By assessing what democracy is and is not Schmitter and Karl make very good points that help us decenter from common western ideas about what democracy is. Furthermore, as aptly pointed out by Collier and Levitsky, a greater consistency and clarity of meanings(…) provide a more adequate basis for assessing causal relationships. In fact, I found that Schmitter and Karl’s ideas about what democracy is not help us avoid spurious relationships about what democracy might cause or not.
Particularly the ideas I found very useful and relevant are:
- Democracy is not one unique type of institution. There are different types of democracies. We shall not consider our kind of democracy has being the only one and wanting to apply it to other countries thinking it would fit them as well.
- The principle that consensus is not needed to produce a democracy but emerge from it. This allows to be more optimistic about democracies in society with a lot of social diversity or groups with different interests. There is no need to make everyone agree all the time about everything. The consent is contingent and does not need to be deeply embedded in society. Social change is an everyday reality and we would like to have a regime that can adapt to it.
- The idea that Democracy does not equal Neoliberalism, happiness or wealth. There are often confusions between a liberal democracy and a liberal economy and if they are not differentiated it makes it difficult to identify which one is the cause of the problems. In Latin America, some authors talk about a “dual transition” that has happen where the system has become democratic and neoliberal at the same time. However, Neoliberalism sometimes brought more inequality and because people associated it with democracy they rejected both together. It is therefore very important to make it clear what democracy is not.
- Finally, the central idea that democracy is not only about elections is very important too. In my opinion, free and fair elections are the fundamental condition to a democratic regime but they are not sufficient to attain a liberal democracy in which civil liberties are respected. If we restrain the concept of democracy to free and fair elections it would be very easy for some countries to pretend they are legitimately labeled as democratic when they actually oppress their citizens.
I personally found all this points very useful to improve my understanding of democracy beyond the limits of the western world. Furthermore I really think that those ideas are very helpful to assess causal relationships.