Shifting Conceptions of Democracy/Democratization

Competing conceptions of democracy have existed for at least two and a half millennia, and although the circumstances of its emergence were highly context specific, it has been argued persuasively that democracy has been invented on multiple occasions and in a wide variety of contexts.Footnote ⁵ Different understandings derive in good measure from unanalyzed preconceptionsFootnote ⁶ and tacit assumptions about the nature of the polis, the demos, and political order. Traditionally, British citizens are liable to “free associate”Footnote ⁷ political democracy in terms of highly specific “Westminster” features that are not core components of the abstract concept of democracy, but that have been shared and taken for granted for so long that they frame the British collective understanding of (tacit associations with) the general category. Similarly, when US citizens promote democracy abroad it is often with their particular set of associations—not with the “Westminster system” nor rigorous Dahlian or Schumpeterian stipulative definitions in mind—that they embark on that project. By the same token, free associating in Mexico, China, or Iraq would not produce an easy convergence around the British or US conceptions because of contrasting historical memories and tacit associations. These brief examples serve to unravel the concept of political democracy as timeless, stable, and universal, and open the way for a more hermeneutic (in Gadamer's sense) apprehension of democratization.

During the Cold War, a timeless abstract version of democracy was pitted against totalitarianism—a binary scheme revived recently with the democracy versus Islam debate. As the polarity of the Cold War faded and various countries began to democratize, there emerged a “step-change” view of democratization, based on the Spanish case (1975–1981), which preserved the essence of the binary analysis. The model starts with a long-established and stable authoritarian regime; regime change is triggered by attempts to liberalize escape the control of their initiators and a democratic transition takes place; and shortly thereafter a new fully democratic political regime takes hold (is consolidated) and becomes the only game in town. This simplified account of the Spanish transition was held up by many observers as the standard by which to evaluate all democratization processes. It generated some powerful general conclusions, and provided an interpretative framework for and idealized yardstick by which to assess other cases. But as the elements omitted by the schema became more prevalent, its insights delivered diminishing returns. The convoluted southern European cases (Greece, Portugal, and Turkey) were set aside as atypical, and the complexities and ambiguities of the Spanish transition faded from view.

Democratic regime change is more complex, protracted, erratic, and diverse in its trajectory than the binary model suggests. The widespread acceptance of the model resulted not just from its parsimony and moral convenience, but also from its contribution to the “end of history” discourse of the post-Cold War period. The convergence between western hegemonic requirements and the “step-change” model of democratization ended as the “war on terror” fills the void left by the disappearance of the Soviet menace. A “step-change” that questions western security in Egypt, Afghanistan or perhaps even Mexico would show that not all good things necessarily go together when democratization gets underway. So control over what counts as a democracy has become a major site of political contestation and dispute, once again highlighting the “essential contestability” of the terminology.

These examples demonstrate that standard conceptions of such complex and controversial terms as democracy and democratization are subject to subtle but significant forms of displacement and variation. As the historical and spatial context changes, so the key associations anchoring such concepts may begin to shift. For example, the invasion of Iraq may well have jolted many collective understandings of the core connotations of the term “democratization.” Such shifting political terminology is inherently prone both to “concept-stretching” and to normative contestation and re-appropriation. This is because there is an unspoken metaphorical structure underlying broad concepts which allows them to adapt to changing demands.

This is particularly the case with internally complex and appraisive concepts like democratization, which contain rival descriptions of their component parts. Disputes over such terms “cannot be settled by appeal to empirical evidence linguistic usage or the canons of logic alone.”Footnote ⁸ One can attempt to identify an ineradicable core of a concept that can be universally applied and guards against “conceptual stretching.”Footnote ⁹ But however persuasively comparativists characterize democracy as an “end-state” it is far harder, as Michael Freeden would say, to “decontest” democratization as a historical process (a “trajectory”) that may be directed towards a given end state.Footnote ¹⁰ Indeed, comparative experience indicates that it can hardly be defined (teleologically) in terms of its necessary success at finally arriving there.

Michael Freeden's account of political concepts, which centers on the internal logic of a morphological analysis rather than on the external contingencies of political history, helps to explain why democratization is so prone to elude the stipulative constraints of a fixed definition, however skillfully crafted.Footnote ¹¹ Although there must be some ineliminable element at the heart of a concept (“rule of the people,” in the case of democracy), that may be too thin to stabilize the idea. We need a larger array of components to give the concept its full meaning, and those can be ordered in multiple ways. Freeden does not view concepts as free standing and self-sufficient entities. Instead, successive concepts interact and overlap in political discourse. One version of democracy may be closely associated with liberalism, others with republicanism, socialism or capitalism. In each case the optional additional features are ordered so as to accommodate the appropriate adjacent concept. They acquire their cogency by the way they are linked together in an ideology or political discourse. A morphological analysis shows us how essential contestability arises from the permanent scope for disputation about which additional features are required to invest the term with its full force, and what criteria should apply to prioritize some and marginalize others.

Physical versus Biological Analogies

Analogies and metaphors are the often hidden devices that serve to rationalize choices of conceptual variants and to render plausible the narrative in which our political concepts are embedded. They typically inspire further heuristic metaphors, some of which become ossified or so stale (“boom and bust”) it is easy to forget the physical analogies to which they allude; others are not yet entirely clichéd (“pricking the bubble” or “nudging reform”). All evoke an image imported from a different (in all these cases a physical) domain in order to elucidate an otherwise less accessible social process.

Substituting biological metaphors would make explicit what is currently hidden (the metaphorical structure of the prevailing characterization of democratization). It would also elucidate an otherwise difficult to grasp social process through the deployment of a more relevant, appropriate, and flexible analogical structure. According to Loet Leydesdorff, glossing Jürgen Habermas, “while physics asks for causes and origins, evolutionary theorizing assumes that the same effects can be caused by different underlying arrangements … Thus the metaphysical quest for last causes and foundational origins is replaced with a (potentially empirical) focus on emerging order … In the metabiological model, the cause/effect schema of independent and dependent variables is replaced with a model of fluxes in different contexts … The distributed systems in flux are expected to display both stability and change while performing a “life cycle” in a variety of contexts.”Footnote ¹²

The toolkit of comparative democratization studies is replete with physicalist imagery, such as waves and snowballs. Transition (change of state, as from liquid to gas) and especially “consolidation” (the fitting together of building blocks into a sturdy structure) invoke implicit analogies with physical processes. Equilibrium, which stands at the heart of the neo-classical resurgence in economics, is another analogical device. Equilibrium involves attaining stability by positioning an entity at the point of intersection between equal and opposite forces. But in biology an organism self-regulates to maintain homeostasis. This is not inert equilibrium (i.e., death) but actively adaptive self-balancing and adjustment to external pressures. Which of these unspoken alternative procedures is more relevant to the analysis of democratization processes?

All language is impregnated with metaphorical allusions, but only a limited range of these are capable of structuring analytical social thought. These may be called “constitutive metaphors” insofar as they become “an irreplaceable part of the linguistic machinery of a scientific theory … which scientists use in expressing theoretical claims for which no adequate literal paraphrase is known.”Footnote ¹³ We need to unpack the overall analogical structure within which a sequence of constitutive metaphors is embedded.Footnote ¹⁴ Biological processes lead us to “speak of the dialectic of specificity and plasticity during development, the dialectic through which the living organism constructs itself. The central property of all life is the capacity and necessity to build, maintain, and preserve itself, a process known as autopoiesis.Footnote ¹⁵ Democratization can also be studied as autopoiesis.

In that spirit, I previously proposed two metaphors drawn from the life sciences—namely “contagion” and “viability.” In contrast to Samuel Huntington's snowballing, the contagion metaphor aimed to separate the various specific processes through which the establishment of democracy in one country might alter the probability of a similar development in adjacent countries. Two of the possibilities I proposed (control and conditionality) involved international and organized strategic action by identifiable political actors. Contagion was included to allow for the possibility of the unorganized influence of a democratizing neighbor (the impact of the Portuguese revolutionary transition on Franco's Spain, for instance). Contagion couples with “consent”—an active process of self-organization which can be viewed as broadly autopoietic in character. It involves a micro-level transmission that activates a chain of individual responses, which reverberates through the body politic, destabilizing the pre-existing homeostasis. The overall consequences are not mechanically predictable, as they depend on the outcome of a complex dynamic process which might inoculate the collectivity against contagion (as in China after 1989) or generate collective consensus around a democratic alternative (as in Germany after the Third Reich). This involves a dialectic of specificity and plasticity not causal reductionism.Footnote ¹⁶

The contrasting presuppositions of consolidation and viability also illustrate my argument. I urged incorporating the concept of viability into democratization studies, arguing that consolidation assumes too much about the necessary components of an eventual stable post-democratization regime.Footnote ¹⁷ Viability concerns more than mere persistence, as a democracy can lose viability even while its institutional forms persist. “Like a plant in inhospitable soil, a democratic regime may be able to adapt and survive, but only by accountability to local realities … viability at least allows us to explore the extent to which such a variant of democratization may be able to reproduce and defend itself.”Footnote ¹⁸

In this essay I consider the merits of a wholesale recasting of the imagery to place the autopoietic nature of democratization center stage. Like any living organism a democratic political order is a complex adaptive system with its own elaborate internal arrangements that are coordinated through a set of regulative principles oriented towards its maintenance, development, and adjustment to external conditions. This is often called homeostasis, although I prefer homeodynamics, which recognizes the plasticity required for viability over time.Footnote ¹⁹

Just as living organisms are oriented to perpetuate their lifelines, so too political democracies have a drive to survive and develop. In Steven Rose's terminology, both combine being with becoming. This developmental aspect of the lifeline of all democracies gets lost in metaphors which privilege static outcomes such as equilibrium and consolidation. By contrast, biological analogies emphasize the plasticity and developmental potential of democracy, and thus place democratization at the heart of democracy's conceptual morphology.

Let us sketch how such a shift in sources of analogy might relate to the quality of democratization debate and to the hybrid regimes classification (the only example I can think of in the mainstream literature that makes use of a biological metaphor).Footnote ²⁰ The biological perspective directs attention to the adaptive processes that can generate diversity within a lifeline and explain the possible emergence of new organisms only partially related to established types.

As regards quality, the obvious biological analogy would be with a healthy organism. There are various potential sources of ill-health, and different afflictions are countered in different ways. There is aging and degeneration. This would correspond to the cyclical or three-generation model of democracy popular among the ancient Greeks. The decline of or threat to good health arises from a weakening of the organism's capacity to maintain itself over time: vital defenses are abandoned since they seem unnecessary, or the organs are patched and the mended ones are less efficient than the originals. It could be productive to explore such analogies as sources of variation in democratic quality over time.Footnote ²¹

Infection by hostile bacteria or parasites connects with “enemy within” imagery. But health has more to do with symbiosis than extermination. Even the healthiest of organisms interact with potentially harmful assailants, so disinfection and isolation alone will not contain the danger; a vibrant democracy is the one best able to domesticate threats rather than survive behind an artificial cordon sanitaire. Moreover, ill health can also result from a breakdown of harmony between the major specialized organs; dysfunctional interactions between the executive and legislative, or the judiciary and security forces are plausible counterparts in a democratic system. Adverse environmental conditions can also cause ill health. An otherwise healthy organism can simply prove unable to flourish in an overcrowded environment where others of its species occupy more favored locations. However, such environmental pressures can also promote major structural adaptations that can prove innovative and highly successful. Thus an amphibian is not just a handicapped fish and a biped is not a crippled quadruped.

Let us look at the implications of this for hybrid regimes. Hybridity derives from the Latin hybrida, which is said by the Oxford English Dictionary to refer to the offspring of a tame sow and a wild boar, although the etymology is dubious. The crucial point is that is some cases the offspring of incongruous parents may prove vigorous and capable of reproduction, while displaying characteristics derived from both sides. Traditional stipulative definitions of democracy and authoritarian rule treated them as binary opposites. Guillermo O'Donnell reminded us of the 1920s term dictablanda and proposed a counterpart hybrid democradura. Since then, scholars have been induced to accept the category of “hybrid” regimes, neither fully democratic nor authoritarian, but capable of vigorous development and reproduction.Footnote ²² Its popularity supports the contention that biological analogies offer a serious alternative to physicalist metaphors. Of course, the hard sciences can also draw upon vivid imagery imported from other domains (think of the “big bang” in cosmology or “Schrodinger's Cat” in sub-atomic physics); in addition, there is more reciprocal influence between the life sciences and the social sciences; multiple methods of investigation thus deserve encouragement, and there are good grounds for thinking that this is the right approach in many fields, including the natural sciences, since all creative thinking involves the imaginative re-interrogation of established assumptions.

Charles Darwin practiced a disciplined form of methodological pluralism, and consciously invoked metaphorical imagery to galvanize his process of concept formation, and he combined a commitment to objective and systematic comparative research with an underlying value orientation.Footnote ²³ About the term “species”, he says it is “arbitrarily given, for the sake of convenience” which does not “essentially differ from the term variety, which is given to less distinct and more fluctuating forms. The term variety, again in comparison with mere individual differences, is also applied arbitrarily for convenience's sake.”Footnote ²⁴ And he adds, as regards metaphor, “in the literal sense of the word, no doubt, natural selection is a false term; but who ever objected to chemists speaking of the elective affinity of the various elements … who objects to an author speaking of the attraction of gravity as ruling the movement of the planets? Everyone knows what is meant and implied by such metaphorical expressions; and they are almost necessary for brevity.”Footnote ²⁵

Since Darwin's time the sciences have became more specialized and professionalized. But image, analogy, and interdisciplinary borrowing is alive and well. For example, Sean Carroll characterizes nature as a “tinkerer” producing evolutionary innovation by “working with and cobbling together available materials and constantly modifying and retouching structures over eons, and not as an engineer would with a preconceived plan and specialized tools.”Footnote ²⁶ He shows how embryologists construct “fate maps” to reveal how initially undifferentiated individual cells react to their relative positions and thus give rise to complex organic structures: “Fate maps” reveal that … cells “know” where they are in an embryo and to what tissues or structures they belong.”Footnote ²⁷ Not only does his approach highlight the limitations of static atomistic causal attribution (reductionism) when explaining complex developmental processes; it also contains a rich harvest of metaphorical images drawn from social life. Similarly, in his manifesto to “make biology whole again” Rose argues that there is “one world, many ways of knowing” and that “life constructs its own future.Footnote ²⁸

Darwin, Carroll, and Rose draw inspiration from outside their own discipline; Darwin refers to Herbert Spencer, to whom he is indebted for the term “survival of the fittest”; Carroll invokes metaphors from geography; and Rose alludes to themes in social theory. There is a process of reciprocal exchange, not just one-sided borrowings. So there is scope for the social sciences in general, and for students of comparative democratization in particular, to exchange imagery and conceptualizations with the natural sciences in general, and the life sciences in particular.

This being the case, why have social scientists come to resist the import of biological metaphors?Footnote ²⁹ During much of the twentieth century such transfers became impregnated with illiberal political connotations. The kind of biology that inspired the last generation of political metaphors was often found to be deeply conservative and indeed even anti-democratic in its implications. Before the Second World War biological ideas were recurrently enlisted in the cause of racial oppression and discrimination against the handicapped (eugenics), and metaphors about the social health of a nation and its need for defenses against infection were used to justify authoritarian and fascist political programs. The questionable use of such biological analogies went beyond racists and demagogues, penetrating the social sciences until the liberal counterattack of the 1960s, as the example of the Harvard “Pareto Circle” shows.Footnote ³⁰ For our purposes, the most significant member of the Circle was Joseph Schumpeter who, in keeping with the tenets of the Circle, proposed to limit his canonical concept of political democracy to a procedural arrangement designed to smooth regularize and legitimize the circulation of ruling elites.Footnote ³¹

But there is no reason in principle why metaphors and analogies drawn from current biological thinking need to carry anti-democratic connotations.Footnote ³² Indeed, the master concept in biology and the life sciences is no longer based on a static equilibrium: it has been “punctuated” by Stephen Jay Gould, sidelined by evolutionary development (Carroll), challenged by homeodynamics (Rose) and by negative entropy (James Lovelock),Footnote ³³ and pushed aside by co-evolution and adaptation “to the edge of chaos” (Stuart A. Kauffman).Footnote ³⁴ Kauffman offers a compelling source of biological analogies for modeling the spread, and also the reversal, of democratization processes both within and between political communities, and sharply contrasts with the “system-maintenance” functionalism that characterized mid-twentieth century conservative social theory.

What these contributions to modern biology share is that they identify regulatory principles that generate change, rather than restore traditional stability to explain the diversity, complexity, interconnectedness, and directional thrust of living organisms. They recognize that life is dynamic, developmental, and in a permanent process of emergence. Thus, modern biology differs from the version practiced during the fascist era; nowadays differentiation, complementarity, interdependence, and adaptability are the hallmarks of autopoiesis. In contrast to the authoritarian model political life, it is how component cells and organs develop, specialize, communicate, and cooperate that largely determines the viability of the whole organism.Footnote ³⁵ Moreover, modern biology is not just concerned with the coordination and integration of cells and functional organs within a unitary organism. It is also concerned with evolutionary developments over extended time frames; with cooperation between individual organisms in a community; with the interactions between diverse species within an ecological niche; and indeed with processes of self-regulation between all living organisms in a closed biosphere. Biological models designed to explain all these different aspects of interdependence, co-existence, and mutual determination between discrete living beings may all have something to tell us about how human political communities can persist, adapt, and even govern themselves without self-destructing. In that sense, modern biology can provide as many clues about democracy as about any alleged biological necessity for authoritarianism.

Such biological imagery bears at least some limited comparison with the modern understanding of democracy as a collective enterprise founded on the creativity, adaptability, and capacity for cooperation and specialization of the individual citizens who constitute the indispensable basis of all democratic political organization. A striking recent contribution underscores the parallels between these natural communities of organisms and human political communities.

In his remarkable recent synthesis of a lifetime of study of the behavior of honeybee swarms, Thomas D. Seeley has demonstrated in rigorous detail how collective decisions crucial to the survival of these communities (often composed of more than 10,000 individuals) are reached. Such decisions are taken through an elaborate process of information gathering and sharing, followed by competition between alternatives to test which has most support, and ending with precisely timed and carefully coordinated implementation steps. These decisions are taken by consensus—although occasionally the swarm may be so evenly divided that it has to reassemble for a second round of deliberation, and in extreme circumstances it may even split into two. The threshold for implementation of the decision requires a quorum.

In Seeley's view the honeybee swarm is a “super-organism” that is governed by democratic principles. He also likens decision-making by the 1.5 kilograms of bees in a swarm to the processes involved when the 1.5 kilograms of cells in the human brain make a choice. He stresses that the hive has no central planner, overseer, or benevolent dictator. He even concludes his study with a series of more or less tenable comparisons between honeybee democracy and the proceedings of a New England Town Hall meeting.

Seeley concludes his account of honeybee democracy by listing five lessons his Cornell faculty can learn from bees: compose a decision-making group of individuals with shared interests; minimize the leader's influence on the group; seek diverse solutions to shared problems; update the group's knowledge through debate; and use quorums to gain cohesion, accuracy and speed.Footnote ³⁶ No doubt bee swarms also differ from human communities in crucial respects, despite these parallels. But at least this example shows that analogies drawn from biology need not be biased in an anti-democratic direction. Moreover, as Seeley's study demonstrates, there can be two-way traffic between the modeling exercises carried out by biologists and those practiced by political scientists. There is also relatively little danger that either discipline will lapse into assuming that such imagery can be straightforwardly transplanted from one domain to the other without qualification or modification. Such un-theorized transplants from engineering and architecture are more likely to pass unchallenged. At any rate, this comparison is fresher and more flexible than the physicalist metaphors that currently prevail in an ossified form. It may therefore serve to enliven concept formation in comparative democratization studies, a field where academic “flight from reality” would be particularly harmful.

But, just like other social images drawn from biological thought (survival of the fittest, the selfish gene), there are also limits to the transferability of this conception: analogy is not homology.

The Scope—and Limitations— of the Metaphor

I have proposed to improve on the established analytical framework by consciously substituting a more flexible and appropriate analogical structure in place of our currently exhausted and ossified metaphors. I have argued for an autopoietic conception of democratization as a complex, open-ended, partially reversible, process of political construction. But although biological analogies are more illuminating than their physical precursors, they are still only analogies and it is important to keep in mind their limitations as well as the insights they offer. Since analogy is not homology the transfer of reference from, say, biology to politics can only be partial and never uncritical.

Precise analytical language facilitates clarity of thought and reliability of causal attribution. It helps the speaker to avoid misleading others, or confusing himself. It can purge arguments of wishful thinking and may be used to separate “facts” from “values” reflecting emotional biases. The ultimate expression of this search for precision is when ideas are stated with “mathematical plainnesse.”Footnote ³⁷ Neither the physical nor the biological analogies considered here come close to meeting such criteria. Rather, the case for invoking a biological structure of analogies rests on the need to complement precise analysis with fresh and lively imagery on the grounds that a more flexible and illuminating framework would capture better the diversity of and changes in democratization, and clarify the limits of previous metaphors. These are framing devices—they direct the analyst's attention to the most fruitful lines of inquiry, and can thus serve to facilitate productive analytical precision, rather than to substitute for it. The engineering image of an idealized piece of timeless machinery (democratization leading to a permanent and fully operational democratic regime) may not be the best starting point for accurate measurement and precise causal attribution in this particular realm of inquiry. It risks becoming too rigid, and of distracting attention from the true dynamics at work. Fortunately, there is an alternative source of imagery that has also proved capable of generating powerful explanations.Footnote ³⁸

Undoubtedly for some aspects of comparative democratization studies (comparing voting and electoral systems, for example), mathematical precision is necessary. For other more elusive and contestable areas, analogical thinking may be required. But Aristotle long ago warned against the abandonment of serious inquiry into those topics that do not respond well to ultra-precision. He also cautioned against any assumption that once established a democracy would be self-perpetuating. “We shall know not to regard as a democratic … any measure that will make the whole as democratic … as it is possible to be, but only that measure which will make it last as a democracy … for as long as possible.”Footnote ³⁹ This portrays democratization as a precarious undertaking, and accords with a biological image of “viability” rather than with a physicalist assumption of permanence and purity. Evidently, the biological analogy carries some disturbing implications for the way we model democracy and democratization, since it emphasizes that all living organisms are finite, either evolving or perishing. This reminds us of the ancient hypothesis that there could be a life cycle of democratization.

Viability, contagion, health, and hybridity are all terms that can be deployed to illuminate features of democratization that concern inter-subjective deliberation between free citizens. The self-construction of a democratic political system can be modeled in biological terms without undermining the postulate of individual choice. In fact, political self-organization implies uncoerced participation.

Moreover, when choosing an interpretative frame we must also consider the users of the analysis. The experts in the relevant fields are ne set of end-users who seek the maximum of clarity, precision and objectivity, and may accept extreme restrictions on their range of inquiry as the price to pay to attain those ends. But the study of politics must provide for a much broader, and less specialized type of, end-user. A wide array of political actors, opinion-formers, and indeed ordinary citizens requires analytical understanding of democracy and democratization. They will form judgments and undertake actions on the basis of whatever material comes to hand, so scholars ought to provide accounts that are accurate and sufficiently vivid and intelligible to non-specialist users. Appropriately selected and non-ossified analogical arguments may be the best vehicle for this purpose.

Finally, rather than mounting a defense of the biological frame of analogy against all challengers, I adopt a pluralist position. Welcoming a careful re-examination of the conceptual morphology of democratization studies—including recasting of its structure of metaphors and analogies—is perfectly compatible with encouraging the application of quantitative, historical, ethnographic and other methods of empirical verification. Above all, we need to keep open the avenues of dialogue and communication between these fragmenting epistemic communities.