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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.

« A senior U.S. diplomat says a Venezuelan law granting sweeping decree powers to President Hugo Chavez violates a decade-old agreement of North and South American countries to respect democracy. »

http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/world/breakingnews/senior-us-diplomat-says-chavezs-decree-powers-are-undemocratic-violate-2001-agreement-113022954.html

This sentence immediately caught my attention. First, on a theoretical point of view I imagined the definition of democracy that was underlying it. Democracy is not only a democratically elected government, but also a democratic way of governing. Therefore there is a need to define what democracy is in the ‘post-voting’ period, as Dahl does. But how can we measure if a president is governing in a democratic fashion? Chief executives must have sufficient authority to govern while also establishing checks on their power. What if the people grant them the right to increase their power? If we consider, as Joseph Schumpeter does, that “the primary function of the elector’s vote is to produce government” (273), and not to produce a ‘will’, then the question is how to limit the authority of the government, once produced? What is the role of morality? Do we only need to define the format of the democratic institutions or also their potential content?

Secondly, I always have an irritated reaction when I read that North America encourages South America to respect democracy. Historically, the interventions of the United States in South America have rarely been encouraging and supporting democracy. In the particular case of Hugo Chavez it is known that the U.S government does not appreciate him and there are serious doubts concerning a potential U.S support of the attempted coup against him in April 2002. It seems to me that the U.S government supports democracy only when democracy supports its own interests. This is however something that needs to be explored more in depth, as it is only an unproved opinion of mine.

In any case, the fact that there are agreements on what is democracy is very interesting as it implies a common definition and a will to have binding decisions about it, which I doubt there is. It forces us to think about the right of nations to breach into other nations’ sovereignty, which is a very actual and captivating debate at the international level, with for example the emergence of the new norm called “the responsibility to protect”. It can start by one country affirming that a country is undemocratic and end up in a mission like “Iraqi Freedom”, therefore the agreement on a definition of democracy is critical.

If I had read Joseph Schumpeter two years ago I would have completely disagreed with him. I would have described him as being an arrogant, pessimist, and elitist man who sees human beings as irrational and primitive beings. I would have said that such a skeptical critique of democracy is not helpful and that the idealism behind Dahl’s procedural definition, even though unattainable, is much more constructive because it produces incentives to improve our systems.

Today, my point of view is slightly different because of the traumatizing experience we recently had in Switzerland. In November 2009, the Swiss people voted against the construction of minarets. This vote is a complete discrimination against the Muslim society and goes against the agreements that Switzerland has with the European Court of Human rights and more generally International Convention on Human Rights.

(To know more you can read this New York Times article, it is concise and summarizes the issue:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/30/world/europe/30swiss.html )

This vote completely dismantled my faith and my idealism about what democracy really is. First, I realized that emotions, and most of all fear could have disastrous effects on freedoms. As Alexis de Tocqueville aptly pointed out, a big risk for democracies is that the people abandon freedom in order to keep their well being (or what they think their well-being is). Second, I realized how the people could be manipulated and their opinion “manufactured” by elites.  Wrong statistics and associations between violence and foreigners are being used by right-wing parties to convince the Swiss population that their well being is threatened by a small and specific portion of foreign people.

Joseph Schumpeter is of course very radical in his way of describing the irrationality of the people, however, his fear is very realistic in a sense and leads us to think about ways in which the ‘will’ of the people should not be taken as being authentic and rational. This fear already existed for the Greeks who saw the people as wanting things that are not good for them and for the city.

Those fears underline a very deep problem about democracy: is the decision of the majority always acceptable? Is it legitimate to act against individual liberties because it is the rule of democracy to be governed by the ‘will of the people’? What are the limits of this will? Can we really trust the people as being the ‘Guardians of liberty’ as Machiavelli saw them?