The ideal of democracy is rarely challenged openly in the contemporary world, yet it remains one of the social science's essentially contested concepts. Despite a large and growing literature on the topic, there is little consensus on how we are to decide when a particular regime qualifies as a democracy or not. In his ambitious and forceful new book, Charles Tilly argues that this lack of a clear and accurate definition of democracy is of considerable consequence. Lucid explanations of democratization, political standing of regimes, related foreign policy decisions and the quality of people's lives are all at stake. Tilly devotes his first chapter to building a working definition of democracy before putting forward a cogent explanatory framework for understanding how and why democracies emerge and why they sometimes disappear and to demonstrate what difference it makes.
Understanding democracy as fundamentally contentious process that necessarily entails the negotiated consent of citizens in the exercise of state power and seeking both clear definition and causal explanation, Tilly's working definition focuses squarely on the relationship between the state and its citizens and provides four measurable indicators of their interaction. Thus, “a regime is democratic to the degree that political relations between the state and its citizens feature broad, equal, protected and mutually binding consultation” (14, italics in original). Democratization, always incomplete, is conceived of as net increases in these three dimensions, while de-democratization, a process every bit as important to understand, represents a decline. Lacking any existing data bank for his four indicators, and focused primarily on developing and demonstrating the potential of his theory, Tilly uses Freedom House rankings for political rights as a proxy for breadth, equality and mutually binding consultation, while considering protection more or less comparable to the Freedom House measure of civil liberties. Whatever the weaknesses of Freedom House as measurement or policy tool, when coupled with Tilly's wide ranging historical knowledge, it allows for a compelling illustration of the power of Tilly's theory.
Part of the originality of this work is the rejection of the widely received notion that there is a set necessary conditions that must obtain before the emergence of democracy and its consolidation can be expected. Tilly insists that there is none. Instead, he proposes three necessary processes that underpin and constrain democratization and its reversal anywhere and at anytime. These processes that shape democratization are the integration of interpersonal trust networks (kin, religious, trade groupings) into “public politics”; the insulation of public politics from categorical inequality; and the elimination of independent power centres. He then demonstrates how these large processes unfold in a variety of historical cases including India, Switzerland, South Africa, Russia and more. Each process involves a cluster of mechanisms, the specifics of which may differ depending on the context but in every case allow us to understand how and why democracy expands or suffers reversals.
Tilly argues that careful analysis of these three processes, when measured against state capacity, allows us to observe, compare and explain variations in his four indicators of democracy. In no case does he claim to find general laws or simple patterns of causality among key variables or between processes. While integrating trust networks with public politics is a process that necessarily underpins democratization, he notes astutely that a kind of distrust becomes necessary to democracy as well. “Contingent consent entails unwillingness to offer rulers, however well elected, blank cheques” (94). Trajectories of democratization differ greatly, depending on the specific context locally. It is not parsimonious but it is compelling, and therein lies the force of Tilly's explanatory framework. He provides an operational definition of democracy and accounts of democratization that allow for complex, analytically rigorous comparisons, measurement and a level of causal explanation without sacrificing (indeed requiring) rich and well grounded historical analysis of what are necessarily always historically idiosyncratic trajectories of change. In doing so he enriches the study of democracy, comparative politics and historical sociology.
The book is not flawless, of course. The definition of state capacity used by Tilly is potentially problematic, particularly given the centrality of the concept. Defined as “the extent to which interventions of state agents in existing non-state resources, activities and interpersonal connections alter the distributions of those resources, activities and interpersonal connections as well as relations among those distributions” (16), Tilly posits a unitary state sphere and introduces a dualistic approach to state and non-state spheres that may prove to be less useful in certain contexts. The same problem emerges in the term “public politics.” While Tilly acknowledges the simplification, it may, nevertheless, create misunderstandings, perhaps most notably in Marxist Leninist states or the changing regimes of East Asia (which do not feature prominently among his cases). In strong and weak states, democratic and non-democratic, societal interests may join forces with state agents at various levels in ways that defy clear division between state and non-state or public and private. This, however, is a small complaint, about at a pithy and powerful book that provides a challenging new approach to the study of democracy.
