Scott Mainwaring and Tarek Masoud, August 2022
The last fifteen years have witnessed a "democratic recession." Democracies previously thought to be well-established--Hungary, Poland, Brazil, and even the United States--have been threatened by the rise of ultra-nationalist and populist leaders who pay lip-service to the will of the people while daily undermining the freedom and pluralism that are the foundations of democratic governance. The possibility of democratic collapse where we least expected it has added new urgency to the age-old inquiry into how democracy, once attained, can be made to last.
In Democracy in Hard Places, Scott Mainwaring and Tarek Masoud bring together a distinguished cast of contributors to illustrate how democracies around the world continue to survive even in an age of democratic decline. Collectively, they argue that we can learn much from democratic survivals that were just as unexpected as the democratic erosions that have occurred in some corners of the developed world. Just as social scientists long believed that well-established, Western, educated, industrialized, and rich democracies were immortal, so too did they assign little chance of democracy to countries that lacked these characteristics. And yet, in defiance of decades of social science wisdom, many countries that were bereft of these hypothesized enabling conditions for democracy not only achieved it, but maintained it year after year. How does democracy persist in countries that are ethnically heterogenous, wracked by economic crisis, and plagued by state weakness? What is the secret of democratic longevity in hard places?
This book--the first to date to systematically examine the survival persistence of unlikely democracies--presents nine case studies in which democracy emerged and survived against the odds. Adopting a comparative, cross-regional perspective, the authors derive lessons about what makes democracy stick despite tumult and crisis, economic underdevelopment, ethnolinguistic fragmentation, and chronic institutional weakness. By bringing these cases into dialogue with each other, Mainwaring and Masoud derive powerful theoretical lessons for how democracy can be built and maintained in places where dominant social science theories would cause us to least expect it.
Democracy in Hard Places
Tarek Masoud Scott Mainwaring | Aug. 05, 2022
Abstract
How does democracy persist for long periods of time in countries that are poor, ethnically heterogenous, wracked by economic crisis, and plagued by state weakness? In Democracy in Hard Places, leading scholars of comparative political regimes attempt to answer this question by examining cases of unlikely democratic survival in “hard places”: countries that lack the structural factors and exist outside of the contexts that scholars have long associated with democracy’s emergence and endurance. Democracies in hard places overcome underdevelopment, ethnolinguistic diversity, state weakness, and patriarchal cultural norms. The book offers rich, empirically grounded theoretical debates about whether democracy survives only because a balance of power and formal institutions constrain actors from overthrowing it, or if it also survives in part because some critical actors are normatively committed to it. The book presents nine case studies—written by leading experts in the discipline—of episodes in which democracy has emerged and survived against long odds. The cases are drawn from almost every region of the world that formed part of the “third wave” of democracy. In each case, many of the conditions conventionally associated with durable democracy were either attenuated or absent. Each case study details the constellation of obstacles to democracy faced by a given country, describes the major political actors with the potential to impact regime trajectories, and explains how the threat of democratic breakdown was staved off or averted.
SELECTED REVIEWS
"We are living through a democratic recession, reversing a decades-long expansion of elections and democratic governance around the world. Why is this happening and what could be done to arrest the decline? This compelling volume tackles this question in an unusual way-by looking at cases (such as India, South Africa, and Indonesia) where democracy has endured, despite having few of the pre-conditions that tend to be associated with success. These rich and carefully researched accounts remind readers that not everything is determined by economic development and other such structural factors. Broadly shared norms and values and specific policy choices all make a difference. Above all, political leaders matter. You cannot have democracy without democrats." -- Fareed Zakaria, The Washington Post
"We are living through an era when it is hard not to be aware of democracy's fragility and concerned about its future. Rather than provide another study of democratic decay, Democracy in Hard Places offers us analyses by some of political science's most eminent scholars of how democracy manages to survive, even in ostensibly inauspicious settings. Democracy in Hard Places will be invaluable to those seeking to understand democracy's contemporary problems as well as come up with solutions to them." -- Sheri Berman, Professor of Political Science, Barnard College, Columbia University
"The recent scholarly turn to more structuralist explanations of regime change has left an important question unanswered: many democracies in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America continue to 'overperform' the expectations of existing theories. Why―and how―do fragile democracies survive despite daunting domestic and international conditions? This volume offers some important answers." -- Steven Levitsky, David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government, Harvard University
India's Democratic Longevity and Its Troubled Trajectory
https://watson.brown.edu/files/watson/imce/news/2022/Democracy%20in%20Hard%20Places%20-%20India%27s%20Democratic%20Longevity%20and%20Its%20Troubled%20Trajectory.pdf
By Ashutosh Varshney
At the core of this chapter lies a paradox.*
On one hand, India is the longest lasting democracy of the developing world; on the other hand, since 2014 a democratic decline has unquestionably set in. In their recent reports, the two most widely read annual assessments of democracy worldwide, by Freedom House and the V-Dem Institute, have noted India’s democratic retrogression in no uncertain terms. Freedom House now calls India only “partly free,” and the V-Dem Institute says India has become an “electoral autocracy” (Freedom House 2021b; V-Dem Institute 2021). Whether or not we find these terms precise, India’s democratic diminution is not in doubt. With the rise of Narendra Modi to power, the world’s biggest democracy has entered a manifestly shaky period. But how should we conceptually map the shakiness? My basic claim in this chapter is that India after 2014 is not a case of democratic collapse but one of democratic erosion or democratic backsliding.1 I will use the latter two terms interchangeably. The analytical task of this chapter is twofold. What explains India’s democratic longevity? And how might one explain the recent downward trajectory? My attempt here is to provide an integrated argument, which seeks to answer both questions. But before the argument is presented and to anchor the detailed discussion, it seems fitting to present a brief overview of India’s democratic record. For most democratic theorists, competitive elections are a necessary condition for the functioning of a democracy. “No elections, no democracy” is a theoretical dictum of widespread acceptability. So let us begin with India’s electoral record. Since independence in 1947, India has held 17 national and 389 state elections. Power has changed hands eight times in the national capital and tens of times at the state level. The latter phenomenon is by now so common that political scientists have stopped counting state-level government turnovers. Until 1992–93, the third tier of government—at the town and village level—was the only unelected tier, but a constitutional amendment finally filled that gap, too. Since the mid-1990s, roughly three million local legislators have been elected every five years. Other than a twenty-one-month period of nationwide authoritarianism (June 1975–March 1977) and a few electoral suspensions in areas of unrest and insurgency, elections have decided who will rule India and its states and, after 1992–93, its local governments as well. This has been true even in the period of democratic backsliding since 2014. Several democratic institutions have been challenged, causing the erosion, but the integrity of elections has not been undermined. Indeed, the idea that competitive elections are the only way to form governments has been the institutionalized political commonsense of the country. Such institutionalization means that for a long time now, no major political actor or organization has proposed a non-electoral way of coming to power. The question of whether there is more to democracy than elections has remained unsettled and contested, but there is no doubt that competitive elections have formed the core of India’s democratic imagination. It is hard to predict whether the electoral core of democracy will remain unimpaired in the coming years, but as of now, despite the ongoing democratic erosion, the electoral principle remains intact. Modi may not have lost nationally since 2014, but he has lost a number of state elections, which include states that are, politically and economically, extremely significant. A Trump-like campaign, questioning election integrity in the face of defeat, something not uncommon in many parts of the world, has not been launched. In the mid-1960s, Barrington Moore was among the first to note India’s democratic credentials: “[A]s a political species, [India] does belong to the modern world. At the time of Nehru’s death in 1964, political democracy had existed for seventeen years. If imperfect, the democracy was no mere sham. . . . Political democracy may seem strange in both an Asian setting and one without an industrial revolution” (Moore 1966, 314). Roughly half a decade later, in what has become a foundational text of democratic theory, Robert Dahl identified India as “a deviant case . . . indeed a polyarchy” (Dahl 1971, 68–69). About two decades later Dahl was even more emphatic, calling India “a leading contemporary exception” to democratic theory (Dahl 1989, 253). Finally, after a little over another decade, Adam Przeworski et al. (2000, 87) argued that in their 1950–90 international dataset, India’s democratic longevity was the most surprising: “The odds against democracy in India were extremely high.”2 A fairly substantial body of literature has sought to explain why India stayed democratic for so long in a theoretically counterintuitive setting (Chhibber 2014; Kohli 2001; Kothari 1970b; Moore 1966; Varshney 1998, 2013; Weiner 1989). In this chapter, I engage the comparative or theoretical literature of a more recent vintage, as well as probe the new datasets that measure democracy worldwide. I advance two arguments. First, seeking a reexamination of how democratic India has been, I draw a distinction between India as an electoral democracy and India as a liberal democracy. Using political theory, India’s political history, and the V-Dem dataset (Coppedge et al. 2021), I argue that India’s electoral record is considerably better than its performance as a liberal democracy. India has, on the whole, been electorally vibrant, but its democracy has substantial liberal deficits. Under the twice-elected Modi regime (2014–present), these deficits have widened quite alarmingly. Substantially eroding civil freedoms, minority rights, and institutional constraints on executive power, these deficits have primarily affected the liberal side of democracy, not the electoral side.3 In my argument below, I will call competitive elections a minimal democratic requirement, while proposing that a fuller, or deeper, democracy also constrains governments between elections—by guaranteeing civil freedoms, protecting minority rights, and viewing executive authority as institutionally checked and delimited. India’s recent democratic erosion is about the latter, not about the former, meaning that India remains electorally democratic but it has rolled back the democratic deepening that was under way for decades. Second, for explaining democratic longevity, my argument concentrates on the primacy of elite choices, not on the structural or cultural determinants of democratic longevity that several democratic theorists have privileged, though not all. My focus on elites is divided into three parts: (1) the founding moment and the formative period of democracy, (2) the period since the only nationwide collapse of democracy (1975–77) until 2014; and (3) the period of erosion, though not collapse, since the rise of Modi (2014–present). In the first period, I demonstrate how elite values played a big role in institutionalizing democracy. In the second period, I argue that while values explain the behavior of a segment of elites, especially those who led some of the constitutionally given independent institutions of oversight, such as the Supreme Court and the Election Commission, a large section of political e
Tarek Masoud is the Ford Foundation Professor of Democracy and Governance at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. His research focuses on political development in Arabic-speaking and Muslim-majority countries. He is the author of Counting Islam: Religion, Class, and Elections in Egypt (Cambridge University Press, 2014), The Arab Spring: Pathways of Repression and Reform with Jason Brownlee and Andrew Reynolds (Oxford University Press, 2015), and several articles and book chapters. He is a 2009 Carnegie Scholar, a trustee of the American University in Cairo, and the recipient of grants from the National Science Foundation and the Paul and Daisy Soros foundation, among others. He holds an AB from Brown and a PhD from Yale, both in political science.
