Learning to Love Democracy: Electoral Accountability and the Success of Democracy

This article explains why dissatisfaction with the performance of individual politicians in new democracies often turns into disillusionment with democracy as a political system. The demands on elections as an instrument of political accountability are much greater in new than established democracies: politicians have yet to form reputations, a condition that facilitates the entry into politics of undesirable candidates who view this period as their “one‐time opportunity to get rich.” After a repeatedly disappointing government performance, voters may rationally conclude that “all politicians are crooks” and stop discriminating among them, to which all politicians rationally respond by “acting like crooks,” even if most may be willing to perform well in office if given appropriate incentives. Such an expectation‐driven failure of accountability, which I call the “trap of pessimistic expectations,” may precipitate the breakdown of democracy. Once politicians establish reputations for good performance, however, these act as barriers to the entry into politics of low‐quality politicians. The resulting improvement in government performance reinforces voters’ belief that democracy can deliver accountability, a process that I associate with democratic consolidation. These arguments provide theoretical microfoundations for several prominent empirical associations between the economic performance of new democracies, public attitudes toward democracy, and democratic stability.     

协商民主概念的提出及其多元认知

协商民主理论研究兴起之后,如何界定协商民主的内涵就成了学术界的研究重点。在毕塞特看来,当初美国立宪者设计的以人民主权原则为基础、以权力分立与相互制约的体制为架构、以定期选举和政党竞争为动力的代议民主体制,就是"协商民主",就是一种深思熟虑的、审慎的、尊重人民主权的民主政治。而曼宁、科恩等学者开始拓展其内涵,将合法性、追求理性自治与公民参与的政治理想赋予协商民主。吉登斯、扬、德雷泽克等学者分别从"对话民主""交往民主"和"话语民主"角度进行了新阐释。协商民主概念经历了一个逐渐丰富和发展的过程。总体上讲,协商民主就是基于人民主权原则和多数原则的现代民主体制,其中,自由平等的公民,以公共利益为共同的价值诉求,通过理性的公共协商,在达成共识的基础上赋予立法和决策以合法性。     

Electoral Democracy during Wartime: The 2004 U.S. Election

The U.S. election of 2004 affords an opportunity to investigate how wartime affects presidential voting. The conventional wisdom is that wartime presidents always get reelected, but previous studies have not examined how citizens' attitudes on the war affect their voting. The papers in this special issue investigate this process, looking at how attitudes on the Iraq War, the larger War on Terrorism, and the so-called cultural war affected attitudes toward the presidential candidates and voting. The studies use a wide variety of datasets and survey questions, showing that the different aspects of the war resonate with different voters and that some of the effects of wartime are indirect through increasing the salience of leadership in the election. Wartime presidents do not get reelected automatically; they have had success in reelection because of how they use the war to build an image that can get them reelected.

Non-Majoritarian Democracy: A Comparison of Federal and Consociational Theories

In an earlier attempt to compare federalism and consociationalism,I found that, both conceptually and empirically, they do notcoincide but that they do overlap to a significant extent. Inthis second comparison, my point of departure is that both conceptsentail a rejection of majoritarian democracy. Eight characteristicsof non-majoritarian democracy—or consensus democracy—canbe identified: (1) executive power sharing, (2) balanced executive-legislativerelations, (3) strong bicameralism, (4) multiparty system, (5)multi-dimensional party system, (6) proportional representation,(7) federalism and decentralization, and (8) a written constitutionand minority veto. Consociational theorists tend to emphasizethe non-majoritarian attributes of power sharing, proportionalrepresentation, and multi-partyism, whereas federal theoristsstress the non-majoritarian characteristics of strong bicameralismand rigid constitutions, in addition to federalism itself. Asimilar pattern is revealed by a factor analysis of these variablesin twenty-two democratic regimes. Although consociationalismand federalism are non-majoritarian in nature, they representclearly different dimensions of non-majoritarianism.     

'To Secure the Blessings of Liberty': Liberty and American Federal Democracy

The founding and subsequent development of the United Stateshave been characterized by a tension between two kinds of liberty,which can be called natural liberty and federal liberty. Naturalliberty refers to the freedom of individuals to do as they pleasewithout being shackled by civil society. Federal liberty refersto the liberty to be a partner in establishing the covenantfounding civil society, and then the liberty to live accordingto the terms of the covenant. Federal liberty has taken twoforms in America: one concerning the relationship between individualsand civil society, and one concerning the relationship betweenthe states and the federal government under the U.S. Constitution.Out of the tension between natural and federal liberty, thereemerged two constitutional traditions: the U.S. constitutionaltradition, which has emphasized individualism and the marketplace,and the state constitutional tradition, which has emphasizedcommunity and commonwealth. Since the end of World War II, however,there has been a shift away from historic syntheses of marketplaceand commonwealth. Increasingly, the states have been deniedtheir constitutional powers to support any particular moralorder other than that of the marketplace, and the federal governmenthas undertaken to establish a new morality of equality for thenation as a whole.     

Alexis de Tocqueville on the Covenantal Tradition of American Federal Democracy

Perhaps no analyst of democracy's potentials for despotism andself-government understood better than Alexis de Tocquevillethe importance of the "favorable circumstances" of America'srepublican and religious origins. America's covenantal heritageinspired the public philosophy of federal liberty and the federalprinciple used to establish governments and political associationsin colonial New England. The Puritans, Tocqueville explained,created the bonds and the liberties of citizenship by theirassent to eternal, transcendent principles, as well as by theirconsent to government. The principles of covenant ultimatelyprovided the institutional and conceptual foundation of constitutionalgovernment, making America's federal democracy less vulnerableto possessive individualism and democratic despotism. Federalprinciples fostered an important indirect role for religionin American politics. Tocqueville not only analyzed the tensionbetween the requirements of faith and democratic norms, butalso distinguished covenantal ways of negotiating these concernsfrom the approach taken by later advocates of religious freedom,fames Madison and Thomas Jefferson. He argued that federalism'smoral foundations will be difficult to preserve if this tensionis resolved in ways that promote individual autonomy by underminingcovenantal thinking.     

Electoral Accountability in a Federal System: National and Provincial Economic Voting in Canada

Are federal incumbents punished for national and/or provincialeconomic performance, and are provincial incumbents held accountablefor the state of the provincial and/or national economy? Usinga pooled cross-sectional time-series analysis of electoral resultsand macroeconomic data for 1953–2001, this article exploresthe extent to which provincial and federal incumbents in Canadianelections are affected more by national or provincial economicconditions. The results of the analysis suggest that federalincumbents would not gain many votes by claiming credit forthe economic prosperity of any particular province when, onaverage, national economic conditions are deteriorating. Theresults further suggest that provincial incumbents are not heldaccountable for economic conditions in their provinces, butare rather punished for national economic deterioration whenthe incumbent federal party is of the same partisan family.     

Pivotal states in the Electoral College, 1880 to 2004

This paper presents an empirical measure of pivoting in the electoral college from 1880 to 2004. The measure derives from established theoretical concepts of power and pivoting first introduced by Shapley and Shubik (Am. Political Sci. Rev. 84:787–792, 1954). Pivotal states identified by this approach generally conform to popular interpretations—Ohio in 2004, Florida in 2000, and so forth—but, historically, pivotal states are also frequently small or medium-sized states. Also, pivotal states by this approach are not necessarily competitive states. In general, whether or not a state is pivotal is mainly a function of its size and bellwether tendency—i.e., its tendency to mirror the national voting trend. A state’s pivot position is also an excellent predictor of how presidential candidates allocated time and money across states in the general elections of 2000 and 2004. Controlling for a state’s pivot position, size and electoral competitiveness have little effect on the allocation of campaign resources.     

Representative Democracy as a Necessary Condition for the Survival of a Federal Constitution

It does not follow from the supposition that the union is beneficialthat its terms would go unchallenged by its members. The argumentin this article suggests that federal stability (robustness)requires for itself a well-functioning democratic process, whichsatisfies a fairly restrictive condition. A necessary conditionfor the resiliency of the federal regime is a representativedemocracy; furthermore, it is the representative democracy inwhich rewards to the representatives are only in part vestedin their parochial constituencies, while in the other part comeform other sources, e.g., from an oversized at-large coalition.The requirement to the democratic process is, of course, onlya necessary, not a sufficient condition for the federal success.Yet, we argue in this essay that only the states with well-developed(properly institutionalized) democratic electoral competitionhave a chance to form a resilient federal union and sustaintheir federal constitutional arrangements not just in form,but in their political practice as well.