Is government contestability an integral part of the definition of democracy?
| Date | 01 February 2017 |
| Published date | 01 February 2017 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0263395715619635 |
| Subject Matter | Research Articles |
research-article2016
Research Article
Politics
2017, Vol. 37(1) 67 –81
Is government contestability
© The Author(s) 2016
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an integral part of the definition DOI: 10.1177/0263395715619635
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of democracy?
Aris Trantidis
King’s College London, UK
Abstract
Is government contestability an integral part of the definition of democracy? The answer to this
question affects the way we classify political systems in which, despite a formally open political
structure, a dominant political group faces weak opposition from other political parties and civil
society organizations – an indication of a low degree of government contestability. In Robert
Dahl’s polyarchy, contestability is an essential dimension of democracy and, consequently, one-
party dominance is classified as an ‘inclusive hegemony’ outside his conception of democracy. For
procedural definitions of democracy, however, dominant party systems are legitimate outcomes of
electoral competition provided that there have been no formal restrictions to the exercise of civil
and political rights. The article examines the boundaries between democracy and authoritarianism,
broadens the notion of authoritarian controls to include soft manipulative practices and explains
why government contestability should be regarded as a constitutive property of democracy.
Keywords
authoritarianism, democracy, dominant party systems, hybrid regimes, pluralism, Robert Dahl
Received: 4th February 2015; Revised version received: 7th May 2015; Accepted: 6th July 2015
The conceptual boundary separating democracy from authoritarianism requires further
clarification. All definitions describe democracy ‘at minimum’ as a system that provides
citizens with political rights which they are free to exercise in a political structure open to
public participation and electoral competition. This procedural description of democracy,
however, is complemented by the pluralist approach to political competition, most promi-
nently represented in Robert Dahl’s conception of democracy as polyarchy, which
requires that, in addition to the existence of an inclusive structure of public participation,
an elected government must face a considerable degree of political contestation generated
by the activities of other political and social forces during its tenure (Dahl, 1971: 2–9,
Corresponding author:
Aris Trantidis, Department of Political Economy, King’s College London, Room S2.42, Strand Building, Strand
Campus, London WC2R 2LS, UK.
Email: aris.trantidis@kcl.ac.uk
68
Politics 37(1)
1982: 6). These two approaches to democracy differ as to whether government contesta-
bility is a constitutive part of ‘empirical’ democracy and must be included in the standards
which political societies must meet in order to qualify as democracies, or whether it is
simply a (desirable) outcome of political participation in a democracy. This differentia-
tion poses a noticeable problem in empirical studies seeking to classify dominant party
systems with a formal structure for public participation and a low degree of government
contestability – defined as the state of affairs in which, despite the presence of elections
open to all parties, a single political force stays in power over a long period of time facing
no serious challenge by other political forces with no foreseeable prospect of losing
power due to persistently weak opposition from other political parties and civil society
organizations.
A procedural approach to democracy would regard low levels of government contest-
ability as a legitimate outcome insofar as the formal process of participation is open and
participating citizens are unobstructed by typical authoritarian controls that block formal
processes of political participation, such as the exercise of violence, physical threat or
electoral fraud, barriers to entry targeting political opponents, the outlawing of political
activities, the systematic harassment of the opposition and the censorship of political
expression. In the procedural sense, whether citizens choose to ‘contest or not contest’ is
a choice of political behaviour that falls inside the definitional boundaries of democracy,
as long as the democratic process is open to participation. On the other hand, Dahl’s
(1971) polyarchy has a more demanding standard, according to which a regime that
exhibits a low degree of government contestation is classified as an ‘inclusive hegem-
ony’, a distinct political system that is open to citizens’ participation but displays low
levels of government contestability (pp. 8, 34). Here, the observed pattern of political
behaviour - a limited degree of government contestability - is elevated to the standard that
defines the boundaries between democracies and non-democracies.
Given that many contemporary dictatorships rely less on traditional repressive meth-
ods and, instead, use more extensively soft manipulation and co-optation tactics to thwart
political competition (Boix and Svolik, 2013; Frantz and Kendall-Taylor, 2014;
Gerschewski, 2013), defining the boundaries between democracy and authoritarianism
has become a more pronounced question. Dictators allow regularly held elections and the
existence of political parties in order to mimic democracies, with the purpose of legiti-
mizing and retrenching their regimes (Ezrow and Frantz, 2011). Following this trend, a
political force can become dominant by primarily relying on co-optation and discrimina-
tion in the allocation of economic and social resources, while making very little use of the
conventional methods of political repression. As the next section indicates, these ‘low-
repression’, ‘low-contestability’ regimes are the ‘greyest’ political systems for the pur-
pose of classification. Can we characterize these systems as authoritarian even if the
recorded level of repression is low and the leaders can be voted out of office?
Leaders who enjoy high popularity scores in regimes where the observed electoral
irregularities are not significant enough to distort actual voting preferences may claim
that their political dominance is the result of their popularity and not the outcome of any
observed ‘unsystematic’ flaws in the dimension of political participation (Cf. Duvanov,
2013). Existing accounts in the literature have responded to this claim by stating that the
elections held are unfair primarily because they observe tactics of soft manipulation tar-
geting electoral behaviour. But the notion of fairness in theoretical terms has not yet been
fully specified – particularly with reference to how these unfair practices differ in relation
to similar pathologies observed in several modern democracies too. In this regard,
Trantidis
69
extending the boundaries of non-democracy too far in order to cover this type of regime
can be criticized for conceptual stretching. What is missing is an argument explaining
why a limited degree of government contestability stemming from formally open elec-
tions is a dimension of political regime classification – distinguishing democracy from
authoritarianism – and not just a dimension of political behaviour.
The contribution of this article is that it aims to tackle this definitional problem by
addressing the source of this conceptual ambiguity: ascertaining the way practices other
than overt repression restrict rather than just influence political behaviour, and answering
the question which state of affairs in political competition obstructs effective political par-
ticipation. A stronger argument here will allow researchers to disqualify ‘low-repression,
low-contestability’ regimes from the class of democracies instead of trying to scrutinize
how extensively and systematically they have relied on typical authoritarian controls in
order to directly restrict political participation.
This article extends the concept of authoritarianism to include the use of soft tactics of
political manipulation, such as co-optation in patron–client relations and its flip side,
discrimination in the allocation of economic and social resources. It argues that concep-
tualizing democracy in purely procedural terms fails to capture how these tactics serve as
informal restrictions to effective political competition in a formally open political system.
It defends the view that authoritarianism can be conceptually broadened to include the
input of informal socioeconomic sanctions in altering the opportunities for effective polit-
ical participation. The article then juxtaposes and evaluates the procedural definitions and
the pluralist approach to democracy. It explains why Dahl’s conception of democracy is
more realistic about how a modern political system can empower its citizens and protect
them from domination by a single political force.
Conceptual ambiguity over the status of contestability:
implications for regime classification
In procedural terms, democracy is defined as a system that provides citizens with regular
institutional opportunities to change the governing officials, and a political mechanism
that allows the population to influence major decisions and choose among various con-
tenders for political office (Lipset, 1960: 45). This system requires fair, honest and peri-
odic elections in which candidates freely compete for votes and in which virtually all the
adult population is eligible to vote (Huntington, 1991: 7). The...
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