How to Defend Democracy: Normative Priorities for a Tragic World

• In Event: Democratic Institutions in Authoritarian Regimes

Abstract

Partially democratic practices like clientelism and electoral authoritarianism are common in much of the world, and they are receiving increased attention from scholars of comparative politics. Yet political theorists and philosophers have almost entirely neglected the complex dilemmas raised by these phenomena. When, for example, does clientelism harm the least well-off, and when might it be tolerable? How should we respond to electoral threats to liberal rights, or to unelected leaders who uphold the rule of law? And when democracies face multiple threats at once—as they often do—what should we prioritize in responding to these threats? When the chips are down, in other words, and tough choices must be made, how ought we defend democracy?

This paper develops an integrated theoretical framework for working through these dilemmas, which is grounded in the concept of “state capture.” Previous work has placed this concept at the core of a robust, realistic, instrumental defense of democracy. In short, the argument goes, the best explanation of the value of familiar liberal and democratic institutions is their ability to resist certain mechanisms by which various elites and private actors manage to use state power for their own benefit at the expense of others. This paper extends that work by considering the “partially democratic” contexts where practices like clientelism and electoral authoritarianism thrive, again centering state capture as a particularly useful concept for navigating difficult normative dilemmas.

I begin by introducing the concept of state capture and its role in explaining the value of various democratic institutions within paradigm liberal-democratic contexts. I then survey the burgeoning empirical literatures on clientelism and electoral authoritarianism, interpreting both practices as elite strategies for entrenching rule. In effect, each turns democratic mechanisms like elections into vehicles of capture, rather than impediments to it—and as I observe in the third section, this introduces particularly vexing challenges for partisans of democracy, pitting essential democratic commitments against one another and forcing us to prioritize among them. Though the difficulty of these dilemmas should not be underestimated, finally, I argue in the fourth section that the imperative of resisting state capture can provide a useful heuristic for understanding their true stakes and making intelligent, morally responsible choices. I illustrate this with several examples, considering choices faced by diverse actors in diverse contexts—including those of citizens and organizers under clientelism, for instance, as well as opposition candidates and journalists under electoral authoritarianism.

The normative theory resulting from this inquiry represents one of the major contributions of the paper. It maintains that the best course of action in any democratic dilemma is the one that minimizes the risk of state capture—and in doing so, it emphasizes the indispensably empirical, predictive dimensions of this normative question, as well as the extent to which practice rightly remains underdetermined by theory. Yet precisely in recognition of the deep uncertainty we often face in such circumstances, it does yield some relatively consistent and reliable guidelines. Even if relaxing foundational democratic commitments such as equal suffrage and freedom of speech would serve in some cases to protect democracy over the long term, for instance, we rarely (if ever) possess sufficient certainty about this predictive claim. As a result, the judgment to suppress speech or votes is justified only in the rarest and most peculiar of circumstances. In more everyday conflicts among democratic priorities, meanwhile, the normative theory I develop recommends persistent action directed towards undermining the most powerful forces likely to capture the state—up to and including many unsavory actions that might be deemed off limits by other theories—which nevertheless stops short of these most dangerous tactics.

Perhaps even more important than the normative guidelines I provide, meanwhile, is the unified interpretive framework that emerges throughout, which enables us to understand democratic and non-democratic practices along a continuum. It allows us to examine each element in the standard democratic ecology on its own, and in a variety of non-standard contexts, which not only expands the frontiers of democratic theory, but also reflects back on its oldest and most essential questions.

Author

• Samuel Ely Bagg, Oxford University