Robert Dahl. The Shifting Boundaries of Democratic Governments

Robert Dahl is one of the patriarchs of American political science, a world-famous expert in the field of democracy theory. For more than 50 years, his academic work has been inextricably linked with the Department of Political Science at Yale University, where he is currently Professor Emeritus of Political Science. R. Dahlem published a huge number of scientific articles and monographic studies of the democratic system of government, among which such works as "Preface to Democratic Theory" (1956), "Polyarchy. Participation and Opposition" (1971), " Dilemmas of pluralistic democracy" (1982), "Democracy and its critics" (1989) and a number of others. His last book, “On Democracy,” was published in 1998 and has already gone through several reprints.

The boundaries within which democratic governments make and implement collective decisions are constantly shifting. Even over short periods of time, boundaries shift. Over long periods, these changes are enormous and extremely significant. If we define a democratic state as one that gives its citizens the opportunity to enjoy a relatively high degree of collective control over government decisions, either directly through citizens' assemblies, or indirectly through their elected representatives, or perhaps through other means, then modern democracies are shaped by three fundamental changes, with a fourth change in progress.

The first change was the shift of the seat of the democratic state from the city-state to the nation-state, or country. The second was the enormous expansion by democratic governments of the scope of their programs and policies. A third, more recent change has been the enormous increase in the number of both countries and citizens living under democratic rule. The fourth change is that democratic governments are becoming increasingly involved in non-democratic international systems.

From city-state to nation-state

The first change happened so long ago that many people may no longer be aware of it. Most Democrats believe that the most appropriate habitat for democratic government is a country, whether it is as small as Iceland or as large as the United States, India, or, for this case, China. Although this view is widely accepted, it ignores or rejects almost twenty-two centuries of previous beliefs and realities. From about the 5th century BC until the 18th century, democratic and republican ideas and the forms of their implementation were considered applicable only to very small state entities - most often to city-states. Even when a city-state expanded beyond its original boundaries, as Rome did, its political institutions were largely preserved, despite the fact that these structures were no longer suitable for any significant participation of the masses in the governance of the enormously expanding republic. .

The conviction that popular government should be small still persisted in 1787, when the framers of the American Constitution met to frame the fundamental law intended for the republic, which was to exercise power over a vast and still expanding territory to an unknown extent. Many of the delegates, including one of the main architects of the Constitution, James Madison, were keenly aware that what they were trying to create was contrary to conventional wisdom. To be sure, none of the delegates seriously questioned the thesis that democratic government could be suitable for government entities that were small enough to allow citizens to gather together. True, their experience in the governments of the colonies allowed them to believe that a certain type of popular government could be appropriate in a wider area. However, the fact that popular government could exist on the scale of a certain union of 13 states seemed extremely doubtful - especially in the event of further expansion of American borders, which, as everyone then believed, was supposed to continue.

However, by the 1930s, when Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States, the old doctrine had lost its validity - mainly due to the fact that democracy (by the standards of the time) actually existed in this state. The country was now the clear seat of democratic government.

Of course, this extraordinary expansion of space required a new set of political institutions that had never existed in older republics - for example, systems of representation plus political parties, plus the diversity of associations (interest groups, as we would say today) that Tocqueville regarded as vitally important. , and as worthy of praise.

I call attention to this change in the scope of democratic governments, not so much because of its historical interest, as because it contains some analogy with the fourth change I have mentioned. If the primary seat of democracy shifted from the city-state to the nation-state during the 17th and 18th centuries, will it shift over the next century from the nation-state to international organizations?

Expanded scope of democratic governments

Over the past century, the scope of democratic government has grown in another dimension: democratic governments have enormously expanded the scope of their programs and policies. They are doing more today, much more than they once did. The extent of this expansion of the scope of democratic governments is revealed, in part, by the enormous increase in the number of programs and policies requiring government expenditures, transfers, revenue sources, regulations, and the like. Looking at the scope of government from a slightly different perspective, democratic governments have expanded their functions to also protect the rights of citizens, their privileges and provide them with social services 1 .

The change in the scope of government activities is clearly evident in the extraordinary increase in government revenues and expenditures. Total government spending, measured as a share of GDP (at current prices), increased from 1913 to 1992 in France from 8.9% to 50.1%, in Holland from 8.2% to 54.1%, in Great Britain from 13.3% to 51.2%, in the USA - from 8% to 38.5% 2 . Between 1950 and 1990, taxes (as a percentage of GDP) rose by 40% in 17 European countries. Total government cash receipts increased here by almost 70%. In 1990, these governments' cash receipts averaged 45% of GDP, ranging from 64% in Sweden and approximately 56% in Norway and Denmark to 34% in Greece. Government cash receipts were high even in the poorest European democracies: 38% in Portugal and Spain and 34% in Greece 3 .

Even political leaders such as Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in the UK, who openly denounced taxation and the welfare state, made only small cuts in government revenue and spending. Among the 19 longest-established democracies, total government spending averaged slightly less than half of GDP in 1990, and it remained ultimately unchanged in 1997. The extremes of these expenditures ranged from about 60% of GDP in Sweden to about 31% in Japan and the United States.

Although some classical liberals have expressed fears that the increasing scope of government programs and policies could cause enormous harm to the individual liberties of citizens and ultimately even threaten the survival of democratic institutions, experience appears to have eroded their fears. The facts actually suggest that these relationships may even be exactly the opposite. It is in mature democracies, in which the largest governments, in terms of their role in the economy, exist, and civil and political liberties are best secured 4 .

Given the fact that large governments spend a significant portion of their spending on health care, education, maintaining citizens' income levels, and the like, it is not surprising that these countries receive the highest scores on various indicators of social development 5 . The biggest governments seem to be the best. The authors of one recent study of the functioning of governments in 152 countries, after measuring the size of the public sector by indicators such as remittances, subsidies, government consumption as a percentage of GDP, and public sector employment as a percentage of total population, concluded: “Although more "Big governments levy more taxes, they look better on almost every indicator of their performance. The finding that larger governments are better quality is one of the key findings of our research." 6 .

I think we can conclude with some confidence that the increasing scope of government does not fundamentally damage democratic institutions and the political freedoms that are essential to them. Strong evidence can be adduced that they have been indirectly strengthened.

From few countries to many

We are all aware that democratic or predominantly democratic governments are established today in many more countries than at any other time in the history of the world. In 1900-1909 there were 8 democracies in the world, accounting for 17% of all states. In 1940-1949 there were 25 democratic countries, that is, 33% of all the then states of the world. Moreover, until the 1920-30s, the common practice for democratic (according to the concepts of that time) countries was to grant voting rights only to the male population. Although the slightly different criteria and methods used to define democracies today produce somewhat different results, most attempts to distinguish between democracies and nondemocracies reveal a largely comparable set of countries. While leaving some room for final definition of the line separating democratic and non-democratic government, I count approximately 86 countries as of 1994-1997 (that is, 45% of the total number of 192 countries in the world) that I define as "democratic" 7 .

Of course, since the total number of states has also increased manifold, the global expansion of democracy can only maintain momentum if the number of countries in the world increases. If such an increase occurred, it would still be an interesting and important phenomenon. However, the percentage of countries in the world with democratic governments has also increased, along with the percentage of the world's population living under democratic regimes. In 1997, 57.3% of the world's total population lived under democratic governments. 22.6% of the population of all countries were in old democracies, and 34.7% in “new democracies”, including 5.6% in countries with high-level democracies, 1.1% in “mostly democracies” countries", 28% - for the least democratic countries and 0.04% - for microstates with democratic regimes (that is, states with a number of citizens of less than 500 thousand people). The population of undemocratic China alone accounts for 21.2% of the total world population. Another 21.4% of the world's population comes from all other non-democratic countries. Taken together, we can reasonably conclude that a greater number of people than at any other time in human history now have the ability to exercise collective control over the decisions of their governments. 8 .

Has the global expansion of democracy reached its limits? I don't think we can answer this question with much confidence. But the conjectural conclusion may benefit from answering another question: What explains the global expansion of democracy? The fact that democratic systems of government have spread to more countries without collapsing and thus remain in place means that previously unfavorable conditions for the emergence and maintenance of democratic institutions must have been replaced by significantly more favorable conditions . Let me point out nearly half a dozen changes that help explain the global expansion of democracy.

External interference and influence hostile to democratic institutions have decreased, while international support for democracy has increased. The most significant source of overt anti-democratic intervention, especially in Central Europe, collapsed with the Soviet Union; less explicit US support for military regimes in Latin America was significantly reversed in the 1980s; International organizations, from the UN to the World Bank, began, albeit timidly, to support democratization. The world climate has thus become more favorable to the formation and survival of democratic governments.

Most of the collapses of democratic regimes in the 20th century occurred as a result of military coups rather than for other reasons, which was most noticeable in Latin America. However, in the last quarter of a century, military dictatorships were discredited by their political, economic, and in Argentina even military failures. Thus, the most common internal threat to democracy and the main source of coups has been significantly weakened, while control of the military and police by elected civilian leaders has increased.

When democratic institutions are established in a country where anti-democratic beliefs are widespread and democratic attitudes are weak, democratic governments are unlikely to survive, especially in times of crisis and tension to which all countries are subject from time to time. During the 20th century, enormous changes occurred in different countries in the balance of power between democratic and anti-democratic ideologies and beliefs. In the first half of the century, support for the monarchy, hereditary aristocracy and oligarchy, which until that time had been the most common forms of non-democratic government, weakened significantly. Over the next quarter century, the major non-democratic ideologies and the systems of government that supported them - fascism, Nazism, Soviet communism - were finally destroyed by their own disastrous failures in the military, economic and political fields. Although anti-democratic ideologies such as extreme nationalism and religious fundamentalism are persistent obstacles to democratization in some countries, they generally lack the appeal of democracy on the world stage. The importance of democratic ideas in creating and maintaining the legitimacy of power is revealed by the persistence with which authoritarian governments try to disguise the essence of their regimes with pseudo-democratic rhetoric.

Acute cultural conflicts serve as a serious obstacle to the stability of democratic governance. Accordingly, much of the global expansion of democracy has occurred in countries with a relatively high degree of cultural homogeneity, or where cultural differences exist in a form that does not give rise to undue conflict. Moreover, in some countries, such as South Africa, where there is significant potential for cultural conflict, the transition to democracy and its subsequent consolidation is facilitated by careful design of electoral arrangements and political practices that encourage political inclusion and compromise rather than discrimination and conflict.

Finally, the spread of capitalist market economies and their replacement in some countries of centrally controlled economic systems has helped create social structures, attitudes, and demands more conducive to democratic beliefs, democratic practices, and democratic institutions. In many countries around the world, free-market capitalism has been a factor in encouraging economic growth, rising living standards and the formation of a broader middle class. With the development of the middle class, there is an increasing need for many attributes of civil society that are conducive to the emergence and stabilization of democratic institutions: education, freedom of inquiry and communication, property rights, the rule of law, political participation, respect for the rights of the opposition and a number of other attributes that directly or indirectly help support democratic political institutes. Thus, the global spread of market capitalism is accompanied by a global increase in the number of countries characterized by the existence of civil societies more conducive to democratic institutions 9 .

Notes:

1 См. Ole Borre and Elinor Scarbrough. The Scope of Government (1995). Особенно глава 2 "The Growth of Government" (pp.25-54) и глава 9 "Government Intervention in the Economy" (pp.234-280).

2 Angus Maddison. Monitoring the World Economy 1890-1992. - OECD, 1995.

3 Borre and Scarbrough. Table 2.4 (p.37) and Table 2.5 (p.38).

4 This applies to 22 countries that have been consistently democratic since 1950 or even longer. To the 21st country analyzed by Arend Lijphart (Democracies: Patterns of Majoritarian and Consensus Governments in Twenty-One Countries, 1984), I added Costa Rica. With three exceptions, all these countries receive the highest score in Freedom House's ranking of respect for “political rights.” In terms of the level of respect for civil liberties, Belgium, Costa Rica, Germany, Italy, Japan and the UK are rated 2 points; Freedom House gives 1 point to the rest of the countries. (Freedom House uses a seven-point scale for assessing respect for political and civil liberties, in which 1 point means the highest and 7 points the lowest level of “freedom.” - Translator’s Note. )

5 UNDP, Human Development Report 1998 (1998), Table 1.2 (pp.20-21).

6 I am grateful to Rafael La Porta, Florencio López de Silanes, Andrei Shleifer, and Robert Vishny for their kind permission to publish the quotation and data from their unpublished paper, “The Quality of Government.”

7 A more recent count, based on a more rigorous classification, can be found in Larry Diamond, "Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation" (1999) (pp. 24-63) and in "Appendix, Classification of Regimes at the End of 1997" (pp.279-280)

8 I have described this in more detail in Polyarchy, Participation and Opposition (1971), Democracy and its Critics (1989), and On Democracy (1999).

9 The long-term downside of market capitalism is, from a democratic perspective, the creation of massive inequalities in the distribution of resources. It can and is used in ways that impede or undermine the political equality of citizens. See On Democracy: Ch.13 "Why Market-Capitalism Favors Democracy" and Ch.14 "Why Market-Capitalism Harms Democracy" (pp.166-179).

Originally published in Social Research , Vol.66, #3, Fall 1999, pp.915-931

Abridged translation by Grigory Weinstein