«Democracy, Law and Comparative Politics

Outline of O'Donnell's Article on Definition of Democracy

1. Current definitions don't meet our needs:
1. The so-called minimalist definitions are not so minimal
1. A minimal definition is one that focuses narrowly on the presence of elections, as in Schumpeter's "a democracy is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people's vote."
2. But all the minimalists (Schumpeter, Huntington and Przeworski) require the existence of civil and political freedoms, refer to legal and moral principles, require "free and fair" elections, etc.
2. Maximalist and prescriptive definitions are unhelpful
3. Realistic definitions like Dahl's might be useful but need to be "precised" (he does not say this, but the rest of the article is structured around Dahl's listing of the attributes of a polyarchy or democracy)
2. His definition starts with the regime conditions listed by Dahl, but he adds to them:
1. Democratic elections must be (by definition)
1. Competitive
2. Free
3. Egalitarian
4. Decisive
5. Inclusive
2. They must also be (as a matter of regime survival) institutionalized
3. They must also (to exist at all) be supported by "political freedoms"
1. So we need to think about political freedoms as the conditions that make it more likely that elections will be democratic
2. Dahl's list of freedoms (expression, association, access to information) is not exhaustive
3. The list we find necessary changes over time
4. We will never be able to make the final and complete list.
4. In summary, a democracy is an institutionalized wager: we give everyone an equal chance to vote and run for office, and take the chance that they will choose the wrong person or policy.
3. This wager has to be embedded in a democratic state (especially the part of the state that is the legal system):
1. Democracies need a legal system that enacts and backs the notion of agency that is implicit in democracy by assigning and guaranteeing the rights of "agency" to each individual.
2. The counterpart of this assignment of rights is political citizenship. If political citizenship is a prerequisite for democracy, then we need to look at the actual effectiveness of the legal system in backing political citizenship.
3. Since we can't decide on the limits of political citizenship, we have to look at the effectiveness of the legal system in backing overall agency, which is the freedom to make choices and accept the consequences.
4. Finally, in a democratic legal system no one can be above the law (de legibus solutus)
4. The social context is also relevant to the "democraticness" of a country, in that it makes it more or less likely that people are actually capable of exercising the rights listed above (just as civil and political freedoms make it more likely that people will be able to exercise the right to vote in a democratic way):
1. We cannot ignore material poverty because the lack of resources can make the free choice that is an essential condition of agency an illusion;
2. and can't ignore legal poverty because the lack of access to an effective legal system can make political citizenship an illusion.