Anybody who has spent even a little time going through the literature on democracy knows that the question of measurement has generated vast effort and little consensus. Researchers not only struggle to find appropriate data, they differ with each other on what it is they are seeking indicators of; on whether to think of democracy as a dichotomy, a continuous variable, something in between, or as some entity to which these terms are not even appropriate; and on how to weight the components of what is – and this is a rare point of agreement – a multidimensional concept. When classifying national states they frequently differ, with much debate, for example, over what adjectives if any ought to demarcate the precise sort of democracy established or re-established in the many states that embarked on a “democratic transition” from the 1970s into the 1990s (Collier and Levitsky Reference Collier and Levitsky1997). Such recent questions have hardly resolved a lot of already classic classificational conundra, which continue to baffle those not wholly focused on the most recent twists and turns in democracy’s history. (How, for example, was one to weight the deprivation of voting rights for large numbers of non-white US citizens between the end of Reconstruction and the 1960s?)Footnote ¹

This will not be another essay that proposes some superior definition whose virtues ought to drive competitors from the field. It will be an exploration of why democracy has proved so resistant to consensus on measurement and, a closely related matter, to definition. Some parts of the argument have been made before but what I hope to show is that the inability of social scientists to hold a precise concept in their sights is rooted in the confluence of several different types of causes. The measurement problem is not primarily a question of data nor the definitional question one of conceptual precision.

The history of democracy has been a history of change. When one of its keenest students, and prophets, Alexis de Tocqueville (Reference Tocqueville1994 [1835, 1840], 1: 57) marveled in the 1830s at the extent of successful democratization in a country born not very much earlier, he thought the advancement of suffrage had gone about as far as could be imagined, but it had not. After suggesting that “[w]hen a nation begins to modify the elective qualification, it may easily be foreseen that, sooner or later, that qualification will be entirely abolished”, he concludes that “[a]t the present day the principle of the sovereignty of the people has acquired in the United States all the practical development that the imagination can conceive”. But in the early twenty-first century few would regard as terribly democratic any country in which, as in Tocqueville’s America, women could not vote, millions were enslaved, and ethnically distinctive minorities were denied citizenship rights. Democracy’s defining institutions have altered as have ideas about what democracy means, could mean, or should mean. They have altered well beyond what an unusually acute observer in the 1830s imagined as even possible. The student of democracy has as the object of study a moving target that bobs and weaves, advances and retreats. Both its ideas and its practice engender conflict, and some of that conflict tends to transform institutions, rather than just reproduce them. I set out six key points in abbreviated form below, then develop their implications.

I shall try to show that democracy inherently generates a variety of tensions, including tensions about how to realize democracy itself. I shall then argue that democratic government provides fertile ground for the development of a wide variety of social movements, some of which challenge current institutionalizations of democracy and that whenever governments make credible claims to democratic legitimation such movements are to be found. I will then conclude in a speculative vein by pointing to some of the tensions of the twenty-first century that may reshape democracy in the years ahead.

Democracy is not just a set of rules

The more quantitatively inclined among students of democracy have with some frequency attempted to develop sets of indicators. Such indicators might include: the presence or absence of electoral mechanisms; the inclusiveness of voting rights; the degree of respect for a range of civil liberties; the degree to which elected officials actually exercise effective power (rather than military officers, unelected civilian bosses, hereditary monarchs or lords, foreign colonial governors, or de facto proconsuls).Footnote ⁴ Some students of democracy, indeed, have insisted that democracy must be defined exclusively as a set of procedures,Footnote ⁵ and in some variants the procedures are limited to the conduct of elections.Footnote ⁶ Such efforts at measurement and at definitional clarity, in this arena as in others, are vital aspects of scholarly inquiry. But when we notice that over the more than two centuries of modern democratic history a great many brilliant writers have patiently and impatiently told us how we should define democracy and a smaller but still considerable number of skilled researchers have proposed ingenious ways of measuring it without having produced any consensus, we ought to try to understand why. It is the wager of this essay that the ongoing lack of consensus is not only telling us something about a troublesome conceptFootnote ⁷, but is also a clue to some fundamental properties of the entire history of democracy.

One of the reasons consensus has been wanting – and there are others, to be explored below – is that something is missing from many definitions and measures, and sensing this some other scholar tries to fill the void. Unsuccessfully. There is something missing that is not procedural and we can get a sense of part of what it is by glancing at some episodes when the state of democracy was in contention.

A long campaign for “universal suffrage” (for adult men, that is) yielded a momentary victory in the early months of France’s revolution of 1848. A sense of rebirth was underscored by fixing that first election for Easter Sunday. Rural voters formed processions as they trooped across the country to sometimes distant polling places, along with drums and flags, and led by local mayors, priests, and other notables such as Tocqueville, who left us a vivid paragraph (1942[1893], pp. 100-101; Huard Reference Huard1991, p. 38). To take another instance, consider Haiti in the fall of 1987, gearing up for its first presidential election in a generation, a prospect unenthusiastically faced by supporters of the incumbent regime. As that election approached, polling places, churches and radio stations were targets for violence. In one dramatic incident known to foreign reporters in Port-au-Prince, citizens queuing up to vote at a downtown school were attacked with machetes and gunfire. Perhaps fifteen died (French Reference French1987, A1). Here is a third witness: If we credit historian Edward Thompson’s (Reference Thompson1985, p. 200) account of his time in a tank in Italy in World War Two, his comrades were “democrats and anti-Fascists” who “knew what they fought for”.

A mere three snapshots of instants in complex struggles drawn from different countries, centuries, and kinds of conflict can hardly be more than suggestive. But if we ask what it was that captivated nineteenth century French peasants, and for which twentieth century Tommies and Haiti’s poor were in different ways running the risk of death, it is not terribly plausible that the answer can be limited to a change in procedures for validating elite incumbents of office.

What it is that is affectively compelling must be something of a different kind. I want to venture the hypothesis that part of democracy’s power as a legitimating formula is found in its at least intermittent power to arouse passions. Consider one 16^th century formulation: “Democracie, when the multitude have government” (Fleming Reference Fleming1576, p. 198). As a definition, this is certainly inadequate by the standards of the constructors of indexes. It does not tell us how the multitude are to wield power, nor over what, nor even which people we are talking about. For those who insist on procedural definitions, and perhaps for those who insist on any sort of readily observable indicator, such a notion is probably vacuous and perhaps devoid of sense. But if we ask what it is that people are from time to time willing to die for, and to kill for, it seems a good deal closer to the mark.

Procedures might be a part of the mix, when those procedures seem to have something to do with freedom or equality or recognition or participation or self-rule or some other currently contested democratic attribute. But the rules on behalf of which people fought yesterday may not solve all the problems of tomorrow and those rules may come to seem to be barriers to freedom or equality or recognition or participation or self-rule, inducing other people or even the same people to fight again.

The lesson in this simple exercise is that democracy as a formula of legitimation is not identical to democracy as a system of rules. What makes democracy legitimate, to be sure, may owe something, in an even minimally established democracy, to a sense of ethical obligation in following properly established rules, the sort of deep-seated justification that Max Weber thought a hallmark of “rational-legal” authority. But it would be a great error to simply think of democracy as exhausted by these sorts of justifications. There is also the belief that democracy does indeed have something to do with popular self-rule.

Democratic authority is often claimed for the actions of elected bodies or executive bureaucracies but it is also claimed for those who defy those bodies. In whose actions is democracy made manifest? Properly elected or appointed officials under attack often claim that the legality of their actions is precisely where democracy is embodied, but sometimes not all are convinced and – as we discuss further below – social movement activists often successfully claim it is themselves, not the legally elected or appointed, in whom democracy inheres. It is a very interesting question why representatives and bureaucrats are able to successfully claim democratic authority at some times and not others, but this is not a question on which Weber is at all helpful.Footnote ⁸ The rules by which incumbents are selected and the rules by which they go on to make consequential decisions will frequently appear to some, and sometimes appear to many, to be violations of the claims of self-governing peoplehood on which assent to a considerable degree rests.

Of course any realistic political scientist will be quick to point out the myriad ways in which any such notions are impossibly vague, or even just plain impossible, that they are merely fictions, and that the real object of our study must be the rules. And this leads me to precisely the points I want to make here. There is an inherent tension between democracy as a legitimating formula and the particular rules, which have been provisionally taken to be the embodiment of that democracy. A full account of democracy must take into account the many times when we attempt to alter that framework to produce a set of procedures that more closely approximates the democratic state about which we care passionately.

Guy Hermet (Reference Hermet1984, p. 137) distinguishes democrats by conviction and by convenience, those who are of the view that democracy is a superior way for people to govern themselves, as opposed to those hoping for some personal benefit from democratic advance. Hermet provocatively contends that conviction has played a much lesser role than convenience in advancing democracy, and that no one is quicker to be disappointed by democracy in practice than a democrat by conviction. While the precise mix of conviction and convenience is worth considerable scrutiny (including their intertwinings), my simple contention here is that the role of conviction is far from zero. As for disappointment with democracy in practice: exactly so, which helps fuel the next movement for more democracy.

Democracy is multifaceted

It is a commonplace to speak of democracy as a multidimensional concept. But the consequences of this challenge to definition and measurement have not always been appreciated in their significance for the history of democracy. Dahl’s (Reference Dahl1989, p. 221) especially influential formulation tells us that “polyarchy is a political order distinguished by the presence of seven institutions all of which must be present”. A glance at the seven shows some of them to be themselves multidimensional. A resourceful empirical researcher, moreover, might want more than one indicator of these 7+ criteria, all essential in Dahl’s view.Footnote ⁹ But Dahl insists that polyarchy is a good bit short of democracy. Differently put, democracy is polyarchy plus still other criteria. In general, those who seek indicators and those who seek definitional precision – two endeavors with much in common – need to ponder how to weigh guarantees of citizen rights against the state; state capacities to impose authoritative decisions on citizens; the range of activities in which the rights of citizens are equal; the ways in which powerholders achieve power; the ways in which powerholders arrive at decisions with consequences for citizens; the extent and quality of citizen participation; the ways in which citizens become informed; the ways in which political competition is and is not a level playing field. Compare quantitative studies and you will find different things measured and then combined into an index in different ways.Footnote ¹⁰

This multidimensionality is not just a measurement problem for scholars, but a source of change. People seeking many different things can often find some aspect of democracy to plausibly weave on their banners.

Democracy’s inclusionary claims conflict with its exclusionary practices

“[A]ll men” may have been created equal as one of the quotable foundational formulas had it, but they certainly were not legislated equal, as has been observed countless times. The inclusionary claims that stir the heart were contradicted by a complex structure of exclusions, among which I will stress three: distinctions in rights of participation among citizens, distinctions in rights between citizens and noncitizens, and distinctions in resources among legally equal citizens.

Democracy in some countries in an undemocratic world

Among the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, the territorial aspect of the divide of citizens and noncitizens deserves special attention. If we ask what is the entity whose democratic character we wish to evaluate, the answer since the late eighteenth century has generally been “the national states”. Although we might speak of villages, provinces, international organizations, families, factories, universities, many other institutions, and even entire ways of life as having or lacking a democratic character, for the most part the term figures in discussions of national political institutions. When without other qualifications we speak of “the world’s democracies” we readily understand that we are identifying a subset of national states, not international institutions, families, folkways, or villages.

National states inherently link several different sorts of entities: a government ruling more or less authoritatively over some territory and its inhabitants; the territory over which that government’s authority and no other legitimately operates; a population regarded as being subject to its laws and who, if endowed with rights as well as obligations by virtue of being members of the national community, are its citizens; and often a nation, a collection of people claimed to have a common identity extending into the past and future to whom it is sometimes said that the state rightfully belongs.

In the seventeenth century, the murderous civil and interstate wars of Europe led to the spread of the notion of sovereignty, of large self-governing territorial states that could deal with one another as autonomous entities. When we attach the adjective “sovereign”, we are taking the authority of the state over its territory to run right up to the border, to be superior to whatever authority may reside in territorial subunits contained within it, and to not be constrained by external or supranational authority other than by treaties to which it has freely consented. This strengthened state could pacify its own territory; the states together could both negotiate peace among themselves and construct rules to limit the destructiveness of warfare. Leviathan was the antidote to anarchic violence. In the turbulence of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, movements in Europe’s western hemispheric possessions sought states of their own. The era’s independence wars were settled through the recognition of many new such entities.

But over the next century, Europe launched a new wave of colonial conquest. According to data gathered on the eve of the Second World War, 32 percent of the human population were living in colonial dependencies (Clark Reference Clark1936, 23)Footnote ¹⁶. The war’s devastations were an opportunity for a variety of movements in those colonies to assert, with success, their claims to statehood. By the mid-1970s, virtually the entire population of the planet was living in one or another of such putatively sovereign entities.

The question of democracy was a question of how it was that such a sovereign entity was politically organized. To the extent that those subject to its authority were citizens, to the extent that those citizen’s rights were extensive and equal, to the extent that those who held power were accountable to those citizens, to the extent that those citizens were secure from arbitrary state action, and could debate, protest, organize, and challenge that government, it had by the late twentieth century became common to call such government “democracy”.

So democracy was something characteristic of sovereign states and more characteristic of some than others. The important rights were citizens’ rights; the important lines of accountability involved the accountability of the governments of those states to their own citizens. From its inception the notion of sovereign entities was a simplified fiction, an aspiration of states, rather than a precise description. Smugglers knew borders could be crossed, criminals challenged the state’s monopoly on force, and states sought to control other nominally sovereign states. Despite many occasions at which diplomats make ceremonial displays of the equality of their states, there have always been enormous differences among them in autonomy and influence, as much a truism in the early twenty-first century as ever. Michael Goodhart (Reference Goodhart2005) has shown very interestingly how significant for theories of how democracy could work and should work was the fundamental presumption that it was a sovereign state that was the essential conceptual field within which notions of democracy operated.

Because the claim of democracy, like that of sovereignty, was a claim made about the national states, democratization could take place in some of those states without disturbing transnational structures of domination. A sovereign state in a system of sovereign states could become more – or less – democratic without any necessary alteration of its place in that system. Indeed, democratization was especially prone to advance in some of the wealthier and more powerful states. Nineteenth and twentieth century observers could be impressed by the degree to which citizens of some of the states were securing equal rights within those states and write wonderingly or anxiously of the advance of democracy, despite increasing inequalities of power on a world scale.

Any history of world democracy would surely pay significant attention to such colonial powers as Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and the United States. The very places pioneering the advancement of citizens’ rights were also major players in establishing global hierarchies. Pride in their own democratizing institutions and pride in domination over colonial subjects blended in the belief that their mastery liberated those subjects from local tyrannies. In a further elaboration, champions of one’s own state’s colonial domination could proclaim their imperial vision superior to that of their rivals because their own aimed at liberation while their rivals merely subjugated (Go and Foster Reference Go and Foster2003; Conklin Reference Conklin1997; Cooper and Stoler 1997). For the United States, for example, Jefferson’s equation of the us’s westward expansion with the “Empire of Liberty” was echoed two centuries later when a us president claimed that the occupation of another country by us forces showed that “freedom is on the march” (Foner Reference Foner1998, p. 50; Sanger Reference Sanger2004, p. A1).

In Juan Linz’s (Reference Linz2000 [1975]) invaluable taxonomic exploration of the variety of nondemocratic regimes a distinctive place is allotted to “racial democracy”, a category most clearly exemplified by South Africa for decades before 1994, a period when competitive electoral politics existed among that country’s white minority from which the great majority, non-white, were excluded. For Linz this is not a variant of “democracy” but of “authoritarianism”. We readily see British, French, Dutch or Belgian history for two centuries as heading toward democracy and South African as heading somewhere else until the 1990s. But is the distinction quite so clear if we think about the political structures of colonial empires taken as a whole? The metropolitan zone’s residents, or at least the adult citizens among them, may have chosen the imperial government in an increasingly democratic fashion.Footnote ¹⁷ However, if twentieth century Great Britain could be said to have governed itself democratically the British Empire as a whole involved exclusions quite as radical as South Africa’s. Less than one person in ten under British rule in the 1930s even lived in the United Kingdom (Clark Reference Clark1936, p. 23)Footnote ¹⁸. That the exclusion rested on the citizen/noncitizen distinction, buttressed by distance and non-contiguity, to a considerable degree insulated British political institutions from Indian grievances. We see here how effectively the citizen/noncitizen distinction permits people to see Britain as a fountainhead of democracy even at the height of Empire while casting South Africa out of the democratic category. Democracy is taken as something that should apply to citizens only.

As yet another indication of the shifting mix of exclusion and inclusion that has characterized the entire history of democracy, we may take note of the institutions of self-government set up by nineteenth century Boers moving north away from British domination. Their Republic of Natalia had an Assembly of Representatives of the People “elected by universal franchise of white males” by 1838; the later Orange Free State had no property or wealth qualifications for those born there, although new immigrants were subject to such restrictions (as codified in 1877) (Giliomee Reference Giliomee2003, Reference Giliomee2004). One prominent comparative student of democracy at the onset of the twentieth century, James Bryce (Reference Bryce1901, I: 380), saw them as “highly democratic” and was especially impressed by the Orange Free State: “an ideal commonwealth” (Bryce, Reference Bryce1899, 314). Few students of democracy have shared Bryce’s interest, let al.one enthusiasm. But twentieth century Afrikaners sometimes took pride in their own democratic traditions, despite the ill-repute that racial exclusion has earned their twentieth century institutions in everyone else’s eyes.Footnote ¹⁹

In exploring the intellectual history of democracy’s intertwined inclusions and exclusions, it is interesting to consider that creative champion of parliaments, proportional representation, personal freedoms and women’s rights, John Stuart Mill. Not only did he advocate that such principles were to be advanced in England but in Britain’s “possessions in America and Australia” as well, and he passionately denounced existing colonial structures in those places (Mill Reference Mill1991[1861], p. 337). There were, however, other colonies wholly incapable of self-rule, whose cultures were hopelessly resistant to freedom, and which had to have colonial masters if they were to be decently governed. Indeed, it “is rapidly tending to become the universal condition of the more backwards populations to be either held in direct subjection by the most advanced or to be under their complete ascendancy” (pp. 346-347). India in particular, he points out, cannot rule itself decently. Such externally imposed “despotism” – Mill’s own term (e.g., p. 346) – ideally might be justified “as the best mode of government for training the people in what is specifically wanting to render them capable of a higher civilization” (p. 346), while the whites under British rule were capable of ruling themselves.

We usually see Mill as a great theorist, and champion, of democracy. But his work is also evidence of the degree to which democracy has involved quite radical exclusions and has been compatible with quite strong structures of transnational domination. In “On Liberty” Mill (Reference Mill2003 [1859], p. 81) contended that “[d]espotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end”. But imperial powers often claim the intention of improving their subjects and find evidence that they are doing so. If we take the perspective of the Empire as a whole and not just its favored places, might one even see Mill as a great theorist, and champion, of racial democracy?Footnote ²⁰

Consider two different antonyms for “citizen”.Footnote ²¹ On the one hand there is the “subject”, the person under the state’s authority who lacks the rights of citizen, and on the other the “foreigner” who may be either a subject or a citizen of some other entity. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, when most people live on the territory of one or other putatively sovereign states, we take it for granted that a foreigner here is a citizen somewhere. But in making citizenship in a sovereign state nearly universal, decolonization opened up the question of rights beyond national citizenship.

As the vast colonial zone was reorganized into sovereign states in the generation after the Second World War, for the first time democracy was a question for all. The agonizing effort by Portugal to hold on to its enormous remaining African possessions was not only one of the last great decolonization struggles, but it also triggered a democratic upheaval in Portugal itself that was the start of a vast new wave of global democratization. As democratic, semi-democratic, and pseudo-democratic institutions flourished over the next generation, disappointment with democracy as it actually existed ran strong in many places.

In post-military Latin America in 2002, almost twice as many reported themselves dissatisfied as reported themselves satisfied with democracy in their country (60 percent vs. 32 percent). Although a slim majority held democracy “preferable to any other form of government”, more than a third favored an “authoritarian government” or held that it did not matter (Latinobarómetro 2002). In post-communist Europe, as one indicator of disillusion, consider a survey from 2004 reported by Poland’s Center for the Study of Public Opinion: asked how frequently “high government officials and politicians” took bribes, 84 percent of respondents answered “often” or “very often”, as opposed to 4 percent answering “rarely” or “very rarely” (cbos 2004, p. 3). For those looking up the global gradient of wealth and power the experience of “third wave democracy” was often disappointing. And even in the established wealthy democracies, many citizens doubted that their own governments performed satisfactorily (Lipset and Schneider 1983; Adams and Lennon 1992; Pharr and Putnam 2000; Norris Reference Norris1999; Nye et al. Reference Nye, Zelikow and King1997). A geographically vast disenchantment with existing democracy had begun.

But will future students of democracy – should there be any democracy worth studying – continue to think primarily of the national states? It seems conceivable that one of the consequences of global economic flows, global communications networks, and air travel is to weaken the capacity of the citizen/noncitizen divide to insulate the wealthier states from the grievances of noncitizens whether those noncitizens are within their borders or beyond them.

Transnational political decision-making structures have emerged (see e.g., Slaughter Reference Slaughter2004). More will do so. Transnational economic and cultural connection is followed by a thickening structure of transnational political coordination from the un to the wto. A globalized economy brings with it globalized criminality, globalized epidemics, and globalized environmental threats, summoning forth (let us hope!) globalized structures of response. Diffusion of technology, e-mail, and air travel mean that foes of current realities might obtain awful weapons and coordinate attacks on targets on the other side of the planet, another threat that may yet summon up some global response. The very globalized economic connection that generates new forms of wealth, in its volatility, raises new forms of threat to national economies that may yet also invigorate measures of control (as straws in this particular wind see Soros Reference Soros2000; Stiglitz Reference Stiglitz2002).

Of course many of these structures cannot simply be said to be erosions of state authority when it is the states themselves, or some of them, that are rushing headlong to create such structures. The states, or some of them, are among the major actors in creating the global order. But the fiction that the people of the world are neatly divided into citizenries connected to states under whose sovereign authority they exclusively and unambiguously live is looking especially fictive. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, it seems possible that the fundamental conception that democracy has its primary meaning within the national states will become yet another fruitful catalyst of contention.

Democracy invites movements

Much of the foregoing suggests that democracy fosters movements; some of the foregoing presumes that it does. It is time to spell out some of these connections (for a lot more, see Tilly Reference Tilly2008, Reference Tilly2006, Reference Tilly2004b, pp. 123-143; Goldstone Reference Goldstone2004). If democracy were only a complex bundle of contradictory principles or a formula for legitimation reposing on fanciful claims about authority, its dynamic potential might well be quite limited. Other legitimating formulae are no less fanciful. But these issues matter as much as they do because they are not restricted to the philosopher’s study or the councils of rulers. Let me begin with ideals, and then move on to structures.

Antidemocratic movements

Not all the movements born within democracy deepen democracy, of course. Many have more limited, or other, objectives; many have more limited, or other, consequences. But one special cluster deserves special mention: antidemocratic movements. Those enabled to organize, those galvanized by anger at the actions of lobbies, parties, or other movements, those impressed by the gap between legitimating rhetoric and other realities include antidemocrats as well as democrats.

Their actions, too, precipitate change:

• - In challenging past democratic achievements they galvanize countermobilizations by democratic movements.

• - In overthrowing democracy altogether – consider Europe’s post-World War One fascisms – they not only institute change but make it improbable that democratic restoration, should it come, will simply restore the previous democratic arrangements. Ralf Dahrendorf (Reference Dahrendorf1969, p. 396, pp. 412-426) provocatively argued that by thoroughly wrecking the prewar German social order, the Nazis destroyed significant longstanding barriers to democratization. We may go further. Not only were the postwar institutions of Germany along with Italy and Japan significantly different from the past, but the “restored” democracies of Western Europe were sometimes strikingly different as well. France enfranchised women in 1944, for example, which was just one of many ways in which the Fourth Republic differed from the Third. The struggle against fascism also set in motion important changes even in the democratic countries that had not been occupied. Britain, for example, brought its plural voting to an end in the war’s aftermath. As for the United States, black activists challenged their country to live up to the antiracist language with which the Nazi enemy was denounced. Congress acted to protect the absentee voting rights of black soldiers through the Soldier Voting Act of 1942 and the Supreme Court ruled primary elections for whites only unconstitutional in 1944, beginning the challenge to Jim Crow exclusions that culminated two decades later in the successes of the Civil Rights movement (Keyssar Reference Keyssar2000, pp. 244-253).

Human rights vs. citizens’ rights?

Extrapolating from the multiple ways in which the tensions surrounding the mix of equalities and inequalities, exclusions and inclusions, empowerments and disempowerments have galvanized movements that have reshaped democracy within the national states, it is imaginable that the vast diffusion of democratic ideology within a world of separate and radically unequal states will be among the major catalysts of contention in the century ahead. Consider specifically the democratic principle that those subject to authority should have some capacity to hold that authority accountable. Medieval lawyers were fond of the Roman formula “quod omnes tangit, ab omnibus tractari et approbari debet” (what touches all has to be treated and approved by all), applied by Bartolomé de Las Casas to deny Spanish claims to legitimate rule over the Indians of the Americas without their consent (Pennington Reference Pennington2003; Manin Reference Manin1997, p. 87). James Madison, the architect of the US Constitution, called this principle “vital” to a meaningful democracy. He rejected the proposal that only a limited stratum of property holders would have the right to vote, commenting that such a restrictive proposal “violates the vital principle of free Govt. that those who are to be bound by laws, ought to have a voice in making them. And the violation wd. be more strikingly unjust as the lawmakers become the minority” (quote in Dahl Reference Dahl2002, p. 35).

As we have seen, the identification of those who “ought to have a voice”, as Madison put it, and the specification of how they are to do this, turn out to have been profoundly contentious in all countries wrestling with the meanings of democracy and citizenship. As late as the 1930s, however, a century and a half after those us constitutional debates, such questions were still largely irrelevant to the great portion of humanity who lived under colonial rule. But post-World War Two decolonization made it possible to think ahead to the global triumph of democracy taking the form of the successive democratization of all the sovereign states on whose territory now lived the overwhelming majority of humanity. A more democratic world would mean, and could only mean, the democratization of the world’s states, one by one. But will this view remain dominant?

One important spur to thinking about democracy beyond the national states is the rise of transnational decision-making bodies, as noted earlier. But there is a second challenge, rooted in the inequalities of wealth and power among those states themselves. By the early twenty-first century, who on this planet is not to at least some degree subject to decisions made in the United States? In Greece it is not unusual to refer to the president of the United States as the “planetarch”, perhaps another useful political coinage from a country that a long time ago gave us a great many.Footnote ²³ Although most of the world’s population are now citizens of some sovereign state, and many are citizens of states with significant democratic features, only a tiny minority are able to vote for the planetarch.Footnote ²⁴

We have usually thought of citizens’ rights as the vehicle for achieving whatever there was that could be achieved by way of human rights. The states were the vehicles for enforcement; the advance of citizen’s rights, state by state, was the path by which human rights would be achieved. Since accountability of governors to governed was one important mechanism raising the likelihood that states would adhere to their part of the bargain, the geographic expansion of democratization would advance human rights in the world. Democratic states have not been immune from torture, ethnic violence, and hunger but they do not suffer from genocide and mass starvation.Footnote ²⁵ In a world of states of vastly unequal wealth and power, however, the question of rights in an ever-changing global order that includes important transnational institutions may be a significant new source of contention, galvanizing movements and galvanizing resistance to those movements. The question of who needs to be accountable to whom, and how, and over what may be rethought. Human rights may in some ways be extensions of citizens’ rights, to grow state by state, but in some ways in opposition to them (Brysk and Shafir Reference Brysk and Shafir2004; Morrison Reference Morrison2004).

Although it seems to many simply common sense that the development of transnational mechanisms that might make a reality of human rights will simply be an extension of the practices of the more democratic national states into the transnational arena, there is much reason to be skeptical. It is not only the world’s less democratic states that resist effective transnational institutions, but some of the more democratic ones as well. Consider the observations of Andrew Moravcsik (Reference Moravcsik2000, p. 244) on the forging of the un Covenant on Civil and Political Rights after the Second World War.

A half-century later, one could say much the same thing of the ferocious – and it is not too strong a word – opposition of the United States to the emergence of an effective International Criminal Court with jurisdiction over human rights cases (Forsythe Reference Forsythe2002). This is a consequence of the intertwining of democratization of the national states and global patterns of domination. The governments with the best established democratic institutions are hardly enthusiastic about diminishing their own claims of sovereignty by creating transnational human rights regimes that can enforce their own citizens’ claims, but they include states with considerable weight on the global stage. It is very doubtful, for example, that the United States’ government would welcome its own citizens having effective rights to challenge its prison conditions, its capital punishment, or the legitimacy of its curious electoral practices in an international arena with decision-making authority. Of course, supporters of the us positions also cite democratic principles, claiming that the judges of such a court will not be democratically accountable and that the international arena today includes many countries whose democratic claims are extremely limited or non-existent. As often, very different positions can appeal to “democracy”.

So, on the one hand, the governments of the older democracies may be something less than enthusiastic supporters of transnational human rights regimes, and will no doubt be less than friendly to other aspects of a more democratic world. But on the other hand there is some reason to think that these countries may be important launching pads for transnational social movements of all sorts, including movements for a more democratic world. Smith and Wiest’s (Reference Smith and Wiest2005) data on transnational movement organizations suggests that they flourish best in the same sorts of places that national movements do, namely within the more democratic states, some of whose elites are not very likely to be pleased. So the politics of a more democratic world is likely to be as highly contentious within the established democracies as anywhere else. Perhaps the propensity of democratic states to violate their own laws in combating “antiglobalization” activism is a sign of things to come (Smith Reference Smith2002; della Porta and Tarrow Reference Tarrow2001).

Whether transnational movements can effectively reshape transnational institutions is a matter of some debate among students of social movements because it is not obvious whether the conditions within national states that fostered the development of effective national social movements are or will be replicated in the transnational arena.Footnote ²⁶ Nor is it obvious what other forms of contention await. Some of the issues include:

• - Whether the forms of solidarity, coordination, and coalition formation that built movements within the states have analogues beyond the states;

• - Whether there are analogues for the state itself in its catalytic role as target of movement action;

• - Whether elite control of transnational institutions is so effective as to deny any potential movements the sorts of leverage that have been so important within the states at moments of intra-elite conflict.

On all of these matters there is no shortage of contradictory views. And it is even less obvious whether whatever mechanisms for transnational participation, accountability, and protection of rights that may emerge will have much resemblance to the institutions that have come to define democracy at the level of the national states. But we may be certain that the history of democracy has hardly come to an end. Tocqueville’s dubious prognostication that popular sovereignty had gone about as far as it could go looks as unlikely to summarize the state of world democracy in the early twenty-first century as the state of American democracy in the early nineteenth. I have suggested there are reasons to suspect that in the emerging global age two important circumstances will lead to questioning whether the national states can remain the field within which democracy applies: first, the ongoing development of transnational decision-making bodies poorly accountable to citizenries and, second, the vast differences of wealth and power among the nominally sovereign states. The student of democracy is always concerned with an edifice under construction, all too often subject to demolition, and never completed, in large part because new architects emerge to alter the plans that in any event they are often unable to get the workers to follow.

A deeply conflictual history…

The foregoing discussion also implies something that receives far too little acknowledgment in much of the literature on democracy: how profoundly democratic history – both advances and retreats – has been shaped by the most intense kinds of conflict there are, including war and revolution. Let us glance at the more stable democratic regimes in existence, as of the early twenty-first century. Robert Dahl (Reference Dahl2002, p. 186) suggests a convenient list of “countries steadily democratic since at least 1950”, which turn out to be precisely twenty-two in number. Had the outcome of World War Two been different (and a democratic outcome did not look very probable in 1942), a minimum of 10 of these would be most unlikely to be very democratic places today (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Norway). The United States was born in revolution and its democracy was significantly advanced in the most bloody war of its entire history. French democracy underwent so many advances and retreats in revolutionary upheavals of various kinds that a major late twentieth century French historian was being provocative in entitling an essay The Revolution is Over (Furet Reference Furet1983, pp. 11-109). Many countries on Dahl’s list participated in bloody interstate wars that were widely understood to be at least in part wars for and against democracy. Significant advances in democratization in still others came about in settling civil wars (not just the United States, but – happily much less bloodily – Switzerland and Costa Rica). Some countries on this list owe even their independent existence to the aftermath of wars (Austria, Finland, Israel). Major advances in the political rights of workers and women occurred in a cluster of these countries as a result of the First World War giving an enormous boost to democratizing social movements; in others women’s voting rights came with the end of the next war (Markoff Reference Markoff1996, pp. 73-75). Still others underwent major episodes of anti-democratization that halted or reversed prior democratizing episodes (Tilly Reference Tilly2004a). Tremendous shocks, not just incremental alterations, have been part and parcel of the history of democracy. Many scholars have focused on explaining stable democracy, an important scholarly agenda because stability is worth understanding, but we must not lose sight of the many storms before the calm. And sometimes after, too.

I conclude by returning to the issues of definition and measurement with which I began. Consider Robert Dahl’s (Reference Dahl1971, p. 2) definition of democracy as a government “completely or almost completely responsive to all its citizens”, only a hair’s breadth more precise than Fleming’s “the multitude have government” four centuries earlier. But Dahl goes on to argue that what empirical researchers can readily measure is the extent to which existing political systems approximate “polyarchy”, which he goes on to define as a set of procedures that are by no means adequate to constitute this perhaps unattainable “democracy”. And now we do arrive at something a great deal more precise than Fleming. Dahl’s polyarchy deeply influenced subsequent efforts at index construction, but on the whole these subsequent efforts abandoned any effort to think beyond polyarchy, and often called what they claimed to be measuring “democracy” into the bargain. In doing so, political scientists miss the significance of aspiration. My point is not simply to emphasize Dahl’s distinction between any existing system, even polyarchy, and democracy, but to point to that gap as a recurrent catalyst to change.

Change is inherent in democracy because of the disjunction between its emotionally compelling claims (that are a vital component of its legitimacy) and the particular rules for choosing incumbents and making decisions that are provisionally held to be democracy in practice. It is never more than provisionally.Footnote ²⁷ While there may be moments in which the appeal of following the rules and the appeal of “democracy” coincide, there are other moments at which they part company. It is an important question why it is that since the 1780s, when people began to march under its banner, democracy came to be widely identified with representative institutions, secret ballots, universal suffrage, and competitive parties. This conflation is a social process worthy of study, and a highly conflictual one at that, not simply the logical entailment of some abstract definition.Footnote ²⁸ How some practices became integral parts of “democracy”, others were shunted aside, still others caught on in some places but not elsewhere, and others yet again wax and wane by turns, needs much more attention. This is not only a question of how particular practices came into being in particular places (as in Fabrice Lehoucq and Iván Molina’s [2002] exemplary work on the institutionalization of honest vote counts in Costa Rica), or on how practices deeply antithetical to ancient democracy came to be denoted by the same word (as in Bernard Manin’s [Reference Manin1997] exploration of “representative government”), but also how certain new practices became part of democratic norms globally, like women’s suffrage (for overviews see Ramírez et al. Reference Ramírez, Soysal and Shanahan1997; Markoff Reference Markoff2003). And we need to understand a great deal more than we do about just who used the word democracy, in what ways, in what contexts, and for what purposes (and the same goes for terms widely associated with democracy like freedom, equality, participation, self-rule and others). But there is no reason to presume that the institutions that are taken to embody democracy today will be those taken to embody democracy tomorrow.

To end at this point leaves much unresolved. Although dissatisfaction with democracy as it exists here and now has recurrently troubled and altered the history of democracy, some or even many may find the current state of affairs a fully satisfactory realization of what they think proper democracy ought to be. They may be baffled or even indignant at those who campaign for a truer realization. Still others may renounce democracy altogether. And others yet again may not care. In arguing at length that such disagreement is woven into the democratic fabric, I have not attempted to specify who it is who views the present as satisfactory and who it is who favors particular alternative democratic visions. These are very large, important matters. What I have tried to do is show why democratic practices will intermittently generate movements whose actions transform it, but I have made no attempt to specify who participates in these movements, nor under what banners they march, nor at which times and places they do so. One might well ask, as a reader of an earlier draft of this essay did, just which social groups favored and favor the sort of democracy that takes “liberal” as a positive and essential adjective, or why a powerful state (let us say, the us) might oppose its realization in some places and at some moments and promote it in other places or at other moments. This essay’s ambitions have been more modest, but an understanding of the dynamic character of the history of democracy suggests an important context for those large, specific issues of who and when and where.

… and future

Toward the beginning of my argument I pointed to a sixteenth century definition that contained no guidance as to how citizens were to exercise democratic power, or even who those citizens were. It may have seemed to the educated elites of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that in fashioning institutions that came to be called democratic, they had found an answer to the many challenges of the revolutionary age in which they lived. But democracy proved to be not an answer but a question. It still is.