their elected politicians. These include extremely strong, independent judiciaries with final and capacious judicial review, a large panoply of rights guarantees, ‘fourth branch’ institutions such as electoral management bodies, anti-corruption agencies, ombudsmen offices, and so forth all staffed by professional experts who de facto cannot be removed, guarantees to not impede, often fund, and regularly dialogue with NGOs and other institutional civil society organizations, implications of subordination to supranational legal and economic regimes, and other elements. The argument is that these institutional additions to the standard electoral democratic framework either improve governance or prevent its collapse via demagoguery, populism, and other perceived evils of mass politics.
Does this mean that liberal democracies should be better at ensuring political succession than electoral democracies with fewer apolitical, insulated expert bodies and tutelary institutions? The answer is we do not know, although most presumably hope yes. We don’t know because not enough time has passed. The median age of a given democracy is less than 30 years, and even very old ones are in most cases less than 100, with very few exceptions.
The institutions that many scholars now say are essentially de rigeur to be a ‘liberal democracy’ are about that age as well, and often only exist in their intended form in Europe and North America. Indeed, some were only added to old democracies in very recent years (see, for example, ex-post judicial review introduced in France in 2008). As liberal democracies are highly clustered in the West, which also share high incomes, national-level ideologies that promote democracy as a good unto itself, and geopolitical security under the US alliance system and nuclear umbrella, there is a sense of historical overdetermination when making the case plain.
Liberal democracies also face the challenge as that as they get more ‘liberal’ (in this specific sense of countermajoritarian institutions), they are often perceived to grow less ‘democratic’ - a fundamental underlying element to populist discontent over the last 30 years. Coupled with the replacement of mass parties with professionalized elite parties disconnected from the average citizen - producing what the late Peter Mair described as ‘ruling the void’ - there are clear legitimacy problems in modern liberal democracies - but the outworkings of this process are ongoing and folly to predict. The jury thus remains out as to whether liberal democracy’s tendency towards juristocracy and technocratic administration actually makes them a different regime type than electoral democracy, per some critics, or if they indeed align with what proponents would consider simply a more sophisticated and elegant form that actually survives better. Not enough time has passed to know the answer with confidence.
Succession Is Not Enough
The ability to successfully manage repeated political succession as an inherent mechanism built into the very structure of electoral democracy is a tremendous gift. That it is the core dynamic of democratic politics is all the more remarkable, and speaks to the fundamental place that political succession has for any lasting polity. But this feature is not enough to justify democracy, as any reader knows. Indeed, the best system for succession - hereditary monarchy - has been dying since the end of the Great War over a century ago. And democracies can surely die as much as monarchies did in the past, or the majority of party-states did at the end of the Cold War. The lesson of modernity is that even the most institutionalized, stable systems that think and act seriously about political succession, can and do fail in the end. They simply are better at it than the competition.
This is why we often rely on the more proximate instrumental and normative cases for democracy: economic growth, superior decision-making, peace preferences, popular inclusion, democratic values and culture. Proceduralist arguments justifying democracy ultimately fall on deaf ears over the medium- to long-term, as we can see clearly from the experience of the Interwar era to our own day. The political scientist Ken Opalo has written persuasively in a recent article that one “can’t eat democracy,” which gets to the core of political legitimacy and how it can be quickly undermined. It is not hard to see that democracy has ultimately been better justified to populations on the basis of patriotism or nationalism (as in the United States, France, and Eastern Europe), historical traditions (as in the United Kingdom), or as a state-symbolic cleansing of past regimes (as in Germany, Southern Europe, East Asia, and Latin America) than system-level abstractions.
The argument here will thus not win you any converts to democracy per se. For some it might even do the opposite. Noting the sustaining power of a democratic regime to those dissatisfied with the substantive outputs of that regime, be from a place of ideology and belief or economic and social conditions may in fact, for some, underline the revolutionary or reactionary case for sharp change. Rather, it recapitulates a truth that we actually do know what democracy really does in a very basic sense, and why it is still here. An analytic point well worth making. And it reminds us that there are not all that many alternatives with the same staying power, at least in the modern era.
As for the million dollar question of what comes next and why - looking to the uncertain future of 21st century governance is a different subject for another time.
Other Reading
This is the first Substack essay of the new year, A.D. 2023, and I’ve been lucky to have a few new writing projects entering the public view in the last few months. I’m noting them below, in case any readers might be interested.
First, at the end of October I had an article review published at Ius et Iustitium, an outlet that focuses on the classical legal and political tradition, in which I highlighted some prospects and pitfalls of classical political theory concepts when applied in comparative politics research. The basic claim is that there’s a great deal of interesting fruit that comes from using classical concepts to discuss political regime (which I’ve discussed here on this Substack in a more abstract sense before), but it can get very messy quite quickly. You can find it here: “Classical Political Forms, the Mixed Regime, and the State of Emergency—Roman, Byzantine, Muscovite?” Ius et Iustitium, October 2022.
Second, in November I published a research note on ‘illiberal’ political movements on the political right in the United States at the Illiberalism Studies Program. I canvass a broad field, showing that some elements of this disparate collection of perspectives are starting to move from critique to political action and substantive politics. You can find it here: “The Illiberal Right Moves Beyond Critique,” Illiberalism Studies Program, November 2022.
Third, in December I wrote a short blog-style article on authoritarian regimes, constitutions, and institutional schemas for the European Consortium of Political Research’s scholarly blog, ‘The LOOP.’ It presages some ongoing research on constitutional order and authoritarianism that will be coming out in due time. You can find it here: “Varieties of constitutional models and authoritarian political order,” The LOOP, December 2022.
Fourth, at the beginning of the new year I waded back into the subject of Russia with a discussion of new developments in domestic politics for the popular, national-security publication War on the Rocks. The main point is that there is actually quite a lot of politics in Russia today, even as the ground has shifted significantly since the war. You can find it here: “Public Politics in the Russian Wartime Dictatorship,” War on the Rocks, January 2023.
I’ve also gotten some good news on future publications, including an academic article on the concepts of ‘authoritarianism’ and ‘illiberalism,’ accepted and forthcoming at Political Studies Review, another article tackling the same concepts but from an IR/foreign-policy analysis perspective at the Journal of International Affairs, and a more in-depth book chapter on differing ways to understand ‘authoritarianism’ in particular for the upcoming Oxford Handbook of Illiberalism. Consider this my trilogy of interventions on why too many scholars use either one or the other concept unhelpfully, and how to Do Better (and why that’s necessary). Once they’re in more-or-less final form, I’ll post prepublication drafts at SSRN. Readers are welcome to message me if any want an early look, of course.
Other academic work is also ongoing. I’ve drafted up a book chapter for a different edited volume on ‘integralism’ in the current Anglo-American ideological landscape, which will happen whenever the book editor gets around to it, I suppose. And I’m currently shopping around my recent conference paper comparing illiberal politics in Eastern Europe with ‘postliberal’ ideological tendencies in the English-speaking world - it’s sitting at a journal now, but we’ll see where it goes. I’m still waiting on my paper about modern ‘authoritarian theorists’ in the American context to actually come back from peer-review (it’s been close to a year…), so that’s a frustration. And I’m trying to shape up some papers coming out of the dissertation on authoritarian regimes in the post-Soviet space, but that’ll take some more time.
Finally, now is a good time to announce that - along with three excellent coauthors - I’ve signed a book contract with University of Michigan Press for an upcoming academic book on institutions in authoritarian regimes. The contract title is Authoritarianism From the Inside: How and When State Institutions Realize Autonomy Under Authoritarian Regimes, (yes a little clunky) and it more or less does exactly that. We look at the concept of authoritarianism in political science, discuss dynamics of intra-institutional politics in stable authoritarian regimes as influenced by their institutionalization and observed through variation in institutional autonomy, and look in detail at three types of institutions: constitutional courts, parliaments, and religious establishments. My coauthors Nathan Brown (GWU), Steven Schaaf (Ole Miss), and Samer Anabtawi (UCL) are all Middle-East experts, so that guides a lot of our thinking and empirics, but we’ve also included major case studies from Russia, Imperial/Nazi Germany, and Thailand as well. We’re waiting on some more comments for final substantive edits, but it’s getting pretty close after some years of fits, starts, and halts - which is exciting!
- Julian