4.DEMOCRACY AND LEGITIMACY

‘Democracy is the worst form of government except all the other forms that

have been tried from time to time.’ WINSTON CHURCHILL

4.DEMOCRACY AND LEGITIMACY

• In modern politics,debates about legitimacyare dominated by the issueof democracy.

• Until the nineteenthcentury, the term‘democracy’ continued tohave pejorativeimplications, suggesting aform of ‘mob rule’.

LEGITIMACY ISRIGHTFULLNESSIN MINDS AND HEARTS OF PEOPLE

LEGITIMACY AND POLITICAL STABILITY

• The issue of legitimacy, the rightfulness of aregime or system of rule, is linked to theoldest and one of the most fundamental ofpolitical debates. Do citizens have a duty torespect the state and obey its laws?

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGqXkcpP3Kk

• Legitimizing power: The classiccontribution to the understanding oflegitimacy as a sociological phenomenonwas provided by Max Weber.

LEGITIMACY AND POLITICAL STABILITY

Three kinds of

authority are;

Three kinds of authority

In effect, traditional authority is regardedas legitimate because it has ‘alwaysexisted’: it has been sanctified by historybecause earlier generations have acceptedit.

The most obvious examples of traditionalauthority are found amongst tribes orsmall groups in the form of patriarchalismand gerontocracy.

Three kinds of authority

Charismatic authority isbased on the power of anindividual’s personality.Charismatic authorityoperates entirely through thecapacity of a leader to make adirect and personal appeal tofollowers as a kind of hero orsaint.

Three kinds of authority

• Legal–rational authority links authority to a clearly and legally defined set of rules.

• The power of a president is determined in the final analysis by constitutional rules, which constrain or limit what an office holder is able to do.

• However, Weber also recognised a darker side to this type of political legitimacy. Bureaucratic forms of organization.

LEGITIMACY AND POLITICAL STABILITY

Legitimation crises may cause revolutions. Revolution: A popular uprising, involving extra-legal mass action, which brings about fundamental change (a change in the political system itself)

DEMOCRATIC LEGITIMACY

Democracy can be seen to promote legitimacy in at least three ways.

• In the first place. Democracy underpins legitimacy by expanding the opportunities for political participation, most importantly through the act of voting, but also through activities such as joining a political party or interest group or by engaging in protests or demonstrations.

DEMOCRATIC LEGITIMACY

• Second, the essence of democratic governance is a process of compromise, conciliation and negotiation rather than the use of naked power.

• Third, democracy operates as a feedback system that tends towards long-term political stability, as it brings the ‘outputs’ of government into line with the ‘inputs’ or pressures placed upon it.

NON-DEMOCRATIC LEGITIMACY

• Non-democratic regimes are,by their nature, illegitimate.

• Nevertheless, someauthoritarian regimessurvive for many decadeswith relatively little evidenceof mass political disaffection.

NON-DEMOCRATIC LEGITIMACY

Three key forms of non-democratic legitimation have been used.

• First, elections have been used to give a regime a democratic façade.

• Second, non-democratic regimes have sought performance legitimation based on their ability to deliver high living standards.

• Third, ideological legitimation has been used, either in an attempt to uphold the leader’s, military’s or party’s right to rule.

NON-DEMOCRATIC LEGITIMACY

However, when suchstrategies fail, all semblanceof legitimation evaporatesand non-democraticregimes are forced either toresort to progressively moredraconian means ofsurvival, or else theycollapse in the face ofpopular uprisings.

UNDERSTANDING DEMOCRACY

• Democracy is derived from the ancientGreek word kratos, meaning power, orrule. Democracy thus means ‘rule by thedemos’ (the demos referring to ‘thepeople’).

• However, a term that can mean anythingto anyone is in danger of meaningnothing at all.

UNDERSTANDING DEMOCRACYDemocracy is the following;

• a system of rule by the poor and disadvantaged

• a form of government in which the people rule themselves directly

• …………so on.

WHO ARE THE PEOPLE?

• One of the core features of democracyis the principle of political equality.

• However, who constitutes ‘thepeople’?

• Answer is simple: ‘the demos’, or ‘thepeople’, surely refers to all the people;that is, the entire population of thecountry.

WHO ARE THE PEOPLE?• In Greek city-states,

political participation was restricted to a tiny proportion of the population, male citizens over the age of 20, thereby excluding all women, slaves and foreigners.

• Strict restrictions on voting also existed in most western states until well into the twentieth century.

Platon

WHO ARE THE PEOPLE?

• Nevertheless, an important restrictioncontinues to be practised in alldemocratic systems in the form of theexclusion of children, the certifiablyinsane and imprisoned criminals.

• ‘the people’ may in practice be taken tomean ‘the majority’.

HOW SHOULD THE PEOPLE RULE?

• In the case of directdemocracy, popularparticipation entails directand continuous involvement indecision-making, throughdevices such as referendums.

• The alternative and morecommon form of democraticparticipation is the act ofvoting, which is called‘representative democracy’.

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6jgWxkbR7A

HOW FAR SHOULD POPULAR RULE EXTEND?

• Liberal democracy have usuallyproposed that democracy berestricted to political life.

• Instead of endorsing merepolitical democracy, socialistshave called for ‘socialdemocracy’.

MODELS OF DEMOCRACY

In reality, there are a number of rival theories or models of democracy.

Four contrasting models of democracy:

• classical democracy

• protective democracy

• developmental democracy

• people’s democracy.

CLASSICAL DEMOCRACYThe form of directdemocracy thatoperated in Athensduring the fourthand fifth centuriesBCE is oftenportrayed as theonly pure or idealsystem of popularparticipation.

CLASSICAL DEMOCRACY

• What made Athenian democracy soremarkable was the level of politicalactivity of its citizens.

• The most influential critic of this form ofdemocracy was the philosopher Plato.Plato attacked the principle of politicalequality.

• His solution, advanced in The Republic,was that government be placed in thehands of a class of philosopher kings.

CLASSICAL DEMOCRACY

The classical model has been kept alive inthe township meetings of New England in the USA, the communal assemblies that operate in the smaller Swiss cantons and in the wider use of referendums.https://www.yout

ube.com/watch?v=fLJBzhcSWTk

SWISS VOTE

PROTECTIVE DEMOCRACY

• In the seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies, democracy was seen as adevice through which citizens couldprotect themselves from theencroachments of government.

• This view appealed particularly to earlyliberal thinkers whose concern was,above all, to create the widest realm ofindividual liberty.

PROTECTIVE DEMOCRACY

This same concern with unchecked power was taken up in the seventeenth century by John Locke.

PROTECTIVE DEMOCRACY

• The more radical notion of universalsuffrage was advanced from the lateeighteenth century onwards by utilitariantheorists such as Jeremy Bentham andJames Mill (1773–1836).

• Bentham came to believe that, since allindividuals seek pleasure and the avoidanceof pain, a universal franchise (manhoodsuffrage) was the only way of promoting‘the greatest happiness for the greatestnumber’.

PROTECTIVE DEMOCRACYLiberty must also be guaranteed by a strictly enforced separation of powers via the creation of a separate executive, legislature and judiciary, and by the maintenance of basic rights and freedoms, such as freedom of expression, freedom of movement, and freedom from arbitrary arrest.

DEVELOPMENTAL DEMOCRACY• An alternative focus: a

concern with the development of the human individual and the community (Jean-Jacques Rousseau)

• They came to have an impact on the Marxist and anarchist traditions as well as, later, on the New Left.

DEVELOPMENTAL DEMOCRACY

In Rousseau’s view, developmentaldemocracy required not merely politicalequality, but a relatively high level ofeconomic equality.

Although not a supporter of commonownership, Rousseau neverthelessproposed that ‘no citizen shall be richenough to buy another and none so poor asto be forced to sell himself ’.

DEVELOPMENTAL DEMOCRACY

For Mill, the central virtue ofdemocracy was that itpromotes the ‘highest andharmonious’ development ofindividual capacities.

By participating in politicallife, citizens enhance theirunderstanding, strengthentheir sensibilities andachieve a higher level ofpersonal development.

DEVELOPMENTAL DEMOCRACY

• As a result, Mill proposed the broadening ofpopular participation, arguing that the franchiseshould be extended to all including women butthose who are illiterate.

• Mill did not believe that all political opinions areof equal value. Consequently, he proposed asystem of plural voting: unskilled workers wouldhave a single vote, skilled workers two votes…

• He had typical liberal fear which was famouslydescribed by Alexis de Tocqueville as ‘thetyranny of the majority’.

PEOPLE’S DEMOCRACYThe term was used, inparticular, to designatethe goal of socialequality brought aboutthrough the commonownership of wealth incontrast to ‘political’democracy, whichestablishes only a facadeof equality.

PEOPLE’S DEMOCRACY

• Marx’ admiration for the Paris Commune of 1871.

• The form of democracy that was developed in twentieth-century communist states, however, owed more to the ideas of V. I. Lenin than it did to those of Marx.

• The weakness of this model is that Lenin failed to build into it any mechanism for checking the power of the Communist Party.