Problems Confronting Contemporary Democracies : Essays in Honor of Alfred Stepan [1 ed.] 9780268086886, 9780268023720

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Problems Confronting Contemporary Democracies

RECENT TITLES FROM THE HELEN KELLO GG INSTITUTE FOR INT E RNAT IONA L ST UD IE S

Scott Mainwaring, series editor The University of Notre Dame Press gratefully thanks the Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies for its support in the publication of titles in this series.

Jodi S. Finkel Judicial Reform as Political Insurance: Argentina, Peru, and Mexico in the 1990s (2008) Robert H. Wilson, Peter M. Ward, Peter K. Spink, and Victoria E. Rodríguez Governance in the Americas: Decentralization, Democracy, and Subnational Government in Brazil, Mexico, and the USA (2008) Brian S. McBeth Dictatorship and Politics: Intrigue, Betrayal, and Survival in Venezuela, 1908–1935 (2008) Pablo Policzer The Rise and Fall of Repression in Chile (2009) Frances Hagopian, ed. Religious Pluralism, Democracy, and the Catholic Church in Latin America (2009) Marcelo Bergman and Laurence Whitehead, eds. Criminality, Public Security, and the Challenge to Democracy in Latin America (2009) Matthew R. Cleary The Sources of Democratic Responsiveness in Mexico (2010) Leah Anne Carroll Violent Democratization: Social Movements, Elites, and Politics in Colombia’s Rural War Zones, 1984–2008 (2011) Timothy J. Power and Matthew M. Taylor, eds. Corruption and Democracy in Brazil: The Struggle for Accountability (2011) Ana María Bejarano Precarious Democracies: Understanding Regime Stability and Change in Colombia and Venezuela (2011) Carlos Guevara Mann Political Careers, Corruption, and Impunity: Panama's Assembly, 1984–2009 (2011) Gabriela Ippolito-O’Donnell The Right to the City: Popular Contention in Contemporary Buenos Aires (2012) Barry S. Levitt Power in the Balance: Presidents, Parties, and Legislatures in Peru and Beyond (2012)

For a complete list of titles from the Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies, see http://www.undpress.nd.edu

Problems CONFRONTING Contemporary DEMOCRACIES Essays in Honor of

Alfred Stepan

Edited by

Douglas Chalmers and Scott Mainwaring

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

Copyright © 2012 by University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 www.undpress.nd.edu All Rights Reserved Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Problems confronting contemporary democracies : essays in honor of Alfred Stepan / edited by Douglas Chalmers and Scott Mainwaring. p. cm. — (From the Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-268-02372-0 (cloth) — ISBN 978-0-268-08688-6 (web pdf) 1. Democracy—History—20th century. 2. Stepan, Alfred C. I. Stepan, Alfred C. II. Chalmers, Douglas A. III. Mainwaring, Scott, 1954– JC421.P764 2012 321.8—dc23 2012024902 ∞ The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Alfred Stepan and the Study of Democratic Regimes 1 Scott Mainwaring with Douglas Chalmers

P a r t I . T h e A r m e d Fo r c e s , P o l i c e , a n d D e m o c r a c y 1 The Armed Forces and Society in Latin America:

Change and Continuity J. Samuel Fitch

25

2 Reconciling the Brazilian Military with Democracy:

The Power of Alfred Stepan’s Ideas 67 Fernando Henrique Cardoso 3 Managing Citizen Security in Latin America’s

Changing States and Societies 82 Mark Ungar

Part I I. The State and Democracy 4 The State of the Market: The Market Reform Debate and

Postcommunist Diversity László Bruszt

111

vi | Contents

P a r t I I I . D e m o c r a t i c Tr a n s i t i o n s a n d D e m o c r a t i c R e g i m e s 5 Revisiting “Paths toward Redemocratization”

139

Robert M. Fishman 6 Electoral Victory, Political Defeat:

A Failed Democratic Transition in Iran Mirjam Künkler

166

7 Executive Approval under Alternative Democratic

Regime Types 203 Ryan E. Carlin, Cecilia Martínez-Gallardo, and Jonathan Hartlyn 8 Cautionary and Unorthodox Thoughts about

Democracy Today 227 Juan J. Linz in collaboration with Thomas Jeffrey Miley

P a r t I V. Fe d e r a l i s m a n d D e m o c r a c y 9 Holding China Together: Democratic Solutions for

Resolving Ethnic Conflict Ashley Esarey

255

1 0 Of Swords and Shields: Federalism and

Territorial Democratization in the United States 273 Edward L. Gibson 1 1 Oil and the Corporate Reintegration of Russia:

The Role of Federal Oil Companies in Russia’s Center-Periphery Relations 299 Shamil Midkhatovich Yenikeyeff

Contents | vii

P a r t V. R e l i g i o n , To l e r a n c e , a n d D e m o c r a c y 1 2 Religion, Politics, and the State in a Stepanesque Perspective:

Inseparable but Craftable 339 Brian H. Smith 1 3 Twin Tolerations or Siamese Twins?

Kemalist Laicism and Political Islam in Turkey 381 Murat Akan 1 4 Consociationalism versus Twin Tolerations:

Religion and State in Israel 424 Hanna Lerner

List of Contributors 450 Index 456

Preface and Acknowledgments

We celebrate Alfred Stepan’s career with these essays from among those presented at a conference in his honor at Columbia University in 2007. Many colleagues came from all parts of the world to discuss his work and demonstrate the fecundity of his contributions. These essays represent a sample, a window on the manifold influences of his work. Yet this is not a fulsome treatment. We aim to advance scholarship on some of the debates that Stepan launched and advanced about major challenges facing contemporary democracies. Stepan is one of the few individuals who are members of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the British Academy. He was one of fifteen outstanding comparative political scientists interviewed in Munck and Snyder (2007: 392 – 455).1 In 2002 the Brazilian government awarded Stepan the Ordem do Rio Branco, which recognizes honorable accomplishments and civic virtues. In 2009 he received the Kalman Silvert Award for lifetime contributions to Latin American studies,2 and he was on a 2007 list of the four hundred most cited political scientists who teach in the United States.3 Anyone who knows Al Stepan is aware of the vortex of energy he represents, generating his own ideas and organizing research projects but also freely sharing his insights, intellectual challenges, skills, and energy. He challenges colleagues and students alike; he sets forth tasks and puts new perspectives on facts and trends. He confronts conventional wisdom and forces people to reconceptualize problems in researchable ways. He makes an art form of collaboration, working with many scholars worldwide. He draws many students into his projects, often giving them an indispensable start on their own careers. ix

x | Preface and Acknowledgments

Stepan is one of a select company of social scientists who combine the tools of social science with a constant concern for central contemporary political issues and challenges. As he makes clear in the introduction to his book Arguing Comparative Politics (2001: 1– 4), significant issues should drive the choice of research tools; the tools should not set the agenda. (see also Munck and Snyder 2007: 454– 55). The consequence of this approach is not only the political relevance of Stepan’s ideas, as Brazil’s former President Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995– 2003) demonstrates in his essay in this volume, but also the range of major topics he has tackled in the course of his career. As the rich array of topics covered in this volume attests—all owing substantially to Stepan’s insights and, often, prodding—he has moved seamlessly from one challenging problem to another, continually expanding the geographic range of his interests. The conference in 2007 at Columbia University to honor Stepan demonstrated the substantive, geographic, and methodological range of his work with papers that built on many of his major scholarly contributions. These themes include authoritarianism, the breakdown of democratic regimes, transitions from authoritarianism to democracy, democratic consolidation, the role of the military in politics, and ways—including the varieties of federalism—to manage conflict democratically in societies that are divided by religious, ethnic, and national cleavages. His recent work analyzes the relationship between world religions and democracy. Most of these themes are represented here. For the first two decades of his scholarly career, Stepan’s writings focused on Latin America, with a foundation in comparative knowledge and insights that went well beyond this region. His experiences as founding president of the Central European University in Budapest (1993– 96)4 and as Gladstone Professor of Government at Oxford (1996– 99) catapulted Stepan onto new stages with new actors and new issues. Beginning about 1990, his work has also dealt with Eastern and Southern Europe. His 1996 book, coauthored with Juan Linz, analyzed democratic transition and consolidation in these two regions and in Latin America. Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation was translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Croatian, and Chinese. More recently, his theoretical interests in the relationship between world religions and

Preface and Acknowledgments | xi

democracy and in nationalism, federalism, and democracy have led him to study Russia, Hungary, Poland, Yugoslavia, Ukraine, Turkey, India, Indonesia, Burma, and Sri Lanka, among several other countries in Asia, Iran and other countries in the Middle East, and Senegal. We believe that no other political scientist has conducted serious fieldwork in so many parts of the world. Reflecting the geographic diversity of Stepan’s work, this volume includes contributions on Latin America, the postSoviet region, Iran, China, Turkey, Israel, Spain and Portugal, and the United States. Given the huge range of Stepan’s theoretical and geographic interests, a volume to honor him would have been very dispersed and lacking in cohesion if we as editors had not established some clear guidelines for intellectual cohesion and for inclusion of chapters. To counter this pitfall, the volume is centered on work that explicitly addresses Stepan’s own contributions and on challenges to contemporary democracies.

We gratefully acknowledge the other participants at what we called the “AlFest” at Columbia in October 2007 and who made those days special. They included Lisa Anderson, Ana María Bejarano, Nancy Bermeo, Jo-Marie Burt, Miguel Carter, Margaret Crahan, Consuelo Cruz, Larry Diamond, Susan Eckstein, Albert Fishlow, Katherine Hite, Evelyne Huber, Margaret Keck, Anthony Marx, Al Montero, María Victoria Murillo, Enrique Ochoa, Graeme Robertson, Hector Schamis, Cindy Skach, and Richard Snyder. We are also grateful to the School of International and Public Affairs and the Institute of Latin American Studies, both of Columbia University, for the support necessary to make the celebration possible. Chad Kiewet de Jonge and Emily Wauford skillfully edited several chapters. Sheila Berg and Brittany Holom very capably prepared the volume for publication. Finally, we thank Rebecca DeBoer and Stephen Little at the University of Notre Dame Press for their assistance and support. Douglas Chalmers Scott Mainwaring

xii | Preface and Acknowledgments

Notes 1. This lengthy interview provides a fascinating introduction to Stepan’s career and his perspectives on comparative politics. 2. His recognition speech (Stepan 2009a) gives additional information about Stepan’s career and intellectual orientations. 3. This list was published in PS 40, no. 1 (January 2007). 4. See Stepan 2009b for his reflections on the experience of creating a new university in the post-Communist world.

References Munck, Gerardo L., and Richard Snyder. 2007. Passion, Craft, and Method in Comparative Politics. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Stepan, Alfred. 2001. Arguing Comparative Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. “Alfred C. Stepan: Recipient of the Kalman Silvert Award for 2009.” Latin American Studies Association Forum 40, nos. 2– 3 (Spring– Summer): 3– 7. ———. 2009b. “The Early Years of Central European University as a Network: A Memoir.” Social Research 76, no. 2 (Summer): 687– 710.

Introduction Alfred Stepan and the Study of Democratic Regimes Scott Mainwaring w ith Douglas Chalmers

We have two primary goals and a secondary one with this book. We hope to advance understanding of some of the most pressing problems facing democracies across the world. And we wish to honor Alfred Stepan, who did pioneering work on the issues analyzed here. Finally, by highlighting the contributions of one of the most prominent comparative political scientists of the past four decades and illuminating some of the debates he sparked, we hope to make a modest contribution to the intellectual history of comparative politics. This volume is organized as a critical dialogue with Stepan’s work around five themes to which he has been a major contributor: (1) the armed forces, police, and democracy; (2) the state and democracy; (3) democratic transitions and democratic regimes; (4) federalism and democracy; and (5) religion, toleration, and democracy. On all five themes, our volume underscores some of the challenges facing contemporary democracies. In this introduction, we briefly discuss Stepan’s major contributions to these themes and how his contributions frame this volume. We do not address all of Stepan’s significant scholarly contributions but instead focus on the works that are central to the debates raised in this volume. Our objective is to highlight his contributions on the subjects of this volume so as to frame the analyses that follow. 1

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The Armed Forces, Police, and Democracy

Part I of our volume discusses the relationship between the military, the police, and democracy in contemporary Latin America, the region that was the focus of Stepan’s work from the 1960s through the late 1980s. Even though the threat of military coups has receded and civilians have established control over the armed forces in most of Latin America, the military and the police remain important actors. All three chapters in Part I illuminate issues in the relationship between the armed forces (chapters 1 and 2) or the police (chapter 3) and democracy. Stepan’s first book was The Military in Politics: Changing Patterns in Brazil (1971). Very few books published on Latin American politics during the 1970s have held up so well. It remains one of the best books ever written on the military and politics, and it was a seminal work on the breakdown of democracy in Brazil in 1964. Stepan argued that existing theoretical approaches to understanding the relationship between civilian governments and the military were not fruitful for understanding Brazil or many Latin American cases (57– 66). Prior scholarship assumed that growing military professionalism would lead to reduced military involvement in politics. In contrast, Stepan showed that a new kind of professionalism that emerged in Brazil fostered expanding military involvement in politics and helped lead to long-term military rule from 1964 to 1985.1 He described a “moderating” pattern by which the armed forces historically intervened to thwart perceived political threats but then quickly returned power to civilians. He analyzed the changes that led to a different kind of military coup in 1964, one that installed the regime that governed Brazil for the next twenty-one years. Stepan analyzed the armed forces as an institution with its own identity and interests but in a specific political context. He argued against sociological reductionism, that is, analyzing the military’s political behavior as a product of class or other social forces beyond the armed forces. He asserted that it is essential to understand the military’s institutional interests, concerns, and ideas (153– 87, 253– 66), and he rejected understanding the military as an expression of class interests (46– 48, 52– 55). On the other hand, he forcefully argued for understanding the military in relation to other political actors and against an insular conception of the military; he cautioned against an exclusive focus on in-

Introduction | 3

ternal military characteristics. For example, civilian politicians in Brazil had a long history of inviting military involvement in politics, and successful military coups had consistently enjoyed significant civilian support (67– 84). An exclusive focus on internal characteristics of the armed forces would miss these crucial interactions between the military and civilians. Stepan’s second single-authored book, The State and Society: Peru in Comparative Perspective (1978b: 127– 44), developed many of these same themes on the military in politics, this time focused on the Peruvian military regime. In chapter 1, J. Samuel Fitch underscores some understudied new challenges to Latin American militaries in the contemporary period. He inverts Stepan’s concern with challenges the military poses to democratization and focuses instead on challenges democratization and expanding social and cultural opportunities have created for the military. While analyzing new issues in the study of the armed forces, Fitch has long carried the torch as a leading analyst of the military and politics. He follows Stepan’s careful analysis in The Military in Politics (30– 56) of the socioeconomic background of military officers. Stepan emphasized the limits of what social scientists and historians can infer by analyzing the recruitment patterns of military officers. He rejected the idea that this information enables scholars to conclude without further evidence that the military represents certain class interests. Yet he also highlighted the utility of studying recruitment patterns, and Fitch picks up on this point. Following Stepan’s injunction against reductionism, Fitch uses new data to raise questions about the potential importance of the military’s links with society based on the milieu they come from, not simply their class origin. Fitch argues that with the panoply of employment choices in today’s world, and with reduced military budgets and salaries in much of Latin America, the military today faces difficult challenges of recruiting and retaining talent. These challenges have helped “civilianize” the armed forces. Fitch rejects the idea that the military is insular and instead builds on Stepan’s insistence that we understand the military both as an institution with its own interests and as one increasingly embedded in society. While building on Stepan’s theoretical insights, Fitch emphasizes important changes in the military, in society, and in the relationship between the two since Stepan wrote his classic book.

4 | Scott Mainwaring with Douglas Chalmers

Stepan returned to the analysis of the military in a 1986 book published in Brazil, Os militares: Da abertura à Nova República, about the armed forces during the late stages of military rule and the beginning of the new democratic period (1985). His 1988 book, Rethinking Military Politics: Brazil and the Southern Cone, extended this analysis to Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. Both books analyzed a central conundrum for politicians in new democracies that follow on the aftermaths of military regimes: how to achieve the civilian control of the military that is an essential part of a robust democracy without alienating the armed forces and risking a backlash. In both books, Stepan conceptualized the transition to democracy in Brazil as the result of a dynamic interaction between the regime and the opposition. He underscored the powerful prerogatives the Brazilian military retained during the first years of democratic rule, 1985 – 87. He argued they were so sweeping that it was questionable whether Brazil should be considered a democracy at that time, and he underscored some of the difficulties of moving away from such powerful prerogatives. He also highlighted the paucity of expertise regarding military affairs in civil society, the legislature, and the executive and argued that this paucity helped create a veritable carte blanche for the armed forces. In democracies, some civilian leaders need military expertise so as to know how to handle military affairs. In chapter 2, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Brazil’s former president (1995 – 2003) and a highly renowned sociologist, reflects on Stepan’s cautionary analysis in Rethinking Military Politics. Drawing on his own academic work and his experience as the president of recently democratized Brazil, Cardoso embraces Stepan’s insights concerning the transition from military rule in the country. He agrees with Stepan’s arguments concerning the dialectic between regime concessions and societal conquest, the interaction between civil and political society in reestablishing the rule of law, and the role of internal military tensions in fostering democratization. He further argues that Stepan’s analysis of military prerogatives was insightful with regard to the first democratic administrations, but subsequent administrations made great progress in establishing civilian control of the military. On this detail, he argues that Stepan understated the potential for positive change. Cardoso’s chapter is an important contribution to the analysis of the transition to democ-

Introduction | 5

racy in Brazil and of the subsequent capacity of civilian governments to rein in the military. In Latin America and some other parts of the world, one of the primary challenges for contemporary democracies is how to achieve citizen security. In a majority of Latin American countries today, public security is the most salient concern that citizens voice in public opinion surveys. In chapter 3, Mark Ungar analyzes this pressing contemporary problem through theoretical lenses developed by Stepan. He adds to our understanding of one of the central challenges to democratic governance in contemporary Latin America. Ungar argues that a role expansion that bears some similarities to the “new professionalism” that Stepan (1971, 1973) observed in Latin American militaries several decades ago has occurred within the region’s police forces. The pressing demands of citizen insecurity have often enhanced the power of police forces, which have perpetuated predemocratic institutional prerogatives and stood in the way of more democratic and effective policing strategies. Ungar ties greater decentralization in the region to increased policing challenges, echoing Stepan’s (1999; 2001: 315– 61) contention that decentralization can lead to negative outcomes. Reaffirming Linz and Stepan’s (1996) concern for the principle of accountability, Ungar argues that police forces in the region have remained largely unaccountable for abuses and poor security outcomes. Legislatures and courts have proven unwilling or incapable of exercising control over the police. Finally, he suggests that whereas civil society was often a key actor in pushing democratization under authoritarian regimes, it has been ambivalent about and sometimes even detrimental to effective police reforms and has more often than not pushed for short-term mano dura (repressive) policies. Stepan’s contributions on these subjects help us understand how rising crime can undermine the behavioral, attitudinal, and constitutional dimensions of democratic consolidation (Linz and Stepan 1996: 5– 6).

The State, Democracy, and Market Reforms

As Guillermo O’Donnell (1993, 2010) and others have underscored, building state capacity is one of the central challenges in many post-1978

6 | Scott Mainwaring with Douglas Chalmers

democracies. Weak states do not effectively enforce or protect rights; they are not good at providing services; they do not even effectively provide public security, which is, according to Thomas Hobbes and Max Weber, the state’s primordial responsibility. But how to effectively build states and how best to sequence state building, democracy building, and economic reforms remain understudied and contentious issues. Since the 1970s, Stepan has been a pioneer in analyses of the state. His The State and Society: Peru in Comparative Perspective initiated his long-standing concern with the state. At the time, most scholarly traditions assigned little or no weight to the state to explain political outcomes. In contrast to the prevalent societal-centric explanations of politics, Stepan argued that states are partly autonomous actors that shape politics and can reshape civil society.2 Linz and Stepan (1996: 11–15, 435– 54) returned to the theme of the state. Arguing against the market-oriented perspectives that were then in vogue, they emphasized that state capacity was crucial for democracy and for effective market reform.3 Against the conventional wisdom of that era, they argued that democracy facilitated rather than obstructed effective market reform (439– 54). The dominant perspective then was that market reform would hurt most voters, who would therefore use elections to support parties that would limit or oppose economic liberalization. Linz and Stepan asserted that functioning market economies required strong regulatory states, that the construction of such strong states required a democratic regime, and that democratic state building must precede market reforms in order for the positive impacts of such reforms to take root. In chapter 4, László Bruszt evaluates Linz and Stepan’s theoretical arguments on the interaction among the processes of state building, market reform, and democratization. Bruszt’s empirical evidence based on the former Communist countries supports their arguments. Only those former Communist countries that built strong regulatory states under democratic conditions were able to improve their positions in the world economy, increase social equality, and enhance their citizens’ standards of living. These findings support Linz and Stepan’s contention that market reforms are not inimical to democracy and that democracy is a necessary condition for successful economic transformation.

Introduction | 7

Democratic Transitions, Democratic Oppositions, and Democratic Regimes

The study of political regimes has always been central to Stepan’s work. His 1971 book on Brazil was the first of several major contributions on the breakdown of democratic regimes and on authoritarian regimes. Seven years later, Juan J. Linz and Stepan published The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes, which remains an enormously influential contribution. In the 1980s, as authoritarian regimes were falling by the wayside in Latin America, Stepan contributed to the equally prominent collection edited by O’Donnell, Schmitter, and Whitehead (1986) on transitions to democracy. Stepan’s chapter in that volume, “Paths toward Redemocratization” (1986b) focused on the ways in which different paths toward democratization durably shape the challenges facing new democracies. He developed a typology of ten different paths toward democracy based on the role played by different political actors in given historical contexts. Underpinning the analysis is his conviction that each of these ten paths “entails a predictable set of possibilities, problems, and constraints” for the subsequent democratic regimes (64). The chapter touches on the strengths and weaknesses each kind of transition creates for a new democratic regime. In his contribution to our volume, Robert Fishman builds on this 1986 essay and argues that different paths to democracy had long-term consequences in Portugal and Spain. Fishman explores the long-term political effects of a partly revolutionary path toward democracy in Portugal and a consensus-oriented transition in Spain. Portugal’s revolutionary path led to democratic practices in which traditionally powerless actors gained access to formal political institutions. In contrast, Spain’s consensus-oriented transition led to a democracy less accommodating of social and political protest. Following Stepan, Fishman argues that the mode of transition influenced later outcomes in enduring ways without determining them. He shows that Stepan and Linz have “elucidated choices and limits, possibilities and dangers, that emerge in the context of regime change.” Fishman adds to the debate about the ways in which paths to democracy condition subsequent outcomes. He emphasizes the

8 | Scott Mainwaring with Douglas Chalmers

importance of weaving together institutional, cultural, and sociostructural analysis. He builds on Stepan’s concern with “underreaching” (i.e., excessive caution on the agenda of democratic change) and argues for certain distinctive advantages of democracy born in social revolutionary processes where that pathway is historically open. The Tasks of Democratic Oppositions

Stepan’s work (1990, 1997) on the tasks of democratic oppositions under authoritarian regimes inspired Mirjam Künkler’s chapter. Stepan (1990) argued that the dynamics of authoritarian regimes and the prospects for regime change depend not only on the regime leadership and supporters but also on the relationship between the regime and democratic opposition. He argued that we can understand regime dynamics on the basis of the interactions among the core regime supporters, the coercive apparatus, passive supporters, passive opponents, and active opponents. He outlined five critical tasks for the opposition in roughly ascending order of complexity: “(1) resisting integration into the regime; (2) guarding zones of autonomy against it; (3) disputing its legitimacy; (4) raising the costs of authoritarian rule; and (5) creating a credible democratic alternative.” Künkler analyzes regime dynamics in the Islamic Republic of Iran during the reformist presidency of Mohammad Khatami (1997– 2005). She describes the unprecedented rise of reformist political movements during this time and asks why, despite broad popular support for reform, the hardline authoritarians thoroughly defeated those who advocated political liberalization. She argues that the failure of the reform movement stemmed from its inability to guard Stepan’s “zones of autonomy” against the regime. Although Khatami pushed liberalization and tried to increase the enforcement of the rule of law, his efforts were constantly undermined by conservative unelected elements of the regime, including the Supreme Leader, the judiciary, the Guardian Council, and the security forces. Instead of leading to a democratic transition, the years under the reformist administration resulted in the consolidation of authoritarian rule and mass disenchantment with reformist politicians.

Introduction | 9

Presidentialism and Democracy

In the 1990s, Stepan and Linz inspired a new debate about the merits and shortcomings of presidentialism. Along with Linz and Cindy Skach, Stepan argued that differing institutional arrangements affect the likelihood of democratic consolidation and breakdown. For Stepan and Skach (1993), presidential regimes create more perverse incentives for political actors than do parliamentary systems. Given the mutual independence of the executive and the legislature in presidential systems, incentives for coalitions are weaker and executive rule by decree is more appealing. Together, these outcomes often give way to deadlock and political crises that threaten democratic regimes (Linz and Stepan 1996: 141– 42, 181– 83; Stepan and Skach 1993).4 In their chapter in this volume, Ryan E. Carlin, Cecilia MartínezGallardo, and Jonathan Hartlyn examine the contrasts between presidentialism and parliamentarism from a different angle. They explore differences in democratic accountability afforded by presidentialism and parliamentarism from the perspective of citizens. Using an original data set, they find support for several hypotheses concerning the effects of presidentialism and parliamentarism on executive approval ratings over the course of democratic administrations in thirty countries. Because executive approval serves as an interelectoral indication of democratic accountability, the fact that institutional variables help to explain approval variation over time gives credence to Stepan and Skach’s (1993) contention that accountability operates differently under presidential and parliamentary systems (see also Samuels and Shugart 2010). The authors find inspiration in Stepan’s focus on institutions and his argument that presidential systems are less accountable because presidents are harder to remove.

Federalism, Multinationalism, and Democracy

Part IV analyzes the relationship between federalism, multinationalism, and democracy. Federalism has advantages in large and mediumsized countries with considerable ethnic and national diversity. Yet as

10 | Scott Mainwaring with Douglas Chalmers

Stepan has shown, and as Part IV of our volume demonstrates, federalism presents challenges as well as opportunities for democracy. Stepan’s abiding interest in Brazil and his fascination with post1989 processes of democratization in the post-Communist world led him to study the relationship between federalism and democracy in several prominent works (1999; 2001: 315– 61; 2004). Rather than view federalism as intrinsically desirable or undesirable, Stepan emphasized both its positives and negatives. Some variants of federalism constitutionally give small minorities veto power over much of the policy agenda and make it more difficult to pass innovative legislation (Stepan 2001: 331– 57; 2004). Stepan called attention to some important yet insufficiently emphasized facts about federalism. First, most people in the world living under democracy resided in federal systems, and yet the most famous previous work on federalism, William H. Riker’s Federalism: Origin, Operation, Significance (1964) was deeply flawed. Riker failed to distinguish between federalism under democracy and nondemocratic regimes. Yet as Stepan observed, without competitive subnational elections, federalism does not really have the territorial division of authority that is its defining feature.5 Riker also argued that federalism did not influence policy outcomes. Stepan (2001: 315– 61; 2004) showed quite the contrary: even relatively weak democratic federalism influences policy outcomes. Much of Stepan’s recent work focuses on building democracy in multinational societies. He called attention to some “inconvenient facts,” focusing on the challenge of creating democracy in multinational countries (Linz and Stepan 1996: 24 – 33; Stepan 2000, 2005; Stepan, Linz, and Yadav 2011): “Under modern circumstances, very few states that are nondemocratic will begin a possible democratic transition with a very high degree of nation-state homogeneity. This inconvenient fact for nation-state proponents is insufficiently recognized . . . and tends to exacerbate problems of stateness” (Linz and Stepan 1996: 25). Linz and Stepan (1996: 30– 33; Stepan, Linz, and Yadav 2011) persuasively argued that in today’s world, a new democracy that is multinational and multiethnic is unlikely to remain democratic if it insists on becoming a nationstate in which nation and state are coterminous. Stepan (2005, 2008; Stepan, Linz, and Yadav 2011) advocates in such circumstances building a

Introduction | 11

state-nation, which supports more than one national identity in the same state and nurtures multiple and complementary identities. By allowing for different national identities within one sovereign state, federalism has advantages for multinational, multiethnic countries that attempt to build democracy (Stepan 2001: 323– 33; Stepan, Linz, and Yadav 2011). Stepan (2001: 360) noted that “all democracies that are strongly multinational are federal and asymmetrical.”6 Federalism can grant nationalities governing capacity within a given subcountry circumscription, thereby potentially increasing the likelihood that they would support democracy and identify both as members of a nationality and as members of a state-nation. Ashley Esarey’s chapter follows Stepan’s analysis on the need for careful institutional crafting in new multinational democracies. He poses the hypothetical situation of a democratic China and asks what institutional arrangements would be most likely to nurture democracy given the country’s multinationalism and many ethnic groups. Esarey argues that the most advantageous institutional arrangement would entail a mixture of asymmetrical federalism and federacies, which are characterized by a constitutionally guaranteed division of powers between the central government and a local government of a culturally or ethnically distinct region (Stepan, Linz, and Yadav 2011: 204–10). This combination would help sustain state-nation unity while at the same time ensuring democratic rights at the individual level. Similar to arrangements in India and Spain, asymmetrical federalism would ensure adherence to the principle of “one person, one vote” while providing special policy prerogatives— particularly over education, religion, and cultural affairs — for separatist-leaning regions such as Tibet and Xinjiang. Given the higher institutional autonomy currently enjoyed by Hong Kong and Taiwan, they could become federacies. Similar to Greenland’s arrangement with Denmark, these federacies would cede foreign policy authority to the federal government while retaining autonomy over most domestic affairs. Esarey concludes that the combination of asymmetrical federalism and federacies with strong consociational practices to maintain nationwide political parties and access to national bureaucracies across regions could facilitate what Stepan has termed “demos enabling” federalism and could help sustain a young democracy.

12 | Scott Mainwaring with Douglas Chalmers

In chapter 10, Edward L. Gibson responds to Stepan’s call for greater theoretical attention to the relationship between federalism and democracy, and in particular to how conflicts among political actors in the central government profoundly affect conflicts in the states. Whereas Stepan (2004) focused on how federalism can constrain the will of national majorities, Gibson asks how federalism can impede democratization in subnational units. He argues that struggles over the design of the territorial regime—that is, the rules and norms that regulate interactions and power across subnational units and determine the division of authority among different levels of government —are inextricably linked to larger-scale battles over democratization. By following the conflicts over the territorial regime in the United States during Reconstruction and its aftermath, Gibson demonstrates that federalism can be used not only as a “sword” for further democratization in subnational units, as Stepan argued with respect to the cases of Brazil and Mexico, but also as a “shield” for subnational authoritarianism. Gibson’s work enhances understanding of the nexus between federalism and subnational authoritarianism. In his critique of Riker’s view of federalism, Stepan (2000, 2004) pointed to Russia to illustrate the profound effect that strong federal structures can produce with regard not only to policy but also to the very existence of the state. He argued that Russia’s complicated asymmetric federal structure, in combination with extraconstitutional “bilateral treaties” between the national and subnational governments and open disregard for federal law by some subunits, threatened to interrupt the country’s economic and political transition during the 1990s. In chapter 11, Shamil Midkhatovich Yenikeyeff analyzes the extent to which center-periphery bargaining during the Yeltsin and Putin administrations affected system stability, erosion, and change. Corporate actors, particularly within the energy industry, played key roles in the changing dynamics of center-periphery bargaining. During the Yeltsin administration (1991– 99), regionally based oil companies and their local elite sponsors enjoyed significant power in many regions. This power enabled them to exercise substantial autonomy from Moscow based on bilateral, extraconstitutional agreements. After federal corporate actors became institutionalized and Putin assumed the presidency in 1999, the power

Introduction | 13

dynamics shifted strongly away from regional governments and oil companies and toward federal corporate and governmental actors. Yenikeyeff argues that the actions of these federal corporate actors, rather than those of political parties, are integral to explaining the reintegration of the Russian state following the tumultuous Yeltsin years.

Religion, Tolerance, and Democracy

Part V examines the challenges that religion can pose for democracy, and vice versa, and the ways in which religion and democracy can mutually flourish and support each other. Stepan studied religion early in his career, and after a long hiatus he returned to this issue in a seminal work that has spawned considerable debate and scholarship on the relationship of world religions to democracy and authoritarianism. His “The World’s Religious Systems and Democracy: ‘Crafting the Twin Tolerations,’” in Arguing Comparative Politics (2001: 213– 53), argued against the conventional wisdom, famously exemplified by Samuel P. Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the Modern World (1996), that world religions have an essentialist nature that fosters or impedes democracy. Whereas Huntington saw Islam as intrinsically and implacably hostile to democracy, Stepan argued that all major world religions are “multivocal”; that is, they all contain some democratic and some authoritarian proclivities. For example, against Huntington’s argument that Islam was inimical to democracy, Stepan showed that many interpretations of Islam were compatible with democracy and that some Islamic countries had somewhat democratic political regimes (see also Stepan with Robertson 2003; Stepan and Robertson 2004). Stepan challenged the notion that under democracies religion must be totally separated from the state (Rawls 1993) and points out that complete disestablishment is not the norm in most long-standing de mocracies. Strong religious institutions can help maintain a vibrant civil society necessary for democratic consolidation. Rather than disestablishment, democracy requires a system of “twin tolerations” that allows for the flourishing of both religion and the state while at the same time establishing boundaries for both. Elected governments must have

14 | Scott Mainwaring with Douglas Chalmers

freedom from religious groups, and religious groups must have the freedom to worship (Stepan 2001: 216–17). The final three chapters in this volume build directly on Stepan’s contribution on the twin tolerations and advance our knowledge about the dilemmas involved in a mutual flourishing of religion and democracy. In chapter 12, Brian H. Smith agrees with Stepan that all major world religions are potentially compatible with democracy. As opposed to Rawls’s (1993) insistence on the separation of religion and politics, Smith avers that the two spheres are inherently inseparable. Religion’s moral and ethical concerns almost invariably nudge it into the political sphere. Smith develops Stepan’s claim that separation of church and state is not the norm in democratic politics. He further asserts that the three classical religion-state models other than disestablishment—that is, theocracy, caesaropapism, and establishment—continue to exist to this day and that partial forms of such models can be crafted over time to attain Stepan’s “twin tolerations.” In chapter 13, Murat Akan evaluates Stepan’s argument on twin tolerations and writing on nation-state conflicts in light of the recent unprecedented success of Turkey’s pro-Islamic Justice and Development Party. Akan traces laicism in modern Turkey from the early Kemalist administrations to the present day and argues that Turkey has not achieved Stepan’s “twin tolerations,” before or after the rise of modern political Islam. Instead, the Turkish state’s relationship with religion is better encapsulated in another of Stepan’s concepts, “organic-statism,” which Stepan (1978: 3– 45) developed to describe the normative foundation of corporatist regimes in Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s. The prevailing laical policy—largely unchanged even with the rise of political Islam, according to Akan—has focused on state mobilization of religion in efforts to create the “third way” harmonious national identity envisioned in the organic-statist approach. These efforts have consistently placed nation-state policy ahead of the rights of minorities guaranteed under liberal democracy, creating a problematic conflict aptly described by Linz and Stepan (1996: 16– 37). In chapter 14, Hanna Lerner utilizes Stepan’s “twin tolerations” framework to evaluate Israeli religion-state relations, with particular attention to a recent law that sanctions civil marriage for nonreligious

Introduction | 15

couples outside of the current system dominated by religious authorities. While some proponents heralded the proposed reform as revolutionary, Lerner argues that the reform fails to meet the standards set forth by Stepan’s twin tolerations. The law’s narrow applicability—only nonreligious citizens, rather than all citizens, may register as couples— demonstrates the inflexibility of the consociational religion-state status quo. Because religious leaders still retain control over the concept of marriage and its authorization for the vast majority of citizens who consider themselves religious, equal rights for all citizens are still infringed by religious authorities in a clear violation of Stepan’s twin tolerations. Lerner argues that these consociational arrangements have tended to ingrain group identification, which has perpetuated the same religionstate relationship since the creation of the Israeli state even as the political struggle over Jewish identity has deepened over time.

Seven Characteristic Stepan Trademarks

Despite the changing set of problems and regions, Stepan’s scholarship has had important continuities. Because a secondary goal of this volume is to contribute to the intellectual history of comparative politics by highlighting some of the debates spawned by a pioneering figure in the field, in this concluding section of the introduction we discuss seven characteristic Stepan trademarks, which are visible throughout the volume. First, throughout his career Stepan has focused on issues of great importance in the real world and in scholarship. He does not study minor issues, nor does he seek to make minor incremental contributions to arcane debates. Critics sometimes lampoon the academic world because a lot of scholarship seemingly focuses on the arcane or trivial. In contrast, Stepan has always studied issues of obvious real-world relevance. Second, throughout his career Stepan has generated paradigmshifting research and insights and has defied conventional wisdom. His first book, The Military in Politics: Changing Patterns in Brazil (1971), and a subsequent article (1973) altered prevailing understandings of the political consequences of military professionalism. The Military in

16 | Scott Mainwaring with Douglas Chalmers

Politics also shattered the notion that all military dictatorships are so impermeable as to make social science research impossible. One of its enduring contributions is to show the feasibility of studying what Stepan called a semiclosed institution.7 The landmark work with Juan J. Linz, Breakdowns of Democratic Regimes (1978), changed thinking about why democracies break down. As opposed to analyses suggesting that regime breakdowns were inevitable or that they were the consequence of powerful antidemocratic oppositions, Linz (1978) and Stepan (1978a) argued that they were often avoidable and that mistakes by supposedly democratic leaders often sealed their fate. All four volumes of The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes remain in print thirty-four years later. In The State and Society (1978), Stepan called attention to a remarkable lacuna in U.S. political science: the lack of serious theoretical and analytic attention to the state. Eighteen years later, breaking with the market-oriented orthodoxy of the 1990s, Linz and Stepan (1996) argued that a solid state is essential for democracy and that democracy facilitates rather than obstructs successful market-oriented economic reform. His work on religion, toleration, and democracy (Stepan 2001: 213– 53; Stepan with Robertson 2003; Stepan and Robertson 2004) shattered the essentialist conception that some religions are inimical to democracy while others are supportive of it (Huntington 1996). His work on federalism (2001: 315– 61; 2004) provided a devastating critique of Riker’s (1964) influential analysis, and it pointed the way to a more insightful understanding. Third, Stepan has exhibited a career-long commitment to highquality fieldwork. Few senior political scientists undertake extended fieldwork trips, but Stepan remains committed to and a forceful advocate for them (Munck and Snyder 2007: 451, 453– 54). Fieldwork generates new ideas that can challenge existing paradigms, and it serves as a check on abstruse theory divorced from reality. He has few peers in obtaining interviews with prominent leaders and in making good use of those interviews. This commitment to fieldwork infuses many chapters in this volume. Fourth, Stepan has consistently called attention to the importance of organizations and formal institutions. The “new institutionalism”

Introduction | 17

made a big splash in sociology and political science in the 1980s and early 1990s, and it continues to have influence today (March and Olsen 1984; Thelen and Stenmo 1992). In the 1970s, before the term new institutionalism existed, Stepan was one of the most prominent practitioners of this theoretical approach. His work on militaries, states, religion, presidentialism and constitutional frameworks, and federalism contributed greatly to empirical knowledge and to theorizing about institutions. Stepan’s interest in formal institutions is echoed in most of the chapters here. Fifth, Stepan has contributed richly throughout his career to understanding the impact of ideas on political outcomes. In this respect, his contributions have been less recognized, yet they have been profound. At a time when behavioralism reigned supreme in U.S. political science, Stepan (1971, 1973, 1978b: 127– 44) was an early advocate for understanding institutional ideas and sense of mission. He argued that changing military conceptions of its mission led to the development of a new military ideology that fostered role expansion in the 1960s (1971: 123– 24, 153– 87). The military’s new confidence that it had the capacity and legitimacy to govern was key in its decision to break with the moderating pattern and to rule Brazil directly for more than two decades. Stepan’s first book (1971) was published during the last great wave of dictatorships in Latin America. At that time, class analysis and dependency theory were ascendant in scholarship on Latin American politics. His emphasis on institutions and ideas represented a contrast to the common concern with class and economic interests. Dependency theory, which had considerable influence at the time, emphasized the impact of international economic structures on political regimes in Latin America. Stepan instead analyzed the ways in which the Cold War in general and U.S. military policy in particular fostered ideational change in the Brazilian military. This change in the Brazilian military’s understanding of professionalism and of its own mission helps explain its willingness to take power in 1964 and rule for twenty-one years. This early work on the impact of ideas—not taken in isolation, but in an institutional and broader political context—is an exemplar of a kind of work that later gained currency especially in international relations,

18 | Scott Mainwaring with Douglas Chalmers

with his former student Kathryn Sikkink (e.g., 1991) serving as a leading representative. His subsequent work on the Peruvian military’s changing understanding of its mission (1978b: 127– 44) and, more recently, on the impact of religion on democracy (Stepan 2001: 213– 53; Stepan with Robertson 2003; Stepan and Robertson 2004) also exemplifies his attention to how ideas and belief systems shape political outcomes. In our volume, the chapters by Lerner, Smith, and Akan embody this aspect of Stepan’s work. Sixth, Stepan has evinced an ongoing concern with the conditions of successful democratic regimes. This concern cuts across most chapters of this volume. Stepan’s work displays a continuing effort to see how real institutions are anchored in social reality. His scholarship is consistently concerned with building concepts that are checked against the reality of laws, opinions, and cultural values. Seventh, cutting across much of Stepan’s work is a concern with the relationship between path dependence and historically open possibilities. The term path dependence (Pierson 2004; Thelen 1999) was not in vogue when Stepan began his career, nor does he invoke this concept frequently, yet he was a leading precursor to this variant of historical institutionalism. As Fishman notes in his chapter in this volume, this thread in Stepan’s work is clear in his analysis of how different paths to democracy affect subsequent outcomes (Stepan 1986) and also in his analysis of how different kinds of nondemocratic regimes pose distinctive challenges for successor democracies (Linz and Stepan 1996: 38– 65). More than most leading theorists of path dependence (e.g., Pierson 2004; Thelen 1999), Stepan emphasized both the imprint of previous historical paths and the possibilities for subsequent change from that historical path. Stepan’s emphasis on the combination of path dependence and historical openness is a useful corrective to the contributions that emphasize only the former. As an example, Stepan’s (1971, 1978a) analysis of the breakdown of democracy in Brazil emphasized the interaction between structure and agency. He argued that the possibilities for rescuing democracy narrowed dramatically because of bad presidential decisions that triggered the breakdown. We agree with Stepan, as does Figueiredo (1993) in her excellent book on the 1964 democratic breakdown in Brazil, that it was not an inevitable outcome determined by a long prior chain of

Introduction | 19

events. An exclusive focus on path dependence might see the democratic breakdown as determined by Brazil’s historical path. Stepan’s work has inspired generations of students and colleagues, including those whose work is represented in this volume. The chapters that follow honor him by advancing scholarship on five themes to which he has been a leading contributor for more than four decades.

Notes We are grateful to Robert Fishman, Juan Linz, and Richard Snyder for helpful comments and to Chad Kiewet de Jonge for research assistance. 1. On this theme, also see Stepan 1973; Stepan 1978b: 127– 44. 2. Along converging lines, see Evans, Rueschemeyer, and Skocpol 1985; Schmitter 1971, 1974; Skocpol 1979. Stepan’s chapter in Evans et al. (1985) analyzes the relationship between state power and the strength of civil society under the military dictatorships in the southern cone of Latin America. 3. See along similar lines Mainwaring 2006; O’Donnell 1993, 2010. 4. For works that challenged the thesis that presidentialism is more vulnerable to regime breakdown because of intrinsic weaknesses, see Shugart and Carey 1992; Shugart and Mainwaring 1997; Cheibub 2007. 5. Stepan follows Dahl’s (1986: 114) definition of federalism as a “system in which some matters are exclusively within the competence of certain local units—cantons, states, provinces—and are constitutionally beyond the scope of the authority of the national government; and where certain other matters are constitutionally outside the scope of the authority of the smaller units.” 6. Asymmetrical federalism refers to “constitutionally embedded differences between the legal status and prerogatives of different subunits within the same federation” (Stepan 2001: 326). 7. See the Appendix to The Military in Politics (273– 76) for his discussion of how to study a semiclosed institution.

References Cheibub, José Antonio. 2007. Presidentialism, Parliamentarism, and Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dahl, Robert A. 1986. Democracy, Liberty, and Equality. Oslo: Norwegian University Press.

20 | Scott Mainwaring with Douglas Chalmers

Evans, Peter B., Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds. 1985. Bringing the State Back In. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Figueiredo, Argelina Cheibub. 1993. Democracia ou reformas: Alternativas democráticas à crise política. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra. Huntington, Samuel P. 1996. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the Modern World. New York: Simon and Schuster. Linz, Juan J. 1978. The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Crisis, Breakdown, and Reequilibration. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Linz, Juan J., and Alfred Stepan, eds. 1978. The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 1996. Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Mainwaring, Scott. 2006. “State Deficiencies, Party Competition, and Confidence in Democratic Representation in the Andes.” In The Crisis of Democratic Representation in the Andes, edited by Scott Mainwaring, Ana María Bejarano, and Eduardo Pizarro, 295– 345. Stanford: Stanford University Press. March, James G., and Johan P. Olsen. 1984. “The New Institutionalism: Organizational Factors in Political Life.” American Political Science Review 78 (September): 734– 49. Munck, Gerardo L., and Richard Snyder. 2007. Passion, Craft, and Method in Comparative Politics. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. O’Donnell, Guillermo. 1993. “On the State, Democratization, and Some Conceptual Problems: A Latin American View with Glances at Some Postcommunist Countries.” World Development 21, no. 8 (August): 1355– 69. ———. 2010. Democracy, Agency, and the State: Theory with Comparative Intent. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pierson, Paul. 2004. Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Social Analysis. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rawls, John. 1993. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press. Riker, William H. 1964. Federalism: Origin, Operation, Significance. Boston: Little, Brown. Samuels, David J., and Matthew S. Shugart. 2010. Presidents, Prime Ministers, and Political Parties: How the Separation of Powers Affects Party Organization and Behavior. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schmitter, Philippe C. 1971. Interest Conflict and Political Change in Brazil. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1974. “Still the Century of Corporatism?” In The New Corporatism: Socio-Political Structures in the Iberian World, edited by Frederick B. Pike and Thomas Stritch, 85–131. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

Introduction | 21

Shugart, Matthew S., and John Carey. 1992. Presidents and Assemblies: Constitutional Design and Electoral Dynamics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shugart, Matthew S., and Scott Mainwaring. 1997. “Presidentialism and Democracy in Latin America: Rethinking the Debate.” In Presidentialism and Democracy in Latin America, edited by Scott Mainwaring and Matthew Soberg Shugart, 12– 54. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sikkink, Kathryn. 1991. Ideas and Institutions: Developmentalism in Brazil and Argentina. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Skocpol, Theda. 1979. States and Social Revolutions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stepan, Alfred. 1971. The Military in Politics: Changing Patterns in Brazil. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1973. “The New Military Professionalism of Internal Warfare and Military Role Expansion.” In Authoritarian Brazil: Origins, Policies, and Future, edited by Alfred Stepan, 47– 68. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. 1978a. “Political Leadership and Regime Breakdown: Brazil.” In The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Latin America, edited by Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, 110– 37. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 1978b. The State and Society: Peru in Comparative Perspective. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1985. “State Power and the Strength of Civil Society in the Southern Cone of Latin America.” In Bringing the State Back In, edited by Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, 317– 43. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1986a. Os militares: Da abertura à Novo República. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra. ———. 1986b. “Paths toward Redemocratization.” In Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Prospects for Democracy, edited by Guillermo O’Donnell, Philippe Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead, pt. 3, 64– 84. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 1988. Rethinking Military Politics: Brazil and the Southern Cone. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1990. “On the Tasks of a Democratic Opposition.” Journal of Democracy 1 (2): 41– 49. ———. 1997. “Democratic Opposition and Democratization Theory.” Government and Opposition 32, no. 4 (Autumn): 657– 73. ———. 1999. “Federalism and Democracy: Beyond the U.S. Model.” Journal of Democracy 10, no. 4 (October): 19– 34. ———. 2000. “Russian Federalism in Comparative Perspective.” Post-Soviet Affairs 16 (2): 133– 76. ———. 2001. Arguing Comparative Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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———. 2004. “Electorally Generated Veto Players in Unitary and Federal Systems.” In Federalism and Democracy in Latin America, edited by Edward L. Gibson, 323– 61. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 2005. “Ukraine: Improbable Democratic ‘Nation-State’ But Possible Democratic ‘State-Nation.’” Post-Soviet Affairs 21 (4): 279– 308. ———. 2008. “Comparative Theory and Political Practice: Do We Need a ‘State Nation’ Model as Well as a ‘Nation State’ Model?” Government and Opposition (Winter): 1– 30. Stepan, Alfred, Juan J. Linz, and Yogendra Yadav. 2011. Crafting State Nations: India and Other Multinational Democracies. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Stepan, Alfred, with Graeme B. Robertson. 2003. “An ‘Arab’ More than ‘Muslim’ Electoral Gap.” Journal of Democracy 14, no. 3 (July): 30– 44. Stepan, Alfred, and Graeme B. Robertson. 2004. “Arab, not Muslim, Exceptionalism.” Journal of Democracy 15, no. 4 (October): 140– 46. Stepan, Alfred, and Cindy Skach. 1993. “Constitutional Frameworks and Democratic Consolidation: Parliamentarism versus Presidentialism.” World Poli tics 46, no. 1 (October): 1– 22. Thelen, Kathleen. 1999. “Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics.” Annual Review of Political Science 2: 369– 404. Thelen, Kathleen, and Sven Steinmo. 1992. “Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics.” In Structuring Politics: Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Perspective, edited by Sven Steinmo, Kathleen Thelen, and Frank Longstretch, 1– 32. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Part I The Armed Forces, Police, and Democracy

1 The Armed Forces and Society in Latin America Change and Continuity J. Samuel Fitch

As a field of scholarly inquiry, the study of civil-military relations analyzes the interactions of the armed forces, the state, and society. However, for nearly three decades students of the Latin American militaries have focused almost exclusively on the military’s relations with the state. Studies of transitions from military rule and the varied balance of military power and autonomy in posttransition regimes dominate the literature. Given the long history of powerful and politically autonomous militaries in the region, it is not surprising that U.S. and Latin American scholars have concentrated on the interactions of military institutions and civilian governments and the progress—or lack thereof—in reshaping those relationships to conform with democratic norms.1 Nevertheless, the cost of that focus has been the near-total neglect of the opposite side of the civil-military triangle, the network of relations between the armed forces and the rest of society. Empirical studies of the social origins of the Latin American militaries are rare. Systematic studies of the linkages between the military and civilian groups are simply nonexistent. As a result, our assumptions about the social context of political relations between the armed forces and the state are, I argue, increasingly obsolete, perhaps dangerously so. This chapter presents the 25

26 | J. Samuel Fitch

results of research on the social composition of several Latin American militaries and data on societal images of the armed forces, arguing that there are continuities but also important changes that warrant revision of standard assumptions from the 1960s and 1970s. It attempts to address the question, “So what?” by arguing that these changes may have important implications for the effort to construct democratic civil-military relations in Latin America and elsewhere. The chapter concludes with a call for a “new military sociology” linking the study of military-society relations to the broader challenge of democratic military-state relations.

The Social Origins and Composition of the Armed Forces

Perhaps the most fundamental questions in military sociology concern the societal origins of the military: Who are the officers who control the state’s instruments of organized violence? From what social group(s) are military officers and soldiers drawn? What status do officers and soldiers have in society? What place do they, and especially the officer corps, hold within the existing system of social stratification? What interactions do they have with the rest of society? Despite the historical stereotype of Latin American militaries as composed of the traditional elite, the first systematic study of the social origins of a South American military, José Luis de Imaz’s classic Los que mandan,2 found that the large majority of Argentine generals from 1936 to 1961 came from upper-middle-class families but not Argentina’s traditional aristocracy. Nearly three-fourths were sons of immigrants— mostly Italian and Spanish but also German and French — for whom military careers were a path to social mobility. In 1967 Roy Hansen interviewed a sample of Chilean generals and concluded that most were from middle-class families. Reflecting the relative decline in the Chilean military’s political importance after 1932, there was significant military discontent with low salaries and declining budgets, which many blamed for the fact that “major portions of the middle and upper classes no longer considered the military a satisfactory career choice.”3 Alfred Stepan’s pioneering study of the Brazilian military in the 1960s found similar trends in the social origins of the officer corps.

The Armed Forces and Society in Latin America | 27

Comparing fathers’ occupations of cadets entering the army academy in the period 1941– 43 with those entering in 1962 to 1966, he documented a sharp decline in the percentage of cadets from upper-class backgrounds and a slight rise in recruitment from working-class families. But the large majority of cadets in both time periods came from white-collar middle-class backgrounds, for example, sons of civil servants, business managers, merchants, teachers, and accountants. Overwhelmingly academy applicants described their families’ economic status as average. The other striking finding in Stepan’s study was the high proportion — more than 40 percent in 1966— of Brazilian officer recruitment from sons of military fathers.4 My own work on the Ecuadorian military likewise found strong evidence of predominantly middleclass social origins among Colegio Militar cadets during the same time period, with a significant but smaller degree of endogenous recruitment from military families than in Brazil.5 (See tables 1.1 and 1.2.) The common picture produced by this research was an officer corps that was strongly middle class in origin, with varying percentages of sons of military families. Data on military salaries and social status were sparse, but overall military officers appeared to be paid reasonably well by middle-class standards, although they probably enjoyed somewhat less social prestige than other middle-class professions requiring university education.6

Changes in the Recruitment Base for the Officer Corps

Although the evidence is still incomplete, all signs point to changes in the “middle-class military” of the 1960s and 1970s. In what is to my knowledge the only systematic study of social origins of a Latin American military in the 1980s, Frank McCann found a significant increase in the proportion of cadets at the Brazilian army academy listing fathers’ occupations as lower middle class or skilled working class. Educational levels for fathers likewise declined, with over half the entering cadets in 1985 reporting fathers with only primary school education, double the proportion for the 1955– 59 period.7 This is the cohort of cadets that constitutes the middle ranks of Brazilian officers today, the colonels and generals to be of the next decade in Brazilian politics.

Table 1.1. Father’s Profession of Entering Army Academy Cadets, by Class:

Ecuador and Brazil Upper Lower Middle Upper Middle Middle Middle Lower Sons of Officers Brazil, 1941–1943 Ecuador, 1937–1939 Brazil, 1962–1966 Ecuador, 1962–1966

20% 40% 6% 17%

76% 57% 78% 60%

4% 3% 15% 24%

21% 17% 35% 16%

Source: J. Samuel Fitch, The Military Coup d’Etat as a Political Process: Ecuador, 1948–1966 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 27. Figures for Brazil calculated from Alfred Stepan, The Military in Politics: Changing Patterns in Brazil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 32– 33, 40.

Table 1.2. Father’s Occupation of Entering Cadets, by Class: Brazil, 1982–1985

Upper

Middle

Lower Middle

Skilled Lower

Fazendeiro Doctor Lawyer Dentist Judge General

Upper Military Business Manager Merchant Civil Servant Accountant Engineer Factory Owner Teacher Public Relations Chemist Radio Announcer

Lower Military Bookkeeper Salesman Insurance Rep. Bank Clerk Small Farmer

Tailor Plumber Store Clerk Nurse Railroad Worker Industrial Worker Airline Worker Mechanic Driver Mason Shoemaker

Total 5%

Total 34%

Total 46%

Total 15%

Source: Adapted from Frank McCann, “The Military,” in Modern Brazil: Elites and Masses in Historical Perspective, ed. Michael Conniff and Frank McCann (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 68.

The Armed Forces and Society in Latin America | 29 100% 90%

Percentage of Total

80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30%

Upper Upper Middle Middle Lower Middle Lower

20% 10% 0%

1980 1982 1984 1986 1988 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 1981 1983 1985 1987 1989 1991 1993 1995 1997 1999

Figure 1.1 Trends in Social Composition of Argentine Cadets, Colegio Militar, 1980–1999 Source: Based on data from Rosendo Frage, “La composición social.”

Argentina

Despite its previous reputation as the most aristocratic of the region’s militaries, the Argentine armed forces appear to be undergoing a similar transformation. Using the Argentine army’s own classification of the “sociocultural strata” from which entering Colegio Militar cadets are drawn, Rosendo Fraga shows a clear decline in the proportion of cadets from the “upper” and “upper middle” strata, a strong rise in recruitment from the “lower middle” strata, and a small but visible increment in recruitment from the lowest strata (fig. 1.1).8 As Fraga notes, much of the observed change is a reflection of a major shift in the cadets from military families. In the 1970s sons of officers outnumbered sons of sergeants and corporals by nearly two to one. By the 1990s sons of noncommissioned officers outnumbered sons of officers. Nevertheless, since the official army figures automatically included all military officers’ families

30 | J. Samuel Fitch 32 28

Percentage

24 20 16 12 8 4

Unskilled Worker

Skilled Worker

Civilian Lower Mid

Civilian Middle

Civilian Upper Mid

Civilian Upper

Noncom Other

Noncom Military

Other Officer

Military Officer

0

Figure 1.2 Social Origins of Entering Army Cadets, Colegio Militar Argentina, 2004 Source: Author’s calculations from data provided by the Colegio Militar de la Nación Argentina.

in the highest sociocultural strata, they are probably more useful for identifying trends than the actual extent of the changes in the social composition of the cadet corps. Figure 1.2, based on a more detailed analysis of the family backgrounds of 345 cadets entering Argentina’s Colegio Militar in 2004,9 is arguably a more accurate description of the current composition of the Argentine army corps of cadets. On the civilian side, cadets from upper-middle-class—mostly professional—families constitute less than 10 percent of the total. Cadets from the middle strata of the middle class constitute the single largest group at 19 percent, with 12 percent from lower-middle-class families and another 12 percent from workingclass families, principally skilled workers. As noted by Fraga, the most dramatic changes have occurred in the pattern of recruitment from military families, which now constitute 45 percent of all cadets. But sons (and now daughters) of noncommissioned officers, historically a rarity among Latin American academy cadets, now outnumber officers’

The Armed Forces and Society in Latin America | 31

40% 35% 30% 25%

Sons of Officers 20%

Sons of Noncommissioned Non-Commisioned Officers

15% 10% 5% 0%

1991 1993 1995 1997 1999 2001 2003 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004

Figure 1.3 Changes in Military Family Backgrounds, Escuela Naval Argentina, 1991–2004 Source: Author’s calculations from data provided by the Escuela Naval of Argentina.

sons and daughters by roughly two to one. Combining entering cadets from military and nonmilitary families, a majority of Argentine army cadets now have lower-middle-class and working-class origins. Although anecdotal evidence suggests that officer recruitment for the Argentine navy remains heavily middle and upper middle class on the civilian side, the same trend is evident in terms of recruitment from military families. Like the army, historically these were sons of naval officers plus a scattering of sons of army and air force officers. By the early 1990s the proportion of cadets from families of noncommissioned officers was roughly equivalent to the sons of officers, even including the other forces. For cadets entering in the period 2000 – 2004, children of noncommissioned officers outnumber children of officers by the same two-to-one ratio found in the army (fig. 1.3).10

32 | J. Samuel Fitch

32% 28% 24% 20% 16% 12% 8% 4% 0%

Military Other Military Other Civilian Civilian Civilian Civilian Skilled Unskilled Officer Officer Noncom Noncom Upper Upper Middle Lower Worker Worker Middle Middle

Figure 1.4 Social Origins of Entering Cadets, Midyear Survey, Escuela Militar Uruguay, 2006 Source: Author’s calculations from data provided by the Escuela Militar of Uruguay.

Uruguay

Based on a detailed analysis of the entering classes of 1990 and 1991 at the Uruguayan army’s Escuela Militar, Juan Rial paints a portrait of cadets’ family backgrounds that is radically different from the conventional assumptions about Latin American officers. Although his data are partly skewed by the severe economic crisis that Uruguay was suffering at the time, Rial estimates that roughly half of successful Uruguayan applicants were from families living below the poverty line. Of these, the majority appeared to be recently impoverished, meaning that in better times these families might have been lower middle class; still, nearly 15 percent were deemed to be living in chronic poverty.11 Forty-five percent of the cadets came from families in which the fathers had only a primary education. Rial concludes that “the officer corps is recruited from the lower middle and lower social sectors.”12 These will be the Uruguayan colonels of 2020. More recent data from Uruguay suggest this trend is continuing (fig. 1.4). On the civilian side, the largest group in the 2006 first-year class of cadets was still the traditional middle strata of the white-collar

The Armed Forces and Society in Latin America | 33

middle class, but that class included nearly as many cadets from skilled worker families.13 In the 2006 first-year class, sons of officers outnumbered sons of noncommissioned officers, but this is probably atypical. In the second-year class, there were slightly more cadets from noncommissioned officer families than sons of officers. According to 2005 data for the entire school, cadets from military and police families constituted 44 percent of all cadets. Of these, 19 percent were from senior officers’ families and 25 percent from “personal subalterno.”14 Most if not all of the latter group and the police official portion of the former would likely be considered lower middle class or below, suggesting again that the majority of Uruguayan cadets are from lower-middleclass and working-class backgrounds.

Factors Shaping Applicant Trends

Although Argentina and Uruguay can hardly be considered representative of South America as a whole, the data available from these two cases provide suggestive evidence about the forces shaping these trends. First, compared to prior decades, the number of potential applicants to Latin American military academies has expanded significantly because of the larger number of lower-middle-class and working-class children who have the requisite levels of education. Even though the shift toward making the academies equivalent to university-level education had the reverse effect in the short run by raising the minimum standards for entry to a completed secondary degree, there is no doubt that the supply of eligible applicants has greatly expanded. Second, for those contemplating entering a university or applying to the military academies, declining military salaries compared to those perceived to be attainable in nonmilitary professions, including private business, are undoubtedly one of the forces behind declining interest in military careers among children of middle- and upper-middle-class families. On the other hand, as shown in figure 1.5, adverse economic conditions tend to increase the number of applicants, allowing admissions committees to be more selective. From a low of 357 in 1986, applications to Argentina’s Colegio Militar jumped to over 1,200 in the midst of the 1989 hyper-inflationary meltdown at the end of the Alfonsín

34 | J. Samuel Fitch

Figure 1.5 Applications and Acceptances, Colegio Militar Argentina,

1970–2004 Source: Author’s calculations from data provided by the Colegio Militar of Argentina.

administration. As the economy recovered but military budgets continued to suffer, applications declined again, to less than 400 per year in 1993– 94. From that low point, there is a gradual increase in applications for the rest of the decade, perhaps reflecting the increasing economic difficulties of Menem’s neoliberal policies but perhaps also re flecting improvements in the public image of the armed forces resulting from the military’s growing participation in international peacekeeping forces in the Balkans and elsewhere. With the 2001 collapse of the fixed exchange rate and the resulting economic crisis, applications again shot up, to more than a thousand applicants per year for the period 2001– 4. As in the United States, economic hard times are the military recruiter’s good times. Whereas the ratio of applicants to cadets admitted had fallen below two to one for most of the 1990s, the debt and devaluation crisis increased that ratio to nearly three to one for 2001– 4. By 2009 applications had fallen again, and the army’s Colegio Militar accepted nearly two of every three applicants.15

The Armed Forces and Society in Latin America | 35

Figure 1.6 Applications and Acceptances, Escuela Militar, Uruguay,

1979–2007 Source: Author’s calculations from data provided by the Escuela Militar of Uruguay.

Trends in applications to Uruguay’s Escuela Militar show a marked dropoff from the period of de facto military government, but the key factor appears to be changes in the curriculum, which began to admit students with five years of secondary education in 1984 and to require six years of high school beginning in 1989. Like Argentina, Uruguay experienced a significant rise in applications in 2001– 2 followed by a return to “normalcy” as the economy recovered from the effects of the Argentine crisis (fig. 1.6). In Argentina (and probably Uruguay as well) the notable rise in applications in the most recent years is also in part a result of the decision to admit women to the officer corps in branches other than the administrative and medical fields to which women have traditionally been limited.16 Female applicant numbers have soared, with almost equal numbers of male and female applicants in Argentina in 2003. Nevertheless, female cadets remain a definite minority of the total cadet corps, given acceptance rates that average about half those of male applicants. (See fig. 1.7.) Whereas roughly one in three male applicants is accepted to the Colegio Militar, for female applicants the acceptance odds are

36 | J. Samuel Fitch

Number of Applicants

Male Female

Percent Admitted, 2000–2004

Figure 1.7 Male and Female Applicants to the Colegio Militar,

Argentina, 1995–2004 Source: Author’s calculations provided by the Colegio Militar of Argentina.

roughly one in six. These differences may reflect limited facilities for women or informal quotas, but they probably also reflect greater difficulties meeting physical strength and endurance standards. It also appears that female applicants, on average, tend to come from more lowermiddle-class and working-class backgrounds than do males. Given existing educational disparities, on average female applicants may be

The Armed Forces and Society in Latin America | 37

less well prepared in terms of educational achievements. Judgments about “vocational calling” for the military career also play an important role in admissions decisions at the Colegio Militar, and it is unclear how psychological differences among male and female applicants influence the decision to admit. The Uruguayan army academy’s high dropout rate for female cadets is unfortunately probably not atypical. Although problems in securing official permission to access recruitment data has thus far limited this analysis to Argentina and Uruguay, in interviews with officials of the army education department, Chilean officers reported many of the same concerns.17 Despite less worry about military salaries and budgets, ironically the strong growth of the Chilean economy has weakened the relative position of military academy recruiters for students ready to enter university-level education. In Ecuador, despite the military’s prominent role as the country’s de facto political arbiter, both the army and, to a lesser extent, the navy experienced decreased numbers of applications in the early years of the twenty-first century.18 In one of those years, the army could not fill its normal quota of cadet positions. As in Argentina and Uruguay, cadets from families of noncommissioned officers were estimated at 30 percent of the total entering class.19

So What? Practical and Theoretical Implications

While the changes in the social makeup of the Argentine and Uruguayan cadet corps are interesting, the larger significance of those changes is not intuitively obvious. If these changes are, as we suspect, to a greater or lesser degree occurring everywhere in South America, what difference is that likely to make in either the short run or over the longer term as these cadets move into positions of authority and eventually into command of the armed forces? The first answer to the “So what?” question is that especially in the armies of the region, and to a lesser extent in the other forces, recruitment of future officers is increasingly seen as a “problem.” Not only in Argentina and Uruguay but also in Chile and Ecuador, my conversations with military academy officials make it clear that they are aware that they can no longer count on an ample supply of qualified cadets

38 | J. Samuel Fitch

and indeed that they are in competition with public and private universities and technical schools to attract the best high school graduates to military careers, despite the often higher pay, greater prestige, and fewer lifestyle sacrifices offered by nonmilitary careers. While military officials are publicly silent or reassuring about their ability to adapt to the changes in the social base of the cadet corps, in private many officers are concerned that many if not most cadets today have primarily economic/social mobility reasons for entering the academies and that many lack “a calling” or vocation for military life. Practical adaptations range from providing more remedial courses in writing, math, and language skills to providing more financial support for cadets with superior performance in the academies.20 But the biggest effect of the military’s awareness that recruitment is now problematic is, in my view, the conscious military effort to “sell itself ” to potential recruits. In doing so, the army in particular is being forced to draw closer (acercarse) to society. The most visible manifestation of this trend is in military recruiting campaigns. Despite its reputation as the most Prussian of the Latin American militaries, a billboard on the grounds of the Escuela Militar Libertador Bernardo O’Higgins features a paratrooper about to jump from a transport plane. The text reads, “After I dropped my daughter off at school, I had to jump. Captain Fernando Silva, 32 years old, Jump Chief, Professional Title Military Officer and University Graduate [licenciado] in Military Science.” In one very effective picture, the ad conveys that one can be a military officer and a father, a parachutist and a university graduate (fig. 1.8). The implication that one can be a military officer and a civilian is, I would argue, a major shift in the traditional mentality of the military as a closed institution in which civilian values—including parenting and family life—are subordinated to the demands of military life.21 Especially in countries like Argentina and Chile that have formally shifted to all-volunteer armies, but even in countries where conscription remains the official policy, recruitment of soldiers is also increasingly problematic. In most cases, bodies can be had to incorporate as many conscripts as the military can afford to house and feed. But if the army wants conscripts with a completed primary education or the ability to learn mechanical/technical specialties, it has to entice them

The Armed Forces and Society in Latin America | 39

Figure 1.8. Chilean Military Officer Recruitment Campaign Source: Photo by author, Santiago, Chile, November 18, 2006.

not to take various avenues of escape from “universal” military service. As Brian Selmeski documents in his study of conscription in Ecuador, the need to recruit even “indian” conscripts has led to significant modifications in the army’s traditional opposition to “multiculturalism” and a sophisticated reformulation of the role of conscription in the formation of a society with multiple ethnic groups in a single Patria.22 As a result of the need to actively recruit soldiers and officers, the military has to pay attention to its treatment of those personnel. Deaths of conscripts and officers during hazing rituals are now widely publicized in the mass media. One such incident prompted the Argentine decision to drop mandatory conscription. The deaths in 2005 of more than forty Chilean soldiers in a winter march that got caught in an Andean blizzard resulted in a national scandal and court-martial for the officers in charge.23 Although the shift to a more “civilianized” military is resisted by military traditionalists and downplayed by reformers, it is—and will to continue to be—a fact of life that, outside of Special Forces

40 | J. Samuel Fitch

units, in the relatively calm security atmosphere of South America today, calls for military officers to live the ascetic life of the Rambo-priest worshiping at the altar of the Patria are not likely to produce many new entrants in the officer corps. If military careers are to be competitive with their civilian counterparts, militaries where officers can be fathers— and husbands whose wives who have careers of their own—and students earning degrees in civilian universities that will facilitate postmilitary careers are unavoidable.24

Seeking Equilibrium in Military- Society Relations: Resources, Missions, and Public Opinion

Thus far, we have treated the problem of recruiting soldiers and officers as an institutional problem as it is understood by the military forces themselves — as two related but separate “problems” to be solved by better advertising, more incentives, and some degree of accommodation to the needs and interests of potential recruits. At a higher level, the recruitment problem is one manifestation of a more complex process of dependence of the armed forces on society, not only for the human resources to reproduce military institutions over time and generations, but also for the material resources and legitimation needed to sustain the operation of those institutions.25 From this perspective, military salaries that are too low to attract the quantity and quality of officer candidates needed to provide management and leadership for the future should be regarded as a symptom of a larger problem in the military-society relationship.26 To be sure, budgetary support for the armed forces depends directly on their relations with Congress and the president. Nevertheless, particularly over the longer run, presidents and legislators respond to what they perceive as public priorities. So, faced with public demand—and electoral rewards—for more spending on education, health, and public works legislators are likely to respond accordingly.27 What is increasingly apparent in South American politics today and indeed over the past two decades is that, except perhaps for Colombia, virtually the only constituency that favors higher military spending has been the armed forces themselves. Especially in politically precari-

The Armed Forces and Society in Latin America | 41

ous democracies, presidents may decide that not antagonizing the military with budget cuts is the better part of valor. Nevertheless, as long as the international environment remains hostile to overtly military or military-dominated regimes, there is not a lot that the generals can do when Congress or the treasury minister decides to hold the line— again—on the military budget. Then the question becomes, “Why is it that there is so little civilian support for greater military spending?” To be fair, there also appears to be very little organized opposition to continuing military budgets at more or less their current levels. But absent some organized support, the tendency seems to be for competing priorities to get more funding and for military budgets to decline in relative terms, if not in real afterinflation absolute terms. Explaining the stagnation, if not decline, in military budgets deserves far more empirical attention than it has received thus far, but the following is at least a plausible hypothesis. Over the past twenty-five years, democratic governments have in fact done an impressive job in reducing, if not eliminating, long-standing border conflicts and military rivalries. With only a few exceptions, expectations of interstate wars in the region are virtually nil. At the same time, again with the exception of Colombia and to a lesser extent Peru and Mexico, expectations of significant intrastate violence and insurgency are likewise very low. Crime and economic instability are the significant sources of insecurity in the region, not military threats of external or internal origin. In those circumstances, it has been a difficult task for the South American militaries to rally public support for their conventional military role as a deterrent to potential military threats. On the military side, the armed forces are — not surprisingly — reluctant to adapt existing military structures to the new budgetary realities. Argentina is the most dramatic example, but not the only one, of military forces that seem to believe that some future president will rescue them from their present state of poverty. Faced with sharp bud get cuts (in real dollars) during the Alfonsín administration and then further cuts under Menem, the Argentine army dramatically reduced its size by cutting conscription levels and releasing conscripts early to reduce expenditures (table 1.3). But while total personnel were reduced by nearly two-thirds, the number of noncommissioned officers dropped

42 | J. Samuel Fitch Table 1.3. Army Personnel: Argentina, 1982 and – 2001

1982 2001

Total Personnel

Soldiers

Noncommissioned Officers

Officers

103,073 38,757

63,000 13,044

24,556 20,664

5,874 5,049

Source: Rosendo Fraga, Evolución de los efectivos y del presupuesto de las Fuerzas Armadas Argentinas en el último siglo y medio (Buenos Aires: Centro de Estudios Nueva Mayoría, 2002), 13.

by only 16 percent. The number of officers has been reduced by only 14 percent, despite a cumulative budget decrease of more than 50 percent. Argentina may be the only country in the world where noncommissioned officers constitute a majority of the army. In addition, it appears that the reductions in the number of officers have mostly occurred at the lower ranks, so the rank pyramid is heavy at the top and the middle. As Ernesto López argues, the result has been a de facto disarmament, as the army has only a small corps of volunteer soldiers and very little money for operations, training exercises, or new equipment. Normal business hours have been altered to accommodate the large numbers of noncommissioned officers working second jobs outside the army.28 Many factors—including the long-term difficulties of the Argentine economy, the heavy weight of military pensions in the defense budget, and the continuing conflicts over the human rights abuses of the previous military regime— contribute to this dysfunctional outcome. At a higher level of analysis, I would argue that this outcome reflects a fundamental disequilibrium in military-society relations in Argentina. On the one hand, none of the posttransition governments—those of Alfonsín, Menem, de la Rua, Duhualde, or Kirschner—has treated military spending as a priority. That response is consistent with what we know about public opinion in Argentina, where economic issues and corruption, rather than security or military issues, have dominated the political agenda for the past three decades.29 In effect, Argentine society has said through its political representatives that it is not willing to fund the existing military model at a level that would be required to make that model functional. On the other hand, the armed forces have

The Armed Forces and Society in Latin America | 43

not been able to reconstitute themselves through an auto-reforma to offer a different military model. While both military and civilian leaders have called for smaller, more mobile, highly professionalized military forces for more than two decades, civilian leaders have not in fact been able to generate a societal consensus on—or the willingness to pay for—an alternative model to the current military. However, civilian leaders in Argentina have done more to restrict the internal security role of the armed forces than anywhere else in the region, and they remain adamantly opposed to the use of military forces for nonmilitary missions other than disaster relief and peacekeeping. Despite the closure of a few bases, the considerable Argentine achievements in reforming previous patterns of civil-military relations have not been matched by equivalent achievements in military reform, modernization, or restructuring. The Ministry of Defense has been transformed and empowered; the armed forces have been reduced in number and in budget; but by and large the organizational structure remains mostly unchanged. At the political level, this result is understandable. Argentine governments continue to spend a large (but declining) sum on the military —just under $2 billion in 2006—and generally appear content to let the military run its own affairs, as long as it stays out of politics. Military officers go to work, collect modest to reasonable salaries depending on their rank, and mostly complain among themselves about the lack of operating funds and spare parts and antiquated equipment. A case could be made that this is just an example of muddling through and that both sides, political leaders and military leaders, know that things could be worse. On the military side, the cost of merely muddling is a festering professional discontent, perhaps to some degree offset by successes in international peacekeeping. On the civilian side, except for the peacekeeping missions, most Argentines seem to accept the armed forces as long as they stay within democratic limits but not really to respect them or value what they do. Although all Argentine institutions have lost societal support over the past two decades, in the 2007 Latinobarómetro survey, almost 60 percent of Argentine respondents reported “little” or “no confidence” in the armed forces. Given the lack of societal support, it would make more sense to engage in a

44 | J. Samuel Fitch

national debate on what kind of military Argentines want. A small mobile professional force, with a heavy emphasis on peacekeeping, seems to be the preferred model of most Argentine specialists. Eliminating the existing military forces in favor of a stronger Gendarmería (à la Costa Rica) would be another plausible and less expensive option, albeit a risky one given Argentina’s history of political violence. However, both of these options are blocked by the overwhelming disinterest of legislators as well as the general public in questions of security policy. In the short term, the status quo may suffice. In the longer term, this disequilibrium in military-society relations does not seem healthy for democratic civil-military relations. Even if they are not voiced publicly, military complaints about the lack of a “culture of defense” in Latin America, about the lack of budgets and salaries in accordance with what they consider their just expectations, will inevitably fuel ingrained military disrespect for “corrupt and incompetent politicians.” Over the long run, mutual respect in military-society relations has to replace mutual disrespect in order to legitimize and institutionalize democratic civil-military relations.30 While Argentina is arguably the extreme case of continuing tension in military-society relations, some degree of tension seems to be common in other countries as well. Even in Ecuador, which has no legacy of human rights violations by the military and a history of relatively benign (if not terribly competent) military governments, slightly more than half the respondents in a 2006 national survey reported little confidence (33 percent) or no confidence (22 percent) in the armed forces.31 The only militaries receiving “high confidence” ratings in the 2007 Latinobarómetro surveys from as much as 25 percent of those polled were those of Brazil, Colombia, and Venezuela, although overall Chile and Bolivia also received mostly positive ratings (fig. 1.9). On the other side, clear majorities in Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay reported “little” or “no confidence” in the armed forces, with more than a quarter of the respondents reporting “no confidence.” In Ecuador and Peru, civilian opinion seems to be more or less evenly divided. In contrast to the generally divided or negative views of the armed forces in much of South America, the Spanish military received 91 percent positive evaluations in 2008, with only 7 percent negative responses.32

The Armed Forces and Society in Latin America | 45

Figure 1.9 Societal Confidence in the Armed Forces, 2007 Source: Author’s calculations from national surveys conducted in 2007 by Latinobarómetro. Figure shows responses to the question, “How much confidence do you have in the following institutions: Armed Forces?”

Social Origins and Military Populism

Given the evidence of a shift toward lower-middle- and working-class origins among army academy cadets, we can ask if there is a connection between this shift and the emergence of varying degrees of military populism in the region, most notably in Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolutionary Movement in Venezuela but also in the abortive alliance between junior officers and the indigenous movement in the Ecuadorian coup that overthrew President Mahuad in 2000. If, as José Nun argued, the coups of the 1960s were “middle-class military coups,”33 should we expect a future wave of lower-middle-class military coups? Based on what we know about the past, I would argue that we should be cautious about any attempt to read too much into the changing social origins of South American militaries. First, it bears repeating that the data show an increased diversity of social backgrounds among current cadets. They do not show dominance by any social group, despite the rise in recruitment from lower-middle-class families. Moreover, thus far we have only fragmentary evidence about how long ago these trends began, or how long it will take before these officers move

46 | J. Samuel Fitch

into positions of importance. Second, we should remember that previous arguments, like Nun’s hypothesis, linking class origins and military behavior did not fare very well. Alfred Stepan’s analysis of the Brazilian military in the 1960s, Fitch and Needler’s analyses of Ecuadorian coups, and a host of other empirical studies stressed the centrality of institutional interests, rather than class identifications, as the crucial determinants of the political behavior of Latin American armed forces. If the theoretical choice is between class identifications or institutional identifications, then empirical evidence is on the side of the latter. In a pretest of an interview questionnaire with cadets at Ecuador’s Escuela Superior Militar, Bertha García and I asked fourth-year students about the relative intensity of their identifications with a series of collectivities. The sample was no more than a (nonrandom) handful of cadets, but the results were nevertheless impressive, particularly in comparison with a sample of civilian students studying international relations at FLACSO-Quito in preparation for careers in the diplomatic corps (table 1.4). Whereas the students preparing for diplomatic careers displayed a remarkable diversity in the identifications they considered most important, the army cadets were unanimous in listing “Ecuadorian” as their most intense identification, followed in virtually every case by strong identification with the armed forces and/or the army. In Ecuador’s Escuela Superior Militar, as in virtually every military academy, regardless of their social origins, academy cadets undergo a rigorous and extensive professional socialization process consciously designed to subordinate preexisting psychological identifications to an overriding identification with the armed forces and the symbols of the nation and the Patria.34 Nevertheless, making this a dichotomous choice between institutional or class identifications is theoretically simplistic and empirically incorrect. Despite their strong national and institutional identifications, Ecuadorian cadets also indicate lesser identifications with their region or city of origin and as citizens. Class, ethnic, and political identifications ranked near the bottom of the list, but it is reasonable to suppose that once these officers are further removed from the intense socialization of the Escuela Superior Militar, the other identifications will become more salient.35 If we view military officers as having a strong set of

Ecuadorian

Latin American

6 6 3 8 1 2 6 9 7 1 3 2

Example

Cadet 1 Cadet 2 Cadet 3 Cadet 4 Cadet 5 FLASCO 1 FLASCO 2 FLASCO 3 FLASCO 4 FLASCO 5 FLASCO 6 FLASCO 7 FLASCO 8

1 1 1 1 1 8 1 1 8 2 3 1 1

National

Transnational

Type

2

4

4 6 5

7 4 3 2 7 6

6 6

5

Quito Guayaquil Cuenca

Sierra Amazon coast 3 2

City

Region

2 3 2 2 3

FFAA

Institution

2

2 3

Army

Force

5

4 4

Cavalry Artillery Airborne

Branch

Table 1.4. Identifications of Ecuadorian Army Cadets and Diplomatic School Students

3

9 5 5 4 1 6

Diplomat

Profession

4 3 4 3 1 3 2

4 7 5

Citizen

Political

Ethnicity

2 9 4

11 5

6 8

3 4 5

9 7

5 10

Mestizo Middle white upper indigenous

Class

5 8

10 2

11

Dem Left Dem Pop.

Party

48 | J. Samuel Fitch

military identifications—institution, force, branch, specialty, and cohort/ generation—plus a complex set of secondary identifications36—with places, family, class, ethnic, and, in some cases, political groups—then the social and geographic origins of the officers corps clearly matter, because these identifications create potential bases for solidarity or cleavage between military officers and elements of the larger society to which they belong. In Ecuador, political identifications are weak and diffuse among both the military and their civilian counterparts. Even so, a minority of party identifiers was evident in my interviews with Ecuadorian officers, and these officers were often critical interlocutors between civilian political leaders and the military institution. As precarious as the survival of the democratic regime has been in Ecuador, at least part of the explanation for that survival lies in the ability of virtually every president to find a nucleus of senior officers identified with that party to serve as his High Command. On the negative side, the lack of officers identified with the coast, particularly with the parties and political movements based in Guayaquil, could easily fuel tensions between senior officers and the political leadership, when half of the electorate comes from a region that produces only a small fraction of the officer corps.37 In Argentina, party identifications and political sympathies are more evident among active-duty and retired officers, even though the former usually do not participate in partisan activities. In particular, there is an important fraction of the officer corps—certainly a minority but not a small fraction—that comes from Peronist families. To varying degrees these officers continue to be sympathetic to or identify with the Peronist party. As I have argued in more detail elsewhere,38 in part because of these identifications, in part because their political beliefs were more likely to be supportive of majoritarian democracy, these offi cers were more likely to adopt democratic professionalist role beliefs. While the negative lessons that the military collectively drew from their experience with the Proceso were undoubtedly the most important factor in the redefinition of Argentine civil-military relations after 1983, that redefinition would very likely not have succeeded if the military itself had not been internally divided. Explaining those internal divisions is impossible if we postulate purely institutional identifications and in-

The Armed Forces and Society in Latin America | 49

terests, ignoring the myriad ways in which the armed forces of any society reflect—however imperfectly—the cleavages and beliefs present in the larger society. Despite the existence of various institutional boundaries that try to constrain the ability of civilian groups to identify and gain access to likeminded military officers, these boundaries are often as permeable as international borders are to both legal and illegal immigration. Family and geographic ties, shared premilitary education, and social and neighborhood interactions all provide natural paths across those institutional boundaries. This point was driven home to me in perhaps my first interview in Ecuador over thirty years ago. The officer with whom I had an appointment was late getting home from his office, so I sat and talked with his wife. The conversation moved quickly to the economy and rising prices. As we talked, I realized that while her husband was a military officer, she was a middle-class housewife complaining about the difficulties of making do in a period of inflation. In my analysis of various coups in the 1960s, Ecuadorian officers frequently invoked public opinion as an explanation for their actions. Since this was long before the days of public opinion polls, how did these officers know what “the public” thought about the government of the day? Clearly part of the answer came from what they read in the major newspapers; part came from observing protests and demonstrations against those governments. But part also came from their everyday conversations with their friends and neighbors. In that era, their friends and neighbors were overwhelmingly the middle sectors of the middle class of the Ecuadorian sierra and the capital. In the decades ahead, those friends and neighbors are likely to belong to different social strata. From the 1980s to the initial years of the twenty-first century, the trend toward a lower-middle-class military occurred in the midst of a complex series of economic changes that had a negative impact on both the military and civilian components of the public sector. While the poor undoubtedly suffered more, it is worth remembering that austerity plans and adjustment policies also reduced salaries, forced layoffs, and reduced the employment options for many civilian white-collar workers, in particular those in the public sector.39 As more officers come from the lower middle class in the decade ahead, they are likely to share

50 | J. Samuel Fitch

similar economic circumstances with other members of that class, including limited economic reserves and strong fears of downward social mobility. Over the past two decades, these shared discontents have been expressed in growing opposition to neoliberal economic policies, nationalist resentment of globalization and U.S. hegemony, and perceptions that government corruption is the principal cause of economic hardships. As Harold Trinkunas described the situation in Venezuela: Suddenly [military] officers who had been comfortably uppermiddle class found themselves [in the early 1990s] barely able to maintain lower-middle and working class living standards. Even junior officers had been able to afford housing, new cars, and vacations, but now their families had to share cramped apartments in poor neighborhoods. These disparities affected junior officers (lieutenants and captains) the most, and more and more abandoned their military careers for employment in the private sector. The abrupt decline in living standards in less than a decade deepened military discontent with democratic rule. In this context, corruption in military procurement infuriated many younger officers. . . . The failure to resolve many of these cases satisfactorily reinforced suspicions among the public and the officer corps of the incompetence and dishonesty of senior military and political figures.40 In Venezuela, this volatile mixture resulted in the attempted coups of 1992, which nearly brought down what had been for three decades one of the region’s strongest democracies. Although the decline in military living standards was less dramatic, this account could easily have been written about junior officers’ reaction to the short-lived government of Jamil Mahuad in Ecuador.41 In ideologically divided societies, what you see depends on where you stand. As the military’s social origins and current circumstances move toward the lower middle class and more educated sectors of the urban working class, we should expect the political views common to the civilian lower middle class to become more common within the armed forces.42 Conversely, ideological positions, especially liberal internationalism, more often found in the civilian upper middle class, are

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likely to decline. To the extent that the lower middle class is weakly articulated with establishment parties, shifting social origins may well result in greater receptivity to antisystem and/or independent nonparty movements and declining representation within the military of parties like Ecuador’s Democracia Popular or Venezuela’s Acción Democrática. Barring a sea change in economic performance over the next decade, it seems unlikely that the lower middle class in Latin America will be a bastion of support for democracy. If lower-middle-class Latin Americans lose faith in democratic regimes, if “corrupt” and “politicians” increasingly go together in the minds of this segment of society, if these people feel like their economic futures are being sold out to pay debts to foreign bankers and taxes to dishonest leaders, these complaints are likely to find a sympathetic audience, especially among the more junior ranks of the armed forces. Increasingly, it seems, social sectors that have lost out in the neoliberal policies of recent decades are likely to constitute the friends, families, and neighbors of the military officers of the future. It remains to be seen if these social sectors share in the greater prosperity of recent years and how that will affect their faith in democracy.

A Research Agenda for a New Military Sociology in Latin America

If this argument is correct, the study of the changing relations between the armed forces and Latin American societies is more than just an “academic” concern. A revitalized military sociology is urgently needed to better understand the social context of the military’s view of and reaction to the unfolding events of a new century. Very briefly let me sketch what I see as the most critical research needs. First, we need up-to-date studies of the social origins of the officer corps in order to understand how these are differentially or similarly affected by the legacies of the past and by changing economic circumstances.43 Longitudinal data on the number and characteristics of applicants and cadets are needed to determine to what extent social origins have in fact changed from the historic patterns described above. Here the primary problem is access to the data, which are in fact already

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collected on an annual basis by the military academies but rarely available outside of the military itself. As noted above, geographic origins also matter, particularly for societies, like Bolivia and Ecuador, where regional divisions are politically salient. In Latin America, as elsewhere, entry into the military profession is largely a matter of self-selection among academically and physically qualified youth. Hence we need to know why cadets choose to apply to the military academies. In particular, what are their images of the military career, and what backgrounds are associated with an attraction to those images? What do they consider the advantages and disadvantages of the military career relative to their career alternatives? Since cadets are chosen competitively, in part on the basis of attributes like character and motivation, we also need to know what these terms mean to those doing the selection. Interviews are needed to determine what cadets bring with them from society into the military in terms of political beliefs, interest (or lack thereof ) in political issues, religious beliefs, and identifications.44 Given the central role of identifications in the theoretical argument above, it would be highly desirable to explore the relative intensity of institutional and other nonmilitary identifications among entering cadets relative to those about to graduate. While it seems logical that the latter would mostly be strongly identified with the armed forces (and that they are beginning to form more specialized identifications as fighter pilots, submariners, artillery officers, etc.), cadets—or at least those who survive the initial months—probably come to the academy with a strong predisposition to those identifications, hence it is an open question how much change one should expect between those entering the academy and those leaving as officers. Second, we need studies of military career patterns and the social interactions with civilians that take place over the span of a typical career. Every officer has the military equivalent of a curriculum vitae, but knowing that he or she was a second lieutenant in a particular place or an instructor at a military school does not tell us much about what interaction he or she had with which civilians during those years or whether any of those experiences resulted in any enduring ties to people or places.

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Writing in the mid-1990s, Carina Perelli and Juan Rial argued that the South American armed forces “are still rather isolated from civil society. However, in most of the poorer countries, with little development of the state apparatus, the military are the only presence of the state in far off, hard to reach places. There military forces have a close relationship with the population. [But] as level of modernization and urbanization increase, so does the detachment from civil society.”45 As Cold War fears fade, the image of the armed forces “living in isolation” from the rest of society seems increasingly anachronistic. Certainly in the area of education there is much greater freedom for officers to pursue degrees in civilian universities and for civilians to attend military schools. Ecuador’s Escuela Politécnica del Ejército, formerly the Army Engineers School, is now a diversified technical university serving an overwhelmingly civilian student body. However, we do not know to what extent officers live together as opposed to intermingled with civilian neighbors, to what extent they interact with civilian friends, or whether they read the same newspapers or watch the same TV programs. What is certain is that there is a spatial dimension to civil-military interactions and that these relationships are different in smaller towns and more remote provinces than they are in megacities, particularly national capitals. Third, we need studies of civilian images of the military and military images of civilians. On the civilian side, in most countries we have periodic public opinion surveys that ask respondents about their trust in various institutions, including the armed forces. These data need to be expanded, disaggregated, and compared systematically over time. Knowing that on average Ecuadorians have more confidence in the armed forces than in Congress or political parties does not tell us much. It would be more useful to know what attributes civilians associate with each of these institutions. In much of the region, human rights abuses and/or corruption scandals have diminished the social prestige of the armed forces. Civilian images of the military as torturer or special interest group now compete with the traditional military self-image as guardians of the Patria.46 Hence we need much better maps of which civilians hold what kinds of views of the military, particularly in ideologically diverse societies like Chile or Argentina, or countries like Peru, El Salvador, and Guatemala that have experienced serious civil wars.

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On the military side, the data will be much harder to collect, since surveys of military officers are quite rare. Nevertheless, interviews in the war academies could easily elicit the images that officers associate with various types of civilians, from the average citizen to the economic elites. It would be useful to determine whether there are significant differences among military images of various political elites — members of Congress, judges, cabinet ministers, and politicians—and whether these vary according to one’s political views. Over the years I have encountered some officers with very sophisticated notions of politics and politicians, and others given to the most simplistic stereotypes. To the extent that military officers differentiate good civilians and bad civilians, we need to know how these categories are constructed. Fourth, while we have lots of anecdotes, to my knowledge we have no systematic studies of military families in Latin America. Interviews or surveys of families across the rank hierarchy are needed to collect basic data on where military officers live, how and where they purchase homes, who their neighbors are, how well or poorly their incomes match the cost of living, how they cope with the realities of two-job households, variable if not shrinking real incomes, and growing economic insecurity. In the past, military officers—like U.S. university professors— have enjoyed comfortable but not extravagant incomes and the military equivalent of tenure. Absent gross misbehavior, most officers had virtually guaranteed employment (and promotion) up to the rank of lieutenant colonel. Under current circumstances, we need to know what expectations officers and their families have about their careers, and what degree of security or insecurity officers and spouses feel about their odds of realizing those aspirations. Even though it is virtually certain that more and more military spouses have to work outside the home to cover household expenses, we know very little about the jobs they hold and what linkages that creates to civilian social groups. Historically, perhaps the most common profession for officers’ wives was schoolteacher. If we consider how teachers’ salaries have fared under neoliberal economic policies, it should not be surprising that many officers’ wives are unhappy with those policies.47 Fifth, we need more empirical studies of the extent and character of civil-military interaction in the so-called new military missions. To take

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just one example, the size and significance of military industries is not well understood. To the extent that these are operated as holding companies to generate money to fund military pensions, they may not be very different from investing in the stock market for the same purposes. To the extent that these are large and/or strategic industries, the military could theoretically become an economic actor in its own right. To the extent that military officers managing such enterprises join sectoral organizations, they may encourage new ties to civilian elites. To the extent that such companies generate significant profits, off-budget revenues increase the military’s autonomy from congressional budget authorities and create economic interests that the military will logically seek to defend.48 To date, it is unclear whether unions are permitted in these military enterprises and to what extent they have the right to strike. Alternatively, a military-controlled bank may be nothing more than its own credit union. While much attention has been given to the wide variety of military enterprises in Ecuador, my impression is that collectively they constitute a relatively small fraction of the economy and that most of the profits come from military investments in enterprises in which the military has no management function. In Ecuador and elsewhere, careful analysis is needed to determine what these economic activities are and how important they are before we declare them a threat to democracy.49 Likewise, the new missions of the military as providers of social services, anticrime forces, and natural disaster assistance, or even their participation in the war on drugs, need to be carefully assessed. In some cases, these activities may be significant enough to impose real opportunity costs in terms of training and implementation of professional military functions.50 But it is also possible that in some/many countries, the combined time spent in all these functions is relatively insignificant— a well drilled here, a school built there, some trucks sent to evacuate people stranded by floods, occasional anticrime patrols in the slums on weekends— while the military continues to engage in all the standard training and other activities it has always done. One useful way to determine the relative importance of these missions would be to document how much time the armed forces spend doing them. Based on a recent survey of junior army officers in Ecuador, where the development

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mission of the armed forces is taken quite seriously, it appears that involvement in civic action and support for development activities is nearuniversal for officers serving in the rural highland provinces and to a lesser extent in areas of urban poverty.51 These activities in turn reinforce the army’s view of itself as closer to society—especially to the poorest and neediest elements of society—than other state institutions and far more engaged with and representative of those sectors than Ecuador’s political institutions.52 Particularly when economic and political elites “disregard” the army’s role as the “columna vertebral” of the state and moral reserve of the Patria, it should not be surprising that some officers see the armed forces and “the people” as similarly threatened by corrupt politicians and unrepresentative governments. As I have argued elsewhere, there is nothing inherently undemocratic about using the armed forces to build roads, carry the mail, or provide medical care to the poor.53 Nevertheless, democratic civil-military relations require that such missions be both assigned and subject to termination by the appropriate civilian authorities and subject to civilian oversight, not missions adopted and implemented by the armed forces in pursuit of their own political or institutional strategies. To the extent that such missions are not open to outside scrutiny or appraisal, they detract from the transparency and accountability that ought to be the norm for all state institutions. To the extent that “economic development” missions in fact generate off-budget revenues, they undermine the legislative budgeting process that is a central mechanism for democratic control in established democracies. Finally, to the extent that these nonmilitary missions are autonomously established and controlled, they may in fact not just contribute to the economic autonomy of the armed forces from the rest of the state but also allow the military to construct social alliances with constituencies that could become political alliances in moments of regime crisis.

Conclusion

To argue for renewed attention to military sociology in Latin America is not to imply some kind of sociological determinism. Indeed, if we view

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civil-military relations as a triangular relationship between the state, the society, and the armed forces, then perhaps the first lesson that Alfred Stepan’s intellectual legacy teaches us is that the nature and quality of the institutional linkages between state and society are the principal forces shaping civil-military relations, not the other way around. But that legacy of theory and research also teaches us that these are dynamic relationships that must be rooted in both society and the state to be effective and conducive to democratic consolidation. Constructing the institutional mechanisms for democratic relations between the armed forces and the rest of the state requires mechanisms for political and policy control as well as extending the rule of law to include the military. Yet as recent events in Honduras and Ecuador remind us, it also requires reforming the way that civilian social groups interact with the armed forces, not just in moments of political crisis, but also in the everyday lives of citizens and soldiers. Understanding civil-military relations and future prospects for democratic consolidation in Latin America thus requires renewed attention to questions of how military officers “see” the world as it changes around them and how they make choices within the world as they understand it. That understanding must be socially situated. In particular, theoretical progress in the study of civil-military relations requires giving up the implicit model of the armed forces as a unitary actor with a single mentality, a single set of interests, and a single universal political agenda. We know from Al Stepan’s work on Brazil and Peru— and from the research of other scholars whom he inspired—that military officers do not all think alike, that there are important differences cross-nationally and within countries in military thinking about their political role and in their views of democracy and society. We know that military identifications, ideas, and interests matter, and that these are shaped in part by who goes into the military, the position officers occupy within the social order, and their ongoing contacts with different segments of the larger society. Until we do far more research, it is difficult to know how much or how little change we will find. Unless we do that research, our understanding of the military as a political force in the decades ahead will be undermined by our ignorance about the interactions of the military with the rest of society.

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Appendix: Methodology Social Categories

Translating the information available from military academy applications into meaningful classifications of the social backgrounds of the applicants is not a simple task. For the purposes of this project, it seemed to be important to differentiate insofar as possible between different strata of the “middle class” since under current conditions the economic outcomes experienced by those strata could be quite different, for example, between high demand professionals and those living at the margins of the lower middle class. Thus we began with six broad social categories, principally defined by their economic roles. Upper Class: Owners of large or medium capital or managers with share ownership in the company, for example, the owner of a hotel or agribusiness or the president of a bank. Upper Middle Class: Professionals with high-prestige and highpaying occupations, earning salaries, for example, architects or doctors. Middle Class: Professionals and white-collar salaried workers with moderate prestige and pay, for example, owners and managers of medium-sized businesses (e.g., an office supply store), middle-level administrative employees, and schoolteachers. Lower Middle Class: White-collar employees with limited salary and prestige or owners of small capital, for example, a taxicab owner/ driver. Skilled Working Class: Specialized industrial or service workers, for example, auto mechanic, plumber, dressmaker, policeman, security guard, cook, bricklayer, or hair stylist. Unskilled Working Class: Manual laborers without identified skills or families with no identifiable income sources such as pensions, for example, agricultural laborer, maid, or janitor.

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I then added four categories for academy applicants from military families or from other security forces. Distinguishing the latter seemed useful, since they may be perceived as related to the “military profession” but in most cases do not have the same social standing. “Other officers” also includes lower-ranking retired officers, who presumably did not complete their military careers. Police officials or policemen were treated as civilian occupations and classified according to the skills and status of their ranks. Military Officers: Career officers, particularly those attaining senior rank, for example, general staff officers. Other Officers: Officers from other security services, for example, captain in the Coast Guard or officers in the regular forces who retired as majors, captains, or lieutenants. Military Noncomissioned Officers: Individuals holding the rank of corporal or sergeant and equivalents in the army, navy, or air force. Other Noncommissioned Officers: Individuals holding noncommissioned ranks in other public security forces, such as Argentina’s Gendarmería. Classification

The Argentine data include individual information on a total of 345 applicants admitted to the Colegio Militar de la Nación in 2004. In addition to the profession and activities in that profession of both the father and the mother and whether he/she was an owner of his/her business, information is also provided on the applicant’s province of birth, type of secondary education (e.g., bachiller, comercial, or técnico) and whether the secondary education was from a private or public school, and the rank and branch of service of fathers in military careers. The Uruguayan survey of first-year cadets provided individual data on a total of 55 cadets admitted to the Escuela Militar in 2006. In contrast to the application form data used by Rial, “Reclutamiento de los oficiales,” and the Escuela Militar’s “Estudio referido a la situación de la

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Escuela Militar,” the survey information was particularly useful because it included a question on the education levels attained by both the father and the mother and information on monthly family income. While there are good reasons not to take the income data too literally, the income and parental education data were very useful in distinguishing between large and small businesses and “agricultural property owners” who were in fact small farmers, not owners of large agribusinesses. Individual records also included province of birth, type of secondary education, marital status of parents, and profession and occupational activi ties of both parents. Taking into account the sum of the information about each case, the author then made a judgment as to the most appropriate of the ten categories above. Cases lacking sufficient information for classification constituted about 3 percent of the Argentine cases and are excluded from the totals reported in the text. Occupational categories can and do cross more than one of the social strata above. Indeed, these are best thought of as “fuzzy boundary” categories with blurred frontiers between, for example, lower middle class and skilled working class. Particularly in the Argentine data, the numbers are large enough to provide confidence regarding the trends toward increased recruitment from the lower-middle- and skilled working-class backgrounds, even though the exact percentages of cadets from those categories cannot be known with any certainty given the available data. Nevertheless, the exact percentages are probably of very little significance compared to the general trends toward greater diversification of social origins of military officers in Argentina and Uruguay, and by implication other South American countries as well.

Notes This chapter draws from earlier papers presented to Latin American Studies Association (LASA) and Research and Education in Defense and Security Studies (REDSS) conferences describing the Latin American Armed Forces and Society research project. Field research for the project has been supported by a grant from the United States Institute of Peace. I wish to express my special appreciation to Ernesto López and Jaime Garreta for their help in obtaining access to information on officer recruitment from Argentina’s Colegio Militar and to

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Coronel Luis F. Suárez, Tcnl. Yamandu González, and Tnte. General Jorge W. Rosales, Comandante General del Ejército, for similar information from Uruguay’s Escuela Militar. Ing. Marco Aníbal Navas Leiva provided valuable research assistance in Ecuador. The analysis and conclusions in this chapter are, however, entirely my own and not those of any of the individuals or institutions above. 1. See, for example, J. Samuel Fitch, The Armed Forces and Democracy in Latin America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); Peter Smith, Democracy in Latin America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 73–106; and Rut Diamint, “The Military,” in Constructing Democratic Governance in Latin America, ed. Jorge Domínguez and Michael Schifter, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 43– 73. 2. José Luis de Imaz, Los que mandan (Buenos Aires: Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires, 1964), 45– 84. 3. Roy Hansen, “Military Culture and Organizational Decline: A Study of the Chilean Army” (Ph.D. diss., UCLA, 1967), 204. 4. Alfred Stepan, The Military in Politics: Changing Patterns in Brazil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 32– 33, 36, 41 n. 16. See also Luigi Einaudi and Alfred Stepan, “Latin American Institutional Development: Changing Military Perspectives in Peru and Brazil,” R-586-DOS, Rand Corporation, Santa Monica, 1971, 41– 57. 5. J. Samuel Fitch, The Military Coup d’Etat as a Political Process: Ecuador, 1948–1966 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 26– 27. 6. Fitch, The Military Coup d’Etat, 28– 30. See Lyle McAlister, Anthony Maingot, and Robert Potash, The Military in Latin American Socio-Political Evolution: Four Case Studies (Washington, DC: Center for Research in Social Systems, 1970), 33– 34, 96– 97, 158, 160– 61, 170, 220– 21, for similar conclusions about the social origins and socioeconomic status of the military in Argentina, Peru, Mexico, and Colombia during the 1950s and 1960s. 7. Frank McCann, “The Military,” in Modern Brazil: Elites and Masses in Historical Perspective, ed. Michael Conniff and Frank McCann (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 70. 8. Rosendo Fraga, “La composición social de los aspirantes al Colegio Militar de la Nación,” Centro de Estudios Unión para la Nueva Mayoría, n.d., 32– 37. 9. I gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the staff of the Colegio Militar de la Nación in providing these data and the support of Tcnl. Ricardo Nibeyro and Tcnl. Humberto Grande, of the army’s Department of Instruction and Higher Education, who served as my liaison with the Colegio. The procedures used for classifying family backgrounds are complex and not without potential for error, given sometimes incomplete information and ambiguous descriptions of parents’ occupations. See the Appendix for details.

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10. Based on data supplied by the Escuela Naval Argentina. These figures probably underestimate the trend toward recruitment from noncommissioned officers’ families, because the data provided do not distinguish between noncoms and commissioned officers in the figures for cadets whose fathers were officers in the army or air force. Given the higher social prestige of the navy, these are more likely to be sons of officers and are so counted, though some are probably children of noncommissioned officers. 11. Rial’s estimates are based on data on household income, housing conditions, parents’ education, and health care coverage. Juan Rial, “El reclutamiento de oficiales y la estabilidad de la democracia en el Uruguay,” MS., n.d., 8– 21. 12. Rial, “Reclutamiento,” 15, 9. 13. One surprising finding in this sample is the presence of only one female. Since 1998, female cadets have constituted on average about 10 percent of the entering class of cadets. However, given high attrition rates, only one of the ten women cadets who entered in 2006 was still enrolled when this survey was administered. Given the evidence that differential social groups may have differential rates of attrition, we should be cautious about assuming that the social origins of the entering class of cadets is necessarily representative of the social origins of those who actually graduate and become officers. 14. “Estudio de Estado Mayor referido a la situación de la Escuela Militar,” 17 June 2005, 2. The study begins by noting “the decline in the socioeconomic and cultural level of cadets of the Escuela Militar” (1). The figures given for 2005 are consistent with Rial’s estimates of social origins. Both Rial’s analysis and that of the Escuela Militar staff were based on application records, which did not include parents’ occupations. The 2006 data come from a survey of first-year cadets and includes occupational data but because of attrition do not include all the initial entering cadets. 15. In contrast, the acceptance rates at the Naval School and the School of Military Aviation were 22 percent and 34 percent, respectively. Marina Malamud, “Tendencias sociodemográficas del reclutamiento militar en la Argentina actual,” Military Review (July– August 2010): 9. 16. See Renata Avelar Giannini, “Género y fuerzas armadas en América Latina: Un análisis sobre la incorporación de las mujeres en las instituciones militares de la región,” paper presented at the XXIX International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, 6– 9 October 2010, Toronto, Canada. 17. Interview, 28 November 2006, Santiago, Chile. 18. “Las escuelas militares atraen menos,” El Comercio online, 10 March 2003. Because of its attractive options for postmilitary employment, the Ecua dorian air force still attracts 700 to 800 applicants a year for 40 to 50 positions in the Air Force Academy’s entering class.

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19. Personal communication with the director of the Escuela Superior Militar, “Eloy Alfaro,” 28 August 2006, Quito, Ecuador. A new salary system in 2006 significantly raised military salaries. Prior to that increase, the base pay for second lieutenants was around $200 a month. 20. Surprisingly, many—perhaps most— South American military academies charge tuition and/or room and board fees for cadets. The Escuela Superior Militar in Ecuador charges a matriculation fee of $2,500, plus room and board charges of $150 month. The Naval Academy charges less but requires entering students to have a personal computer. “Las escuelas militares atraen menos,” 3– 4. While these fees pale by comparison to those charged by private universities, for poor families they are potentially serious barriers to entry. Anecdotally it appears that the “investment” in getting a son or daughter into a military career is perceived as “worth the cost” to working-class or petty merchant families but not necessarily as valuable to the kinds of middle-class families from which cadets have traditionally been drawn. Chile is probably typical in offering a series of scholarships for top-ranked students, athletes, and children of military personnel. www.escuelamilitar.cl/gxpsites.hgxpp001.aspz?2, 1,6,O,S,0,MNU;E;2:3:6:1MNU. 21. On the persistence of comparisons of the military career to the priesthood, see José Miguel Florez, “Algunas reflexiones en torno a la formación profesional del militar desde el caso peruano,” Revista Fuerzas Armadas y Sociedad 18, nos. 1– 2 (January– June 2004): 203– 4. On the tensions between defending traditional views of the profession and adapting to new realities, see Juan Rial, “Ajustes en las corporaciones militares de América Latina ante los nuevos escenarios,” Redes-Brazilia (August 2002): 9–11. 22. Brian Selmeski, “Multicultural Citizens, Monocultural Men: Indigeneity, Masculinity, and Conscription in Ecuador” (Ph.D. diss., Syracuse University, 2007), 131, 349– 51, 363– 66, and passim. 23. Carlos González, “Tragedy Fuels Call for End to Compulsory Military Service,” Inter Press News Service Agency, 24 May 2005, http://ipsnews.net/ africa/interna.asp?idnews=28805. 24. In Argentina, Chile, and Ecuador, I have been told the same apocryphal story of the officer whose professional wife now makes more than he does and refuses to give up her career in order to follow him to be a commander or staff officer at a garrison in the provinces. So in the end the officer goes to complete his assignment and she and the children remain in the capital. See Charles Moskos, “From Institution to Occupation: Trends in Military Organization,” Armed Forces and Society 4, no. 1 (November 1977): 41– 50. Although Moskos’s thesis was greeted with howls of protest from Southern Cone offi cers, resisting the “occupational trend”—as opposed to adapting to it—seems likely to be a losing battle in the long run. Christopher Dandeker, “Las fuerzas armadas en la sociedades democráticas,” in Los militares y la sociedad en la

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Europa del siglo XXI: Un análisis comparativo, ed. Omar Gutiérrez (Santiago: Gráfica Funny, 2004), 64– 68. 25. See Jean Callaghan, Christopher Dandeker, and Jurgen Kuhlmann, “Las fuerzas armadas y la sociedad de Europa,” in Gutiérrez, Los militares y la sociedad, 18– 34. 26. In 1993 Peruvian generals were making less than $300 a month in dollar terms. Enrique Obando, “The Power of the Peruvian Armed Forces,” in Peru in Crisis: Dictatorship or Democracy, ed. Joseph Tulchin and Gary Bland (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1994), 124. These figures seem atypical, but they are indicative of the instability of military salaries in real terms in recent decades. 27. See Wendy Hunter, Eroding Military Influence in Brazil: Politicians against Soldiers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 95–115. 28. Ernesto López, “Argentina 1991: Las nuevas oportunidades para el control civil,” in Democracia y cuestión militar, ed. Ernesto López and David Pion-Berlin (Buenos Aires: Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, 1996), 192– 96. 29. In Rosendo Fraga’s surveys in metropolitan Buenos Aires, from 1990 to 2002 “the military question” never registered as the “top priority” problem for more than 1 percent of the respondents. “Imagen de las Fuerzas Armadas,” Centro de Estudios Nueva Mayoría, 2002, 3. 30. On the importance of institutional prestige and civilian respect to the Brazilian military, see Alfred Stepan, Rethinking Military Politics: Brazil and the Southern Cone (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 58– 59. 31. Survey data provided by Santiago Nieto, director of Informe Confidencial, Quito, Ecuador, 2006. 32. “Mejora la imagen de las FAS,” Revista Española de Defensa, no. 243 (July– August 2008), 25. 33. José Nun, “The Middle-Class Military Coup Revisited,” in Armies and Politics in Latin America, ed. Abraham Lowenthal and J. Samuel Fitch, rev. ed. (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1986), 59– 95. 34. The best analysis of that socialization process in a Latin American military is Máximo Badaró, Militares o ciudadanos: La formación de los oficiales del Ejército Argentino (Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros, 2009). 35. For purposes of both theory and measurement, it is important not to forget that the intensity of identifications manifested in particular situations depends on the psychological intensity of the affective bond but also on the extent to which that bond is evoked by the context. Thus many U.S. academics who identify quite strongly as global citizens nevertheless reacted strongly as “Americans” to the attacks of September 11, 2001. 36. Such a formulation is consistent with a later, more sophisticated version of Nun’s thesis and Martin Needler’s critique of Nun’s class-based explanation. See Lisa North and José Nun, “A Military Coup Is a Military Coup . . . or Is It?,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 11, no. 1 (1978): 165– 74; and

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Martin Needler, “Military Motivations in the Seizure of Power,” Latin American Research Review 6, no. 4 (1975): 614– 24. 37. In a nonrandom survey of forty junior and middle-ranking Ecuadorian army officers in 2009, only two were born in the coastal provinces that contain half the country’s population, one of whom was from Guayaquil, Ecuador’s largest city. 38. Fitch, The Armed Forces and Democracy in Latin America, 91–101. 39. Alejandro Portes and Kelly Hoffman find a significant decline in the number of public sector workers and a smaller but corresponding rise in the number of petty entrepreneurs since 1980: “During the 1990s, the petty bourgeoisie assumed a novel role as a place of refuge for public servants, salaried professionals, and other skilled workers displaced by the adjustment policies promoted by the neoliberal model” (48). Despite significant measurement issues, they estimate that “the average incomes of the Latin American urban workforce stagnated or declined during the years of neoliberal adjustment [and] the average incomes of all the subordinate classes, including the urban petty bourgeoisie, declined as well” (65). Portes and Hoffman, “Latin American Class Structures: Their Composition and Change during the Neoliberal Era,” Latin American Research Review 38, no. 1 (2003): 41– 82. See also Alberto Minujin and Eduardo Anguita, La clase media: Seducida y abandonada (Buenos Aires: Edhasa, 2004), 100–116. 40. Trinkunas, “The Crisis in Venezuelan Civil-Military Relations,” Latin American Research Review 37, no. 1 (2002): 52. See also Domingo Irwin G., “Comentarios sobre las relaciones civiles y militares en Venezuela, siglos XIX a XXI (Sencillamente Complicado),” paper prepared for the XXIV International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, 27– 29 March 2003, Dallas, 8. Irwin notes that resentment of limited budgets and declining salaries was particularly strong among junior officers, who accused senior officers of corruption and spinelessness in dealing with the party-dominated regime. Deborah Norden likewise argues that changes in military education and greater interaction with civilians in nonmilitary education and in social missions contributed to greater identification with the poorer classes. Norden, “Democracy and Military Control in Venezuela: From Subordination to Insurrection,” Latin American Research Review 33, no. 2 (1998): 152, 158– 61. 41. See J. Samuel Fitch, “Post-Transition Coups: Ecuador 2000,” Journal of Political and Military Sociology 33, no. 1 (Summer 2005): 39– 58. 42. Perelli and Rial come to a similar conclusion. Carina Perelli and Juan Rial, “The New Order and the Evolution of the Armed Forces in South America,” Documento de Trabajo, PEITHO, Montevideo, 1995, 11. 43. Information on parents’ education and household income would provide more accurate classification of social origins. There are also methodo logical questions about how to categorize father’s and mother’s occupations according to social class when the class structure of the larger society is itself

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undergoing significant change. Portes and Hoffman, “Latin American Class Structures,” 41– 82. 44. Brian Selmeski’s study of conscription in Ecuador suggests that even among conscripts, those who self-select to report for induction tend to see military service as an avenue for personal advancement and “becoming better men.” Selmeski, “Multicultural Citizens, Monocultural Men,” 116– 58. 45. Perelli and Rial, “The New Order and the Evolution of the Armed Forces in South America.” 46. Felipe Agüero and Eric Hershberg, “Las fuerzas armadas y las memorias de la represión en el Cono Sur,” in Memorias militares sobre la represión en el Cono Sur: Visiones en disputa en dictadura y democracia, ed. Eric Hershberg and Felipe Agüero (Madrid: Siglo XXI Editores, 2005), 14; and Alexandra Barahona de Brito, “Truth, Justice, Memory, and Democratization in the Southern Cone,” in The Politics of Memory: Transitional Justice in Democratizing Societies, ed. Alexandra Brahona de Brito, Carmen González-Enríquez, and Paloma Aguilar (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 119– 60. 47. Minujin and Anguita, La clase media, 145– 98. In 2006 teachers in the city and province of Buenos Aires staged repeated strikes demanding that the base salary for teachers be raised to roughly $325 a month. 48. In Ecuador, the Association of Generals and Admirals has been outspoken in its criticism of government attempts to privatize military industries. 49. Maiah Jaskoski’s recent paper describing the Ecuadorian and Peruvian armies’ contracting to provide security services to oil companies, landowners, and businesses is an example of the kind of detailed empirical study needed to clarify the significance of these nonmilitary missions. “Battalions for Hire: Private Army Contracts in Peru and Ecuador,” paper presented to the 2009 Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 11–14 June 2009. 50. Trinkunas, “Militarizing the State,” 12. 51. Selmeski points out that the manual labor for most of these activities comes from conscripts, so that the most marginal members of the military “family” are the ones serving the most marginal sectors of Ecuadorian society. Selmeski, “Multicultural Citizens, Monocultural Men,” 279– 85. 52. Cecilia Ortiz B., Indios, militares e imaginarios de nación en el Ecuador del siglo XX (Quito: Ediciones Abya-Yala, 2006), 201– 41. 53. Fitch, Armed Forces and Democracy, 187– 94. The literature on military missions is too extensive to summarize here, but see Louis Goodman, “Mili tary Roles: Past and Present,” in Civil-Military Relations and Democracy, ed. Larry Diamond and Marc Plattner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 37– 40; and David Pion-Berlin and Craig Arcenaux, “Decision-Makers or Decision Takers: Military Missions and Civilian Control in Democratic South America,” Armed Forces and Society 26, no. 3 (Spring 2000): 413– 36.

2 Reconciling the Brazilian Military with Democracy The Power of Alfred Stepan’s Ideas Fernando Henrique Cardoso

An Original, Forward-Looking Thinker

As a personal friend and also as a social scientist and former president of Brazil, I wish to acknowledge and praise the groundbreaking role that Alfred Stepan played in stressing the importance and challenging our understanding of the role played by the military in our societies and politics. From the mid-1960s to the late 1970s most of Latin America was under military rule. At a time when civic freedoms and political society were strictly controlled, small groups of social scientists strived to keep alive the flame of critical thinking. At this tragic moment in the history of Latin American societies, Stepan made an immense contribution to political and social science by focusing on the military’s role as the backbone of authoritarian regimes.1 The military was the dominant actor in our societies, and yet its study was an area traditionally neglected by Latin American social scientists. Our focus was on the analysis of the structural conditions for development and social change. We elaborated a new theory of dependence to explain long-term social and economic processes.2 We were also deeply 67

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committed to the cause of democracy and increasingly hopeful about the emerging role of civil society in the struggle for human rights. Stepan illuminated for us what might happen if we failed to develop a capacity to understand the role played by the military not only in the preservation of authoritarian rule but also, and more important, in the processes of transition to democracy.3 He called our attention to questions that now seem obvious but that were overlooked at the time: What are the inner dynamics of the military?4 How cohesive or fragmented are they?5 How can these differences favor or hinder processes of regime liberalization?6 By addressing these issues, Stepan’s contributions enabled us to come to grips with the critical challenge of reconciling the military with society, thus paving the way for viable strategies of democratic change. In a nutshell, he helped us to frame a strategy to reconcile the military with the idea and practice of democracy.7 I will illustrate the quality and pertinence of Stepan’s sharp analysis by recalling his insights on three issues of critical importance for Brazil’s democratization process: • • •

the tug-of-war between regime concession and societal conquest;8 the interplay between civil society and political society in the pro cess of restoring the rule of law;9 and the strains between the three levels of military power—as government, as institution, as security community—and their impact on the democratization process.10

Later, I will contrast his insights of the 1970s and 1980s with recent developments and emerging challenges that are drastically redefining the military’s place in contemporary Brazil and ratifying its full reconciliation with democracy.

The Military and the Path toward Democratization

Civic opposition to the military regime preceded any attempt at concession by the military. In the early seventies, while political repression neutralized organized resistance from traditional channels such as po-

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litical parties and trade unions, small circles of freedom emerged at the grassroots level. With strong support from the Catholic Church, these groups operated with their “backs turned to the state.” And yet their struggle for the defense of human rights gradually gave birth to new forms of popular association and participation. In those years of darkness, I used to say, if you cannot shout, talk; if you cannot talk, whisper. It was essential to keep alive the flame of critical thinking and to explore, step by step, how to extend the field of possibilities. We had to weave the threads of civil society and open up channels of participation so that, in time, disagreement and conflict would no longer be seen as disloyalty or subversion. Democracy is not the illusion of consensus. It is the acknowledgment of diversity and conflicts of interest. Even when political parties and Congress were seen by most as hopelessly subservient to the repressive system, Stepan called our attention to the role that political society might ultimately play in the transition to democracy. While civil society grew from the bottom up, political society — even though severely restricted by repression and censorship—never ceased altogether to function. Legislative elections were still periodically held even though Congress had no real power vis-à-vis government.11 Stepan’s insights about the political sphere were confirmed when the Brazilian population to the surprise of many dramatically seized the opportunity of the national elections for Congress in 1974 to vote en masse for opposition candidates. This strong and unexpected expression of widespread discontent took place during the first year of Ernesto Geisel’s presidency (1974– 79) and the initial, faint intimations of a relaxation in authoritarian rule. Contrary to Pinochet’s Chile, the Brazilian military refrained from a personalization of the dictatorship. Power was wielded by the military as an institution. Over a twenty-one-year period, five generals, selected by the army’s high command, took turns in the presidency of the republic. Every change at the presidential level was submitted to congressional approval. Each succession was a time of crisis within the military establishment and also an opportunity for the new president to introduce policy shifts.

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Stepan was very penetrating in his analysis of President Geisel’s slow, tentative steps toward political liberalization.12 In his view, the most crucial motivation for the opening up of the authoritarian regime had its origins in contradictions within the state generated by the development of the new, relatively autonomous military intelligence and repressive systems.13 During his mandate from 1974 to 1979, as president and commander in chief Geisel strengthened his authority over the military as an institution in order to curb its growing power as a security community. Notorious cases of death under torture of political opponents in army barracks led to Geisel’s decision to dismiss top military commanders and, in 1977, Minister of the Army General Sílvio Frota. Military discipline was gradually restored and the repressive apparatus brought under control. However, the tension between regime concession and societal conquest remained constant throughout Geisel’s term. The partial relaxation of press censorship was a decisive factor in the reduction of human rights abuses. On the other hand, the emerging autonomous labor and social movements were continually repressed. But by the late seventies, fear had been replaced by hope. In this tug-of-war between pressure from society and concession from the state, the pendulum gradually shifted in favor of less repression and increasing tolerance of dissent. The gradual building of a broad, diverse, loosely connected “democratic front”—ranging from bishops, intellectuals, and journalists to civic, labor, and business leaders — ultimately led to the restoration of basic human rights and free elections for local governments. Stepan argued that democratization entailed liberalization but was a wider and more specifically political concept. It involved civil society but referred fundamentally to political society. He correctly observed that between 1982 and 1985 the fundamental power shift was the growing autonomy of political society. Changes in this sphere further weakened the military and brought the opposition in civil and political society closer together.14 The democratic coalition gained new impetus during President João Figueiredo’s government (1979 – 85). In 1984 millions took to

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the streets to reclaim the right to elect the president by popular vote. Political leaders were at the forefront of the struggle, and the arena shifted to Parliament. A constitutional amendment to restore direct elections was narrowly defeated in 1984, but the call for change was unstoppable. Twenty-one years of military rule finally came to an end in 1985 with the election by Congress of an opposition candidate as president. Stepan had strong doubts about the capacity of the civilian democratic government to control the military. He felt that the continued military influence constrained the consolidation of democracy. He feared that any civilian-military conflict would have a nondemocratic resolution.15 These concerns directed his analysis to the question of the considerable prerogatives that the military wanted to preserve and to what he called the vulnerabilities of “unequal civilian accommodation.”16 His list of these military prerogatives that might make Brazil a flawed democracy included several topics: • • • • •

immunity from prosecution for violations of human rights;17 ratification by the new Constitution of the military role in the management of internal conflicts;18 military control over the armaments and nuclear industry;19 militarization of the office of the presidency and of the intelligence services;20 and preservation of the national security ideology, with its vision of social conflict as a risk to the state and not as a constituent element of democracy.21

The New Brazilian Constitution and the Role of the Military

The first civilian government was indeed quite timid in its dealing with the military. In what was probably the most sensitive issue affecting civilian-military relations, the definition in the 1988 Constitution of the role of the military in domestic conflicts, there were doubts expressed by some that truly democratic control over the armed forces could be achieved.

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A proposal excluding any kind of military action in internal matters was rejected by the Constituent Assembly. A compromise was reached: a military intervention could take place only if the head of one of the branches of state power—Executive, Legislative, or Judiciary—asked for military intervention to ensure law and order.22 In spite of several criticisms, practical experience showed that such permission could be obtained only in critical situations, for instance, when conflicts between police forces occurred and governors requested federal help, or when army troops were used to enforce public order during elections under Judiciary control. In both cases, the military was involved under the umbrella of the Constitution and with broad public support. In 1992 the armed forces were successfully entrusted with ensuring public safety in Rio de Janeiro during the UN World Environment Summit. Under President Itamar Franco’s government (1992– 95), the army was also employed for a short period to fight drug and criminal gangs in Rio’s favelas. During my first presidential term (1995– 99), the military was asked to ensure public order but only when local police went on strike or conflicts erupted between sectors of the police forces, or to protect federal facilities threatened by strikes or protests. As time went by, involvement in social conflicts became more and more the responsibility of the state police, not the military. In 2004 the federal government created the National Force of Public Safety, composed of members of state police forces under the command of the Ministry of Justice. These troops are fighting drugs and smuggling, and they ensure public order for special events such as the 2007 Pan American Games in Rio de Janeiro. This illustrates the profound transformations in Brazilian society and political culture. Today, no party, political group, or civil society movement is concerned with the improper utilization of the Constitution’s Article 142 mentioned above. The behavior of the armed forces and the preeminence of the democratic order over any hypothesis of military interference in politics have practically extinguished fears of nondemocratic intervention. I am sure that my friend Al Stepan is proud of the fact that his concerns with the matter have been superseded. In fact, as time went by, Brazilian democracy proved its capacity to deal with issues that are highly sensitive everywhere to the military.

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Human Rights and the Military Reaction

Transitional justice is a critical issue that affects societies once the rule of law is restored after long periods of authoritarianism. How is it possible to handle in a fair and balanced way the conflicting demands between peace and justice, between truth and reconciliation in transitions from authoritarian to democratic rule? Recent history provides some examples of the sudden collapse of authoritarian regimes, usually in the aftermath of failed military adventures. This was the case of Portugal (1974), Greece (1974), and Argentina (1983). In most cases, however, such as Brazil, the transition to democracy was a long process driven by many factors combining pressure from civil society and the international community with power fatigue and adverse economic scenarios. In both situations the question of how to deal with past atrocities has been a highly problematic issue for newly restored democracies. Different countries have chosen different paths. Some countries that opted for a policy of retribution met a strong military backlash and were unwillingly forced to make concessions to safeguard their fragile democracy. Others that tried to negate the wounds of the past were incapable of healing their societies. My sense is that truth, as the precondition for peace and reconciliation, is the alternative to either outright impunity or the punishment of the many guilty of human rights abuses. Some measure of reparation for the victims is also an indispensable component of the healing process. This requires at the very least that the state take the lead in conducting a full investigation that sheds light on the violations committed by its agents. This is also the best way to prevent the repetition of these atrocities. We followed this path in Brazil. Human rights abuses under the military regime were not prosecuted, but facts were unearthed and victims compensated. My government recognized the state’s responsibility for the abuses, as I announced at the time publicly and officially. I created a commission, under the Ministry of Justice, to review the cases of people whose rights had been violated. The commission had the power to grant due compensations to the victims and families of those who were killed or died under torture.

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The very day I signed the decree creating this commission, the widow of a congressman who was a victim of the dictatorship, killed in the seventies, was invited to speak at the ceremony. On this occasion, the Brazilian press published on its front pages a photograph of this woman being embraced by the general who was my military chief of staff. This image symbolized the closure of an era. By and large, the military went along with this need to shed light on the past and offer reparations to the victims. In a few cases, reactions did occur, especially against the rehabilitation of former militants who had played leading roles in the guerrilla movements. A retired general who represented the army on the commission came to see me to voice his strong concerns regarding one specific case. He complained of the lack of attention paid to his remarks at the commission’s meetings and said that he felt compelled to quit if this pattern were to continue. I listened to his arguments but stressed that his gesture would be understood as a breach of military discipline that would seriously harm the climate of national reconciliation aspired to by all Brazilians. I made clear that I would not revoke a decision taken by the commission that I myself had empowered. He accepted my arguments and remained on the commission. The only public criticism occurred in the case of a military officer, Captain Carlos Lamarca, a former guerrilla leader gunned down by the army in 1971. The commission granted his family a pension corresponding to that of a retired superior officer. A general in command of a northeastern garrison gave a speech protesting this decision. I ordered his immediate dismissal by the Minister of the Army, with the recommendation that no publicity should be given to my decision. That was the end of the problem. Civilian Control over Dual Technologies

Brazil’s and Argentina’s militaries have always viewed each other with suspicion. A major step to overcome this mutual fear was the initiative by both countries to undertake a joint program of nuclear control. This bold decision reduced the pressure for huge military budgets and precluded an arms race in the region.

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Even before this joint nuclear control program was signed, President José Sarney had already put a stop to veiled attempts by the Brazilian military to develop a nuclear capability. President Fernando Collor (1990– 92), the first civilian president elected by direct vote after Sarney’s transitional period, celebrated this attempt with grandiose publicity, filling an enormous hole in the middle of the Amazon region that was supposedly dug as a testing ground for atomic explosions. President Sarney, together with President Raúl Alfonsin, took the initial steps to smooth relations with Argentina. Those efforts eventually led to Mercosur, the Common Market of the South, created in 1991 when President Collor signed the Asunción Treaty. This was a landmark of Southern Cone economic integration. Under this atmosphere of rapprochement, during President Itamar Franco’s government, I signed, as Brazilian chancellor, together with the Argentine chancellor, Guido di Tella, the program of mutual monitoring of both countries’ plants and nuclear facilities. Scientific and technological developments were directed to the peaceful uses of our nuclear capabilities, including particle acceleration, well known as a dual technology. More acute controversy was raised concerning technological developments that might lead to the construction of missiles and their launching vehicles. Argentina’s Condor program, with similar aims, was halted after the disaster of the Falklands War (1982). Brazilians joined this unfortunate arms race later and continued it for a longer period. When, at the beginning of my first term in office, the air force minister informed me about what was happening in this field, I ordered our program to be submitted to the Missile Technology Control Regime, thus avoiding any risk of further developments without civilian control and international oversight. This was done, and Brazil signed the volunteer agreement in 1995. Brazil and China are presently developing a joint program to produce and launch satellites. Some have already been launched, and a Brazilian rocket was recently sent into space with devices for scientific experiments. The entire program is under the joint oversight of the air force and the civilian-led Brazilian Space Agency, a department of the Ministry of Science and Technology.

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The Creation of the Ministry of Defense

The creation during my presidency of the Ministry of Defense completed the process of reasserting the preeminence of civilian authority over the military. It took a while for the idea of a civilian Ministry of Defense to be implemented because it was essential to first persuade the military of the need for and national ownership of this new structure.23 Our military institutions have a long tradition, dating back to the transplantation of the Portuguese Court to Brazil two hundred years ago. Their contribution to the consolidation of Brazilian sovereignty over a huge territory and to the strengthening of the Brazilian state deserves national and popular respect. The Brazilian military also played a historic role in the global defense of democracy through the participation of 25,000 Brazilian soldiers on the Italian Front during World War II. Taking all that into consideration, any thoughtful political leader should know that changes in the military establishment require patience, persistence, and common sense. That is to say: a leader is well advised to be aware of Stepan’s insights and listen carefully to his ideas on how to deal with the military in any process of democratization.24 The Ministry of Defense is still an institution in the making. It took four years to draft a bill and to get it approved by Congress. I kept the military ministers informed of the developments. When the law was promulgated, I appointed a former senator as Minister of Defense and nominated military officers as commanders of each branch of the armed forces, without the status of cabinet ministers. One of the former ministers insisted on serving as commander. I rejected his bid, not for any lack of confidence or competence, but to show the nation that a major policy shift had taken place. I fired some military ministers on several occasions and for different reasons. No rumors or military reactions were generated by my decisions, with one exception: I decided to replace the air force minister because of a statement made to the press that I deemed inappropriate. An association of retired officers offered a lunch in solidarity with the dismissed minister. The event had no repercussions within the military, and I considered the question resolved.

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A similar solution was applied to the formerly all-powerful Ser viço Nacional de Informações (SNI), the notorious Brazilian intelligence agency under the dictatorship. During my presidency, the agency was totally restructured under a civilian director-general and given new tasks under the permanent oversight of a congressional committee. The academic community also gradually enhanced its capacity to engage in substantive debate with the military about its professional role in a democratic society. Scholars were invited to debate questions related to the military in their schools, colleges, and professional institutions. Dialogue between civilians and the military over matters of interest became commonplace.

The Military in Today’s Brazil: Full Reconciliation with Democracy

Democracy is always a work in progress, an unfinished journey. But Brazilian democracy today is strong and stable. It is not only a set of rules and procedures, but, more substantively, the process through which citizens influence the decisions that affect their lives. Brazilian democracy is embedded in an open society and an increasingly informed public. In this environment, the role of the military has gained an entirely new connotation. The national security doctrine, with its focus on the enemy in a world demarcated by ideology, is a relic of the past. In an interconnected world, Brazil, like any other country, is confronted with threats raised by transnational issues such as environmental degradation, pandemic risks, drug trafficking, and organized crime. These threats affect national and human security. They require international cooperation and the mobilization of both governments and societies. This radical reframing of issues is a challenge and an opportunity for the military. It requires a drastic revision of military training and strategic thinking. But it represents, in my view, the culmination of a long process of reconciliation of the military with democracy that Stepan was the first to envision.25 Let me take the examples of the preservation of the Amazon and the fight against drug trafficking to illustrate the new role played by the armed forces in democratic Brazil.

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No question is more complex and comprehensive than preservation of the environment. It transcends the borders of space and time. It is “the” global issue, par excellence. Brazil is no latecomer to the environment question. Since the political decision to host the 1992 Environment Conference in Rio de Janeiro, we moved from a defensive or reactive position to an attitude of transparency and constructive engagement with the international community. In the discussions leading to the Kyoto Protocol, we adopted an active and forward-looking stand. The Clean Development Mechanism resulted from a draft Brazilian proposal. Today Brazil holds a strategic position at the crossroads of the global environmental debate. We are a target of criticism for our failure to manage the problem of deforestation, especially in the Amazon region. We are a driver of technological innovation in the fields of renewable energies and biodiversity. Finally, we are a promoter of an international response to climate change that does not crystallize existing power inequalities. The deforestation of the Amazon is, indeed, Brazil’s vulnerable point. What happens to the Amazon is a matter of human agency. The critical problem in curbing deforestation is the Brazilian state’s lack of enforcement capacities. The preservation of the Amazon is an area in which the military have a key role to play alongside many other government agencies and social actors. It is a precious ecological heritage for the Brazilian people and for humankind. There are no simple answers or alternatives. Regressive visions— grounded in myths or idyllic or catastrophic scenarios—are unrealistic. The Amazon is neither a “lost paradise” nor a “green hell.” We need a comprehensive project for the region that combines halting deforestation through law enforcement and space monitoring with a new definition of the areas destined for ecological and economic use. This is a challenge that Brazil cannot fail to address, because pressure from the international community for an effective conservation strategy will continue to grow, but also, and foremost, because we Brazilians have a vital interest in preserving the Amazon, its water, forest, and biodiversity, as a matter of national and human security. The way forward is investment in technology to promote sustainable uses of the forest and mobilization of all sectors of society to partici-

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pate alongside government in the preservation of the Amazon. Military resources and capabilities are being increasingly called upon to play a strategic role in this common effort. A more controversial issue has to do the military role in fighting drug traffickers and organized crime. Two of the most critical problems facing democracy in Latin America, violence and corruption, are closely associated with the narcotics trade. The control exercised by drug gangs and cartels over populations and territories is leading to a criminalization of politics and a politicization of crime. Poor, urban youngsters are caught in the crossfire. They are responsible for most of the drug-related killings and deaths. Violence and corruption rank as the first priority in people’s agenda, ahead of unemployment, education, or health. In Colombia and Mexico the armed forces are already at the forefront of the war against drugs. In Rio’s favelas where residents are exasperated with the inability of the police to curb drug gangs, there is a widespread call for direct military involvement in the fight against organized crime. So far, military leaders have been very reticent to respond, lest the armed forces be contaminated by drug-related corruption. The overall perception is that the situation is getting worse by the day. Hence the pressure for military action is likely to grow. The very fact that people from all sectors of society are asking for the armed forces’ engagement is a telling example of the new roles and challenges facing the military in a more complex political environment. Another interesting example is the leading role played by the Bra zilian military in UN peacekeeping missions. Brazilians have had considerable success in leading the UN peacekeeping forces in Haiti. Working in partnership with civil society, this experience has led to the emergence of a new vision and sense of professionalism on the part of a younger generation of Brazilian officers attuned to the changes in our society and in the world. All these developments point toward the strengthening of a new, collaborative relationship between the military and civil society. I wish to conclude by praising again Stepan’s foresight in anticipating the possibility of reconciliation between the Brazilian military, democracy, and the rule of law.

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Notes 1. See Alfred Stepan, The Military in Politics: Changing Patterns in Brazil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971); Alfred Stepan, “The New Professionalism of Internal Warfare and Military Role Expansion,” in Authoritarian Brazil: Origins, Policies, and Future, ed. Alfred Stepan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), 47– 65; and Alfred Stepan, The State and Society: Peru in Comparative Perspective (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). 2. Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Dependency and Development in Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). 3. On the role of the military in transitions to democracy, see Alfred Stepan, Os militares: Da abertura à Nova República (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1986); Alfred Stepan, Rethinking Military Politics: Brazil and the Southern Cone (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988); Alfred Stepan, “Paths toward Redemocratization: Theoretical and Empirical Considerations,” in Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Comparative Perspectives, ed. Guillermo O’Donnell, Philippe C. Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 64– 84, 170– 74, but esp. 75– 78; and Juan J. Linz and Al fred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), esp. 66– 68; Alfred Stepan, “State Power and the Strength of Civil Society in the Southern Cone of Latin America,” in Bringing the State Back In, ed. Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 331– 43. 4. Stepan, Military in Politics, chaps. 10–12. 5. Stepan, Rethinking, chap. 3. 6. Ibid., chap. 5; “Paths toward Redemocratization,” 75– 78; Problems of Democratic Transition, 66– 68. 7. Stepan, Rethinking, chap. 8. 8. Ibid., chap. 5, esp. 60– 67; “Paths toward Redemocratization,” 75– 76; “State Power,” 331– 43. 9. Stepan, Rethinking, 128– 36; Problems of Democratic Transition, 10, 14, 167, 178– 80, 187. 10. Stepan, Military in Politics, chaps. 10–12; Problems of Democratic Transition, 66– 68; Rethinking, chap. 3; and “Paths toward Redemocratization,” 75– 78. 11. Stepan, Rethinking, 4– 7; chap. 5, 133– 36. 12. Stepan, Os militares, 45– 55; and Rethinking, chap. 3. 13. Stepan, Rethinking, chap. 2. 14. For Stepan’s distinction between liberalization and democratization, see Rethinking, 6– 7; and Problems of Democratic Transition, 4. For the importance of the growing role of political society, see Rethinking, chap. 5.

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15. Stepan, Rethinking, chaps. 6– 7, esp. 121– 27. 16. Ibid., 103–14, 122; and Problems of Democratic Transition, 169. 17. Stepan, Rethinking, 107– 8. 18. Ibid., 112–14. 19. Ibid., 83– 86. 20. Ibid., 139– 42; and Os militares, 99–102. 21. Stepan, Rethinking, 132– 33, 143– 45. 22. See Article 142 of the Brazilian Constitution. 23. Stepan advocated a civilian Ministry of Defense in Rethinking, 104– 5, 141– 43. 24. See in particular Rethinking, chap. 8. 25. On changing the mission of the Brazilian armed forces, see Rethinking, 86– 88, 131– 32, 143– 44.

3 Managing Citizen Security in Latin America’s Changing States and Societies Mark Ungar

Stepan’s work on the broad and complex challenges that have faced Latin America continues to provide a strong foundation of analysis even as those challenges change. One of the most difficult of those current challenges is citizen security. A 41 percent rise in homicides in the 1990s has made Latin America the world’s deadliest region:1 42 percent of all the world’s homicides take place there,2 with an annual homicide rate averaging 27.5 per 100,000 people since 2000, far above the 8.8 global rate.3 One of three Latin American citizens has been victimized by violence, murder is the second cause of death for young people, and half of the world’s ten most dangerous countries are Latin American: El Salvador, Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, and Honduras. These increases, and the failure of governments to halt them, have become a crisis for Latin America that imperils its democracies. Security has been the first or second highest priority in national polls since the 1990s and has contributed to the collapse of five governments since 2000. The causes of this crisis span a range of conditions and institutions that Stepan’s work has helped us understand. Much of that work centers on a critical analysis of democracy and the state, which lays out definitions, standards, and ideal types that have guided their study in the 82

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field of comparative politics. Standing out among those concepts are four that this chapter examines: professionalism, accountability, federalism, and civil society. Each demonstrates why crime is so destabilizing to democratic regimes, showing how Stepan’s interlocking frameworks are invaluable for studying the tenuous and multilayered process of democratic consolidation. In the broader realm of democracy, Stepan and Juan Linz (1996: 15) outlined behavioral, attitudinal, and constitutional dimensions of consolidation. Behaviorally, they say, “democracy becomes the only game in town when no significant political groups seriously” attempt to overthrow the regime. Attitudinally, a solid majority of society must believe that any change “must emerge from within the parameters of democratic procedures.” From the constitutional perspective, they consider a democratic regime consolidated when all major actors become “habituated” to the resolution of conflict “according to established norms.” They also set out five conditions for consolidation, of which three are “virtually definitional” prerequisites: a vibrant civil society, an autonomous political society, and a rule of law guaranteeing basic freedoms. These three conditions are much more likely to obtain when accompanied by an effective state bureaucracy and an institutionalized economic society. Together, this set of dimensions and prerequisites usefully shows how a problem like crime and the state’s responses to it can be destabilizing. In particular, record crime rates put enormous strain on the behavioral, attitudinal, and constitutional dimensions, since it heightens temptation to resort to violent and legally questionable responses. Because that temptation exists within civil as well as political society, it also undermines the open and equitable relations that should define them. In addition to stretching the limits of police power, for example, tough anticrime policies in Latin America almost always involve at least indirect blame on the social sectors associated with crime. The “complementarity” of civil and political society, which Stepan also emphasizes, underscores how demands to crack down on crime can weaken the quality and strength of a democracy’s actors and thus their promotion of the three needed dimensions of the regimes they are working to consolidate.

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The Police: The Quest for Professionalism

As part of his analysis of the nature of specific state agencies and of the regimes in which they operate, Stepan developed the concept of new professionalism to examine how the military in countries like Brazil shifted their attention from external to internal threats such as those of guerrillas. In contrast to traditional approaches and practices, which kept the military apolitical and promoted specialized skills, new professionalism widened the scope of both the military’s actions and its political involvement. In particular, he discusses the impacts when militaries in Latin America “began to train their officers to acquire expertise in internal security matters that were defined as embracing all aspects of social, economic, and political life” (1973: 50). Such analysis of the nature, impact, and actions of state institutions provides a very useful approach for the police, which have replaced the military in most of Latin America as the primary security agency. Stepan recognizes the centrality of the police to democratization, in fact asserting that “without a modern coercive apparatus, we cannot really think of a modern democratic state” (Stepan and Costa 2001). Based on that fundamental principle, he then outlines the mutually reinforcing connections between policing and civil society, political society, the rule of law, and the state in democratizing regimes. The framework of new professionalism helps us understand what happens to those connections when a security agency adopts a new approach. In Latin America, nearly every new approach adopted by the police has, like new professionalism, involved greater attention to social, economic, and political life. In particular, the region’s unrelenting crime has revealed the limits of its long-established form of law enforcement, based on centralized and forceful responses. Growing realization of this approach’s weakness has generated efforts to introduce problem-oriented policing, which, in contrast, tried to address crime’s causes through more citizen participation and institutional accountability. The clearest result of this move is community policing, which has involved the creation throughout Latin America of neighborhood councils, social programs, and other preventive and citizen-based efforts. Both new and established democracies in every region have initiated such police re-

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forms in the past twenty years (Kadár 2001; Das and Marenin 2000). With advantages such as developed legal structures and active civil societies, Latin America has been at the forefront of these reforms in the democratizing world. But this needed change is stalled by continuation of traditional police practices, which are rooted in both the long-standing dominance of the executive branch and the continuing appeal of the organic-statist model, a concept Stepan (1978: 33) developed to show how elites see the state as a “clearly interventionist and strong” instrument to achieve a common good. Through this model’s prism, the police are regarded as more pivotal than other state agencies because they maintain order in volatile societies. Much like the perception of the military as the guardian of the national interest through centuries of armed turmoil and weak civilian government, the police are now seen as the protectors of the public order. Such an approach not only gives the police outsized political weight but also solidifies the role of the executives, who use their official role as head of the police to justify dominating citizen security policy to the detriment of the other branches of government. This disposition also tends to exclude society, which is crucial to the ability of problem-oriented and community policing policies to identify and respond to the ever-changing social conditions that cause crime. The role of the police in the contemporary state can also be seen through a similar historical lens centered on executive and state power. Modern policing in the West has gone through three main stages. As they were formed in the 1800s, police were controlled by local officials and focused on local issues. With the growth of state power and technology in the 1900s, they came under national control with standardized policies and rapid responses. Amid social upheaval in the 1960s and 1970s, though, the United States and Europe began moving toward a form of community policing to improve relations with society through more flexibility for officers and opportunities for citizen involvement. The authoritarian regimes dominating Latin America in the twentieth century, though, only solidified and militarized the professional model of the police, whose function was more to control political opposition than stop crime. This centralized model continued to dominate even

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after the transition toward democracy in the 1980s and 1990s, as demands to crack down on crime and disorder grew along with political and economic uncertainty. So while other state structures and policies were altered, the police and policing remained largely intact, based on repressive response to crime and quantitative measures such as the numbers of detentions. As Stepan has stressed in discussing different transition processes, in addition, many nondemocratic practices and officials survived the end of authoritarianism and took root in new democracies. Many of them have been in law enforcement and the judiciary, further entrenching and legally justifying a criminal justice system based on aggressive detention and high incarceration weakly checked by objective investigation and the due process guarantees of penal process codes. As in the United States, this model has given way to a problem orientation better able to gauge changes in society and to high rates of crime. But such new approaches struggle against the historical trajectory and political strength of the police and the state, demonstrating the relevance of Stepan’s analysis. Against this wider historical and political backdrop, an institutional analysis of the police, based on new professionalism, also shows why they are often unable to make needed change. This section focuses on two sets of those reasons: poor police management and procedure on the one hand and the legal and political tolerance of such functioning on the other. With political demands for crime reduction delaying structural reform throughout Latin America, few state agencies in the region have changed as little as the police. Even when police chiefs accept them, new policies get caught in the thicket of long-standing bodies and rules, from internal agencies to detention authorities, many of which were adopted under authoritarianism but survived the transition from it. Effective policing within democratic standards is also inhibited by poor coordination between preventive and investigative arms, inadequate or nonexistent information sharing, and institutional territoriality that continue the lack of uniform geographic law enforcement mentioned above. On an individual level, poor training, low salaries, little professional security, archaic hierarchies, and exhausting work schedules all make officials both resentful and reluctant to take on the extra work to implement new policies.

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Management and Procedure

At each stage, policing in Latin America is afflicted by poor management and inconsistent procedures. Such deficiencies begin with recruitment, which in most countries falls short of entrance requirements, clarity in basic expectations, and a representative cross section of the population. As Fitch describes in chapter 1 of this volume, the original pool of candidates shapes agencies’ overall readiness and professionalism. In explaining their decisions to enter the police academy, many cadets give reasons not particularly connected with the professionalism or reality of the job; many have exaggerated visions of their law enforcement prowess or seek the job’s lucrative informal benefits. In Guatemala’s rush to fill its police ranks after the civil war, an estimated 30 percent of police do not have the minimum education prerequisites, and the majority received insufficient training of no more than three months (Sequén-Monchéz 2003: 148). Of the thousands of Guatemalan police trained as investigators, in addition, fewer than fifteen actually work as investigators (USAID 2005: 2). Even educational improvements can have adverse effects on professionalism when more well-educated officers are held back in the lower and middle ranks by higher officers suspicious of their new approaches. The academies to which such recruits are sent do not do enough to counter such weakness. Academies for both high- and low-ranking offi cers still emphasize physical preparation and formalistic knowledge of laws over critical analysis, open discussion, and application to societal realities. In Venezuela, the police themselves rate their basic training as poor—particularly on social conditions, firearm use, and human rights. Shortcomings in education continue into the force by limiting the ability of the police to comprehend, address, or resolve increasingly complex crime patterns. This dearth of flexibility to adopt new approaches is particularly damaging in the high-crime urban areas where they are most needed. While the flow of information and cooperation between the police and upper- and middle-class areas boost local organizations and new approaches, poor areas are neglected at best and battlegrounds at worst.4 Even when crime mapping and other technological steps help track crime in such areas, without better management and training they

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cannot reveal its causes or solutions. And innovation by individual offi cers is often lost amid changes in policy, automatic rotation, new chiefs, and scant coordination between the police and social services on problems like drug abuse. New courses and joint government-NGO educational programs for serving officers help make up for this deficit but tend to be geared to specific organizational goals or narrow specializations. Throughout the region, in fact, officers say that they have almost no opportunity to use the specialized training they receive. Even in Costa Rica, where the police enjoy more political and financial support than in other countries, officers complain of the paucity of educational opportunities and salary incentives.5 All these problems then undermine the most important task of the police: investigation. The evidence and witnesses attained through criminal investigation provide the material to identify patterns of crime, find criminals, get convictions out of detentions, and prevent future crime. But because most officers throughout Latin America are poorly trained for criminal investigation, they haphazardly carry out the steps needed to secure evidence and witnesses, such as crime scene protection, coordinated forensics, and cooperative relations with the police. Frustrated by the lack of citizen cooperation and trust that can make up for such deficiencies, officers resort to blunt, abusive, and ineffective tactics like neighborhood raids, indiscriminate roundups, and witness intimidation. In nearly every country, far more resources are given to street preventive policing than to investigation. In the United States, about 15 percent of officers carry out investigation—a low number but far higher than most Latin American countries, where the figure is well below 10 percent. Not only are the numbers of investigative police low, though; their work is undermined by competition from preventive police, a lack of forensic and technical support, and chronic judicial delays. The consequences of such limits are apparent in everyday law enforcement. In many areas of Latin America, there is very little skill development for street officers, who usually just monitor a single corner without training in proactive crime prevention through investigation, community relations, or similar approaches.6 This lack of supervision and training extends to promotion. Rather than critical evaluation of positive actions or skill development, promotion in most police agen-

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cies depends almost entirely on the officer’s seniority, academy exam score, and whether she has caused any problems. Most forms used for individual promotion are usually no more than a page, with few if any questions about the agent’s actual policing work, without built-in incentives for general improvement or for specialization in areas such as juvenile criminology. Combined with pervasive corruption, these standards translate into a highly conservative system that discourages risks and innovation. Top officials struggle to reverse such problems but make little headway with agencies buffeted by both change and a lack of it. On the one hand, the police are constantly being restructured through changes like decentralization, but on the other, militarized hierarchies and complacent middle ranks keep them overly rigid and reform adverse. Chronic budget deficits for equipment, salaries, and operations add to mismanagement while also heightening internal political conflict and further distracting police from focusing on the quick responses they need to develop. The Ecuadorian police estimate that they get only 25 percent of what they need in basic equipment such as vehicles and munitions.7 The effects of poor management are clearest in the police stations (co misarías), the heart of crime fighting, whose officers do not have enough autonomy, are punished for mistakes, and anyway are usually too busy for self-improvement. Poor pay, professional insecurity, and arbitrary discipline further discourage both middle- and low-level officers from developing ideas, projects, or the kinds of innovation that make reforms like community policing effective—which itself is stigmatized as “social work.” Further hampering management is incomplete information on crime’s causes and patterns, which should shape and drive daily operations, management, and planning. In the Colombian city of Calí, for example, former mayor Rodrigo Guerrero used information as the basis for a study showing alcohol restrictions cut homicide by 25 percent and disarmament could cut it by an additional 14 percent.8 In most of Latin America, though, statistics are uneven and incomplete, due to problems such as “severe underreporting by victims, lack of systematic survey data, and deficiencies of statistics agencies reporting incidences of crime and violence” (Ayres 1998: 3). The processes of collection and compilation

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are often highly unreliable, leading to discrepancies in reporting by different agencies of even homicide, the most serious crime. In Venezuela, about a third of all crimes are reported to the disparate offices of the judicial police, which lack a mechanism to consolidate and channel them. And the even less reliable statistics on armed robberies, physical assaults, and rapes—far more frequent and a better indicator of violence—can only add up to the roughest of guides for criminal policy and police professionalism. In many police stations, reports are written, often not very legibly, in a logbook without room for much detail. By ignoring the vast majority of incidents, police miss information that could be valuable. But growing awareness of such basic deficiencies has led to the adoption of programs like Compstat, or Computer Statistics, used most successfully in New York City, to help link crime statistics to street operations. The benefits of such programs come from improving the flow of information and policy down the chain of command to each police station, where it is followed up with action. Reflecting their suspicion of institutional change, though, many police adopt crime mapping as a solution rather than as an instrument and cannot help agencies unable to adapt to them. Policy and Law

As in any country on any issue, policy and law can be marshaled to correct such problems. But on three mutually reinforcing levels, in many Latin American countries they often only aggravate them. At the broadest level, rooted in the traditional practices discussed above but with a strong contemporary policy rationale, is zero tolerance. This approach stems loosely from the “broken windows” argument developed by Wilson and Kelling (1982) and Kelling and Coles (1996) that antisocial behavior such as intimidation and harassment, along with physical deterioration, scare off law-abiding citizens and allow crime to take root. A broken window is a signal that no one cares about a property, precipitating the decline of security as it becomes a gathering place for de linquents. As law-abiding residents start avoiding the street and other delinquents are drawn to it, a sense of order may collapse even without actual criminal activity. Zero tolerance focuses on halting that process.

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Since misdemeanors and antisocial behavior lead to more serious crime, its proponents assert, detention of perpetrators prevents potential crimi nals from being emboldened into more serious crime while divulging illegal arms, persons wanted for outstanding crimes, and other illegal possessions or activities. Combined with crime mapping and strong prosecution, zero tolerance thus prevents minor crimes from leading to major ones. A 2008 study in the Netherlands, which documented the responses of people to a public area that was both orderly and disorderly, gave strong credence to the theory (Keizer, Lindenberg, and Steg 2008). To be both effective and remain within the bounds of civil rights, though, zero tolerance requires major changes in police training and activity. Since this approach by definition brings the police in closer contact with causes of crime such as poverty and drugs, it requires good legal training for all officers, courts able to process detainees and refer them to treatment for their problems (such as drug addiction) so that they do not just end up back on the street, and oversight by a combination of government agencies, courts, NGOs, and the media. Nowhere do such controls prevent abuses, of course, but “zero tolerance” is often applied in Latin America without sufficient supports or controls, making it little more than a continuation of predemocraticc practice. Helping institutionalize and drive zero tolerance are the edicts and other internal regulations that most Latin American police have been acquiring since the colonial era, empowering them to carry out detentions for an expanding range of subjectively defined activities and behaviors, from “vagrancy” to “suspicion of criminal intent.” Because they reflect existing police practice and social prejudices, a majority of police detentions are for some kind of misdemeanor. In Guatemala, 80 percent of all detentions and arrests are for alleged misdemeanors; most serious crimes do not lead to arrests (USAID 2005: 2). As police operations become centered on edicts, statistics are also affected, with the number of detentions becoming for police the measure of success. On an administrative level, effective policing in democracy requires coordination with social services. Without it, detentions cannot fully serve the “broken windows” purpose of stopping more violent crime. Drug abuse and trafficking is a major source of crime throughout Latin

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America, for example, and can only be addressed effectively by state or state-sponsored programs, such as identification of at-risk individuals, educational support, and antitruancy actions. Without such prevention policies, the police have little hope of understanding or reining in the many types of crime they fight. While not as effective in the long term, such an approach can also include analysis of detention patterns and the characteristics of detainees. But the daily pressures and limits faced by criminal justice agencies leave little opportunity for such endeavors. Costa Rican courts get up to fifty thousand misdemeanor reports each year, for example, but criminal justice officials acknowledge that they are not categorized and that there is little analysis of whether police action to stop them has any effect. In countries where nongovernmental violence observatories have taken on this work, though, understanding of criminal patterns has greatly increased. On a third level are laws and the courts that adjudicate their constitutionality and application. Actions commonly falling under the rubric of zero tolerance, such as detention for checking identity and police record, probably have more damaging effects on policing and the rule of law than other tactics by shifting focus away from the causes of crime, contributing to judicial backlogs, and eroding individual freedoms. Built into many arrest authorities, for example, are exemptions from judicial controls such as notification of a judge within a certain time. But as part of their “wide” interpretation of police power, as discussed above, courts have largely not questioned such provisions, and when they have been struck down for being unconstitutional or abusive, governments often try to reinstate them in new forms or step up other powers. Venezuela’s 1939 Law of Vagabonds and Crooks, for example, allowed detention of anyone deemed “suspicious” and was one of the main bases for police detentions until it was finally declared unconstitutional in 1997. However, it was quickly replaced by arrests based on checking for identity or past criminal record. Also buttressing zero tolerance are the many “social control” laws enacted since the democratic transition, often introduced to replace eliminated edicts or as part of special operations that continue after the operations end. Without checks on the increased authority that they give to the police, such laws increase the use of repressive tactics that clash with due process, legal oversight, and other democratic standards the courts are supposed to uphold.

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Much hope for correcting this string of deficiencies was placed in the region’s new penal process codes, the cornerstone of criminal justice reform in contemporary Latin America. Fifteen countries have enacted new codes to speed up criminal justice and strengthen due process by replacing written with oral trials, transferring investigatory control from the police to judges and prosecutors (fiscales), and creating courts at the investigative and sentencing stages. In many countries, the codes’ results—primarily during their first years in operation—are impressive. In Nicaragua, citizen crime reports rose by 4 percent and police detention dropped by 30 percent in the first year after the code went into effect in 2004.9 But over time, the combination of inadequate funds, poor training, bureaucratic inertia, and resistance by police agencies resentful of losing investigative power has impeded these codes’ application. In Venezuela, judicial police officials, saying that “we speak different languages,” accuse fiscales of continuing to protect defendants’ rights, as under the old penal process code, instead of prosecuting them, which is their responsibility under the new code.10 Insistent in their blame of the code rather than their own weaknesses, police also justify abuses such as evidence tampering with their belief that judges free criminals to frustrate the use of preventive detention and that public defenders force their clients to hide incriminating evidence.11 Serious efforts to correct these administrative, policy, and legal issues are often undermined by politicians drawing a line between “public order,” associated with a strong executive-controlled state, and “human rights,” associated with delinquency and disorder. As more and more electoral campaigns throughout the region become competitions to be tougher on crime, steps to make the police and criminal justice more professional grow farther apart.

The Impacts of State Decentralization and Federalism in Latin America

The importance of decentralization, which has paralleled democratization throughout the world, was recognized early by Stepan in his studies of both the harms and the opportunities of federalism and decentralization. Questions he asked, particularly whether there might be

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some types of decentralized governance “that worsen the quality of democratic politics rather than improve it” (2002), are critical in Latin America, where nearly every country has embarked on a rapid and extensive shift of long-centralized governmental services and authorities to the regional and local level.12 As Dahl (1998), Schumpeter (1950), Oxhorn (2004), and others recognize, this process can improve state services, since governments closer to citizens are theoretically better able to respond to their conditions and needs. It can also bolster democracy, for example, by creating smaller political arenas that give minorities more influence (as with indigenous groups in countries like Indonesia and Mexico), by the establishment of new parties or movements through local bases (such as the rise of small parties in Venezuela after the 1989 Decentralization Law), and by initiatives that promote citizen involvement and more equitable resource reallocation (such as the participatory budgeting adopted by many Latin American municipalities). But along with promise, decentralization brings risks that Stepan has highlighted. On one level, he showed (1999; 2001a: 331– 32) that greater authority for regional governments can provide an opening for local powers that may challenge equality and constitutionalism. Decentralization may turn out to be more undemocratic than centralization in practice, since subnational governments do not necessarily allow more participation, accountability, or rights. In many cases, it can fire up local prejudices and political clientalism that were held in check by national standards. In contrast to the twentieth-century centralization that gradually eroded local powers and abuses through national political and legal channels in many countries, many of Latin America’s regional elites and political structures survived through the region’s decades of authoritarianism. Amid new autonomy, such a legacy increases the level of state and societal as well as criminal violence. While police tend to be sparse in more rural regions in particular, the agencies that oversee them—from the media to public defenders—tend to be even sparser. Not only does this imbalance imperil rights, but it allows the use of public offices to protect private interests, particularly those of landowners, which is a continuing phenomenon associated with clientelistic networks in regions such as northern Brazil. Stepan exposes other concerns about federalism through the case of Brazil, where the states, with full autonomy over security, have police

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forces so divergent in quality and practices that they complicate national policies, rule of law, and human rights standards. Such problems are particularly evident in the region’s other federal states, Argentina, Venezuela, and Mexico, where clientalistic and poor states, often overrepresented at the national level (see Stepan 2000a), seem immune to pressure for reform and rights on security matters. In Argentina, the 2004 National Crime Prevention Plan, one of the most comprehensive responses to crime since the 1983 transition, was blocked by provinces complaining of the potential for federal intrusion on tier operations and finances. In Mexico, the efforts by President Felipe Calderón to consolidate municipal forces into state agencies and provide greater federal involvement have been resisted by many governors. Such politics are a warning for other countries trying to strengthen regional governance while maintaining national standards and policies. In some cases, such as the violent rifts among Bolivia’s departments (provinces), that process over security control has threatened the integrity of the country itself. On another level, the ability of subnational units to actually absorb their new responsibilities is often limited when decentralization is hurried, as in Indonesia in the late 1990s, or is just an attempt to accommodate local grievances while maintaining ultimate control, as in Chile at different times in its history. Even when it has been deliberate and well designed, decentralization of Latin America’s security sector has led to a proliferation of police and security forces amid the breakup of centralized police into geographically smaller agencies, a functional division of police into specialized units, and the growth of units and offices within each police agency. Most of these changes, in particular the breakup of overly centralized and powerful agencies, were overdue and beneficial. But without needed training and oversight, the region’s record number of regional and municipal police agencies usually just repeats the poor management, accountability, and policies of their national progenitors. Venezuela created 105 new police forces (a 363.64 percent increase) since its 1989 Decentralization Law, for example, and its homicide rate more than quadrupled in that period (El Achkar 2012). Costa Rica’s public security structure consists of eleven different police forces, belonging to five national ministries, the judiciary, and municipal governments. As in other countries, its municipal police lack needed

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regulatory statutes that clearly demarcate their roles from those of the national police. Amid regional inequalities of wealth, in addition, decentralization has widened gaps among provinces and cities in the quality and extent of law enforcement. Since urban crime is far higher than the national average,13 rural provinces tend to support decentralization based on the perception that they have been subsidizing expensive urban policing. However, decentralization’s biggest impacts are in urban areas, where the poorest neighborhoods suffer from most of the violent crime but are least able to afford quality policing. These extreme differences between rich and poor areas further aggravate crime by reducing the state’s capacity to address it where it is concentrated. While Venezuela’s national homicide rate was 48 per 100,000 in 2007, for example, the rate in the Federal District was between 130 and 166 per 100,000.14 The wealthy eastern half of that city has ten times more police officers than the poor western half, which has over 70 percent of the city’s residents and exceedingly high rates of violent crime—with over two-thirds of all crimes in the western municipality of Libertador alone.15 Decentralization’s combination of great need and great risk, in short, demonstrates the importance of examining how both federal and regional governments adapt to democratization. Stepan’s work on federalism provides a foundation to do so, opening up subnational study of civil society, the rule of law, and other democratic standards.

Accountability

In one of his most important contributions in the area of democratic transitions, Stepan, along with Linz and others, disentangled the many threads of democratization to expose those that hold it back. One of those weak links, which he was among the first to emphasize, was accountability. After a history of authoritarianism, one of the principal objectives of Latin American democracy is ensuring that state institutions and officials are accountable to democratic laws and norms. If a democratic regime is consolidated when all major actors “become habituated to the resolution of conflict within the specific laws, proce-

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dures and institutions sanctioned by the new democratic process,” he wrote (1996: 8), then mechanisms for such habituation are indeed central to democracy. This focus on the principle of accountability reinforces analysis of institutional functioning and relationships in Stepan’s work, particularly how “reserve domains of power” such as the military remove issues and decisions from public purview and thus undermine democratic governance. Casting this requirement wider, he adds that religious and other societal institutions “should not have constitutionally privileged prerogatives that allow them to mandate public policy to democratically elected governments” (2000b: 39– 40). These approaches help us to understand challenges rooted in the predemocratic past and emerging during the transition. With the weaknesses of the region’s democratic governments, in particular, accountability has come under threat from the belief that it hinders the state’s efficiency and the clear decision making seen as necessary to overcome persistent economic and political problems. All governments wish to respond to these public pressures, but most lack the political and institutional support to develop long-term plans or to push through sweeping, difficult, or controversial changes—such as the penal process codes discussed above. This combination of public pressure and policy impotence steers presidents and governors toward iron fist (mano dura) anticrime policies, which are popular, easy to formulate, easily enacted by legislatures, and, for executives ever cognizant of appearing “tough,” the best guarantee of quick results during limited terms in office. Often compared unfavorably and unfairly to their authoritarian predecessors’ ability to keep order, many elected presidents are further tempted to allow legal guarantees and controls—for both individual rights and executive accountability—to be watered down through greater police power. Imbalances in power fuel such tendencies. Legislatures, the primary counterweight to executives, usually lack the discipline to counter presi dential decrees, advance policy alternatives, or oversee police practices through fiscal controls, hearings, legislation, and other mechanisms. Control of Congress by the president’s party often reduces the already dim transparency of state security agencies, since they would be blamed if any adjustments to police agencies are followed by increases in crime.

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When different parties control these two branches—or when no party is in control — there is often either too much division or too much disorder to develop feasible policy changes. The vast majority of legislation in Latin America, as a result, originates in the executive. This imbalance between the two elected branches can be seen in the distinction between “police power” and the actual physical and legal actions of police agencies. In a democratic regime, elected officials have “police power”—the constitutional authority to legislate and regulate laws and “juridical norms that fix the powers and obligations of ” police officials (Altamira 1963: 25), along with the authority to monitor the police themselves. In most constitutional democracies, primary police power resides in the legislature, which exercises it through legislation, oversight, and budgets. Police forces have the separate authority only to execute and enforce those regulations. But in the process of doing so, the police themselves—often backed by the executive’s political and financial controls—often redefine, reinterpret, and reformulate those same laws to the point where the actions of the police become de facto “police power.” So while Congress passes laws, funding, and alterations on policing, it is the executive that runs most police agencies on a daily basis and has the ability to decide how such laws, funding, and alterations are put into practice. In most countries, “police power” belongs not just to the legislative branch but also to the judiciary, which has the authority to interpret laws and decide on cases involving police action. But the power accumulated by the police since the colonial era has made it difficult for courts, which still struggle to become independent and functioning, to hold police accountable. Under political pressure to be tough on crime, furthermore, most courts apply a “wide” interpretation of police power that gives wide berth to state discretion. Similar to judges’ positive disposition toward edicts, for example, they often retroactively legitimize joint police-military raids in poor neighborhoods or searches without a warrant. Such rulings are further likely because of claims that courts hamper the fight against crime, claims that are often part of political campaigns in support of mano dura and a “right” to security over civil rights—further undercutting the courts and constitutionalism by coopting their language. As Mainwaring (2003: 4) explains, governments

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“immobilized by oversight mechanisms are sometime perceived . . . as indecisive, ineffective, or inept.” To counter such power, one of the most promising and important police reforms is the establishment or strengthening of external and internal affairs units to investigate and expose police wrongdoing and malfeasance. Such a task is particularly challenging in new democracies, where any new agency struggles to carve out a space of autonomous power. Units in Peru, Argentina, and some other countries have had the support and expertise to breach this power difference, but the majority have been stalled or rolled back by financial, institutional, and political limitations. Many units cannot carry out basic investigation, for example, or are forced to allow police themselves to do so. Many of Argentina’s internal affairs units, as in other countries, are inundated with petty charges that deprive their officials of time to focus on the larger abuses and causes. Accountability is particularly weak on police corruption— from individual bribery to financial transactions (e.g., contract kickbacks). Although such problems are handled by the courts and ombudsmen, most countries and provinces have set up specialized internal police agencies to help tackle the problem. But in most countries, the police control the lion’s share of funds, both those directly from the state budget and those from other activities such as fines and identification cards. Entire sections of many police budgets do not include these revenue sources, allowing them to be siphoned off. Formulation and distribution of security sector budgets long has been the least transparent and greatest source of police power. On a grander scale, of course, is collaboration with organized crime. Most governments, though, either directly or through various agencies such as internal affairs units, lack the political will or ability to permanently roll back such activity. With vague regulations on use of arms and detainee mistreatment, police discipline throughout the region is weak, with about 90 percent of rights violations by police unpunished. Ecuador’s tripartite system of tribunals, district courts, and the National Court of Police Justice is officially independent in its authority to try police, but its impartiality is open to question because many of its judges are retired police officers. Frustrated by such weak discipline, many governments opt for purges to

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try to eliminate its bad apples. However, not only do such purges create a mass of angry former officials with time on their hands to stir up trouble, but they often fail to reach the top officials or the institutional reasons why such abuses start in the first place.

Civil Society

Stepan helped open the way to an understanding of how civil society shapes democracy, first showing how bureaucratic-authoritarian re gimes were affected by relations between and relative power of the state and civil society. In particular, his work detailed different scenarios in which state power increases at the expense of civil society, how civil society’s power grows at the expense of the state, and how the power of both can simultaneously increase or decrease. A second pillar of the framework Stepan developed for studying civil society is its definition as “that arena . . . where self-organizing groups, movements, and individuals, relatively autonomous from the state, attempt to articulate values, create associations and solidarities, and advance their interests. Civil society can include manifold social movements . . . and civic associations from all strata” (Linz and Stepan 1996: 7). By placing the notion of an arena at the center of civil society’s definition, this approach shows that broad or temporary social movements are as significant as the permanent organizations normally associated with it. It also brings out the intangible values, identities, and interests that shape civil society and its impacts.16 This combined study of state-society relations and civil society’s definition help us to understand important challenges and changes of democratization. Stepan’s examination of civil society’s action against authoritarianism, of course, is a remarkable example of its power to bring about historical change through mass mobilization, targeted strategies, specialized expertise, and monitoring of governmental action. Citizen security has displayed many of civil society’s contributions, from the formation of neighborhood community policing programs to demands for changes in national policy. As society organizes in new and more effective ways, alliances and groups have been able to help form, consolidate, and channel citizen identity into the political and policy

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arenas. Groups representing the indigenous, women, and other sectors of society are not only demanding greater protection of their rights from shrinking states but new powers and autonomy as well. The democratization literature, though, often misses a wider fragmentation that is draining the collective action and trust that led to such changes. Many societal actions that advanced democratization—from mass protests on one end to local activism on the other— have been too blunt or too piecemeal to bring about long-term policies in the area of public safety. Only by a better understanding of state-society relations and the underlying nature of civil society will the reasons for such limits begin to emerge. A look at mass temporary movements, violent groupings, community policing, and human rights organizations demonstrates the applicability of Stepan’s approach to understanding civil society’s role in public security. On the widest level are the public opinions that shape civil society. In particular, demands to reduce crime have maintained solid popular support for mano dura crackdowns to bring immediate results that fulfill campaign promises, and, conveniently for officials, fit in well with traditional police practice and allow indefinite postponement of reforms whose results are uncertain and unlikely to appear during their terms in office. There are many examples of societal demands to rein in police abuse, of course, but most gain traction only after egregious incidents of police violence or when victims of crimes committed or bungled by the police are from the middle- or upper-class sectors. The clamor for change in Brazil after the police killing of seven homeless boys in 1993 and in Buenos Aires province after the murder of a prominent photojournalist in 1997 are two of many examples. In these and other cases, such demands then either dissipate or get channeled into impractical, contradictory, or even mano duro proposals. The 200,000-strong march in April 2004 in Buenos Aires after the kidnapping and murder of a middle-class student, for example, led to a raft of laws increasing criminal punishment. Most of the time, the most forceful and loudest public demands are for greater security, but such demands often divide society even more, since they aggravate existing discrimination against social sectors like youth who are associated with crime. Those sectors not only face most of the police hostility, but are the least aware of their rights to challenge it.

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Popular momentum for repressive policing then shapes specific associations of civil society. On the most destabilizing level, such scenarios can incubate formation of groups whose antipathy to democratic norms is seen in their expression of frustration and impotence through violence and discrimination. In this flip side of civil society, citizens do not nurture tolerance or trust—challenging the positive association between civic engagement and democracy in most conceptualizations of civil society. Some of “the ties and groups through which people connect to one another and get drawn into community and political affairs” (Skocpol and Fiorina 1999: 2) may even include groups that carry out vigilantism, which, by most estimates, kills about six thousand people each year in Latin America. The lethal interaction of crime, poverty, poor state services, and ineffective policing has not only increased the number of auto-justicia killings, but their types, perpetrators, and victims as well. Vigilantes now range from spontaneous mobs to “social work” groups to clandestine organizations with police ties. And while targets were initially limited to those suspected of committing a particular crime, the current set now extends from marginalized societal sectors to mayors accused of corruption. Community justice and policing associations are a third sector of civil society shaken and shaped by both general demands for anticrime action and local groups who carry it out on their own through alternatives like vigilantism. As fear of crime becomes an integral part of regular intersocietal and state-society interactions, it narrows the physical and social scope of urban life to the point where people avoid a growing range of their cities and learn not to trust “anyone who looks at you for more than a few seconds” (Rotker 2003: 17). As poor urban barrios blend into each other, familiarity and cooperation among residents are replaced by guns, dogs, and window bars. In many cities, residents in the poor areas now say they need to have someone home at all times to prevent robbery, which further undercuts income and education while practically eliminating time or opportunity for neighborhood meetings. Community policing in the sprawling barrios of many cities have failed in part because of the resulting lack of participation. When meetings are held, visceral fears and demands can overwhelm the discourse, while hostility and competition among participants make it difficult for them to present coherent or viable proposals.

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Although civil and political rights were catalysts of the antiauthoritarian movements, they have, in addition, been slowed and sometimes halted in the democracies those movements brought forth. The “right” to security is used to trump others while mass rallies in Argentina, Mexico, Guatemala, and other countries have turned security into a third-generation community right on par with economic development. For most Latin Americans, furthermore, “impunity” is no longer about a lack of justice for rights abuses from the authoritarian era but the vast majority of criminals who are not arrested and tried. Fighting against the rights abuses linked to such policies are many rights groups that are part of or grew out of the human rights movements of the 1980s, but they find themselves cast as defenders of criminals rather than of human rights. One of the main problems that Ecuador’s police said it faced, for example, is that “Human Rights Organisms have carried out campaigns to discredit the Police Institution, which has affected the morale of its members.”17 Expressions such as these play into fear that reform and due process undermine public safety. So just as Stepan’s study of state-society relations showed how their respective powers are re flected in each other, that approach helps us to understand the complex ways in which society continues to shape power, policy, and the rights norms at the core of democratization.

Conclusion: Inner and Outer Arenas of Democracy

By carefully and clearly mapping out the dimensions of the state and democracy, Stepan’s work provides openings to analyze new challenges. Through professionalism, accountability, decentralization, civil society, and other key aspects of a democratic regime’s functioning, we can better understand problems whose solutions are undermined from the start by weak state agencies, a lack of oversight, rapid decentralization, and a volatile society. If crime and crime crackdowns overwhelm the basic roles and efforts on an issue, they can easily swamp the behavioral, attitudinal, and constitutional dimensions of consolidation by replacing established constitutional norms and procedures with repressive and short-term solutions promoted by civil and political societies that are supposed to hold them in check.

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Only with an understanding of such weaknesses, though, is formulation of workable responses possible. Penal process codes that target the judiciary’s defects and community-policing programs that bolster citizens are two of the many ways toward a sustainable citizen security approach within the rule of law and a limited state. So even as crime often appears to be unraveling Latin American democracy, it has galvanized actions that are sustainable precisely because they account for the fragilities and prerequisites that Stepan’s scholarship has stressed since democratization began.

Notes 1. Centro de Noticias OPS/OMS Bolivia, “Mueren unos 80.000 menories al año por violencia en la región,” 17 November 2006. The Health Situation Analysis Program of the Pan American Health Organization, 1997. 2. Daniel Luz and Rebeca Pérez, “Between the Right to Project and the Need to Serve,” Comunidad Segura, 11 September 2007, comunidadsegura.org. Each year, about 140,000 Latin Americans are murdered; 80,000 minors are killed by violence; and 54 families are robbed every minute (Carrión 2003: 51). 3. Interpol Internacional Crime Statistics, www.interpol.int; UNODC 2007. 4. On local maps in many police stations high crime areas are blacked out. Author interview with Padre Farinello, Fundación Farinello, Quilmes, Buenos Aires Province, 22 May 2004; author meetings with neighborhood groups in the working-class Illia district and the villa (shantytown) Ciudad Oscura of the Capital Federal, 22 May 2004. 5. Most courses lead to a miserly 1.5 percent increase in salary. Interviews with police officials, San José de Costa Rica, 18– 30 June 2006. 6. Author interview with the commissioner, subcommissioner, and two subcommissioned officers of Comisaría 32 of the Policía Federal Argentina, 25 May 2004. 7. Policía Nacional de Ecuador, “Saludo a Cargo del Señor Comandante General,” Policía Nacional de Ecuador, Quito, 2006. 8. Author interview, 1 April 2007. 9. The legal base of Latin American policing comprises penal codes, penal process code, police codes, ordenanzas, contravenciones (both also called faltas; edicts are a category of faltas), regulations (reglamentos), prohibitions, police orders, permisos (exemptions to written regulations), special permits or authorizations, and customary laws made up of unlegislated but long-held practices.

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10. Author interview with Jerssen Mojica, Inspector of the CICPC, Caracas, 26 February 2003; Luis Enrique Oberto, president of the Legislative Commission, 29 June 29 1998. See also Inter-American Development Bank, Code Orgánico Procesal Penal (Washington, DC: Inter-American Development Bank, 1988), 5–15. 11. Another major problem with security in Ecuador, say the police, is the “implementation of the new Penal Process Code, which permits detainees of police operations to be put in liberty immediately by the judicial authorities.” Policía Nacional de Ecuador, “Saludo a Cargo del Señor Comandante General,” Policía Nacional de Ecuador, Quito, 2006. 12. Broadly understood as the central government’s transfer of power to different subnational levels, decentralization actually comes in three main forms: deconcentration, the decentralization of administration or implementation, with policy formation continuing at the national level; delegation, limited transfer of decision-making authority to local or provincial governments; and devolution, handing over of maximum decision-making authority to subnational governments. 13. Ecuador’s urban homicide rate is about three and a half times the rural rate (INEC), for example, while nearly all gun killings in the Dominican Republic occur in its two main cities. 14. “Deadly Message,” The Economist, 19 July 2008, 47. 15. In the wealthier eastern municipalities, investments in security have lowered crime rate by nearly a third. “El avance fue muy escaso,” El Universal, 23 July 2001, 4–1. 16. There are many definitions of “civil society,” of course, ranging from the “civic culture” theories that regard it as a “school of virtue” that fosters cooperation, aggregates interests, and equalizes representation (Almond and Verba 1963; Putnam Leonardi, and Nanetti 1994). Broader views regard it is as the public space where individuals negotiate and contest political and societal life, while narrower conceptions see it as a constellation of citizen groups that mediate between the state, society, and the market or as the process in which citizen action crystallizes around particular demands. 17. Policía Nacional de Ecuador, “Saludo a Cargo del Señor Comandante General,” Quito, 2006.

References Almond, Gabriel A., and Sidney Verba. 1963. The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ayres, Robert L. 1998. Crime and Violence as Development Issues in Latin America and the Caribbean. Washington, DC: World Bank, Latin American and Caribbean Studies.

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Bautista Lara, Francisco. 2006. Policía, seguridad ciudadana y violencia en Nicaragua: Breves ensayos y un testimonio. Managua: PAVSA. Carrión, Fernando. 2003. “De la violencia urbana a la convivencia ciudadana.” In Entre el crimen y el castigo: Seguridad ciudadana y control democrático en América Latina y el Caribe, edited by Lilian Bobea, 51– 84. Caracas: Nueva Sociedad. Dahl, Robert. 1998. On Democracy. New Haven: Yale University Press. El Achkar, Soraya. “Police Reform in Venezuela: An Ongoing Experience.” Policing and Society 22, no. 1 (March 2012). Kadár, András. 2001. Police in Transition. Budapest: Central European University Press. Keizer, Keess, Siegwart Lindenberg, and Linda Steg. “The Spreading of Disorder.” Science 322, no. 5908 (12 December 2008): 1681– 85. Kelling, George, and Catherine Coles. 1996. Fixing Broken Windows. New York: Touchstone. Linz, Juan J., and Alfred Stepan. 1996. Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lowenthal, Abraham, and J. Samuel Fitch, eds. 1986. Armies and Politics in Latin America. Rev. ed. New York: Holmes & Meier. Mainwaring, Scott. 2003. “Introduction: Democratic Accountability in Latin America.” In Democratic Accountability in Latin America, edited by Scott Mainwaring and Christopher Welna, 3– 33. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Oxhorn, Philip, Joseph Tulchin, and Andrew Selee, eds. Decentralization, Demo cratic Governance, and Civil Society in Comparative Perspective: Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press. Putnam, Robert D., Robert Leonardi, and Raffaella Nanetti. 1994. Making De mocracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rotker, Susana, ed. 2003. Citizens of Fear. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Quintana, Juan. 2004. “Bolivia: Militares y policía—Fuego cruzado en democracia.” Unpublished manuscript. Observatorio Democracia y Seguridad, La Paz. Sanjuán, Ana María. 2003. “Dinámica de la violencia en Venezuela: Tensiones y desafíos para la consolidación de la democracia.” In Entre el crimen y el castigo: Seguridad ciudadana y control democrático en América Latina y el Caribe, edited by Lilian Bobea, 119– 26. Caracas: Nueva Sociedad. Schumpeter, Joseph A. 1950. Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. New York: Harper and Row. Sequén-Monchéz, Alexander. 2003. “Desmilitarizar para democratizar.” In Entre el crimen y el castigo: Seguridad ciudadana y control democrático en América Latina y el Caribe, edited by Lilian Bobea, 127– 55. Caracas: Nueva Sociedad.

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Skocpol, Theda, and Morris Fiorina, eds. 1999. Civic Engagement in American Democracy. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Stepan, Alfred. 1973. Authoritarian Brazil: Origins, Policies, and Future. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. 1978. The State and Society: Peru in Comparative Perspective. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1985. “State Power and the Strength of Civil Society in the Southern Cone of Latin America.” In Bringing the State Back In, edited by Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, 317– 43. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1988. Rethinking Military Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1999. “Federalism and Democracy: Beyond the U.S. Model.” Journal of Democracy 10, no. 4 (October): 19– 34. ———. 2000a. “Brazil’s Decentralized Federalism: Bringing Government Closer to the Citizens?” Daedelus 129 (Spring): 145– 69. ———. 2000b. “Religion, Democracy, and the ‘Twin Tolerations.’” Journal of Democracy 11, no. 4 (October): 37– 57. ———. 2001a. Arguing Comparative Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2001b. “The New Professionalism of Internal Warfare and Military Role Expansion.” In Arguing Comparative Politics, by Alfred Stepan, 23– 38. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2002. “Brazil’s Decentralized Federalism: Bringing Government Closer to the Citizens?” In Mexico, Central, and South America: New Perspectives, vol. 2, Democracy, edited by Jorge I. Domínguez, 83–105. New York: Routledge. Stepan, Alfred, and Arthur Costa. 2001. “Democratisation and the Police: Crafting in Five Democratic Arenas: ‘Civil Society,’ ‘Political Society,’ ‘Rule of Law,’ ‘Useable State,’ and ‘Economic Society.’” Paper presented at the Conference on Democratic Transition and Consolidation, FRIDE and the Gorbachev Foundation, Madrid, 18– 21 October. Stepan, Alfred, and Juan J. Linz. 1997. “Toward Consolidated Democracies.” In Consolidating the Third Wave Democracies, edited by Larry Diamond, Marc F. Plattner, Yun-han Chu, and Hung-mao Tren, 14– 33. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). 2007. Tenth United Nations Survey of Crime Trends and Operations of Criminal Justice Systems. Geneva: UNODC. USAID (U.S. Agency for International Development). 2005. Reflections on Community-Based Policing Programming in Guatemala. April. Washington, DC: USAID. Wilson, James Q., and George L. Kelling. 1982. “Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety.” Atlantic Magazine (March): 29– 38.

Part I I The State and Democracy

4 The State of the Market The Market Reform Debate and Postcommunist Diversity László Bruszt

This chapter revisits three interrelated claims made in Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation, the magnum opus of Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan. These claims were about the links between market reforms, state making, and democratization in the context of postcommunist economic and political transformations. The first of them involved the relationship between market reforms and state making; the second was about the relationship between democracy and (regulatory) state making; and the third was about the proper sequencing of reforms. The arguments Linz and Stepan made were the following: (1) constructing a functioning market economy presupposed state building; (2) nondemocratic ways of building a capable state in Eastern Europe were not an alternative; and (3) the reforms should start with state building under democratic conditions and later build a functioning market economy on these foundations. At the time Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation was written, the dominant view was that market making was about “destatization” and that democracy, at least in the short term, was a liability from the perspective of the necessary reforms that were supposed to lead to a functioning market economy. The right sequencing of reforms 111

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followed unambiguously from the previous two propositions of the mainstream view: market reforms should come first; democracy and state building should come later. Linz and Stepan were not alone in claiming that building markets presupposed state making, and they were not the first to claim that democracy might be an asset for market reforms. They were among the first, however, to make the theoretically based claim that if at the end of reforms the goal was to have both functioning markets and sustainable democracies, then building a regulatory state under democratic conditions was the way to start. More precisely, they claimed that to make de mocracy and market reforms compatible, the goal of reforms should be to create the conditions for the orderly politicizing and regulation of the economy. That was exactly the opposite of what the then-dominant neoliberal paradigm suggested: depoliticizing the economy and making it a private business. The orderly politicizing of the market meant creating what Linz and Stepan called an economic society: a “set of norms, regulations, policies, and institutions” produced by political society and enforced by the state. Formulating the goals of reforms this way, Linz and Stepan went well beyond the revisionist reform proposals of the 1990s that suggested creating a market-preserving state as a condition for free markets but were silent about the regulatory state and, more implicitly than explicitly, rejected the politicizing of the issues of economic transformation. I present some empirical evidence on the relationship between market reforms, state building, and democracy and show that in Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation Linz and Stepan were right in their theoretical conclusions. Moreover, early on they provided a key to one of the central factors of postcommunist divergence in developmental pathways.1 Twenty years after the commencement of economic and political transformations, the former state socialist countries dramatically diverged on key dimensions of economic development. While most of them have introduced all the liberalizing reforms prescribed to them in the early 1990s, less than half have a well-functioning regulatory state. One can find regulatory states comparable to Western standards only in countries where in the 1990s issues of economic trans-

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formation and regulation were politicized and decided in a democratic political framework. The development of capable regulatory states in the framework of democratic institutions was the necessary condition for improving global positions in international markets while keeping social inequalities low and domestic social integration relatively high. Lack of progress in building regulatory states meant remaining in or falling to the periphery of the globalizing world economy, drastic increases in social inequalities, and lower levels of domestic social integration (Bruszt and Greskovits 2009). I begin with a brief synopsis of the arguments of Linz and Stepan, then position the arguments presented in Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation within the broader debates on what a functioning market economy is and what the politics of economic transformation in the post-Communist countries should be. I will argue that the way Linz and Stepan defined the relationship between market reform, state making, and democratization has a strong family resemblance to the political program of the post– New Deal constitutional political economy and to ordo-liberal views that guided reconstruction in postwar Germany and eastward extension of transnational market building within the European Union.2 Just a year after the publication of Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation, in 1997, the European Commission issued its Agenda 2000 strategy, which insisted on the necessity for the Central European countries that were candidates to join the EU to build regulatory state capacities in order to have a functioning market economy. In the Agenda 2000, the introduction of extensive and effective regulatory states was clearly and unambiguously linked to stabilizing democratic institutions and upholding human rights. Departing from the standards of other transnational developmental organizations such as the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund, the EU was the first to connect political with economic conditionality, to insist on the need for the parallel stabilizing of democratic institutions and building regulatory states while going ahead with market reforms. The third part of the chapter provides some evidence on the evolution of different state capacities and about the relationship between de mocracy and the evolution of state capacities. The first element of Linz

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and Stepan’s argument was that the creation of markets has to start with state building. Market reforms, according to them, will differ not in degree but in kind, depending on progress in state making: no state capacity, no market economy. The data I present prove that Linz and Stepan were right: the development of functioning market economies in postcommunist Eastern Europe presupposed state building. No marketpreserving state and no regulatory state means the absence of a normally functioning market economy. The data also show that the relationship between political regime type and the construction of economic state capacities worked in the way predicted by Linz and Stepan in the postcommunist world: No democracy, no regulatory state.

Market Reforms and Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation

The propositions of Linz and Stepan on the relationships between market reforms, state making, and democratization, briefly mentioned above, were linked to the way they defined a consolidated democracy and to their conception of the factors of democratic consolidation. In their framework, economic society was one of the five major interrelated arenas that positively interacted with the others to produce what they called consolidated democracy (Linz and Stepan 1996: 13). The five arenas—civil society, political society, rule of law, the state apparatus, and economic society—were all dependent on inputs from each other, getting necessary support for their functioning from the other arenas and producing outcomes essential for the functioning of the others. They defined economic society as a “set of socio-politically crafted and sociopolitically accepted norms, institutions and regulations” that mediates between state and markets (11). In Linz and Stepan’s argument for such an economic society, the political crafting of socially acceptable public rules for the private economy was linked to their claims about the economic conditions of a consolidated democracy. The crux of this argument was that there cannot be a consolidated democracy in a command economy and that a completely free market economy cannot coexist with consolidated democracy. The

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second part of the argument is relevant here. Linz and Stepan gave three reasons why a completely free market economy cannot coexist with consolidated democracy. “No regulatory state—no free market” was their first argument. Market economies “could neither come into being nor be maintained without a degree of state regulation” (12). Their second argument extended the previous one: public rules are necessary for creating the market, and they are also necessary for correcting eventual market failures. The third argument, finally, was linked to the key aspect of a well-functioning democracy, namely, that public rules are contestable and are contested. The very working of a modern democracy leads to the development and changing of norms, regulations, policies, and institutions that constitute economic society. Note that in this framework the creation of public rules for the private economy was both a precondition of democratic consolidation and a sine qua non of successful economic transformation. The latter part of the argument concerns us more here. As we will see below, at the time of the writing of Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation, the mainstream literature linked the success of economic transformation exactly to the diametrically opposed condition, namely, the depoliticizing of economic reforms. Picturing functioning markets as a contestable structure of norms, policies, and regulations and defining market making as the institutionalizing of public rules for private economic action was a clear deviation from the conventional definitions of the goals and expected outcomes of mainstream market reforms. This is where Linz and Stepan bring in the state. “Stateness” was the master explanatory variable of the whole book, coming into focus as part of their analysis of democracy in multinational societies. “Stateness” comes in also when discussing the relationship between market reforms and democratization. Without an effective state that has the capacity to uphold rights, enforce norms and rules, and implement policies, neither economic society nor a functioning economy can come about. To summarize the argument thus far: no effective state → no regulated economy → no sustainable democracy and no functioning market. With the above formulation of the right sequencing, Linz and Stepan took an unambiguous position in the so-called simultaneity debate. In that debate, linked to the simultaneity of the starting of economic

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and political change, the mainstream view of the time was that priority should be given to economic change, understood as neoliberal reforms. Political reform and especially state reconstruction, in that view, should wait until the consolidation of liberalizing reforms. The theoretical argument of Linz and Stepan for putting democratic regulatory state power first was based on the rejection of the neoliberal formulation of the goals and expected outcomes of reforms. “Free markets” cannot be the outcomes of market reforms under democratic conditions, and mere liberation of economic action from the state will not create a functioning economy. Neglecting political reforms and especially state reconstruction might undermine simultaneous transformations. Their argument in brief was that a lack of democratic regulatory state power would negatively affect the chances to create a functioning market economy and a sustainable democracy. In order to make the argument about the sequencing of the reforms even more unambiguous, Linz and Stepan attacked head-on the key political argument of the proponents of the idea that starting with economic reforms would create the foundations for progress in political reforms. The essence of that view was that people cannot make intertemporal trade-offs and that if economic reforms imposed hardships on voters, they would use the political opportunities offered by democracy to halt those reforms.3 The suggested solution to this dilemma was to use shock therapy and/or insulate the making of economic reforms from democratic political interventions. Based on extensive survey data, Linz and Stepan proved that there is no direct link between the evaluation of changing economic conditions and support for the political system—meaning that “the perceived legitimacy of the political system has given democratic institutions . . . an important degree of insulation from the perceived inefficacy of the economic system” (443). Democratic politics, instead of preventing market reforms, was the mechanism to create room for neoliberal reform.4 Finally, Linz and Stepan also rejected the nondemocratic solution to building state capacities in the postcommunist countries by arguing that the reconstruction of state power after the implosion of the oneparty state is not feasible without some degree of democratic legitimacy. Trying first to create and legitimate capitalists and then a legiti-

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mate market economy as a basis for legitimate democratic political institutions would, they argued, invert the “legitimacy pyramid” (438). The redistribution of wealth and opportunities in the framework of market reforms controlled by the old elite would hardly create a solid foundation for legitimating the new economic order. This is the more practical part of their argument. From a theoretical viewpoint, they called attention to the fact that in the history of Western democracies, democratic political systems always legitimated market economies and never the other way around.

Market Reforms, Economic Development, and State Making

Linz and Stepan were among the first to make theoretically based arguments for starting economic transformation in postcommunist Eastern Europe with building a regulatory state under democratic conditions. Below I position these claims in a broader frame of the debates on the relationship between market reforms and development on the one hand and state making on the other. The Developmental State

It has always been a contested issue what capacities states were supposed to have to promote economic and political development. In the scholarly literature, what was usually meant by state capacity was the variable and changeable probability that specific states will provide diverse types of public goods related to the maintenance and development of (social, economic, political) order. In addition to such “demand-side” specifications, definitions usually included the probability that states will be able to get the necessary resources (e.g., in the form of taxes, political support) needed to supply these public goods. What these public goods were, or what they were supposed to be, was contested and varied in time and space. Students of the political and economic transformations in the East and the South have listed and studied several relevant state capacities, ranging from the capacity to maintain the rule of law and enforce citizenship rights (O’Donnell 1994; Linz and Stepan

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1996), uphold economic freedoms and create a predictable policy environment (North and Weingast 1989), collect taxes and impose enforceable rules in the economy (Woodruff 1999; Bruszt 2002), and resist corruption or state capture (Hellman 1998) to such capacities as implementing unpopular restructuring policies (Haggard and Kaufman 1995) or formulating and implementing coherent policies that reflect wider developmental considerations (Evans 1995; Stark and Bruszt 1998). The role states were expected to play in socioeconomic development, and the list of capacities they were supposed to have, has changed several times during the past three decades, and it still differs dramatically across the world’s regions. Until the early eighties, in most of the developing countries in the South and the East, states were seen to be the prime movers of development (Gereffi 1995; Evans 1995; Stepan 1978). Based on the work of scholars like Shonfield (1968), the mainstream academic view was that the capitalism of the North (and West) also moved toward a “mixed economy” characterized by significant state management of markets and development. In the late seventies and early eighties, the reviving interest in the study of the developmental state capacities coincided with the rediscovery of the state by neo-Weberian scholars (Stepan 1978; Skocpol, Evans, and Rueschemeyer 1985). The resulting revival of research interest in states has provoked an ongoing fruitful debate on the sources of the autonomous role states can play in development and the bases of their capacity to design and implement coherent developmental programs (Evans 1995; Doner, Ritchie, and Slater 2007). The Market-Preserving State

During the eighties, partly as a result of the failure of the state-based developmental models in several Latin American countries and, later on, the collapse of the state socialist model in Eastern and Central Europe, states began to be perceived more as part of the problem itself than as part of the solution. For some time the capacity to “introduce and sustain the right policies” of liberalization, privatization, and stabilization—the mantra of the international financial institutions (IFIs)—was the sole cited challenge on the pathway of economic transformation and development. The yearly progress reports of the IFIs ranked transforming

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countries according to the capacity of their states to make progress in the introduction of the policies of “de-statization.” In that context, state capacity to further market reforms was pictured as being the function of success in depoliticizing economic reform (Haggard and Kaufman 1995). At the beginning of economic transformation in Eastern and Central Europe, these were the dominant views in both scholarly and policy circles. The policy suggestions of IFIs were shaped by an amalgam of the “capture theory of regulation” and by libertarian pre– New Deal ideas of constitutionalism stressing the importance of preserving the prepolitical status of “private ordering.” According to the capture theory of regulation, first proposed by George Stigler (1971) and later the basis for broader public choice models of the state, markets have to be saved from regulations. Regulations are closer to conspiracies by rent-seeking groups than to expressions of something that could be called public good. In the popularized version of this thesis, interest groups and other political participants will use the regulatory and coercive powers of government to shape laws and regulations in a way that is beneficial to them. Attempts at politicizing economic issues and giving the state regulatory powers are the surest way to the corruption of states and markets. Liberating the markets from social and political regulations was in this framework pictured as liberating the state from the hold of rent-seeking groups.5 Behind the policy advice given by IFIs in the initial period of economic transformation one can also detect the revival of laissez-faire ideas from pre– New Deal era constitutionalism.6 Until the mid-1930s, U.S. Supreme Court decisions tried to restrain the legislature and the executive from politicizing market ordering and rejected a large part of regulatory interventions with arguments referring to the superiority of private ordering (Sunstein 1987). For the Spencerian proponents of laissez-faire, market order was the outcome of millions of private contracts. The most important goal of the state was to uphold the maximum freedom of contracting and maintain the “prepolitical” status of economic transactions. Public interventions in free contracting were pictured as unjust redistributions of wealth and opportunities, as arbitrary “taking” (Sunstein 1987). State neutrality meant staying away

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from private ordering, leaving it to courts and the judiciary branch to deal with conflict. It also meant minimizing the possibility of politicizing economic transaction by way of interventions of the executive or the legislature (Sunstein 1987). In this perspective, the key task of states was to preserve markets by upholding the key economic freedoms: freedom of property and freedom of contracting.7 At around the time Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation was published, reports on the progress in market making prepared by the IFIs started to rank countries based on elementary state capacities to uphold market freedoms. Typical was the study commissioned by the World Bank that made the first interregional comparative study on the capacity of states to uphold property rights, enforce contracts, maintain a stable and predictable policy environment for businesses, and combat corruption (Brunetti, Kisunko, and Weder 1998). While the reports were still silent about regulations, they were the first to depart from the public choice assumption of a uniform state and thus were the first to represent postcommunist states as variable and changeable entities. The Regulatory State

The state had been brought back in by the second half of the 1990s, and the list of (missing or weak) state capacities grew in the meantime. Until the second half of the 1990s the talk about state capacity to regulate the economy was not politically correct in serious economic developmental circles. However, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) in 1997 had already introduced measures in its progress report showing the highly uneven capacity of the transition countries to introduce extensive and effective regulation of their financial and capital markets. While the World Bank and the EBRD were very active in the second half of the 1990s in propagating the need to build regulatory capacities, theoretical reflections on regulations and the need for regulatory state were in short supply throughout the decade. Until the collapse of the Russian financial markets in 1998 and the publication of the first studies on the uneven development of capital markets in the leading

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postcommunist reform countries, there were very few theoretically oriented reflections on the role of regulatory institutions in postcommunist market building (Stiglitz 1999; Coffee 1999). That markets are neither self-constituting nor self-regulating was perhaps not news to many economists. Still, arguments for developing regulatory institutions as the precondition for making functioning markets were largely invisible until the late nineties in the discussions among economists dealing with economic transformations. Students of comparative capitalism, on the other hand, took the existence of robust regulatory states for granted, as they were concerned primarily with understanding persistent divergences among wellfunctioning regulatory regimes that have differed only in the content of regulations (Hall and Soskice 2001). The issue of the politics of making regulatory institutions and developing regulatory states in formerly communist countries was thus mainly absent in the theoretical literature on economic transformation. In a footnote, Linz and Stepan approvingly cite a leading North American economist to claim that “ne glect of the role of the state in the transformation by economists borders on the criminal” (Linz and Stepan 1996: 253 n. 42). The ideas represented in Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation on the need for regulatory states could thus be weakly linked to ongoing debates among economists or students of political economy. When making their theoretical arguments, Linz and Stepan cited only one economist participating in the debate on the goals and means of economic transformation. On the issues of regulations and the regulatory state, they cite classics from political economy and political science such as Adam Smith and Robert Dahl (12–13). Besides these classics, Linz and Stepan’s concept of economic society and their arguments in favor of regulations can be linked to the political program of the post– New Deal constitutional political economy and to the ordo-liberal views of the founders of the German social market economy.8 Common among these thinkers was the rejection of the libertarian ideas that (a) social and economic order could be the outcome of free private contracts and (b) that freedom of contracting and property are natural rights that have to be protected from political interference. Both of these approaches saw markets as based on politically

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constructed and socially accepted norms that can be politicized and contested. While post– New Deal constitutionalism was primarily about extending regulatory state interventions after a period of laissez-faire, the “soziale Marktwirtschaft” of the post–World War II ordo-liberals was based on the idea that democracy cannot coexist with a command economy or with laissez-faire capitalism. Both of these approaches saw freedom of contracting and property as politically crafted and socially legitimated rights that were created and upheld with reference to a public good that therefore did not enjoy a prepolitical status. Both approaches saw public interventions in free contracting as necessary measures to constitute the market order, correct market failures, and maintain competition. They have rejected the views of the libertarians who saw public regulations as unjust redistribution of wealth and opportunities. For the representatives of post– New Deal constitutionalism and ordo-liberalism, nonintervention would have meant toleration of the misuse of asymmetries in economic power, which would have resulted in the public sanctioning of unfair redistributions. State neutrality for both of these approaches meant not staying away from unjust or unfair private ordering. According to both approaches, political society cannot be prevented from politicizing and contesting the public rules of the private economy. During the first period of economic transformation in the postcommunist countries the above ideas seemed to have been forgotten, at least in the world of IFIs advising these countries how to go about creating markets.9 The originality of Linz and Stepan was to bring these ideas back based on democratic theory and linked to the idea of democratic consolidation. While among the Washington-based IFIs each and every little step of moving away from neoliberal orthodoxy was celebrated as a paradigmatic change, the EU, the other key external player in the Eastern European transformations, did not make a big fuss about regulation and regulatory state capacities. Brussels and the Eurocrats never participated in the ongoing global debates about the relationship between success in market reforms and building state capacities. Without much ado in the mid-1990s, the Commission posted tens of thousands pages of regulations to the aspiring applicant countries. These regulations were sup-

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posed to be introduced in the national legal systems and implemented as a condition for being considered a functioning market economy ready for EU membership. The EU demanded not the mere transposition of thousands of pages of EU laws to the domestic law books, but also insisted on building state capacities to implement and adjust these norms on the ground. Just a year after the publication of Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation, in 1996, the Commission issued its Agenda 2000. Agenda 2000 insisted on the need for the candidate countries to build regulatory state capacities, including the judicial and administrative capacities to enforce and monitor the European public rules of the regional market economy. The way the EU translated the dominant neoliberal paradigm to non-negotiable conditionality is unique and still unmatched by other transnational integration regimes, such as NAFTA or Mercosur. Agenda 2000 implied the need to combine the building up of the institutional conditions for meeting EU demands with the adoption of 80,000 pages of EU institutional standards and regulations detailed in thirty-one chapters or policy domains ranging from consumer protection to corporate governance, from banking regulation to state aid policies, and from environmental protection to public procurement. EU conditionality documents made it clear that market building, besides liberalization, means building up institutional capacity —remaking administrative and regulatory state capacities and creating developmental state capacities (Bruszt 2002). At least as important, and similar to the ideas advanced in Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation, the EU also used extensive assistance programs to build what Stepan and Linz called “economic society.” Various assistance programs throughout the 1990s and early 2000s empowered diverse public and private actors, not simply via resources, but particularly by enhancing their political and functional participation in institution-building efforts. By the late 1990s, the EU had built up a diversified and complex assistance program (Bruszt and McDermott 2009). With an overall budget of around 28 billion Euros, these programs targeted building capacity both within and outside the state and involved the direct participation of thousands of experts and policy makers from the EU member states.

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Finally, one can detect a third similarity between the ideas in Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation and the developmental interventions of the EU in the Central and East European (CEE) countries. By connecting political with economic conditionality and closely monitoring the upholding of political rights and the rules of fair political competition, the EU helped to keep constant domestic democratic rights to contest policies and rules while at the same time giving a clear and unambiguous directionality to domestic bottom-up pressure in the form of accession conditionality. The embedding of CEE domestic markets in a broad transnationally monitored regulatory frame has strengthened the bargaining position of domestic states vis-à-vis rent-seeking domestic firms and transnational corporations (TNCs). It has also improved the political opportunities of diverse weaker economic actors and has contributed both directly, through assistance programs, and indirectly, through increased political opportunities, to the building of economic societies in these countries.

The State of the Market in the C E E Countries: Some Evidence

In this section I present some evidence on the relationship of market reforms, state building, and democratization. I start with the link between market reforms and state building. As noted above, at the time of the writing of Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation, IFIs still measured progress in market reforms with different indicators of economic liberalization. In that framework the outcomes of market reform were expected to differ from each other in degree: some of the countries made more while other countries made less progress in introducing the prescribed policies. The first element of Linz and Stepan’s argument discussed above was that creating markets has to start with state building. To put their prediction in simple terms, the outcomes of market reforms will differ not in degree but in kind, depending on progress in state making: no state capacity, no market economy. To present some evidence on this prediction, we need to operationalize two concepts: progress in market reforms and progress in state building. To measure progress in market reforms we use the indexes constructed by Campos and Horvath (2006) that are based on the most

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encompassing data set put together on progress in market reforms in the twenty-eight postcommunist countries. The data set of Campos and Horvath measures actual introduction of liberalizing reforms constructed from thirty variables for external liberalization and three for internal liberalization. Regarding internal liberalization, they collected data on the number of goods subject to price regulation, the share of administered prices in the consumer price index (CPI), and wage regulation. Regarding external liberalization, they used thirty measures of capital controls and trade barriers.10 The higher the scores countries have on these measures, the fewer the number of state controls and the freer the economic transactions are from different kinds of state interventions. We use two measures for progress in building state capacities. First we measure state capacity to maintain rule of law using data from the World Bank governance survey (Kaufmann, Kray, and Mastruzzi 2005). The Rule of Law index in this survey combines several indicators to measure the subjective perceptions of the presence of an effective state: the extent to which agents have confidence in and abide by the laws of society. These include perceptions of the incidence of crime, the effectiveness and predictability of the judiciary, and the enforceability of contracts. Together, these indicators measure the success of states in developing an environment in which fair and predictable rules form the basis for economic and social interactions and the extent to which prop erty rights are protected. Higher scores on this index mean the presence of states with higher capacity to create stable expectations about rule of law. Figure 4.1 presents some preliminary evidence on the relationship between progress in neoliberal reforms and state capacity to maintain rule of law. According to the measures of Campos and Horvath, by the early 2000s most of the postcommunist countries had liberalized their economies. Twenty-one of twenty-eight countries were close to the extreme right on the horizontal axis, meaning that they had implemented all the liberalizing policy measures that were prescribed by the IFIs in the 1990s. According to the measures of Campos and Horvath, Central European countries such as Slovenia and Estonia have at least as liberalized economies as post– Soviet Republics such as Moldova or Georgia. These countries, however, differ dramatically on the vertical axis, which measures rule of law using the 2004 data of the World Bank.

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Sloveniaa Estonia Hungary Lithuania

1,00

Czech Re

0,50

Latvia Slovakia Poland o Bulgaria

0,00

Croatia Romania Macedon

-0,50 0 50

Armenia i Azerbai

-1,00

Ukraine

Russia Albania Kazakhst

Tajikist

Moldova Georgia

Kyrgyzst

Uzbekist Turkmeni

Belarus -1,50 0,00

0,20

0,40

0,60

0,80

1,00

Level of Liberalization 2004 Figure 4.1 Level of Economic Liberalization and Rule of Law

According to these measures, postcommunist countries can be clustered in three groups. In the first group are countries in which a high level of market liberalization combines with a high level of rule of law. In these countries, economic actors can have stable expectations that they can profit from rational calculative enterprise in the presence of a state that enforces their rights. The Central European countries belong to this group. At the other extreme we find three countries, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Belarus, where in the early 2000s low levels of economic liberalization were combined with low levels of rule of law. These countries could hardly be described as market economies. Most of the former Soviet Republics belong to the third group, where a high level of economic liberalization combines with a low level of rule of law. In the early 2000s, a decade after the beginning of economic reforms, the factor that differentiated postcommunist countries from each other most was not the level of freedoms from the state but the presence or absence of a state with the capacity to uphold these freedoms. We find the same differentiation when we link market liberalization to the evolution of regulatory state capacities. To put the related

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12,00

Hungary Poland d Czech Re i Slo l vakia ki Latvvia Lithuania Estoniaa Sloveniaa

10,00

Bulgariaa 8,00

-6,00

Belarus

Macedon Kazakhst

Georgia

Armenia Albania

Moldova

Azerbai Kyrggyyzstt

Uzbekist Tajikist

-4,00 Turkmeni

-2,00 0,00

0,20

0,40

0,60

0,80

1 1,00

Level of Liberalization 2005 Figure 4.2 Economic Freedoms and Regulations

argument of Linz and Stepan in a simple form: no regulatory state, no progress in market building. We measure progress in regulatory state building using the data compiled by the EBRD (2005). The EBRD data measure the capacity of a regulatory state in three dimensions: regulation of competition, the financial sector, and capital markets. In each of these three dimensions, countries can get scores ranging from 1 to 4, with 4 equaling the presence of extensive and effective regulations. Going down from 4 to 1 means having regulatory norms on the books that are weakly enforced, that are not enforced at all, and, finally, not having regulations even on the books. For this chapter I aggregated the three indicators to construct an index that ranges from 1 to 12. The higher countries score on this measure, the stronger the presence of a marketregulating state. Countries with scores below 8 might have regulations on the law books, but they do not have state capacities to enforce them. (See fig. 4.2.) Among the countries that we could include in this measurement we found the same differences as in the case of rule of law. The Central European countries combined high levels of economic liberalization

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with high levels of regulatory state capacities. In these countries, as a rule, economic actors can profit only from rational calculative enterprise and cannot use either asymmetries in economic power or information asymmetries to make rents in the markets of production or in the financial and capital markets. In the absence of such a regulatory state, the liberalized economies of the former Soviet Republics had different versions of crony capitalism. Again, the factor that differentiated postcommunist countries from each other most was not the level of freedoms from the state but the presence or absence of a state with the capacity to enforce public rules for economic transactions. Finally, we present some evidence for the relationship between progress in regulatory state building and democratization. Linz and Stepan had two interrelated arguments on these issues. First, they argued for linking democratization with the development of regulatory states. Second, according to them, nondemocratic roads to regulatory state building were not available in the postcommunist countries. We assess level of democratization with the help of Freedom House indexes for Political Rights and Civil Liberties using the data for the initial period of economic reforms. In most of these countries this was the period of the early to mid-1990s. For the war-torn countries of the former Yugoslavia we have used the data for the postwar period starting with 1999. We count Romania as a liberal democracy at the time of reforms because after a few years of initial wavering, from 1996 it got the adequate Freedom House scores continuously. Also, we count Slovakia as a liberal democracy at the time of economic reforms because it was a liberal democracy in the 1990– 96 period, the key phase of economic change, and except for the short 1996– 98 period of the Meciar government, it has continued to be a liberal democracy until the present. We measure regulatory state capacities as above, with the aggregated EBRD indexes from the year 2005 (table 4.1). The findings are unambiguous: liberal democracy and regulatory state capacities go hand in hand. There is a strong association between the two variables. Countries that were liberal democracies in the period of economic transformation in the 1990s are the ones that have states that can enforce public rules in the private economy in the early 2000s. Countries that could not guarantee political rights and could not uphold civil liberties in the period

Table 4.1 Democratization and Regulatory State Capacity Political rights and civil liberties in the initial period of economic reforms

1– 2.5 Liberal Democracies

3– 5 Hybrid Regimes

5.5– 7 Authoritarian regimes

Progress in regulatory state building in 2005 12– 9 Strong to medium regulatory state capacities

Bulgaria (2) Croatia (2.5) Czech Republic (1.5); Estonia (2.5); Hungary (2); Latvia (2.5); Lithuania (2); Poland (2); Romania (2.5)* Slovakia (2.5)** Slovenia (1.5)

5– 8 Weak regulatory state

Below 5 No regulatory state

Notes: In parentheses, Freedom House scores. *From 1996 on continuously. **Except for the 1996– 98 period.

Albania (4); Armenia, (4.5); Azerbaijan (6) Belarus (5) Bosnia-Herzegovina (4); Georgia (4.5); Kazakhstan (5); Kirgizstan (4); Macedonia (3.5); Moldova (4); Russia (3.5); Ukraine (3.5) Uzbekistan (6.5) Tajikistan (7); Turkmenistan (7)

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of economic reforms all score below 8 in the EBRD index, that is, below the minimum threshold of a functioning regulatory state. The aggregated low scores on this index might mean two things. First, scores below 8 might mean that while these countries have some of the rules necessary to run a functioning market economy “on the books,” they do not have the needed state capacities to monitor and enforce these rules on the ground. Low scores in regulatory state capacity might also mean that some of the laws enforced in these countries reflect the interests of the strongest private actors only. Finally, even minimal regulatory state capacities are absent in the authoritarian countries. In the postcommunist setting the dictum of Linz and Stepan proved to be right: no democracy, no regulatory state. We could, finally, see Linz and Stepan’s argument on the relationship of democracy and the evolution of regulatory state capacities as a forceful critique of attempts at depoliticizing issues of market reforms. Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation can be read as a strong rejection of the idea that successful reforms must be based on strong power centralization that gives concentrated power to reformers who are assumed to know which reforms best serve public interests. Although they are not explicit on this issue, based on their arguments, one would expect an inverse relationship between power concentration and progress in regulatory state capacities. We also analyzed the relationship between power concentration and regulatory state capacities using the presidential power index (PPI) as a proxy (results not shown).11 We have found a strong correlation between distribution of authority within the state and regulatory state capacities. In countries where executive power is more constrained and checks and balances are present, regulatory state capacities are stronger. A high level of power concentration within the state goes hand in hand with low probability of having a state with regulatory capacities. It should be noted that this relationship between democracy and state capacity to regulate holds only for the postcommunist setting, where the remaking of political institutions started in the framework of a noncapitalist economy, and we do not find this relationship in other parts of the world where democratization started in the framework of

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more or less consolidated capitalist economies. The mainstream view at the time Linz and Stepan’s book was published was that the exceptional starting position of the postcommunist countries is a liability from the perspective of the simultaneous transitions. Accordingly, the politicization of economic transition might prevent both the liberalization of markets and the coming about of the right institutions. Because of their flat and inarticulate social structure, runs the argument, the economic transformation would create too many losers and too rapid an increase in inequalities. The losers would not tolerate these changes and would use their newly acquired political rights to stop the process (for a critique of this approach, see Hellman 1998). As it turned out, fears of the losers of market reforms proved to be exaggerated while the dangers represented by the early winners of liberalizations were underestimated. The abolition of state control over prices and trade and the rapid privatization of public firms resulted in a dramatic redistribution of wealth and economic power within these societies and between the state and the most powerful economic actors. The latter had strong incentives to set the rules of the private economy for themselves, and, as a result of the fast privatization, they had concentrated economic power. In countries where states did not have institutionalized defenses in the form of checks and balances and political pluralism was weak, early winners could capture the state, use it to set the rules of the private economy, undermine the fledgling democratic institutions, and redistribute wealth and opportunities to themselves. Political competition and the presence of mechanisms extending the accountability of incumbents, on the other hand, have helped to strengthen state capacity to resist capture and introduce public rules for the private economy representing complex exchanges and accommodating diverse interests (Hellman 1998; Bruszt 2002).

Conclusion

This chapter revisits three interrelated arguments of Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation on the links between market reforms, state building, and democratization in the context of postcommunist

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economic and political transformations. Linz and Stepan argued that (1) the development of a functioning market economy presupposed state building; (2) nondemocratic ways of building a capable state in Eastern Europe were not an alternative; and (3) the right sequencing of reforms started with state making under democratic conditions and then building a functioning market economy on these foundations. Their most important claim was that to make democracy and market reforms compatible, the goal of reforms should be to create the conditions for the orderly politicizing and regulating of economic action. That was exactly the opposite of what the than dominant neoliberal paradigm suggested: depoliticizing the economy and making it a private business. As the evidence presented here shows, Linz and Stepan were right both in their predictions and in their prescriptions. Moreover, they early on provided a key to one of the central factors of postcommunist divergence in developmental pathways. Twenty years after starting economic and political transformations, only those countries in which in the 1990s issues of economic transformation and regulation were politicized and decided in a democratic political framework have regulatory states comparable to Western standards. Moreover, the construction of capable regulatory states in the framework of democratic institutions was the necessary condition for improving global positions in international markets while keeping social inequalities low and domestic social integration relatively high. Lack of progress in building regulatory states meant staying in or moving toward the periphery in the globalizing world economy, drastic increases in social inequalities, and lower levels of domestic social integration.

Notes 1. On the diverse developmental pathways in postcommunist settings, see Stark and Bruszt 1998; Bruszt and Greskovits 2009. 2. Ordo-liberals rejected laissez-faire capitalism; they were distrustful of the “invisible hand” and have argued for public rules for the private economy primarily to prevent misuse of power asymmetries among economic players. The dictum of the ordo-liberals was simple: no public regulation, no free market. On the ordo-liberal views, see Böhm, Eucken, and Grossmann-

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Doerth [1936] 1989; Eucken [1948] 1989; Reiter and Schmolz 1993; and Van berg 1988. 3. For a detailed presentation and critique of this approach, see Hellman 1998. Some of the representatives of this approach were Fischer and Stanley 1991; Boycko, Shleifer, and Vishny 1995; and Lipton and Sachs 1990. 4. Remmer (1993) provided robust evidence to substantiate this claim based on survey data in Latin America. See also Bruszt 1996. 5. For critical discussions of the public choice perspectives on the state, see Evans 1995; Stark and Bruszt 1998. 6. For an insightful discussion of pre– New Deal era constitutionalism, see Sunstein 1987, 1990. 7. On the market-preserving state, see North and Weingast 1989; and Weingast 1995. 8. On post– New Deal constitutionalism, see Sunstein 1987. On the ordo-liberals, see Streeck and Yamamura 2005; and Borchardt 1991. 9. Actually, the IFIs have stayed with their close to libertarian views until the most recent, still ongoing financial crisis supporting the deregulation of global financial markets. 10. The indicators for capital controls include controls on commercial credit, controls on foreign direct investment, controls on the liquidation of foreign direct investment, documentation requirements for the release of foreign exchange for imports, exchange rate taxes, interest rate liberalization, investment liberalization, multiple exchange rates, permission requirements for foreign exchange accounts held abroad by residents, permission requirements for foreign exchange accounts held domestically by residents, permission requirements for foreign exchange accounts for nonresidents, repatriation requirements, repatriation requirements for invisible transactions, surrender requirements, and surrender requirements for invisible transactions. Data on trade barriers include the following: compatibility with Article VIII (current account convertibility), export duties as percentage of tax revenues, export licenses, export taxes, import duties as percentage of tax revenue, import licenses and quotas, import tariff rates, OECD and WTO membership, trade openness, share of trade with nontransition countries, tariff code lines, tariff revenues as a percentage of imports, and tax revenues on international trade (as a percentage of revenue). 11. The PPI is a standard measure for power concentration within the state, which lists all the powers that presidents have either exclusively or shared with the legislative (Frye 1999). We recoded the PPI index giving the value of 1 to all powers that presidents can use exclusively and 0 to all that they can exercise only together with the legislative. The index is a good proxy for the distribution of decision-making authority within the state: in countries where the PPI value is high, the concentration of power in the executive is high. Low values indicate authority that is more dispersed within the state.

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References Böhm, F., W. Eucken, and H. Grossmann-Doerth. [1936] 1989. “The OrdoLiberal Manifesto of 1936.” In Germany’s Social Market Economy: Origins and Evolution, edited by A. Peacock and H. Willgerodt, 15– 26. London: Macmillan. Borchardt, K. 1991. Perspectives on Modern German Economic History and Policy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boycko, M., A. Shleifer, and R.W. Vishny. 1995. Privatizing Russia. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Brunetti, A., G. Kisunko, and B. Weder. 1998. “Credibility of Rules and Economic Growth: Evidence from a Worldwide Survey of the Private Sector.” World Bank Economic Review 12 (3): 353– 84. Bruszt, L. 2002. “Making Markets and Eastern Enlargement: Diverging Convergence?” West European Politics 25 (2): 121– 40. Bruszt, L., and B. Greskovits. 2009. “Transnationalization, Social Integration and Capitalist Diversity in the East and the South.” Studies in Comparative International Development 44: 411– 34. Bruszt, L., and G. McDermott. 2009. “Transnational Integration Regimes as Development Programs.” In The Transnationalization of Economies, States, and Civil Societies: New Challenges for Governance in Europe, edited by L. Bruszt and R. Holzhacker, 34– 48. Political Science Series. New York: Springer. Campos, Nauro F., and Roman Horvath. “Reform Redux: Measurement, Determinants, and Reversals (April 2006).” IZA Discussion Paper No. 2093. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=898598. Coffee, J. C., Jr. 1999. “Privatization and Corporate Governance: The Lessons from Securities Market Failure.” Journal of Corporation Law 25 (1): 1– 39. Doner, R. F., B. K. Ritchie, and D. Slater. 2005. “Systemic Vulnerability and the Origins of Developmental States: Northeast and Southeast Asia in Comparative Perspective.” International Organization 59: 327– 61. EBRD. 2005. Transition Report 2005: Business in Transition. www.ebrd.com/ downloads/research/transition/TR05.pdf. Eucken, W. [1948] 1989. “What Kind of Economic and Social System?” In Germany’s Social Market Economy: Origins and Evolution, edited by A. Peacock and H. Willgerodt, 27– 45. London: Macmillan. Evans, P. 1995. Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Fischer, S., and A. Gelb. 1991. “The Process of Socialist Economic Transformation.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 5 (4): 91–105. Frye, T. 1999. “Changes in Post-Communist Presidential Power: A Political Economy Explanation.” Draft for Constitutional Design 2000. Center for Continuing Education, University of Notre Dame, 9–10 December.

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Gereffi, G. 1995. “Global Production Systems and Third World Development.” In Global Change, Regional Response, edited by B. Stallings, 100–142. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haggard, S., and R. R. Kaufman. 1995. The Political Economy of Democratic Transitions. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hall, P. A., and D. Soskice, eds. 2001. Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hellman, J. 1998. “Winners Take All: The Politics of Partial Reforms in PostCommunist Transitions.” World Politics 50 (1): 203– 34. Kaufmann, K., T. Kray, and M. Mastruzzi. 2005. “Governance Matters IV: Governance Indicators for 1996– 2004.” Worldwide Governance Research Indicators Dataset, 2004. www.worldbank.org/wbi/governance/govdata/ index.html. Linz, J. J., and A. Stepan. 1996. Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post Communist Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lipton, D., and J. D. Sachs. 1990. “Creating a Market in Eastern Europe: The Case of Poland.” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 20 (1): 75–147. North, D., and B. Weingast. 1989. “Constitutions and Credible Commitments: The Evolution of the Institutions of Public Choice.” In Empirical Studies in Institutional Change, edited by L. J. Alston, 49– 67. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Donnell, G. 1994. “Delegative Democracy.” Journal of Democracy 5 (1): 55 – 69. Remmer, K. 1993. “The Political Economy of Elections in Latin America, 1980–1991.” American Political Science Review 87 (2): 393– 407. Rieter, H., and M. Schmolz. 1993. “The Ideas of German Ordoliberalism and 1938– 45: Pointing the Way to a New Economic Order.” European Journal of the History of Economic Thought 1 (1): 87–114. Shonfield, A. 1968. Modern Capitalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Skocpol, T., P. B. Evans, and D. Rueschemeyer, eds. 1985. Bringing the State Back In. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stark, D., and L. Bruszt. 1998. Post-Socialist Pathways: Transforming Politics and Property in Eastern Europe. New York: Cambridge University Press. Stepan, A. 1978. The State and Society: Peru in Comparative Perspective. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Stigler, G. 1971. “The Theory of Economic Regulation.” Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science 2 (1): 3– 21. Stiglitz, J. E. 1999. “Whither Reform?” World Bank Annual Bank Conference on Development Economics, Washington, DC. Streeck, W., and K. Yamamura. 2005. The Origins of Nonliberal Capitalism: Germany and Japan in Comparison. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Sunstein, C. 1987. “Lochner’s Legacy.” Columbia Law Review 87 (5): 873– 919.

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———. 1990. After the Rights Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Vanberg, V. 1988. “Ordnungstheorie as Constitutional Economics—The German Conception of a Social Market Economy.” ORDO: Jahrbuch für die Ordnung von Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft 39: 17– 31. Weingast, B. 1995. “The Economic Role of Political Institutions: Market Preserving Federalism and Economic Development.” Journal of Law, Economics and Organization 11 (1): 1– 31. Woodruff, D. M. 1999. Money Unmade: Barter and the Fate of Russian Capitalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Part I I I Democratic Transitions and Democratic Regimes

5 Revisiting “Paths toward Redemocratization” Robert M. Fishman

The effort to conceptualize meaningful differences among regime transition scenarios—and to ask whether the contrasts between pathways to political freedom generate divergent consequences for the durability and quality of new democracies—has attracted the interest of numerous social scientists in the decades following the beginning of the worldwide turn to democracy in the 1970s. The contribution that launched scholarly debate on that theme in the context of late-twentieth-century redemocratization was Alfred Stepan’s 1986 essay, “Paths toward Redemocratization,” which systematically formulates a comprehensive typology of transition scenarios, analyzing the consequences of these varying paths. Whereas some scholars have subsequently argued that democratic transitions follow the principle of “equifinality”1—asserting that dissimilar transition pathways lead to a common outcome, that is, liberal democracy without qualifications — Stepan’s essay is articulated around the “contention that the actual route taken toward that redemocratization has an independent weight”2 in shaping the endpoint of the process. In these pages I examine Stepan’s pioneering 1986 contribution, taking it as a lens through which to identify central features of his broader corpus of scholarship, and I revisit the essay’s central themes, placing them in the context of regime transition scholarship and offering a 139

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proposal for one way to advance our examination of the questions posed by “Paths toward Redemocratization.” I argue that at least one distinctive pathway from authoritarianism to political freedom —that of social revolutionary democratization—carries important consequences not only for the design of representative institutions but also for democratic practice itself, especially on the important point of the relationship between the holders of institutionalized power and protesters lacking any meaningful source of institutional or economic power. Democratic practice may be more or less inclusionary; it may push beyond, or fail to attain, the promise provided by formal institutional parameters. In this vein I suggest that pathways to democratic rule hold significant consequences for what many scholars call the depth or deepening of democracy, encompassing the extent to which poor and socially marginal sectors are afforded meaningful opportunities for participation and influence in political processes extending beyond the minimal institutional requirement of equal voting rights for all adult citizens.3

Revisiting a Classic Essay

Stepan’s “Paths toward Redemocratization” moves well beyond the conventional scholarly distinction between reforma and ruptura, specifying far more fine-grained distinctions among transition scenarios, arguing that all pathways from authoritarian rule carry their distinctive consequences. This pioneering work posed—and, to the degree then possible, answered—the interrelated questions of how political systems can move from authoritarianism to democracy and whether contrasting paths of regime change generate distinctive outcomes. More than two decades after its writing, the essay continues to speak powerfully to those interested in the viability and quality of democracy. Focusing as I do in this chapter on an enduring essay written more than two decades ago is in many ways useful in a collective tribute to the impact of Stepan’s work, but it holds one limitation: a specific essay cannot fully reflect the fact that Stepan’s areas of work—and insight— have constantly evolved and have come to include thematic terrains not yet evident in the contribution I examine. That said, we encounter in

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this piece essential features of the methodological approach and the sensibilities that make Stepan’s work a continuing source of guidance for those concerned with understanding how democracy can be established and whether the route taken carries consequences for democracy’s quality. I delineate below the ten theoretically distinct pathways elaborated by Stepan. In its enumeration of these pathways, the 1986 essay groups together three scenarios of change initiated from within the authoritarian structure of power, labeling them pathways 4a, 4b, and 4c; the essay highlights major points of difference among them, resting analytically on Stepan’s deep insights into military politics.4 For the sake of simplicity, and given the very considerable differences among these subcategories, I renumber the inventory of pathways 1 through 10, rendering 4a, 4b, and 4c as pathways 4, 5, and 6. In elaborating the ten theoretical pathways that he formulates, Stepan works with the threefold distinction between state, political society, and civil society actors that appears throughout his oeuvre.5 He also draws on his historical knowledge and analytical insights on the connections between war and episodes of regime change — especially in twentieth-century Europe, although the essay’s geographic reach is worldwide. Throughout the discussion, Stepan combines his analytical formulation of ideal types with the search for empirical cases that approximate those types. The first pathway, “internal restoration after external conquest,” is empirically found in the restoration of democracy after World War II in several European countries occupied by the Nazis. The second democratizing road, “internal reformulation,” refers to cases sharing some features of the first pathway but in which some domestic forces shared at least partial responsibility for the earlier defeat of democracy. The partial implication of some domestic forces in that earlier democratic collapse leads to efforts to refound rather than simply restore democracy. The installation of France’s new Fourth Republic after World War II represents, for Stepan, an emblematic case of this scenario. The third pathway, “externally monitored installation,” applies to cases such as West Germany and Japan in which victorious democracies supervise the installation of free and competitive institutions in their defeated wartime adversaries. The essay’s fourth type, “redemocratization initiated by the civilian or

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civilianized political leadership (of an authoritarian regime),” refers to cases following a trajectory of change more or less like that of postFranco Spain in the 1970s.6 Stepan conceives of the fifth pathway, “redemocratization initiated by ‘military-as-government,’” as a theoretical construct not empirically attainable in pure form—without elements of other transition scenarios incorporating at least some civilian pressure for change. The essay’s sixth pathway, “redemocratization led by ‘military-as-institution,’” refers to instances of change—such as that of the Greek case in the 1970s—in which Stepan attributes the military’s role in extrication from authoritarian rule to the armed forces’ concern to protect their own corporate interests. Stepan’s seventh pathway, “society-led regime termination,” refers to the theoretical possibility that pressures from civil society could single-handedly install democracy, but the essay suggests that this type, although analytically useful in the elaboration of alternative scenarios, is virtually inconceivable except in combination with other pathways given the need for at least some involvement of politically relevant forces. The essay’s eighth type, “party pact (with or without consociational elements),” identifies a pattern of change most clearly found in the Austrian case. Stepan’s ninth type, “organized violent revolt coordinated by democratic reformist parties,” is most closely approximated in empirical reality by the Costa Rican case. Finally, the essay’s tenth type, “Marxist-led revolutionary war,” in Stepan’s analysis might prove to represent a viable route to democracy in the Nicaraguan case. Thus the essay structures its analysis around an exhaustive inventory of theoretically open and distinct pathways from authoritarian rule to democracy. Several features of the essay are quintessentially Stepanesque, most prominently its global geographic reach and a methodology that is productively eclectic while also manifesting a strong internal logic: Stepan’s examination of ten paths toward democracy weaves together two scholarly approaches that, through their differences, constitute the characteristic tension on which all truly Weberian social science rests, namely, the opposition between generalizing theorization and case-sensitive historically grounded analysis. Stepan, alongside his longtime collaborator and close friend Juan Linz, builds his analysis on this constitutive characteristic of Max Weber’s methodology: the simultaneous embrace

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of both poles defining a fundamental intellectual opposition.7 Also classically Stepanesque are several other features of the essay, including the refusal to take as a given conventional wisdoms without subjecting them to empirical and theoretical scrutiny, a keen ability to identify the actors and institutional terrains crucial for macropolitical transformation, and a human concern for the danger of socioeconomic underreaching in transitions. In relatively few pages, the essay presents its readers with all these qualities of Stepanesque analysis and with the intellectual fruits that result. The 1986 essay, like all genuinely Weberian work, seeks to theorize in ways that reach beyond any one empirical case, indeed in ways that do not fully fit any case at all, while also attempting to capture the theorydefying nuances and complexities of those historical cases that it discusses. The essay develops a theory of transition pathways in broad cross-case terms, but it also argues that empirical reality rarely fits perfectly within such theoretically based classifications. Indeed, “Paths toward Democratization” is quite explicit in arguing that many national cases have elements of more than one of the conceptually formulated pathways it elaborates. Thus Stepan’s analysis of democratizing scenarios involves both the conceptual work of theorizing pathways in an ideal typical fashion and the historically grounded task of identifying the complexities and specificities posed by given empirical cases. This method’s capacity to shed light on the choices and limitations that actors face emerges precisely from its constitutive tension between the opposing intellectual poles of generalizing cross-case theory and the careful study of case-specific dynamics valuing both poles as fundamental to scholarly inquiry. This methodology generates powerful payoffs for Stepan and his readers; the essay compellingly argues that pathways which appear theoretically open may be historically closed in all but highly exceptional settings and that pathways which have yet to generate success might prove feasible under new historical conditions. In formulating his typology of pathways to democracy, Stepan focuses on the identity and the institutional location of the crucial actors who elicit change. We encounter here another Weberian feature of the work: Stepan’s ability to think his way into the position and the mindset of the key actors in regime transformations. Both Stepanesque and

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Linzian analysis follow Weber in their keen focus on identifying, understanding, and analyzing the actors and institutional terrains that prove decisive in large-scale processes. This, in turn, facilitates the identification of characteristic challenges posed by given transition pathways. Thus, for example, in instances of externally imposed democratization, the resulting system’s search for internal legitimacy may prove especially difficult; in transitions initiated by elements of the existing nondemocratic regime, the lingering capacity of surviving state and regime institutions to block or reverse thorough political change stands as a potential barrier to success; in those pathways led by the quintessential state institution—the military acting through its hierarchically defined structure of command—the willingness of the armed forces to thoroughly renounce ongoing political powers may remain uncertain, thus presenting a limitation on full democracy; in instances of genuinely societal-led change, the ability of civil society to design and implement the legal basis for democratic representation emerges as a difficult challenge requiring the incorporation of institutional political actors within the mechanics of transition; and in instances of revolutionary removal of authoritarian incumbents from power, the willingness of revolutionaries to guarantee political rights for all actors may prove to be absent or insufficient, thus providing a fundamental impediment to democracy. For all the theoretically defined pathways, Stepan locates and analyzes their characteristic challenges, pitfalls, and possibilities. Stepan introduces important distinctions among the relevant actors and institutional terrains constituting his universe of significant factors. Essentially all scholarship on democratization differentiates between actors whose power is rooted in some fashion within the existing nondemocratic system and others with power or resources located outside it, but Stepan’s analysis goes well beyond this basic distinction. Whereas some students of democratization confound state and regime actors— thus reducing our ability to draw causally meaningful connections between transition scenarios and the subsequent contours of democratic outcomes8— Stepan’s typology is rooted in an appreciation of this and other conceptual distinctions. Whether a military engaged in extricating itself from authoritarian power acts as a state institution (operating on the basis of the specifically military line of command) or as an au-

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thoritarian government (with its politically designated leadership taking precedence), whether the impetus for change emerges from the political circles of an incumbent authoritarian regime, from state institutions largely marginal to the design and routine exercise of political power, or instead from the longtime opponents of authoritarianism — these and other such questions form the basis of Stepan’s conceptually based typology. However, this conceptual endeavor is only one part of the larger intellectual contribution of “Pathways toward Redemocratization.” Stepan is quite explicit in drawing the distinction between his effort to specify ideal typical routes out of authoritarianism that are theoretically conceivable and his concern to elucidate transition scenarios that are actually viable in historically concrete circumstances. Alongside its theoretical elaboration of ideal typical scenarios of change, the essay focuses with equal concern on the historical circumstances and complexities of transitions that have actually taken place, and in so doing it explicitly highlights tensions between the historical record and the theoretically based typology. Stepan presents national cases as combining features of the differing scenarios that he formulates on theoretical grounds. Precisely because historically given empirical reality does not fully adhere to the conceptually based typology, the actual viability of any given pathway is contextually conditioned, and thus historically bounded, in ways that Stepan carefully shows. Scenarios that worked under one set of conditions may prove not to be meaningfully open to future actors operating under changed circumstances. The analytical distinction between what is theoretically conceivable and what is historically viable stands out especially clearly in the essay’s analysis of transition by external military imposition. Stepan specifies central features of this pathway and outlines why this form of democratization succeeded in the defeated Axis powers at the close of World War II. But he also warns that the factors that made external imposition a viable path to democracy at the close of World War II were historically exceptional. The essay’s analysis suggests that contemporary or future efforts to impose democracy through external military action are likely to fail, given the absence in contemporary settings of the facilitating conditions found in the defeated Axis powers.

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Nearly two decades after the publication of the 1986 essay, Stepan and his close collaborator Juan Linz reiterated this logic when they explicitly warned, prior to the invasion of Iraq, that the plan to impose “re gime change” on that country by external military conquest was likely to lead not to successful democratic consolidation but instead to a far less felicitous outcome. Stepan’s appreciation that the successful imposition of democracy by the Allies at the close of World War II was a historically bounded episode, not likely to prove replicable in the future, underscores the enduring relevance of a social science based on the classic Weberian tension between generalizing theorization and historically contextualized empirical analysis. The same methodological tenet—that the purely theoretical plausibility of a transition scenario and its historically bounded viability are thoroughly separate questions—leads Stepan to suggest that democratizing pathways which have yet to emerge might prove historically feasible under new circumstances. It is this approach which allows Stepan to pose the question of whether a democratic revolutionary route to democracy, led by Marxist-oriented armed insurgents such as Nicaragua’s Sandinistas, could prove capable of generating a post-authoritarian (or post-sultanistic)9 polity that is fully democratic and at the same time deeply committed to socioeconomic change. The essay offers no definitive answer to this question but presents historical grounding for its reasoning that this pathway of change might be more viable in the late twentieth century—or beyond—than it proved to be in an earlier global context strongly molded by the Leninist denial of democracy in the Soviet case. Stepan’s analysis highlights, but cannot fully resolve, the important question of whether revolutions committed to changing the social order may build democracy rather than foster antidemocratic tyranny. In posing the question of whether a revolutionary and socially transformative process might prove a viable road to democracy, “Paths toward Redemocratization” highlights another defining feature of Stepanesque analysis, one that is deeply complementary to a rather different feature of Linzian analysis. Stepan’s work, not only in this essay but also elsewhere, is often concerned with the danger of underreaching in transition scenarios and with the search for opening new possibilities for desired social changes. In a near–mirror image of this sensibility, one of the

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concerns underpinning much of Juan Linz’s pathbreaking analysis focuses on the danger of socioeconomic overreaching, a mistake that he argues bedeviled Spain’s Second Republic and several other cases of democratic breakdown. Linz warns of the dangers of excessively broad and ambitious regime-founding agendas in new democracies. In contrast, in this 1986 essay, the reader clearly encounters Stepan’s unease that socioeconomic underreaching may yield new democracies with less depth or weaker material conditions for the poorest sectors than what might have proved possible with a more ambitious commitment to socioeconomic change. Despite the evident difference between these two sensibilities, I take them to be deeply complementary. The fundamental complementarity between the Linzian preoccupation with overreaching and the Stepanesque concern for underreaching, as well as the enormously productive ongoing conversation and succession of collaborations between the scholars holding these sensibilities, helps to explain the extraordinary intellectual impact generated by the joining of these two great minds in their shared endeavors. These different but complementary sensibilities are bound together not only by the evident human closeness of the longtime collaborators but also by their scholarly rootedness in the Weberian approach that searches for empirically adequate answers to questions that emerge from the value perspectives (and life experiences) of scholars. Stepan, like Linz, asks questions that matter to him and others and then answers those questions by carefully weaving together historically grounded comparative analysis and cross-case theorization. The questions and answers resulting from the complementary insights and sensibilities of Stepan and Linz have elucidated choices and limits, possibilities and dangers, that emerge in the context of regime change. But the contribution of Stepan and Linz to answering such questions is not limited to direct scholarly output. They have motivated and guided legions of younger scholars concerned to pose questions that matter to them and to answer those questions with rigor and intellectual honesty. As a member of that scholarly community,10 and in pursuit of the objectives formulated by Stepan’s 1986 essay, in this chapter’s next section I offer an avenue to conceptualizing — and studying — a socially expansive and transformative pathway to democracy. In so doing,

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I conceptualize the social revolutionary path to democracy as one that is marked not by a specific ideological perspective on the part of the actors initiating regime change but instead by the nature of broadly social and cultural processes taking place within the context of democratic transition. Before turning to that analysis of enduring consequences of an especially comprehensive mode of democratization, it will be useful to briefly highlight a central feature of the Linz-Stepan approach to the study of regime change. In their paradigm-initiating work on the breakdown of democratic regimes and on redemocratization, Stepan and Linz offered a powerful intellectual case for viewing political actors—and political action itself — as a major causal force in the complex process leading to regime change or stability. Their perspective succeeded in reorienting the study of conditions for democracy by offering a carefully crafted corrective to earlier scholarship that had placed excessive explanatory emphasis on long-run social processes, as best exemplified in the work of Barrington Moore,11 or on the overall level of “system institutionalization,” as influentially argued by Samuel Huntington.12 The Linz and Stepan approach to the study of democratization rejects all such determinism, links the study of regime change to the conceptualization of regime types,13 and highlights the independent causal force of political action and political actors themselves as well as specific institutional forms (rather than overall system institutionalization). In all these ways, Linz and Stepan opened the door to many of the past three decades’ most important contributions to the study of conditions for democratic rule, but I argue that it would be a mistake to fashion this enormous contribution as a new determinism placing exclusive explanatory weight on specifically political explanatory factors. I take the Linz-Stepan approach, instead, as a Weberian attempt to highlight one side, one link in a complex bidirectional (or multidirectional) set of causal processes connecting social forces to political and regime practices. Just as Weber himself presented his single best-known contribution, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, as an accentuation of but one side of complex causal processes—that is, the examination in that classic work of religious influences on economic conduct, paired against his emphasis elsewhere on economic influences on religion — so too should we find in the best-known contributions

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of Stepan and Linz a much-needed accentuation of the independent causal force of politics rather than a deterministic insistence on the exclusive causal impact of politics itself in generating regime outcomes. Indeed, Linz and Stepan both complement their primary emphasis on political explanations with much attention directed toward causal forces rooted in civil society. Stepan’s classic essay “Paths toward Redemocratization” is clearly located intellectually within the approach pioneered by the two longterm collaborators. Stepan focuses primarily on specifically political differences among contrasting paths to democracy, differences rooted in the political identity and institutional location of the principal actors (with the aforementioned caveat that in some cases relevant actors may be situated in civil society). The essay’s concern over the danger of socioeconomic underreaching essentially takes the political outlines of democratic transitions as the independent variable and socioeconomic outcomes as the dependent variable. That this approach proves enormously fruitful is the main argument of this chapter’s first part. However, I also suggest that for some purposes it is useful to reverse these causal arrows, especially in scholarly inquiry that examines socially expansive and revolutionary transitions. In such cases it proves fruitful to examine how the social characteristics of transition scenarios, including their cultural dimensions, can shape long-term political patterns of democratic practice that endure long after the completion of regime change and democratic consolidation. I develop this argument by analyzing the Portuguese case of democracy born in social revolution and by contrasting this national experience with that of its larger neighbor, Spain. As we shall see, the pioneering Portuguese case of democratization, “liberation by golpe” in the memorable formulation of Philippe Schmitter,14 proved to be fundamentally different from most militaryled processes of change—both those initiated by the existing military apparatus and those brought about by insurgent guerrilla armies. In Portugal, a partially spontaneous process of revolutionary “spill-over” spread the upheaval within hierarchies that began inside the state to other venues in social institutions. As a result, the country’s democratization scenario took on a social as well as political hue. I examine below the nature of that social transformation and its enduring impact on the political practice of democracy.

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Democracy Rooted in Social Revolution: The Portuguese Case

Can social revolution offer a viable path to democracy—at least under certain historical circumstances — and if so does the resulting political system differ in meaningful respects from democracies established through other means? This question clearly fits within the bounds of the broad inquiry initiated by Stepan’s classic essay, but the specificities of this path—and of its enduring legacies—are great enough to merit monographic focus. It is abundantly clear that social revolutions have led to long periods of antidemocratic rule in several major historical cases, most notably those of Russia and China, yet in other cases, such as that of Portugal in the 1970s (and classically in France, far earlier, in a long and discontinuous historical process), a pathway of change initiated in social revolution did ultimately end in democracy. More recently in Nicaragua, and in Elisabeth Wood’s analysis in El Salvador as well,15 social revolutionary movements contributed to the emergence of democracy, or, at a minimum, what Mainwaring and Pérez Liñán have labeled “semi-democracy.”16 Stepan’s argument in “Paths toward Redemocratization,” that specific historical circumstances determine whether a theoretically defined pathway (such as social revolution) can successfully lead to democracy or is instead unviable, appears strongly supported by the contrasts among revolutionary cases: The historically grounded political contours of social revolution in Russia and China were fundamentally different from those of Portugal in the 1970s in certain respects that proved decisive for democracy’s prospects. Elections held one year after the captains’ revolution of 1974, the elaboration of necessary constitutional guarantees, the decisive action of numerous actors committed to a democratic outcome, and the underlying geographic and historical context of the events, all contributed to lead the Portuguese revolution toward its institutional expression in a system that meets all the classic requirements for democracy and that is also marked by significant sociocultural and political legacies of its somewhat unusual beginnings.17 However, the focus I adopt here centers not on specifying the circumstances leading a social revolutionary process of regime change toward a democratic outcome but instead on elaborating the enduring consequences of this pathway in the shape taken by contemporary democratic practice.

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I address this theme in ongoing work through a paired comparison of the two Iberian Peninsula transitions to democracy, those of Portugal and Spain, which together, in the mid-1970s, inaugurated the ultimately worldwide democratizing quarter century, Huntington’s “Third Wave” of democratization.18 These neighboring countries moved from longlasting authoritarian rule to democracy through nearly polar opposite transition scenarios: In Portugal a social revolutionary process initiated by the captains’ coup of April 25, 1974, and the ensuing revolution of the carnations, and in Spain the consensus-oriented process of regime-led reform (under pressure from the opposition). I argue that the paired comparison of these two cases represents an especially fruitful avenue for exploring the enduring consequences of divergent democratization pathways because these neighboring countries share numerous structural characteristics and an extraordinary (if imperfect) set of historical parallels in their political development until their passages to democracy took two radically different forms in the 1970s. Whereas Portugal’s transition was shaped by a classically Skocpolian19 state crisis rooted in the country’s failing colonial wars in Africa, ultimately leading to a loss of coercive capacities and discipline within the armed forces, Spain’s transition lacked any measure of state crisis and was, instead, marked by concerns among all democratic actors (both inside the remnants of the existing regime and within the opposition) that the armed forces might prevent or constrain regime change. Despite the significance of this major contrast between the two Iberian transitions in the role—and dynamics—of state structures in the pathway to democracy,20 the point I wish to emphasize concerns not the origin of the Portuguese revolution in state crisis but instead the social turn it rapidly took and the impact of that turn on the way the Portuguese understand and practice democracy, a dimension of collective life that is amenable to social science analysis only through a perspective that incorporates cultural phenomena into its analytical approach. The continuing search for consequences of democratization pathways can usefully adopt the perspective elaborated by Hall and Lamont in their important new work, Successful Societies, with its emphasis on the interplay between institutional, cultural, and sociostructural determinants.21 Portugal’s distinctive path to democracy began with a military coup led by middle-level officers, primarily army captains. This location of

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the actors who launched the process of change directly challenged the existing lines of command within the armed forces, thus engendering a crucial feature of this national case of democratization by social revolution: a partial inversion of hierarchies within numerous social and political institutions. This defining feature of the Portuguese transition ultimately made its appearance in numerous institutional settings, including government ministries, newspapers, schools and universities, and a large number of private firms, as was exemplified by the massive program of bottom-up purges carefully analyzed by Antonio Costa Pinto22 and the widespread nationalization of privately held firms. The spreading, if partial, inversion of hierarchies, manifested first within the armed forces and later within numerous other institutions, fundamentally sets this case apart from the Spanish transition and most other recent processes of regime change. Parallel to the revolution’s social turn, made possible by state crisis, a wave of expressive and interpretive energies accompanied by powerful new collective experiences generated a broadly significant process of cultural change both in implicit understandings and explicit communicative endeavors, which, operating together, shaped the basis for a new form of practice rooted in changed dispositions.23 As I develop at length elsewhere,24 the synergy between implicit and explicit cultural patterns rooted in social revolution put in place a form of democratic practice that has endured—thus serving as the crucial mechanism linking ongoing developments in the new system to the polity’s origin in a historically unusual pathway to democracy. The social character of the Portuguese revolution was also powerfully shaped by other factors, including the overall composition of the actors who led (and were reshaped by) the process of political change. Those actors included insurgent social forces from the revolution’s first day, April 25, when popular protesters and rebellious soldiers blended together in one of Lisbon’s old squares, the Largo do Carmo—where these participants in the Carnation Revolution forced the surrender of incumbent authoritarian ruler Marcelo Caetano—and in other public places. Crowds entered the streets not only to celebrate the captains’ overthrow of the decades-old Estado Novo but also to share in the process of dislodging the old order and to voice their wide-ranging demands, thus broadening the focus of change beyond the strict question of political regime form in its minimally defined (and decisively impor-

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tant) institutional sense. The popular component of the revolution was to grow alongside the progressive weakening of the hierarchical and coercive capacities of the military. This scenario generated a set of expansive social demands, and a sense of collective exuberance (among large sectors of the population but not others),25 that provided a crucial backdrop to the emergence of a democratic party system. Both the discourse prevailing within the political sphere and the identity of the principal emergent parties strongly reflected this expansive social character of Portugal’s pathway from authoritarianism to democracy. One might be tempted to examine these events through an analytical prism that locates the revolution’s social character exclusively in the enterprise occupations and widespread nationalizations that transpired in the most radical phase, thus capturing one important component of the Portuguese case—but missing much else of significance. Such an understanding of this pathway to democracy would be insufficient, for the distinctive marks of the Portuguese revolution were to be seen not only in the vital arena of enterprise ownership but also in the social and cultural dynamics transpiring within educational institutions, the mass media, and families themselves—to name only a few of the institutions reshaped by April’s aftermath.26 The tendency of social revolutions to unleash new cultural energies, which Lynn Hunt’s important work classically showed to be central to the French Revolution,27 is also much in evidence in the Portuguese case. Journalists gained substantial operating autonomy from editors and media owners, teachers and students emerged as central actors in the shaping of educational institutions, and, perhaps most important, gender relations were partially recast, most tellingly reflected by the massive increase in labor force participation by women.28 New symbols, forms of expression, and collective practices took shape. Although Portugal remained a relatively poor society by Western European standards, in some respects it broke out of the southern European social cluster—marked, among other features, by low labor force participation by women—and on several indicators (but not others) came to resemble northern European social democracies.29 The revolutionary process that transformed Portuguese society and culture, as well as the political system, is often seen as having posed certain risks to democratic viability and authenticity. Many historically

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significant social revolutions have ended in antidemocratic regimes that value only comprehensive societal transformation and not the institutionally rooted guarantee of political rights required for democracy. Indeed, many Portuguese political actors deemed such an antidemocratic outcome to be dangerously possible in the roughly year and a half of revolutionary fervor following the captains’ coup of 1974. Leftwing hegemony in the armed forces, the communications media, and on the streets of Lisbon, as well as the Leninist ideology of major political forces such as the Communist Party, contributed to such concerns among many Portuguese defenders of democracy. However, the political process was ultimately guided not only by revolution in the streets but also by elections that greatly strengthened those actors committed to both the social advances of revolution and the institutionalized political guarantees offered by democracy. Portugal’s new political system was built on the historically unusual (but not unprecedented) synthesis of relatively conventional representative institutions with forms of political practice and social understandings inherited from revolution. Many differences between the democracies of Portugal and Spain can be identified, including the nature of the party system, the predominant tenor of political discourse, and the contrast in national identities — which are multiple in Spain30 and singular in Portugal. However, I argue that the most fundamental political contrast between the neighboring democracies of the Iberian Peninsula concerns the nature of the ongoing relationship between protesters in the streets, many of them relatively poor and powerless, and institutional power holders. In Portugal, social protest and institutionalized political power participate in one interconnected democratic conversation, in which these two spheres of politics address one another, each acknowledging the significance of the other. Portuguese protesters frequently end their demonstrations at the parliament, the Assembly of the Republic, where even poor immigrants may seek and receive a hearing from all major parliamentary groups. In contrast, in Spain, demonstrators and the holders of institutional power lack such a sustained conversation, and often appear to dwell in parallel political universes, each refusing to acknowledge the significance of the other. This discrepancy between the two countries is reflected in the spatial location of protests, the tenor of po-

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litical discussion and interchange, the content of news coverage, and ultimately also in many public policy and societal outcomes. The way the two countries understand and practice democracy is different. Before exploring several examples of the way protest and institutionalized politics interact — or fail to do so—in the two cases, it will be useful to introduce and address one possible objection to this chapter’s emphasis on the significance of protesters in democratic practice. Given that only elections themselves can definitively weigh the relative preferences of competing perspectives within the electorate and that formal organizations such as unions, parties, and interest groups of all sorts have the right to organize members and lobby policy makers, why should democracy’s political practice center heavily on the frequently informal and potentially disruptive terrain of street protests? A vibrant scholarly tradition stresses precisely the importance of the interaction between social protest and institutional centers of power.31 I take the impact of social protest on institutional power holders to be vitally significant for democracy, given the extraordinary difficulty of extending effective political equality among citizens beyond the ballot box so that it encompasses the complex processes of opinion formation, agenda setting, and policy making.32 Where institutional power holders and relatively poor or powerless protesters genuinely engage one another and participate in a shared conversation accessible to others through inclusionary news reporting, the consequence is a substantial expansion in the attainment of one of democracy’s great promises: effective political equality among citizens. In addition to the theoretical rationale for weighing the interaction—or lack of engagement—between protesters and institutional power holders, a more inductive and case-based approach leads to the same conclusion: Both Spanish and Portuguese citizens devote enormous energy and a great deal of time to informal political participation in the form of protests and demonstrations. Much survey data confirm observational evidence establishing Spain as a world leader in the degree to which citizen political participation is channeled through street protests rather than membership in formal organizations. Portuguese politics also involves frequent street protests by citizens. In both countries but especially in Spain, most formal political organizations such as

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parties have lower membership than in Europe’s highest membership party systems.33 No matter how one evaluates the contribution of public protest to democracy in theoretical and philosophical terms, from the standpoint of empirical reality itself, it is clear that for citizens in the contemporary democracies of Spain and Portugal, informal street pro tests assume a greater significance than in those national cases in which political energies are predictably and consistently expressed through formal membership in mass associations and other institutionalized forms of political behavior. Given the salience in both Spain and Portugal of political energies and sentiments expressed on the streets, it is important to ask how the two democracies incorporate such expression within institutionally recognized political life—or fail to do so. One of the most telling instances of the Portuguese approach to practicing democracy is to be found in the recent activities of an immigrant association, Solidariedade Imigrante (SI), and the reception they have received. One weekday morning in late January 2006 all major Portuguese television stations interrupted regular programming to report live on events taking place in Amadora, a working-class suburb of Lisbon. African immigrants organized by SI were protesting plans to demolish the illegal homes in which they lived, promising to physically block the work teams charged with the task of removing those structures. Although the protesters were few in number and of limited economic means, the television reporters on the scene interviewed them live, thus providing the immigrants an opportunity to present their perspective to a national audience. The immigrants articulated their grievances around the broad demand for the Right to Housing, as they labeled their campaign, a goal that led them to march on parliament some two months later where they sought, and received, a hearing from all the parties present in the chamber. Poor African immigrants had placed their concerns, and located their voices, within the range of political issues covered in the national press and discussed in the nation’s parliament. When SI activists look back on this experience, they are able to point to political achievements as well as disappointments—both changes and points of continuity—in the government housing policies they sought to change. Their demonstrations in favor of guaranteeing the right to housing for all the country’s residents, immigrants included, entered the mainstream agenda of Portuguese democratic life.34

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The success of protesting immigrants in achieving a hearing from all parties present in parliament and in taking their case to a national television audience is reflective of a broadly prevalent norm in contemporary Portuguese politics. Demonstrators representing a wide range of political and social perspectives—from students protesting proposed changes in the institutional design of universities to residents of towns affected by planned reductions in public medical facilities and advocates for cultural or economic causes of all sorts—routinely take their demands and proposals to the stairs of the parliament in the heart of Lisbon where many demonstrations then receive some sort of recognition, hearing, or even welcome from institutional political leaders of the representative chamber. Portuguese demonstrators seek to change public policy, and those who make public policy think of demonstrators as part of the universe of actors relevant for their democratic responsibilities. The salient role of demonstrators and crowds in the streets in the revolutionary pathway to democracy has made its mark on enduring practice. The news media also play a vital role in the distinctive Portuguese democratic practice, offering a hearing to a wide range of political voices from across the ideological and social spectrum. The civic norm that guides news coverage in newspapers and television stations, including the state-owned RTP broadcasting network, insists on treating all voices with respect, thus providing readers and spectators with an opportunity to make their own judgments on matters of controversy. On the day in June 2006 when I interviewed the RTP’s director of news services, the morning television news began, in typical Portuguese fashion, with extensive coverage of three separate sources of antigovernment protest.35 Portuguese news coverage reflects not the interests or political preference of those owning the media outlets—or in the case of state-owned media, of the government itself—but instead a shared journalistic commitment to a norm of civic impartiality and inclusion. Directors and editors of news services attribute this journalistic practice not simply to their own civic commitments but also to the ability of Portuguese journalists to resist pressures from above and to insist on reporting the news as they have seen it, with full recognition of the discordant voices of protesters. The partial inversion of hierarchies within Portuguese newsrooms in the aftermath of revolution and the

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country’s cultural celebration of disobedience in the narrative retelling of the captains’ revolt of April 2536 reinforce the resistance of Portuguese journalists—reporters, writers, editors, and media outlet directors— to the sorts of politically oriented pressure from above which can produce owner or state-directed biases in the reporting of the news in some national settings.37 Democratic practice in the Spanish case takes a fundamentally different form, although the larger polity on the Iberian Peninsula shares with Portugal the channeling of a great deal of political energy into street protest rather than more institutionalized forms of participation. In Spain, the treatment of protest—and more broadly, of political difference —by the media has often been marked by the strong political preferences of media owners, or in the case of state-owned media of the government itself, rather than by a shared norm of civic impartiality and inclusion.38 Media coverage of protesters has been somewhat sporadic, and when demonstrators do receive coverage, it is often hostile.39 In important political episodes such as the election campaign of 2004, culminating in the victory of the Socialist opposition on March 14 of that year, newspaper and television news coverage has been marked by substantial biases especially in state television. Significant aspects of political reality have failed to reach much of the national audience—or have done so only through the filter of the clear political preferences of media outlet owners or directors.40 Perhaps even more significantly, Spanish demonstrators and institutional power holders commonly speak past one another rather than engage in a shared conversation affording to the relatively powerless a place of inclusion in mainstream political life. This lack of engagement in shared conversation is at least somewhat symmetrical. Spanish pro test movements are internally divided over whether they should address institutional political power or only civil society, and often they eschew efforts to appeal to political power.41 The spatial location of protests is fundamentally different from that found across the Iberian border in Portugal, and demonstrators often focus their mobilizations on locations that carry symbolic meaning for the theme of their protest— prisons, schools, sources of pollution, or whatever else—rather than on the institutional settings such as parliament where policies can be

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discussed and changed. Institutional power holders, for their part, have often practiced a politics of denial, rejecting the significance and, at times, even the legitimacy of discordant voices. I contend that this contrast in the nature of interaction between demonstrators and power holders is of deep significance. Democracy assumes, in principle, equality among the citizenry, but all democracies, indeed all political systems, rule over populations that are more or less unequal in the distribution of social and economic rewards and resources. Democracy’s required equality of political rights always runs up against the politically inconvenient fact that citizens are economically and socially unequal, and that—to one degree or another—inequalities in society do influence actors’ abilities to shape political agendas and outcomes. Demonstrations by the relatively powerless offer such actors an opportunity to influence a country’s political agenda and policymaking processes, but they can do so only if protesters and institutional power holders participate in a shared conversation — as is the case in Portugal’s postrevolutionary democracy. I argue that the legacies of social revolution have created a form of political practice that is more inclusionary and more egalitarian—in purely political terms—than is to be found in many democracies, such as Spain, which arrived at democracy through nonrevolutionary paths. My argument in this chapter that the socially revolutionary route to democracy creates a distinctive form of democratic politics that incorporates relatively powerless actors in institutionally recognized political discussion may seem to offer grounds for recommending such a route to all future democratizers, but that conclusion would fundamentally misrepresent the claims advanced here and the important lessons of Stepan’s 1986 essay. Had Spanish political actors attempted in the mid1970s and later to follow the Portuguese path to political freedom, the outcome certainly would have been a return to authoritarianism rather than a public sphere similar to that of Portugal. The historical circumstances of the Spanish transition were thoroughly unlike those of the Portuguese road from authoritarianism, and any serious effort at social revolution in the Spain of the 1970s would have constituted overreaching, with disastrous consequences. By the same token, the Spanish path to political freedom would not have proved viable in Portugal, and had

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it been attempted after the captains’ coup of 1974 it would have constituted at best an exercise in underreaching and at worst an unwise failure to recognize the existing historical circumstances—thus generating unnecessary complications for the cause of democratization. The contrast between the neighboring cases of the Iberian Peninsula serves to underscore the importance of Stepan’s 1986 argument that scenarios that appear theoretically open are feasible only under some historical circumstances and not others. The contrast between Portugal and Spain highlights the significance of the continuing scholarly search for both underreaching and overreaching, as well as their consequences. The Stepanesque and Linzian paradigm for studying political action within its historically grounded constraints can help us understand not only whether democracy can achieve stability but also what type of democratic practice prevails after consolidation.

Notes I wish to thank the volume editors and anonymous readers for very useful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. I gratefully acknowledge a FLADKellogg Institute research grant that supported my fieldwork in Portugal. Considerations of space make it impossible for me to note here the numerous intellectual debts I have acquired in the course of my work on the legacies of Portugal’s social revolutionary pathway to democracy. 1. Terry Lynn Karl and Philippe C. Schmitter, “Modes of Transition in Latin America, Southern and Eastern Europe,” International Social Science Journal 43, no. 2 (1991): 269– 84. Other early contributions to this debate argued not for equifinality but instead for the existence of distinctive consequences of varying pathways to democracy. See also Terry Lynn Karl, “Dilemmas of Democratization in Latin America,” Comparative Politics 23, no. 1 (1990): 269– 84; J. Samuel Valenzuela, “Democratic Consolidation in Post-Transitional Settings: Notion, Process, and Facilitating Conditions,” in Issues in Democratic Consolidation: The New South American Democracies in Comparative Perspective, ed. Scott Mainwaring, Guillermo O’Donnell, and J. Samuel Valenzuela (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), 57–104; and Frances Hagopian, “Democracy by Undemocratic Means? Elites, Political Pacts and Regime Transition in Brazil,” Comparative Political Studies 23, no. 2 (1990): 147– 70. 2. Alfred Stepan, “Paths toward Redemocratization,” in Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Comparative Perspectives, ed. Guillermo O’Donnell,

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Philippe C. Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 65. 3. On democratic deepening, see Kenneth M. Roberts, Deepening Democracy: The Modern Left and Social Movements in Chile and Peru (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); Patrick Heller, “Degrees of Democracy: Some Comparative Lessons from India,” World Politics 52, no. 4 (July 2000): 484– 519; and The Labor of Development: Workers and the Transformation of Capitalism in Kerala India (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999); Archon Fung and Erik Olin Wright, eds., Deepening Democracy: Institutional Innovations in Empowered Participatory Governance (London: Verso, 2003); Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Militants and Citizens: The Politics of Participatory Democracy in Porto Alegre (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005); and Boaventura de Sousa Santos, ed., Democratizing Democracy: Beyond the Liberal Canon (London: Verso, 2005). 4. See Alfred Stepan, Rethinking Military Politics: Brazil and the Southern Cone (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). 5. See, for example, Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and PostCommunist Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). 6. For the most important discussion of this case, see the analysis in Linz and Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation. 7. I present my understanding of Weberian methodology, and arguments in its favor, in Robert M. Fishman, “On Being a Weberian (after Spain’s 11–14 March): Notes on the Continuing Relevance of the Methodological Perspective Proposed by Weber,” in Max Weber’s ‘Objectivity’ Reconsidered, ed. Laurence McFalls (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 261– 89. 8. I argue for the importance of the state/regime distinction in democratization studies in Robert M. Fishman, “Rethinking State and Regime: Southern Europe’s Transition to Democracy,” World Politics 42, no. 3 (April 1990): 422– 40. 9. On the variant of antidemocratic rule that includes regimes such as that of Somoza in Nicaragua, see H. E. Chehabi and Juan Linz, eds., Sultanistic Regimes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). 10. The inspiration and intellectual guidance of Juan Linz, which I first encountered as a Yale undergraduate, led me to pursue a career of scholarship, and once I was happily located in the community of Linz students in Yale’s graduate school I received a “double dose” of Al Stepan’s influence: through the constant references of Juan to the ideas and findings of his good friend and collaborator and through my own work with Al. The close collaboration and deep friendship of Al and Juan has forged a shared community among the students of these two scholars. 11. Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966).

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12. Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968). 13. I emphasize this point as an organizing principle of the Linzian theoretical perspective in Robert M. Fishman, “Triumphs, Failures and Ambiguities in Democratization: Juan Linz and the Study of Regime Change,” in Roads to Democracy: A Tribute to Juan J. Linz, ed. Joan Marcet and José Ramón Montero (Barcelona: Institut de Cièncias Polítiques i Socials, 2007), 33– 50. 14. Philippe Schmitter, “Liberation by Golpe,” Armed Forces and Society 2 (November 1975): 5– 33. 15. See Elisabeth Jean Wood, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Elisabeth Jean Wood, “Challenges to Political Democracy in El Salvador,” in The Third Wave of Democratization in Latin America: Advances and Setbacks, ed. Frances Hagopian and Scott Mainwaring (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 179– 201. 16. Scott Mainwaring and Aníbal Pérez Liñán, “Latin American Democratization since 1978: Democratic Transitions, Breakdowns, and Erosions,” in Hagopian and Mainwaring, The Third Wave of Democratization in Latin America, 14– 59. 17. On the challenges to securing a democratic outcome, see the discussion of the Portuguese case in Linz and Stepan, and in Paul Manuel, Uncertain Outcome: The Politics of the Portuguese Transition to Democracy (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1995). 18. Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991). 19. See Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). Skocpol elaborated her now-classic model of social revolution before the Portuguese experience in social revolution had run its course, but nonetheless the Portuguese case fits that model every bit as closely as the three historical cases on which she bases her theorization. 20. I develop this point and its larger theoretical significance in “Rethinking State and Regime: Southern Europe’s Transition to Democracy.” 21. Peter Hall and Michele Lamont, Successful Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 22. See Antonio Costa Pinto, “Settling Accounts with the Past in a Troubled Transition to Democracy: The Portuguese Case,” in The Politics of Memory: Transitional Justice in Democratizing Societies, ed. Alexandra Barahona de Brito et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 65– 91; and “Authoritarian Legacies, Transitional Justice and State Crisis in Portugal’s Democratization,” Democratization 13, no. 2 (April 2006): 173– 204. For a parallel treatment of the Spanish case, see Paloma Aguilar, “Justice, Politics and Memory in the Spanish Transition,” in Alexandra Barahona de Brito et al., The Politics of Memory, 92–118.

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23. With a foundation both in extensive field research on the Iberian cases and in the scholarly literature on the theory of practice, I develop this perspective on the cultural underpinnings of democratic practice and on the mechanisms connecting social revolution to a distinctive way of understanding and conducting democratic political life in “Democratic Practice after the Revolution: The Case of Portugal and Beyond,” Politics & Society 39, no. 2 (June 2011): 233– 267. 24. Ibid. 25. In this sense, the Portuguese case appears to offer major evidence of the process of transformation in the self-understanding of previously subordinate actors that Elisabeth Jean Wood has labeled “pleasure in agency” in Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador. 26. For important scholarly works on the dynamics of social revolution in this case, see the pioneering study of Nancy Bermeo, The Revolution within the Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); the important analysis of Rafael Durán Muñoz, Contención y Transgresión: Las movilizaciones sociales y el Estado en las transiciones española y portuguesa (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales, 2000); and the highly useful historical overview of Kenneth Maxwell, The Making of Portuguese Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 27. Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 28. Social relations in the news media and in schools are among the themes I have addressed in the extensive program of qualitative interviewing that I undertook in conjunction with the book I am writing on democratic practice in Portugal and Spain. I examine the change in labor force participation by women and other labor market–related phenomena in Robert M. Fishman, “Rethinking the Iberian Transformations: How Democratization Scenarios Shaped Labor Market Outcomes,” Studies in Comparative International Development 45, no. 3 (September 2010): 281– 310. For important work on women’s mobilization and the change in gender relations, see Virginia Ferreira, “Engendering Portugal: Social Change, State Politics, and Women’s Social Mobilization,” chapter 9 in António Costa Pinto, Modern Portugal (Palo Alto, CA: Society for the Promotion of Science and Scholarship, 1998). 29. I elaborate on this point in my paper “Rethinking the Iberian Transformations.” 30. The complex relationship between national identity(ies) and state building in Spain is one of many themes on which the scholarship of Juan Linz is absolutely fundamental to an understanding of the larger of the two Iberian cases, as well as for an understanding of the broader theoretical and comparative phenomena in which the Spanish case may be placed. On Linz’s scholarship on this theme, see the excellent essay by Thomas Jeffrey Miley, “Juan J. Linz on State and Nation: The Case of Spain in Comparative Perspective,” chapter 5

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in Joan Marcet and José Ramón Montero, eds., Roads to Democracy: A Tribute to Juan J. Linz (Barcelona: Institut de Ciències Polítiques I Socials, 2007). 31. For major works in this tradition, see William A. Gamson, The Strategy of Social Protest (Homewood, IL: Dorsey Series in Sociology, 1975); Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People’s Movements (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977); Sidney Tarrow, Democracy and Disorder: Protest and Politics in Italy, 1965–1975 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Charles Tilly, The Contentious French (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). 32. The great democratic theorist Robert Dahl emphasizes this problem in On Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 33. See the data in Leonardo Morlino, Democracy between Consolidation and Crisis: Parties, Groups and Citizens in Southern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 34. Field notes, Lisbon, January 24, 2006; and interviews with Timóteo Macedo, leader of Solidariedade Imigrante, Lisbon, April 27, 2006, and February 7, 2008. See also information available on-line at solimigrante.org. 35. Field notes, Lisbon, June 7, 2006. 36. In a culturally central retelling of the Carnation Revolution, the popular movie Capitaes de Abril, released in 2000, a leading member of the captains’ movement refuses an order from a hierarchical superior asking him to abandon the coup attempt with the words, “There are times when the only solution is to disobey.” That celebration of disobedience is routinely used in the publicity trailer advertising reshowings of the film on Portuguese television and elsewhere. 37. Interview with António Luis Marinho, RTP, Lisbon, June 7, 2006; and interview with José Manuel Fernandes, Publico, June 12, 2006, Lisbon. 38. In one of the most important reforms of the government of José Luís Rodríguez Zapatero, elected in March 2004, Spain’s state-owned television has been offered new guarantees against partisan control. On the significance of this reform, see the discussion in Philip Pettit, Examen a Zapatero (Madrid: Ediciones Temas de Hoy, 2008). 39. For important work on this theme, see Víctor Sampedro Blanco, “Nunca mais: El dique y el bunquer,” in La red en la calle: Cambios en la movilización. Anuario de movimientos sociales 2003, ed. Elena Grau and Pedro Ibarra (Barcelona: Icaria, 2004), 176– 94; and Victor Sampedro, “The Media Politics of Social Protest,” Mobilization 2, no. 2 (1997): 185– 205. See also the politically engaged scholarship of Jaume Asens on coverage of the Okupas movement: Jaume Asens, “La presión al movimiento de las okupaciones: Del aparato policial a los mass media,” in ¿Dónde están las Llamas?: El movimiento okupa: Prácticas y contextos sociales, ed. Ramón Adell Argilés and Miguel Martínez López (Madrid: Los Libros de la Catarata, 2004), 293– 338. 40. On the Spanish media’s treatment of the 2004 election campaign, the massive terrorist incident that occurred three days before the March 14 ballot-

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ing, and the demonstrations protesting perceived media bias, see Rafael Durán Muñoz, “La caverna en tiempo de crisis y elecciones: Del 11M al 14 M en TVE,” Revista de Investigaciones Políticas y Sociológicas 4, no. 2 (Spring 2006): 219– 39; Alfonso Vara Miguel, Jordi Rodríguez Virgili, Elea Giménez Toledo, and Montserrat Díaz Méndez, eds., Cobertura Informativa del 11-M (Pamplona: Ediciones Universidad de Navarra, 2006); Víctor Sampedro Blanco, ed., Medios y elecciones 2004 (Madrid: Editorial Universitaria Ramón Areces, 2008); and Víctor Sampedro Blanco, ed., 13-M: Multitudes Online (Madrid: Los Libros de la Catarata, 2005). 41. On this point, see Jeffrey Juris, Networking Futures: The Movements against Corporate Globalization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).

6 Electoral Victory, Political Defeat A Failed Democratic Transition in Iran Mirjam Künkler

The Islamic Republic of Iran presents a puzzle for students of democratic transitions: in four consecutive elections, a democratic-minded opposition won overwhelming majorities at the ballot box. For a period of four years, these electoral victories gave the opposition control of the national legislature, the presidency, and most municipal governments. Polity IV, an annual index that scores countries according to their degree of political contestation on a scale between –10 (most authoritarian) and +10 (most democratic), placed Iran at +3 for seven consecutive years, 1997 to 2003.1 This score meant that Iran was a more competitive and open regime than any Eastern European country had ever been between 1945 and 1989. It also enjoyed a higher score during those seven years than most Latin American countries between 1945 and the early 1980s.2 With a democratically minded movement in charge of the presidency and the parliament, in addition to a relatively neutral army, many observers would have expected a transition toward democracy. Why then was this fate denied to Iran? What precluded this competitive authoritarian regime from opening up to a successful democratic transition? This chapter examines the politics of the Iranian reform movement, why it won repeatedly at the ballot box, but why these electoral 166

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victories failed to translate into political ones. In a 1990 article about the tasks of a democratic opposition in an authoritarian regime, Alfred Stepan wrote that “guarding zones of autonomy against the regime” was one such core task.3 The failure of the Iranian reform movement can be attributed, I argue, to the opposition’s failure to achieve and guard zones of autonomy.

Loss of Hegemony

In the 1997 presidential elections, the Islamic Republic experienced a consequential surprise: against the endorsement of Ali Akbar NateqNouri (then parliamentary speaker) by the republic’s Supreme Leader (vali-e faqih) Khamenei and the majority of government officials, almost 70 percent of the votes were cast in support of Hojjatoleslam Mohammad Khatami, who had served as minister for culture and Islamic guidance from 1982 to 1986 and 1989 to 1992. Khatami had run on a platform of political and cultural liberalization, declaring that he would direct his efforts toward “strengthening the rule of law,” fostering a political climate conducive to the growth of civil society, and defending constitutionally prescribed civil liberties.4 Frustrated by the republic’s strict cultural laws, limits on political pluralism, and enduring economic hardship, many Iranians saw in Khatami a candidate that would satisfy the profound need for change. The moderate cleric’s promise of reform especially attracted women, young people, and urban educated middle-class voters. Around the world, journalists and political commentators interpreted Khatami’s victory as the beginning of a struggle that might eventually lead to the political, cultural, and economic liberalization, and possibly democratization, of the country. Crucially, Khatami’s electoral support was not limited to urban youth and women. Evidence suggests that Khatami was initially popular even among a majority of the military and a substantial segment of the ‘ulama (religious authorities). According to a poll commissioned by the Iranian parliament in 1999,5 80 percent of the members of the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) favored Khatami’s agenda, whereas only 9 percent endorsed the more conservative candidate, Nateq-Nouri.6

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Official records from the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance indicate that 73 percent of the IRGC, the social base of Iran’s current president Ahmadinejad, and 70 percent of the Basij (voluntary force) had voted for Khatami in 1997.7 Among the clergy, Khatami enjoyed similarly unexpected support. In Qom, the traditional nucleus of the country’s hawzeh (religious seminaries), Khatami achieved the phenomenal result of 58.7 percent.8 Here he ranked not a few but 25 percentage points higher than the candidate favored by the Supreme Leader, “who for months had been praised by the regime’s propaganda—particularly intense in Qom—as the embodiment of the ‘true Islam.’”9 As political commentators noted retrospectively in the country’s reformist newspapers, the strong support for an oppositional candidate in Qom pointed to the possibility of a quietist clerical resistance to the regime and to what Alfred Stepan likes to call “the loss of the revolution’s ideological hegemony” in Gramscian terms. Given the fact that the Guardian Council, which is directly and indirectly appointed by the Supreme Leader, can vet all candidates for electoral office and given that the regime had promoted in the statecontrolled media its own candidate for weeks, the chances for the success of any alternative candidate were slim.10 Khatami’s win was all the more remarkable in light of the fact that Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri already functioned in a position of political influence as speaker of parliament,11 while Khatami had been demoted in 1992 to the politically insignificant post of director of the National Library. What looked like a done deal weeks in advance turned out to become the election with the largest turnout in the republic’s history and, moreover, the largest percentage of votes ever cast for any candidate. There is hardly a democratic transition in the twentieth century in which reformers in the government reached 70 percent of popular support—an explicit, unequivocal mandate for political change. Khatami and the growing reform movement behind him received this mandate not once or twice but in four consecutive elections. To add to Khatami’s 1997 success, in the country’s first municipal elections in 1999 an umbrella coalition of reformist parties12 that supported his agenda for greater freedom of speech, fewer restrictions on cultural goods (music, cinema, literature), and a more pragmatic foreign policy, won 80 to 90 percent of the 200,000 contested seats,13 as well as 215 of 290 seats in

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the 2000 parliamentary elections.14 In 2001 Khatami was elected for a second term, not, as in 1997, with 70 percent of the vote but an astounding 78 percent—a figure rarely reached in democratic systems, let alone for the opposition in any given authoritarian regime. We can be sure that these numbers were not exaggerated upward. If anything, the ultraconservatives had a strong interest in manipulating electoral outcomes via the Guardian Council in a way to obfuscate the extent to which their preferred candidates had been defeated. In addition to the extraordinarily high levels of support for Khatami, the four elections between 1997 and 2001, together with the 1996 parliamentary election, featured the largest turnout of all elections in the republic’s history. In this regard, the 1997 and 2001 presidential elections were particularly noteworthy: while previous presidential elections witnessed a 50 to 58 percent turnout, in 1997 and 2001 turnout rose to an outstanding 80 percent and 70 percent, respectively. In less than three years (1997– 2000), Khatami and his reformist supporters in parliament and the municipal councils had transformed Iran from a relatively closed autocracy into a diarchy, where reformist forces controlled the executive and the legislature, while ultraconservatives held on to the judiciary, as well as several political councils appointed by the Supreme Leader. The emergence of this diarchy is nothing short of phenomenal.15 Figure 6.1 offers an overview of this system of rule. What could Khatami possibly promise to the Iranian people that made him such a popular presidential candidate? The core of Khatami’s agenda consisted of strengthening the rule of law and those political institutions directly elected by the people. These are, in principle, the parliament, the presidency, and the Assembly of Experts, which is a clerical body that elects the Supreme Leader and as stipulated in the Constitution convenes once a year to review the Supreme Leader’s political performance. Theoretically, it can unseat the Supreme Leader, but in the republic’s thirty-three year history it has never exerted a serious check on the Supreme Leader’s power. Iran’s Constitution of 1979, modeled on the French 1958 Constitution, comprises all political rights and civil liberties conventionally associated with Dahl’s minimum conditions of democracy.16 Articles 24 and 25 grant freedom of expression, Article 26 guarantees the freedom

1993 (Pres.)

1996 (Parl.)

1997 (Pres.)

1998 (AE)

39.1% (after revision 16.82%)

98.32

46.4%

h

25.94% (after revision 16.63%)

67.35%

65% 65%

78%

71.3%a

80%

98.77%

67.77%

2001 (Pres.)

2000 (Parl.)

1999 (Mun.)

n.p.d.

49%

n.p.d.

2003 (Mun.) 35%b

2006 (AE.) ~30%

2008 (parl)

35%e

2009 (pres.)

~60% 57.21% 85.21% n.p.d. 41.08% 99.16%

n.p.d.c n.p.d.d

2005 2006 (Pres.) (Mun.)

51.21%f 62.84% ~60% 44.09% 99.21% 65% (after revision 33.31%)

30%

2004 (Parl.)

Source: Iran Data Portal (www.princeton.edu/irandataportal/), unless otherwise noted. n.p.d. = no precise data. a. See Menas Associates Limited & Future Alliances International, special report on Iran’s 6th Majles Elections: A Supplementary Report, June 2000. The figure is composed of 44 percent gained by the Khordad Front, 17 percent by the Kargozaran (Rafsanjani’s technocratic faction), and votes secured by reformist independent candidates. b. This is the combined percentage all three reformist candidates received in the first round. See Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Iran after the June 2005 Presidential Election, Middle East Program Occasional Papers, Summer 2005, www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/mepopsummer051.pdf. c. 230,000 candidates ran for approximately 110,000 seats. d. 165 candidates ran for 86 seats. e. There is strong reason to believe that these results were tampered with. The subsequent protests throughout Iran suggest that the support for the reformist candidate(s) was much higher than the official election results established. f. Many voters expressed their disappointment with the reform project by submitting invalid ballots. Six percent of all ballots were spoiled. g. Only 4 of 128 were approved. See Wilfried Buchta, Who Rules Iran? The Structure of Power in the Islamic Republic (Washington, DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2000), 36. h. The Guardian Council accepted fewer than half of the 396 applicants and none of the nine women who nominated themselves. In the past, would-be candidates had to demonstrate their attainment of the mujtahed rank, equivalent to an M.A. degree in Islamic learning, which authorizes Qur’anic interpretation. But in 1998 all potential candidates had to demonstrate the proper political inclination as well. The council allowed a number of incumbent Assembly of Experts members to run again, even though they failed to demonstrate the required level of religious learning. The council argued that incumbents could run again because Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had approved their credentials previously. Yet reformist clerics, such as Mehdi Karrubi, who had been a member of the Assembly in the 1980s and whose credentials therefore also had been “approved” by Khomeini, were disqualified.

Percentage of disqualified 35.23% 96.9% candidates (after revision 15.22%)

g

Votes for pragmatist 28% 26.34% 30% 70% 3 of 86 (Kargozaran)/reformist (IIFP, MRM, Hambastegi) opposition to regime conservatives Voter turnout 57.71% 50.66% 71.10% 79.92% 46%

1992 (Parl.)

Table 6.1 Parliamentary, Presidential, Municipal, and Assembly of Experts (AE) Elections, 1992– 2009

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ELECTORATE 290 representatives; can with 2/3 majority pass legislation vetoed by Guardian Council on to Expediency Council

mediates between Majles and Guardian Council; since 1997 also asked to offer advice to Supreme Leader on major policies

6 mujtaheds + 6 secular lawyers; acts as upper house

86 mujtaheds elected for 8-year terms; reviews actions of supreme leader

Figure 6.1 Iran’s Political System

to form and join organizations, Article 27 grants freedom of assembly, and Article 23 even imparts freedom of belief.17 Significantly, however, all rights and liberties have validity “in accordance with Islamic principles,” a clause found in each of these articles. In other words, if any of these rights are found to contradict “Islamic principles,” they may be abrogated. Due to this limitation, the Guardian Council, the judiciary, and governmental ministries circumvent abiding by these constitutional injunctions if it is politically, socially, or economically opportune to do so. Moreover, checks and balances are allocated in a way that the Supreme Leader’s office may interfere in most political processes. All legislation by the Majles (parliament) needs to be approved by the Guardian Council.18 The Guardian Council consists of six Islamic jurists appointed by the Supreme Leader and six constitutional lawyers confirmed by parliament from a list provided by the head of the judiciary, who is

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also appointed by the Supreme Leader. If the Guardian Council vetoes a given bill, the parliament may pass the bill on to a second council, the Expediency Council, all of whose members are appointed by the Su preme Leader.19 Besides functioning as an upper legislative house, the Guardian Council has a second important function: it may vet electoral candidates. Any candidate running for the Assembly of Experts, the parliament, or the presidency who does not meet the Guardian Council’s approval may be disqualified. The Supreme Leader is the commander in chief. Foreign and security policy is determined in the National Security Council, which comprises the president, certain ministers, and other members the Supreme Leader appoints. Budgetary power lies with the parliament, but the Expediency Council passes its own budgets that cover the Supreme Leader’s office, as well as certain security agencies. Although the polity features important republican elements, such as direct elections for the president, the parliament, the Assembly of Experts, and since 1999 the municipal councils, as well as meaningful civil liberties and political rights, the republican elements can be qualified, limited, denied, and overruled by bodies appointed by the Supreme Leader— most important, the Guardian Council, the Expediency Council, and the head of the judiciary.

Parties and the Press: Opportunities for Civil and Political Society

From the beginning of his presidency, Khatami pursued two initiatives aimed at strengthening the link between civil society and the political elite: the development of a robust multiparty system with strong roots in the electorate, and the promotion of a multifaceted press. While serving as director of the National Library, Khatami had written extensively on the need for political pluralism and dialogue. Dialogue and exchange were necessary to build peaceful social relations. What came to represent his approach to both domestic and foreign policy was his view that “life is a collective effort which cannot go forward except through debate, critique, and cooperation, and by recognizing the limitations and relativity of all perspectives.”20 Islam could be a fruitful source for political

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and social ethics. In contrast to his opponents in the Supreme Leader’s office, Khatami felt that this ethics must not be imposed through moralistic laws and the careful selection of information imparted to the public but instead that Islam should be part of an open discursive environment that would allow citizens to recognize the kind of life they would want to live on their own terms: “Religion is a cradle and support for the growth of reason, freedom, and liberality.”21 Khatami’s initiatives aimed at strengthening civil society and political participation were inaugurated chiefly through three mechanisms. First, the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance issued a number of new licenses for newspapers. Second, Khatami’s administration initiated for the first time in the republic’s history the holding of municipal elections for village and city councils, which had hitherto been appointed by provincial governors. Third, in preparation for the 1999 municipal elections, his minister of interior encouraged the registration of political parties to pave the way for the development of a multiparty system. The Press Upsurge

Toward the end of the Iran-Iraq war in 1988, the number of registered publications in the country was as low as 62. By 1994 it had risen to 500, and four years later it reached 850.22 Thanks to the eagerness of Khatami’s minister of culture and Islamic guidance, Ataollah Mohajerani, the ministry accepted 1,396 applications for new publications between 1999 and 2001 alone.23 Bayat claims that the reform era gave birth to 2,228 new titles, among them 174 new dailies.24 In 1999 newspapers for the first time reached a circulation of one million.25 Between 1998 and 2000, Tehran’s press landscape alone included about 30 dailies. Jame‘eh (Society), published by the University of Tehran sociology professor Hamidreza Jalaeipour, became the country’s “first civil society daily.” Although it was closed down numerous times by the conservativedominated judiciary, the reformist Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance issued new licenses that allowed its editors and journalists to reopen the newspaper under different names. Between spring 1998 and April 2000, Jame‘eh was reincarnated as Tus, Neshat, Asr-e Azadegan,

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and Sobh-e Emruz.26 Other reformist newspapers included Khordad, Fath, Mosharekat, Arya, and Azad. Also among the new media were a sizable number of women’s newspapers and magazines, with 200 registered in 2000 and 286 by 2002. The daughter of former President Rafsanjani launched a women’s daily, called Zan (Woman).27 The Formation of New Parties

Many of the newspapers were created as direct organs of the multitude of political factions that registered as parties, following Khatami’s announcement that his minister of interior would more willingly than his predecessors issue the necessary license.28 Parties had been discouraged since the early years of the revolution when the multiplicity of parties competing with each other were perceived as threatening the consolidation of the regime. Khomeini at that time had pushed Iran toward a one-party state led by the Islamic Republic Party and in the mid-1980s after the latter’s dissolution proclaimed that parties were divisive and un-Islamic. His successor, too, made no secret of his antiparty stance. Even in 1997, when there was already widespread demand among the public for the existence of parties and the promotion of a strong party system, Khamenei proclaimed that elections alone displayed the political growth of the Iranian nation and that the public did not need political parties and their “materialist” leaders.29 Even the chairman of the commission issuing party licenses in the Ministry of Interior under Khatami’s predecessor stated that the people did not have much need for parties because there were already other groups that enjoyed the public trust, such as the clergy.30 Yet with the announcement of the inauguration of municipal elections to be held in 1999, Khatami made some headway toward creating a climate in which the need for parties was more widely shared, even among his opponents. The municipal elections had been stipulated in Article 100 of the 1979 Constitution but had never been held. Now, in conformity with Khatami’s campaign slogan “Rule according to the Constitution,” his administration worked hard to put in place the required infrastructure to hold elections.31 Suddenly, it became important for the competing factions to identify issues of local concern able to mobilize potential voters and to recruit candidates willing to run for

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the thousands of positions that would now be elected instead of appointed. As reformist factions sought party licenses from Khatami’s reformist ministry, conservative factions followed suit. The municipal elections raised the importance of nationwide networks between likeminded local organizations to a new level. Khatami’s own brother, Reza Khatami, founded the Iranian Islamic Participation Front (IIPF), a party that became the heart of reformist coalitions during the following years. The IIPF advocated absolute adherence to the rule of law, a restriction of the powers of the Supreme Leader to a mere supervisory function without veto powers, and a stronger role for the institutions that enjoy electoral legitimacy. Consequently, it aimed to institute precisely circumscribed guidelines for the Guardian Council’s use of the veto against parliamentary bills, as well as of its supervisory function in the republic’s elections. Another important faction that sided with the reformists in 2000 (but not in 2004 when many reformist parties boycotted the elections in light of vast disqualifications by the Guardian Council) is the Executives of Construction Party (Hezb-e Kargozaran-e Sazandegi). This faction consisted of mostly pragmatic technocrats associated with former President Rafsanjani, such as Ataollah Mohajerani who became Khatami’s minister of culture and Islamic guidance, and Tehran mayor Gholam-Hossein Karbaschi, who emerged as Khatami’s right hand during the 1997 presidential bid. The mayor had served as Khatami’s campaign manager and used the vast resources of the municipality of Tehran and its daily newspaper, Hamshahri (Fellow-Citizen), with a circulation of several hundred thousand at that time and over one million by 2005, to boost public opinion in favor of Khatami. Two other groups were instrumental to Khatami’s growing reform movement. One was the Office for Fostering Unity among the Islamic Student Associations (Daftar-e Tahkim-e Vahdat, or DTV), the country’s largest student umbrella organization, comprising, in 1999, 1,437 student associations nationwide. It published a newspaper, Azar, as well as seven hundred local student magazines, and ran its own news agency, ISNA.32 The organization had played a key role in the seizure of the U.S. embassy in 1979 but changed its orientation in the mid-1990s when it became one of the most important supporters of Khatami’s reform efforts during his first term.

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The second group was the Center for Strategic Studies, which was founded by a group of revolutionaries-turned-reformers, including Ma shallah Shamsolvaezin, who wrote for a number of reformist newspapers, and Said Hajjarian, founder and first deputy minister of the revolutionary Ministry of Information. The Center for Strategic Studies was affiliated with the Office of the President, and it became Tehran’s intellectual nucleus for policy-driven discussions about the reform movement’s performance and strategies. In total, ninety-five new political parties and organizations were registered between 1997 and 2000. The reformist-dominated parliament of 2000 – 2004 also passed a bill for the registration of labor unions and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). A registration wave of new labor unions followed. In 2000 – 2001, 100 employers’ guilds and 120 workers’ organizations officially registered. Months after Khatami’s win, the first professional association of journalists was founded, and journalists even managed to establish the Association for the Defense of Free Press, which was headed by dissident cleric Mohsen Kadivar until his imprisonment. Significantly, as Asef Bayat notes, in contrast to NGOs in most other countries of the region, “NGOs [in Iran] were valued more for their political and democratizing potential than for charitable and developmental roles.”33 Clerical Associations

Before the registration of new parties in 1998, factional politics had been dominated by two clerical organizations, the Society of Combatant Clergy (Jame‘eh-ye Rohaniyat-e Mobarez, JRM) and the Assembly of Combatant Clerics (Majma’e Rohaniyun-e Mobarez, MRM). Initially, the two differed primarily in economic outlook: whereas the JRM entertained close ties to the bazaar and advocated a mercantile economic order, the MRM envisioned land reform and a strong redistributive role for the state. Both are professional organizations and open only to members of the clergy. Most of the high-ranking ultraconservative officials, such as Supreme Leader Khamenei, the present and past heads of the judiciary, and the members of the Guardian Council, are members of the JRM.34

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The MRM, by contrast, includes many individuals who joined the reformist project in one way or another, including President Khatami;35 Mehdi Karrubi, parliamentary speaker in 2000– 2004 and presidential contender in 2005 and 2009; Mohammad Musavi-Khoeiniha, chairman of the student organization DTV and prosecutor-general of Tehran in the 1980s; Mohammad Ali Abtahi, vice president for legal and parliamentary affairs under Khatami; Ayatollah Bujnourdi, a progressive voice regarding women’s rights; and Hadi Khamenei, brother of the Supreme Leader.36 Unlike the JRM, which dominates the councils appointed by the Supreme Leader, the MRM has been largely limited to electoral positions, notably in the parliament. Members of the leftist clerical organization had felt increasingly marginalized since the 1992 elections, when, following the 1989 constitutional amendment, the Guardian Council for the first time made wide use of its constitutional prerogative to “supervise” elections and extensively disqualified MRM candidates. When few publications reported on the large-scale disqualifications of leftist clerics, one of its senior members and a prominent leader of the student organization DTV, Musavi-Khoeiniha, established Salam, the longest-running reformist daily until it was closed in 2008.

Ensuing Power Struggles

Along with his domestic reforms aimed at strengthening civil society, Khatami’s presidency started with a number of foreign policy successes. In explicit challenge to Huntington’s clash of civilizations hypothesis, Khatami developed the concept “Dialogue among Civilizations,” which was conceived as a program of conferences and workshops of philosophical and diplomatic exchanges to take place over the following years in Iran. His program was so successful that the United Nations named 2000 the Year of the Dialogue among Civilizations. In late 1997 the meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference was held in Tehran, and Khatami’s allusions to popular sovereignty and republicanism were broadcast over Arab TV channels to the wider Middle East. These images of an emerging democracy in Iran raised renewed fears

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about Iranian influence in the region. As one Arab newspaper commented, “Iran this time is exporting free elections instead of Islamic Revolution.”37 In January 1998 Khatami famously gave an interview on the U.S. network CNN in which he indicated that Iran would accept a two-state solution in Israel/Palestine if that was the wish of the Palestinian people. To the astonishment of American TV viewers, Khatami stated: We have clearly said that we don’t intend to impose our views on others or to stand in their way. In our view all Palestinians have the right to express their views about their land, including the millions of Palestinians in Diaspora. They too have a right to self-determination. Only then can there be a lasting peace. We seek a peace through which Jews, Muslims and Christians, and indeed each and every Palestinian, could freely determine their own destiny. And we are prepared to contribute towards the realization of that peace.38 In March of the same year, the Iranian gas and oil industry was opened up to foreign investors for the first time in the republic’s history. Several months later, Iran gave the United Kingdom assurances that it had no intention, nor would it take any action, to threaten the life of Salman Rushdie or those associated with his work, nor would it encourage or assist others to do so. This became the first step in the normalization of relations between Iran and the UK and the eventual reinstatement of diplomatic ties. Domestically, however, Khatami ran into major obstacles. As soon as the media began to flourish and the public discourse became more politicized, a dramatic power struggle unfolded between the ultraconservatives who dominate the appointed councils on the one hand and Khatami, the reformist press, and, after 2000, the reformist-dominated parliament on the other. In June 1998, the then still conservative-dominated Majles impeached Khatami’s minister of the interior, Hojjatoleslam Abdollah Nouri, on alleged but probably fabricated corruption charges.39 Khatami responded by reappointing Nouri immediately to the newly created post of vice president of development and social affairs, which does not require parliamentary approval. One and a half years later, how-

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ever, Nouri was convicted for allowing his newspaper, Khordad, to report on “dissident opinions” and was eventually incarcerated for nearly three years. In July 1998 Tehran’s Mayor Karbaschi, who had been instrumental in facilitating Khatami’s victory as his campaign manager, was found guilty on charges of corruption and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment. From his house arrest, Grand Ayatollah Montazeri, designated Khomeini’s successor until he started to criticize the regime’s human rights track record, expressed his dismay over Khatami’s inability to protect his ministers against a judiciary that did not safeguard law and order but was instead used by the Supreme Leader to curb reformist power. Montazeri commented: This is actually one of my criticisms of President Khatami. When he was first elected, I sent him a message, saying, “If I were in your place, I would go to the Leader [Khamenei] and say: ‘Your position is protected; respect for you is guaranteed. But 22 million people voted for me; and when these 22 million people voted for me, all of them knew that the [Supreme] Leader of the country favored someone else [i.e., Nateq-Nouri, the conservative presidential candidate]. He himself, and everyone in his office, endorsed someone else. But did 22 million people come and vote for him? No. It meant that they did not agree with that organization. The vote of these 22 million people means, we do not agree with what you say. They have expectations of me, and if you want to interfere with my ministries, with my ministers and governors-general, and impose certain individuals on me, I cannot work. Hence, I will thank the people for their trust and resign.’”40 The year 1998 witnessed a series of mysterious murders of dissidents. Dariush Forouhar, who had served as minister of labor in Mehdi Bazargan’s provisional government in 1979– 80, and his wife were stabbed to death in their home.41 The writers Mohammad Jafar Pouyandeh and Mohammad Mokhtari, who had planned to found a writer’s association, disappeared, and their bodies were found several days later on the outskirts of Tehran.42

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In the newspaper Rah-e No (New Way), investigative journalist Akbar Ganji, helped expose two years later that the murders originated nowhere else than in the (pre-Khatami) administration. In fall 1998 Ganji published a series of articles implicitly accusing the Ministry of Intelligence of having masterminded the attacks on dissident intellectuals. Following Ganji’s articles, President Khatami ordered investigations into the ministry.43 Deputy Minister of Intelligence Said Emami was arrested and later committed suicide in prison (or so official reports suggested) before his trial could begin. Ganji’s investigations showed that the ministry had also been behind a failed collective assassination attempt in 1996 on a group of Iran’s most established writers and intellectuals who were en route to a conference in Armenia and whose bus was nearly steered down a cliff. Implicitly, Ganji hinted that the ministry could not have planned and carried out the assassinations if former President Hashemi Rafsanjani had not given his consent. Ganji was later summoned by the judiciary (like many of his colleagues) for participation in the April 2000 Berlin conference, “The Future of Reform in Iran,” and eventually sentenced to ten years in jail and an additional five years of internal exile. The prison term was later reduced to six years after Ganji went on a hunger strike.44 The July 1999 Protests

July 1999 presented the most violent onslaught on political activists yet and in many ways became a turning point for the reform movement. A new, more restrictive press law that placed the press under the jurisdiction of the Revolutionary Courts and the Special Courts of the Clergy was about to be passed in parliament in response to pressure from the judiciary.45 When, on the evening of the vote for the new law, Salam published a letter implicating none other than Deputy Minister of Intelligence Emami, charged with having masterminded the chain of 1996 murders, in the drafting of the law, the newspaper was closed down.46 Extensive but peaceful student demonstrations on the campus of the University of Tehran against the new press law and the closure of Salam were countered by a nocturnal raid on a dormitory complex by the vigilante group Ansar-e Hezbollah.47 The group brutally attacked students,

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confiscated computers and books, and ransacked the interior. The raids left four students dead and several hundred wounded, some of them because the Ansar had thrown them from the dormitories’ windows.48 But governmental repression backfired and instigated further mobilization in the city and surroundings. Following a national outcry at the illicit attacks, the protests spilled over to other cities of the country. During the following two days, Rasht, Yazd, Mashhad, Isfahan, Khorramabad, Hamadan, Shahrud, and Tabriz experienced widespread demonstrations. In other cities, such as Bandar Abbas, Zanjan, Gorgan, Semnan, Yasouj, Maragheh, and Arak, student unions issued statements condemning the suppression of the Tehran protests.49 In Tabriz on July 11, police and vigilante groups moved onto campuses and into schools to brutally suppress student uprisings. At least five people were killed.50 The same day in Tehran, the Interior Ministry warned that “unlicensed demonstrations” would not be permitted.51 Khatami, who owed some of his 1997 electoral success to the youth, remained silent. Demonstrators then abandoned their original plan to march on the city center and instead rallied on campus.52 Ten thousand to 20,000 students were joined by “ordinary people [with] shopkeepers closing their stores, others providing demonstrators with food and cold water, motorists honking their horns and putting on their lights.”53 On surrounding streets, the Agence France-Presse reported, “students, residents and passersby” battled against police and “volunteer Islamic militiamen [basij].”54 Minister of Higher Education Mustafa Mo‘in (the leading reformist candidate in the 2005 presidential elections) and the chancellor of the University of Tehran both resigned over the confrontations.55 The following day, July 12, demonstrations moved to a prominent square in Tehran, Vali-ye Asr Square, where local residents joined students in demanding the release of those who had been arrested during the previous days. Amnesty International reported that some of the worst violence occurred on this day. Police rounded up photographers to block evidence of the violence, reporters were released only after their notes and films had been confiscated, club-wielding thugs beat up protesters, and tear gas was used to disperse the demonstrations.56 To undermine the ability of demonstrators to communicate with one another, the government shut down mobile telephone service in Tehran.57

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Both the parliament and the National Security Council ordered investigations into the July 9 attack of vigilante groups against the student dormitories; they found that the raid had taken place without authorization. The Tehran Revolutionary Court investigated ninetyeight members of the Ansar-e Hezbollah and eventually arrested twenty, eighteen of whom were released two years later. On July 19, just six days after the last large-scale demonstration in the capital, Manucher Mohammadi, a high-profile student activist and leading member of the National Association of Students and Graduates (Anjoman-e Daneshjuyan va Daneshamukhtegan-e Melli), was shown on national television “confessing” to his involvement with “counterrevolutionary agents.”58 Following the broadcast, statements by the Ministry of Intelligence suggested that Mohammadi was the primary agent provocateur responsible for the unrest and that he had been supported by “foreign networks” to incite violence and instability. Mohammadi was later sentenced to death.59 The Revolutionary Court also tried two hundred other students and eventually sentenced three more to death for having violated public order. The sentences were ultimately commuted to prison terms, but many of the two hundred originally arrested remained in prison well into the mid-2000s.60 Crucially, President Khatami did not speak out against the criminal behavior of the Ansar-e Hezbollah until three days after the event, and then, instead of acknowledging the students’ courage, he reprimanded them for their actions: “[The protests] were against the interest of the nation, and against the policies of the government. This event is just the opposite of the political development advocated by the government.”61 On national television, he called on students “to respect law and order” as further chaos would work against the reform agenda.62 Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei referred to the dormitory attack as “a bitter and unacceptable incident,” but he also issued a statement asserting that “officials in the government, especially those in charge of public security, have been emphatically instructed to put down the corrupt and warring elements. . . . My Basiji children in particular should maintain their full alertness and through their presence in every needed scene terrify and crush down the wicked enemies.”63 In reaction to the calls for calm by Supreme Leader Khamenei and

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President Khatami, students in Ardabil canceled a previously planned protest.64 Meanwhile, in Tehran, students were chanting “Khatami, where are you? Your students have been killed.” In a letter to the newspaper Neshat, a student wrote, “They were looking for someone, they were looking for any traces of him. Yes, they were looking for Khatami, not that he would do anything about it, but simply that he would come and listen and see them cry.”65 Khatami addressed the situation again in an interview broadcast on July 13. He promised to investigate the causes behind the student unrest and announced, “We will try not to confront the violence with violence but with special and legal means.” The president noted that the “issues raised, the slogans chanted . . . are all meant to induce division and engender violence in society.”66 The students suspended their protests temporarily on July 15 to provide time for negotiations with “the government.” Their demands included the dismissal of the national chief of police, Hedayat Lotfian; the transfer of control of the police to the (reformist) Interior Ministry; the dismissal of Ansar-e Hezbollah members from security forces and the military; the public trial of those responsible for the dormitory attack; the return of the bodies of the students killed in the dormitory attack to their families; and a lifting of the ban on Salam. None of these demands were met.67 Conspicuously absent from the July student protests was a figure who could have negotiated between the regime and the demonstrators. Khatami was a politician, not a civil society activist. He was the softliner among the incumbents, in need of an interlocutor from the moderate opposition. However, none of the journalists and editors, on behalf of whom the students demonstrated, intervened as a spokesperson or arbiter between the government and the demonstrators. None of the civil society activists from the new association for the protection of journalists, the Bar Association, or the newly registered political parties took on a leading role during the week of unrest. No one performed the crucial functions of, on the one hand, sustaining public pressure against the government and, on the other, preventing an escalation of the situation. All the reformist press did was that two newspapers announced

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their intention to suspend publication on July 13 in support of Salam.68 A statement signed by 583 journalists expressed its outrage over the new press law.69 Retrospective analyses of the July 1999 events raise important questions about the politics of repression and dissent in the Islamic Republic at the time. Twenty-four high commanders from the IRGC wrote a letter to President Khatami on July 12 (published a week later)70 in which they criticized the government’s mild handling of the protesters and warned “the Guards’ patience has its limits.”71 An article in the London Sunday Times on July 18 suggested there were indications of an attempted coup against Khatami and his government. While the confrontations between students and the Ansar-e Hezbollah at the dormitories on July 8 probably resulted from spontaneous actions, what followed over the rest of the week “had all the hallmarks of a well-orchestrated covert action, using mobs to discredit and reverse a popular movement,”72 so that Khatami would be obliged to distance himself from the protesters. Similar suppositions were voiced in Neshat on July 15, 1999. Whether or not hard-liners in the Ministry of Intelligence had intended to use the popular uprising in order to discredit the reform movement and force either the resignation of Khatami or his estrangement from the student movement, the week of July 8–15, 1999, had precisely this effect. Two months later, August 27– 29, 1999, during a visit to Hamadan Province, Khatami commented on the protests in retrospect. He criticized the July 8 attack on the dormitories as “a crime” but said that what happened after July 8 “was an effort to go beyond the boundaries. It was to express vengeance towards the system, . . . an act against national security with deviant slogans[,] . . . a scenario to distort fundamental slogans[,] . . . a declaration of war against the president.”73 The 2000 Parliamentary Elections and the Final Crackdown on the Press

In the preparation for the 2000 parliamentary elections, the most serious measures against the press occurred. In a speech on April 20, 2000, Supreme Leader Khamenei ordered a mass attack on the press: “There are

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ten to fifteen papers writing as if they are directed from one center undermining Islamic and revolutionary principles, insulting constitutional bodies and creating tension and discord in society. . . . Unfortunately, the same enemy who wants to overthrow the [regime] has found a base in the country. . . . Some of the press have become the base of the enemy.”74 Within ten days of the speech, twenty-five of the country’s leading newspapers and magazines were closed, including Asr-e Azadegan, Fat’h, Aftab-e Emruz, Arya, Gozaresh-e Ruz, Bamdad-e No, Payam-e Azadi, Azad, Payam-e Hajar, Aban, Arzesh, Iran-e Farda, Sobh-e Emruz, Akhbar Eqtesad, Jebheh, Awa Gozaresh-e Rouz, Ham’mihan, Khordad, and Bayan. Also among the banned newspapers was Mosharekat, published by the IIFP (the reformists’ strongest faction), as well as the monthly intellectual magazine Kian, originally founded by the religious intellectuals Abdolkarim Soroush, Mohsen Kadivar, and Mohammad Mojtahed Shabestari. The closures were particularly painful in that reformists now had limited means to disseminate their programs and list of candidates to the larger public, as well as to highlight the achievements of the Khatami presidency, despite the domestic setbacks. As if the discrediting of the student movement and the closure of the most important reformist newspapers was not enough, the regime engaged in two more clampdowns before the 2000 parliamentary elections. A few weeks after the onslaught on the press, some seventeen leading Iranian reformist intellectuals and politicians who attended a conference in Germany on the future of reform in Iran (the 2000 Berlin Conference) were arrested. These included the investigative journalist Akbar Ganji and the dissident cleric Hasan Yousefi Eshkevari. On January 13, 2001, the Revolutionary Court convicted seven of the participants on vague charges concerning “national security,” “propaganda against the state,” and “insulting Islam” and sentenced them to two to fifteen years in prison (fifteen years for Ganji). Yousefi Eshkevari, who was tried in the Special Court for the Clergy (SCC), was sentenced to death.75 A few weeks later, the core members of the Center for Strategic Studies, the think tank affiliated with the presidential office, were under attack. Mashallah Shamsolvaezin was jailed for having criticized the Iranian policy of capital punishment, and Said Hajjarian barely survived

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an assassination attempt, when he was shot in the face. He has been paralyzed ever since. In addition to closing the large majority of reformist newspapers and incarcerating some of the key intellectuals of the reform movement, the conservative parliament passed a last-minute bill that raised the voting age from sixteen to eighteen, evidently in order to cut out the fraction of the vote most likely to be cast for the reformist candidates. Despite these major setbacks, Khatami’s supporters once again surprised the regime: reformist factions won a robust two-thirds majority with 215 of 290 seats at the 2000 parliamentary elections, and turnout reached another high with 69 percent.

Closing in on the Last Zones of Autonomy The Judiciary and Authoritarian Consolidation

While the reformists had now expanded their presence from the presidency via the municipal councils into the national legislature, the conservatives increasingly used the judiciary to repress dissent. On March 18, 2001, the Tehran Revolutionary Court ordered the closure of the religious-nationalist Iran Freedom Movement of Mehdi Bazargan (the first prime minister after the revolution) on charges of attempting to overthrow the Islamic Republic. While the Political Parties Law provided that any court might take action against a political party only after receiving an official complaint from the Article 10 Commission in the Ministry of Interior that also issues licenses, the Revolutionary Court closed down the party nevertheless and in violation of the law. The Court also used the opportunity to order the arrest and detention of twenty-one of its leading members (mostly legal scholars, engineers, and physicians), as well as independent political activists around the country on suspicion of being associated with the Freedom Movement. The parliament objected. In an open letter, the MPs protested the illicit closure, objected to the fact that the accused members of the Freedom Movement had been denied access to lawyers, and that some had been held in (what was supposed to be “temporary”) solitary confinement for more than five months.76

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Once again, despite these major confrontations between hardliners and reformists, Khatami emerged victorious from the 2001 presidential election and reached a mandate for change 8 percentage points higher than that of 1997: 78 percent. In a national survey held during the electoral campaign, 90.5 percent of Iranians supported either reform or fundamental change of the political process.77 During the same summer, the six nonclerical jurists of the Guardian Council were to be appointed by suggestion of the judiciary and confirmation by the parliament. The MPs opposed the list of suggested names submitted by the head of the judiciary and in particular the planned appointment of at least two ultraconservative candidates. Conservatives, meanwhile, were anxious not to lose control of the Guardian Council as this might have enabled Khatami and the reformist parliament to pass extensive political and social reform packages. The standoff between the legislature and the judiciary forced a delay in swearing Khatami in for a second term as president. Finally, in August 2001, the Supreme Leader called on the Expediency Council to resolve the standoff between the parliament and the judiciary. Instead of reviewing the judiciary’s and the parliament’s arguments and attempting arbitration, the Expediency Council under the leadership of former President Rafsanjani unilaterally rewrote the laws concerning the appointment of members of the Guardian Council such that parliamentary confirmation required only relative and no longer absolute majorities. It also rewrote a law to the effect that for the president’s inauguration only two-thirds (rather than all) of the Guardian Council members had to be present.78 Despite these setbacks, the reformist factions in parliament remained committed to reforming the justice system. A 1994 justice reform had combined the civil and criminal courts in so-called general courts, and, with devastating consequences for habeas corpus, had merged the functions of the investigator, the prosecutor, and the judge in the judge—similar to the qadi in traditional Shari‘a courts.79 The 2001 parliament passed a law that would reestablish the prosecution and strengthen the rights of the accused.80 Predictably, the Guardian Council blocked it.81 Hopes to improve the rule of law were further dashed when the third economic and social five-year plan contained an article (187) that instituted a new regulation permitting the judiciary to arbitrarily confer

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the title of “lawyer” and “jurist” to applicants who were not admitted to the bar. For decades, one of the main responsibilities of the Bar Association had been to select and certify lawyers through a competitive examination. It could penalize and take disciplinary actions against lawyers who violated the ethical code of the profession. With the new regulation, the neutrality of the legal profession was further eroded. Lawyers now had to fear collusion with judges and jurists directly certified by the judiciary. Political Law

The Iranian situation exhibits graphically the dominance of what the legal theorist Ugo Mattei calls “political law” over “professional law.”82 In a rule of law state, law is professionalized and apolitical, in that the legal and political arenas are differentiated and political decisionmaking itself is subjected to law. “Political law,” by contrast, is a product of political administrations and not protected from the interference of political incumbents. Mattei’s description of political law powerfully resonates with the situation in the Islamic Republic generally but under the two Khatami presidencies in particular. One witnessed repeatedly how the ultraconservatives arbitrarily used law and the judiciary to their advantage, how they might even expand the power of the unelected positions in the polity by transforming reformist bills from the parliament into bills that would further consolidate authoritarian rule, and how intervention by the Supreme Leader in judicial matters in defiance of the Constitution became a well-established practice. When Hashem Aghajari, a professor of history at Tarbiat Modarres University, gave a speech in June 2002 commemorating the death of Ali Shariati, he used the occasion to remind his young audience of Shariati’s motivation for rejecting quietism and emphasizing political responsibility as a religious duty. What Iran needed now was a reformation that reversed the authoritarian trend of absolute clerical hegemony, Aghajari suggested. Islam could not be practiced freely in an environment that did not respect human rights. A few weeks later, Aghajari was convicted for apostasy and sentenced to death. The sentence set off protests across the country until the Supreme Court repealed it in February 2003 and sent the case back for retrial to the very court that

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had ordered the execution. The court reinstated the original sentence, upon which Aghajari was expected to appeal to the Supreme Leader for pardon. Aghajari, however, refused to appeal the ruling, announcing, “Those who have issued this verdict have to implement it if they think it is right or else the judiciary has to handle it.”83 Once again, protests erupted until the Supreme Court (illegally, because according to the law it does not enjoy that prerogative) commuted the verdict to a prison term of three years in jail, two years of probation, and five years’ suspension of his social rights. Five years into the reform era, 108 major dailies and periodicals had been banned. When the sixth parliament tried to protect the press by drafting a new press law, the Supreme Leader intervened and ended all discussions about such a bill. In an unprecedented step, he did not wait for the bill to be vetoed by the Guardian Council but instead personally intervened in the legislative process in clear violation of the Constitution and in defiance of Khatami’s agenda to strengthen the rule of law. Khatami and the reformists attempted one final push toward political and legal reform when they introduced two bills into the parliament that would have limited the Guardian Council’s power of “approbatory supervision” of elections and would have enabled the president to warn and prosecute officials in the three branches of power who overstepped their competencies. After nearly two years of back-and-forth between the parliament and the Guardian Council, during which the Council not only rejected the “twin bills” but also tried to rewrite them in a way that would have strengthened the power of the unelected institutions even further, President Khatami announced that he was going to withdraw the bills in March 2003. The incoming parliament, he feared, might otherwise use the legislation to reduce presidential powers further. All in all, the Guardian Council vetoed 111 of 295 legislative proposals between 2000 and 2004. A Movement Breaks Apart

Reflecting on the years 1997– 2005, Bayat notes, “The initial strategy of mobilizing from below and negotiating from above seemed to have failed. The reform movement was instead the target of onslaught from above and disenchantment from below.”84

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Seven years after Khatami’s sensational victory, Iran News proclaimed the death of the reform movement.85 The two major proposals Khatami’s alliance had produced in parliament in order to restrict the extensive powers of the Guardian Council and to strengthen those political institutions accountable to the people had repeatedly been rejected by the Guardian Council. Khatami’s early initiatives to boost civil society had worn off too. In 2004 there were more journalists imprisoned in Iran than in any other state in the world. Political parties had not, as envisioned, become the vehicles for mass mobilization around salient issues; and the student movements, the population that was most “mobilizable,” had been alienated from the reformist project after July 1999 when they felt protection by reformist politicians was lacking. In a move to curtail prospects that the reformists had a future, the Guardian Council six weeks before the 2004 parliamentary elections disqualified 30 percent of all candidates, among them eighty-seven sitting parliamentarians. Reacting to the collective resignation of 122 MPs on February 1, 2004, the candidacy of three parliamentarians was reinstated, but no other action followed. Of the original twenty-two groups of the Khordad Front, the umbrella coalition of reformist factions that enjoyed a two-thirds majority in parliament, only eight ultimately competed.86 The largest reform party, the IIFP, along with fifteen other original members of the Khordad Front, boycotted the elections and withdrew its candidates. The clerical association MRM, meanwhile, did decide to participate, in a clear illustration of waning solidarity and cohesion among the reformist factions. Days before the election, President Khatami, along with the minister of the interior and the twenty-seven reformist provincial governors, threatened to step down should the list of disqualified candidates not be revised. However, like numerous occasions before, the president did not live up to this threat, despite the hard-liners’ failure to cooperate.87 Quite to the contrary, he backed Supreme Leader Khamenei’s edict that “voting was an Islamic duty” days before the election, despite the fact that his own brother, leader of the IIPF and disqualified candidate himself, had successfully mobilized the majority of reformist factions for a boycott.88 After seven years of political opportunities in the executive and four years in parliament, the reformist project was thus “checkmate,” as

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the conservative daily Keyhan sarcastically noted following the February 2004 elections.89 With these elections, reformists had lost their dominion in parliament, and when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected to the presidency in 2005, the reform movement, for the moment, seemed to have come to a tragic end.

Conclusion

Alfred Stepan has outlined as the five core tasks of democratic opposition resisting integration into the regime, disputing its legitimacy, raising the costs of authoritarian rule, creating a credible democratic alternative, and guarding zones of autonomy. The reformists, both in political and civil society, had successfully resisted integration into the regime (not the most difficult task to achieve in the Iranian context, where worldviews and ideologies of ultraconservatives and reformists run diametrically opposed to each other). By achieving the exponential growth in print media and by raising the quality of reporting, the reformists had also successfully disputed the regime’s legitimacy. When reformists were voted out of parliament in 2004 and the presidency in 2005, it was not because voters had renewed confidence in the regime’s legitimacy but because reformists had proven unable to deliver on their promises of political, social, and economic reform. The vote for Ahmadinejad in 2005 was, like the vote for Khatami in 1997, predominantly a protest vote. Initially, the reformists had also been quite successful in raising the costs of authoritarian rule, notably by attempting in a number of ways to hold politicians accountable and strengthen the rule of law and prosecute transgressions and by mobilizing protesters against media closures. As is also documented, the reformists were quite successful in creating a credible democratic alternative.90 President Khatami himself was a leading voice in this discourse who in his writings laid out the reasons why political power needed checks and balances and why, if unchecked, it had a corrupting effect to which even religious authorities were not immune. He was supported in this by the writings of Abdolkarim Soroush, Mohsen Kadivar, Hasan Yousefi Eshkevari, and Mohammad Mojtahed Shabestari—all religious intellectuals and clerics once

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supportive of the Islamic Revolution whose politico-religious thought made a 180-degree turn in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when it became clear that the nature of power in the Islamic Republic hardly differed from that under the previous regime. The democratic theory these intellectuals developed was a major impetus for the mobilization of the Iranian public in support of the reformist project and soon reached audiences beyond Iran. Yet the task that the reformist project did not achieve was guarding zones of autonomy. By contrast, a history of the eight years of attempted political reform in Iran reads like a chronology of systematic exclusion and elimination of regime critics and the gradual but inexorable process of authoritarian consolidation. While President Khatami initiated a number of reforms to construct and consolidate zones of autonomy vis-à-vis the regime—by liberalizing the press, by establishing municipal elections for the first time in the republic’s history, by promoting the professionalization of political parties, and by attempting to reform parts of the legal and justice system—the Supreme Leader’s office and its representatives reacted quickly (and often preemptively) to draw such emerging zones of autonomy back into their realm of control. Authoritarian consolidation started with the mysterious murder of several independent intellectuals and writers in 1996 and 1997, and these events were soon followed by many others: the violent crackdown on a weeklong uprising by the student movement in the capital and other cities in 1999; the merciless mass closures of critical newspapers and magazines in 1999 and 2000; the closure of the Iran Freedom Movement in 2002 and persecution of its members; the marginalization of the Bar Association with the certification of lawyers through the judiciary in the same year; the Guardian Council’s rejection of a third of all legislative proposals passed by the reformist parliament between 2000 and 2004, including the twin bills that would have expanded the purview of the elected institutions; the final blow to reformist parliamentary factions with the widespread disqualifications prior to the 2004 elections; and, throughout this process, the systematic violations of law and human rights. Not only were reformists not able to deliver on their promise of political, social, and economic reform, but they also were not able to halt the very significant erosion of the rule of law

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during that time period. If anything, challenging the Supreme Leader through legal channels was harder in 2005 than it had been in 1997. By attempting to use all potential openings and opportunities the 1979 Constitution offered for “reform from within,” the reformists had brought these very opportunities to light. Ultraconservatives soon understood the urgency of closing these windows of opportunity, and along the way mastered the game of putting the law and the judiciary into their service.

Notes I thank Said Amir Arjomand for providing helpful comments on this chapter. In the interest of easier readability, no diacritics are used in Persian transliterations. 1. Polity classifies countries on a scale of –10 to +10 annually. Countries with a score of +7 and above are generally considered democratic. Before 1997 and after 2003 Iran was scored at –6. 2. This is true for Brazil after 1963 and Chile after 1973. Iran between 1997 and 2003 was also considered freer than ever in its past, including the first democratic interlude between 1941 and 1953. The degree of freedom in that period is in itself noteworthy. Iran was freer and more competitive between 1941 and 1953 than East Germany ever was (until 1989), than Spain ever was under Franco, than Portugal was under Salazar, or than Italy ever was before 1948. 3. Alfred Stepan, “On the Tasks of Democratic Opposition,” Journal of Democracy 1, no. 2 (Spring 1990): 41– 49. The other four core tasks are resisting integration into the regime, disputing its legitimacy, raising the costs of authoritarian rule, and creating a credible democratic alternative. I have written elsewhere on the Iranian opposition’s project to create a credible democratic alternative. See Mirjam Künkler, “Democratization, Islamic Thought and Social Movements: Coalitional Success and Failure in Indonesia and Iran” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2008), chap. 6. 4. Characteristically, Khatami’s campaign slogans were “Pluralism and democracy—observance of the rule of law—implementation of the Constitution.” In light of the importance of the creation of order and the rule of law in moving the country toward political liberalization, “implementation of the Constitution” became a key aspect of the Khatami presidency. On the need for oppositional actors to create impartial and effective state institutions and strengthen the rule of law as a means to achieve political liberalization, see Eva Bellin, “The Robustness of Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Exceptionalism

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in Comparative Perspective,” Comparative Politics 36, no. 2 (2004): 139– 57. “To a large degree, order comes prior to democracy” (152). Khatami and the reformist factions had recognized this and directed their greatest efforts toward ensuring decision and policy making in accordance with the mandates prescribed in the Constitution and books of law. 5. Daniel Byman, Shahram Chubin, Anoushiravan Ehteshami, and Jerrold Green, eds., Iran’s Security Policy in the Post-Revolutionary Era (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2001), 49. 6. Several organizations are responsible for internal and external security: the intelligence services, the IRGC (Revolutionary Guards), and the regular army (Artesh). While the IRGC are more focused on the defense of the revo lution vis-à-vis “internal enemies,” the Artesh is entrusted with the country’s defense against external threats. Under article 110 of the 1979 Constitution, the Supreme Leader retains the right to declare “general troop mobilization,” and he is the supreme commander of both the IRGC and the Artesh. Although Khamenei does not often play a role in the day-to-day concerns, he guides the general direction of security policy through his representatives in the security institutions, especially the National Security Council, and the military Islamic commissars of which an estimated two thousand work under the Supreme Leader’s direction. 7. Byman et al., Iran’s Security Policy in the Post-Revolutionary Era, 49. See also Wilfried Buchta, Who Rules Iran? The Structure of Power in the Islamic Republic (Washington, DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2000), 125, whose source is an interview with Hojjatoleslam Mohammad Abtahi in the Arab weekly magazine Al-Sharq al-Wasat, October 5, 1998, 8. Abtahi became Khatami’s chief of staff in 1997 and in 2001 was promoted to vice president for legal and parliamentary affairs, from which he resigned in 2004 to protest the massive disqualifications prior to the parliamentary elections. 8. Buchta, Who Rules Iran?, 35. 9. Ibid. Sachedina notes that it was almost two weeks before the Friday Prayer leader of Qom, Ayatollah Javadi-Amoli, expressed satisfaction with the outcome of the elections in the Friday sermon and congratulated Khatami publicly. Abdulaziz Sachedina, “The Rule of the Religious Jurist in Iran,” in Iran at the Crossroads, ed. John L. Esposito and R. K. Ramazani (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 127– 31, 124. 10. Throughout the chapter, what is meant by “regime” is the Office of the Supreme Leader, the councils he appoints, and the institutions he controls. Even though Khatami gained the presidency, and reformist factions were in the majority in parliament in 2000– 2004, reformists were—despite all efforts, as this chapter tries to show—not in charge and could ultimately not determine the state’s domestic and foreign policy. 11. The parliamentary speaker also sits ex officio on the Expediency Council, which directly advises the Supreme Leader and “resolves” disputes

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between the parliament and the Guardian Council. If the Guardian Council has vetoed a bill passed by parliament, the parliament may decide with a twothirds majority to forward the bill to the Expediency Council, which may then decide to pass it as law in the original version of the parliament, or with the changes demanded by the Guardian Council, or in an entirely different version drafted by itself. 12. The coalition called Second Khordad Front, signifying the date of the Persian calendar when Khatami had been elected president, consisted of twentytwo factions, among which the Assembly of Combatant Clerics (of which Kha tami is a member), the Participation Front of Islamic Iran (headed by Khatami’s brother), the Solidarity Party of Islamic Iran, and the Executives of Construction Party under Rafsanjani were the most prominent. In Tehran, the latter broke away from the coalition shortly before the 2000 election. 13. The range is due to the fact that many independent candidates cannot be unequivocally classified. 14. See the election results on the Iran Data Portal constructed by my colleague Mehrzad Boroujerdi and me, www.princeton.edu/irandataportal/ elections/parl/2000. 15. Though it did not remain competitive for long, Iran certainly qualified between 1997 and 2001 as what Levitsky and Way designate a “competitive authoritarian regime” in which some degree of contestation in key arenas of the overall authoritarian polity exists. These four arenas of contestation are the legislature, elections, the media, and the courts. See Steve Levitsky and Lucan Way, “The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism,” Journal of Democracy 13, no. 2 (2002): 51– 65. In Iran, reformers and conservatives competed in three of these four areas: in the realm of the press in 1999 and 2000 (see below), in the realm of the legislature from 2000 to 2004, and in elections in 1997, 1999, 2000, and 2001. Only in the realm of the courts did the reformists have no influence whatsoever, and it was this bastion of power of the ultraconservatives that brought the reformists to their knees. 16. See Robert Dahl, On Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), chap. 4. 17. While four religions are tolerated as minority religions (Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Armenian Christianity, and Assyrian Christianity) and may each vote for one parliamentary representative (Armenian Christians for two), conversion from Islam is punishable as “apostasy” by death. It is not possible to register no religious affiliation. 18. According to Article 96 of the Constitution, “The determination of compatibility of the legislation passed by the Islamic Consultative Assembly [parliament] with the laws of Islam rests with the majority vote of the fuqaha¯’ [Islamic jurists] on the Guardian Council; and the determination of its compatibility with the Constitution rests with the majority of all the members of the Guardian Council.” According to Article 98, “The authority of the interpretation

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of the Constitution is vested with the Guardian Council, which is to be done with the consent of three-fourths of its members.” A bill is passed into law after it is passed by the parliament, approved by the Guardian Council, and signed by the president. In case of a Guardian Council veto, the parliament has the option of shelving the bill, agreeing to the Guardian Council’s demanded changes, or voting with a two-thirds majority to forward it to the Expediency Council. For the latter case, see note 11. 19. On the Expediency Council, see note 11. 20. Mohammad Khatami, Islam, Dialogue, and Civil Society (Canberra: Australia National University Press, 2000), 43. 21. Ibid., 5. 22. See Hamid Reza Jalaeipour, “Religious Intellectuals and Political Action in the Reform Movement,” in Intellectual Trends in 20th-Century Iran, ed. Negin Nabavi (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2003), 136– 46, esp. 138. 23. More precisely, Mohajerani’s deputy in charge of press affairs, Ahmad Burqani, should be credited with having initiated the press upsurge. 24. See Asef Bayat, Making Islam Democratic (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 110. 25. See Jalaiepour, “Religious Intellectuals and Political Action in the Reform Movement.” Bayat claims circulation rose to 3 million by 1999 and estimates that each newspaper was read by four individuals on average, which would raise newspaper readership to 12 million a day. See Bayat, Making Islam Democratic. 26. See Bill Samii, “Sisyphus’ Newsstand: The Iranian Press under Khatami,” MERIA Journal 5, no. 3 (September 2001): 1–14. Jame‘eh was closed down after it had leaked a quote by IRGC General Rahim Safavi to the effect that the Revolutionary Guards were ready to “cut the throats and tongues” of the emerging free press. 27. Despite the protection one might assume Faezeh Rafsanjani enjoyed within the regime, even Zan was closed down in 1999. 28. The permit is issued not by the minister alone. It involves a commission within the ministry on which two representatives of the judiciary sit, as well as two members of parliament and a representative of the ministry. The commission may also order the dissolution of parties. 29. Resalat, August 4, 1997, quoted in Stephen Fairbanks, “Theocracy versus Democracy: Iran Considers Political Parties,” Middle East Journal 52, no. 1 (Winter 1998): 17– 31, esp. 29. 30. Ibid., 28. 31. Until 1999 elections had been held only for the parliament (every four years), the presidency (every four years), and the Assembly of Experts (every eight years). Article 100 of the Constitution reads, “In order to expedite social, economic, development, public health, cultural, and educational programmes

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and facilitate other affairs relating to public welfare with the cooperation of the people according to local needs, the administration of each village, division, city, municipality, and province will be supervised by a council to be named the Village, Division, City, Municipality, or Provincial Council. Members of each of these councils will be elected by the people of the locality in question.” 32. Numbers cited by Mustafa Mo‘in, Minister of Higher Education, in No Rouz, 11 Tir 1380 (2001). 33. See Bayat, Making Islam Democratic, 109. 34. The ultraconservative JRM is closely connected to the Society of Instructors of the Qom Seminaries (Jame‘eh-ye Modarresin-e Hawzeh-ye Elmiyyeh Qom), which plays a key role in installing Friday Prayer leaders in the country and keeping a registry of clerical personalities (and thereby certifying who counts as an ayatollah versus a (lower-ranking) hojjatoleslam, etc.). Two other influential associations close to the JRM are the traditionalist merchants of the bazaar organized in the Islamic Coalition (Mo’talefeh-ye Islami) and the Society of Muslim Engineers (Jame‘eh-ye Islami Mohandessin), of which President Ahmadinejad is a member. The network of these four organizations is closely linked with the broadcast media and the parastatal endowments (bonyads), which are thought to control as much as one-fourth of the country’s GDP, are tax exempt and not subject to financial audits. 35. Notably, many of Khatami’s clerical supporters and close confidants were MRM members, and the MRM played a major role in mobilizing voters during Khatami’s election in 1997. 36. Karrubi, however, left the MRM after the association failed to endorse him as its presidential candidate in 2005. 37. Cited in Bayat, Making Islam Democratic, 111. 38. Transcript of interview with Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, January 7, 1998; www.cnn.com/WORLD/9801/07/iran/interview.html (retrieved March 15, 2004). 39. Notably, Nouri was accused of, inter alia, giving publicity to Ayatollah Montazeri. Nouri was sentenced to five years in prison in November 1999 but released early in 2002, following the death of his brother. For his defense speech, see Abdollah Nouri, Shawkaran-e eslah: defaiyat-e Abdollah Nouri dar dadgah-e vizheh-ye ruhaniyat (Tehran, 2000). Nouri’s deputy in charge of press affairs, Ahmad Burqani, resigned after the first set of closures in early 1999 and was replaced by Shaaban Shahidi, former head of external services of the staterun radio, another close aide to Khatami. In January 2000, it was reported that the National Control and Inspection Organization had charged Burqani with allocating foreign currency to the press on a preferential basis. See Tehran Times, January 9, 2000. The October 13, 1999, issues of the reformist dailies Aftab-e Emruz and Manateq-e Azad, however, printed reports from the ministry to the

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effect that hard-line publications received 23.57 percent of foreign exchange distributed among the press, while reformist newspapers received only 5.67 percent of the subsidies. The articles note that the hard-line newspapers Kayhan and Resalat alone received three times more money from the ministry than Sobh-e Emruz, Khordad, Salam, Neshat, and other reformist dailies together. The editor of one of the reformist dailies pointed these articles out to me during an interview on September 18, 2003. 40. Cited in Ziba Mir-Hosseini and Richard Tapper, Islam and Democracy in Iran: Eshkevari and the Quest for Reform (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), 106. I have corrected the translation. 41. Navid Kermani, Die Revolution der Kinder (München: C. H. Beck, 2001). 42. “The murder network is located abroad,” a judicial spokesman was quoted as saying at that time. “As Slain Secular Writer Is Buried, Iran Blames a Foreign Network,” New York Times, December 16, 1998. 43. In her autobiography Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi recounts how, being the lawyer of one of the victims’ family, she studied the case files only to find out that she, too, was on the very list of “undesirable subjects” sought to be eradicated. See Shirin Ebadi, Iran Awakening: From Prison to Peace Prize: One Woman’s Struggle at the Crossroads of History (New York: Knopf, 2006). 44. The International Commission of Jurists records several violations in the proceedings of the cases against the “serial killers”: “Only five defendants, who were accused of being the main perpetrators of the killings, were in custody, whereas other suspected accomplices remained free on bail. The lawyers of the victims’ families were denied access to the case files. The identity of the defendants and the specific charges against them are still not known. Furthermore, any criticism of the actions of the judiciary and the conditions of the trial received harsh punishments from the judiciary. Several citizens, including journalists and lawyers of the victims’ families were arrested and prosecuted merely for criticizing the actions of the judiciary in connection with the case.” See International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), Attacks on Justice 2002—Iran, 11th ed. (2002), 200, available at www.icj.org//news.php3?id_ article=2685&lang=en. 45. The Court of the Clergy is not under the purview of the judiciary but under the aegis of the Supreme Leader, who may refer any case to the court at his own discretion. See Mirjam Künkler, “The Special Court of the Clergy (Dadgah-e Vizheh-ye Ruhaniyat) and the Repression of Dissident Clergy in Iran,” in Constitutionalism, the Rule of Law, and the Politics of Administration in Egypt and Iran, ed. Said Arjomand and Nathan Brown (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012). Under the new law, journalists and publishers have to reveal all their sources and the responsibility for the published material is no longer limited to the editor but extended to photographers,

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journalists, and publishers. The law was passed on July 7, 1999, with 125 votes in the 270-member house (55 members of the parliament being absent at that time). See Ramin Karimian and Shabanali Bahrampour, “Iranian Press Update,” Middle East Report, no. 212 (Autumn 1999): 38– 39. 46. The managing director of Salam and chairman of DTV, Mohammad Musavi-Khoeiniha, was tried by the Special Court for the Clergy on July 25, 1999, for “spreading fabrications,” “disturbing public opinion,” and “publishing classified documents.” See Künkler, “The Special Court of the Clergy.” 47. The Ansar-e Hezbollah is one of several paramilitary militias. Like most of the paramilitaries, such as Ansar-e Velayat, Ashura and Zahra battalions, it was created in the 1990s to “protect clerical authorities” and to handle problems of popular unrest. Each of these militias typically consists of about 10,000 to 12,000 members. See The Military Balance (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2008). 48. Human Rights Watch (HRW), World Report 2000, suggests that at least four students were killed, 300 wounded, and 400 arrested. 49. RFL/RL Iran Report, July 19, 1999, vol. 2, no. 29. 50. Amnesty International Index: MDE 13/16/99, “Further information on UA 160/99 (MDE 13/15/99, 9 July 1999)—Fear for Safety.” See also RFL/RL Iran Report, July 19, 1999, vol. 2, no. 29, which provides interesting background on the reporting of the event on national television: “After 9 minutes of video and commentary about the damage and the funeral of a casualty in Tabriz, there was a 3-minute piece about U.S., Israeli, and Mujahedin Khalq support for the demonstrations. Then 10 minutes of Khatami saying the demonstrations harmed the system and some people were taking advantage of the situation, was followed by 9 minutes of commentary condemning the BBC and State Department spokesman James Rubin for their statements about the demonstration.” 51. Since the police and vigilante groups were responsible for the attacks on the dormitories, it seemed that the Ministry of Interior was not in control. It is likely that the ministry, although reformist, issued this statement to establish some authority in the situation. 52. Douglas Jehl, “Despite Police Dismissals, Iran Protest Is the Angriest Yet,” New York Times, July 12, 1999. 53. Iran Press Service, July 11, 2000. 54. AFP, July 13, 1999. 55. Khatami refused to accept Mo‘in’s resignation, however. 56. Amnesty International, July 13, 1999; and RFL/RL Iran Report, July 19, 1999, vol. 2, no. 29. 57. Ibid. 58. Amnesty International, “Iran: Further Information on Fear for Safety: Student Demonstrators,” AI index: MDE 13/14/99.

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59. Ibid. This was later commuted to thirteen years of imprisonment. 60. The International Commission of Jurists notes, “According to a declaration by the head of the Tehran Revolutionary Court, Hojjatoleslam Gholamhossein Rahbarpour, in September 1999, 1,500 students were arrested during the riots, 500 were released after questioning, 800 were released subsequently and formal investigations were undertaken against 200. . . . In October 2000, Amir Farshad Ibrahimi, a former member of a vigilante group, was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for defamation after he stated in a videotape that Ansare Hezbollah vigilantes had received payments from senior clerics and conservative politicians to carry out attacks on reformist personalities and to disrupt public events and demonstrations.” See ICJ, Attacks on Justice, 18. It is not inconceivable that the Ansar-e Hezbollah might have received funding from clerics or other elements in the regime to fight the demonstrations. See note 47 above. 61. BBC, “Six Days That Shook Iran,” Tuesday, July 11, 2000, http:// news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/middle_east/828696.stm. 62. “Protesting in Tehran,” The Economist, July 15, 1999. 63. Tehran Times, July 15, 1999. Khamenei also warned, “Watch out for the enemy. . . . Try to see the invisible hands; try to recognize those who are behind it.” He blamed the “spy agencies of the world,” and America specifically, for the unrest and incited chants of “Death to America, Death to Britain, Death to Monafeqin [hypocrites] and Saddam, Death to Israel.” See RFL/RL Iran Report, July 19, 1999, vol. 2, no. 29. 64. RFL/RL Iran Report, July 19, 1999, vol. 2, no. 29. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid. 67. Lotfian was replaced in June 2000 by Brigadier-General Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, who hitherto had served in the Revolutionary Guards Air Force and ran against Ahmadinejad in the 2005 presidential elections. He thereafter succeeded Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as mayor of Tehran. 68. Jehl, “Despite Police Dismissals, Iran Protest Is the Angriest Yet.” 69. Iran Press Service, July 11, 2000. 70. The letter was published in the July 19 issues of the conservative newspapers Jomhuri-ye Islami and Kayhan. 71. “We have been forced to shut our eyes, remain silent and watch the wilting of a flower which blossomed as a result of 14 centuries of Shia and Muslim suffering. . . . How long should we have revolutionary patience while the system is being destroyed?” See RFL/RL Iran Report, August 1, 1999, vol. 2, no. 31. 72. Ibid. 73. RFL/RL Iran Report, August 2, 1999, vol. 2, no. 31. 74. On September 19 Reuters reported that “Iranian vigilantes” raided a bookshop in the city of Isfahan, seizing seven hundred books, as well as maga -

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zines and compact disks deemed anti-Islamic. A member of the Ansar-e Velayat said in an interview that “the books seized in the attack were written by secular Iranian writers and Western philosophers including Jean-Paul Sartre.” All these books had been licensed by the censorship office of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, but one of the attackers said, “The books were corrupting, anti-religious and deviant. . . . Our brothers confiscated them in a popular and spontaneous act after being tipped off by pious people.” See International Press Institute, World Press Freedom Review, Iran (2000). 75. He was later “pardoned” by the Supreme Leader and the sentence reduced to a prison term. 76. ICJ, Attacks on Justice, 200. 77. Quoted in Hossein Seifzadeh, The Landscape of Factional Politics in Iran, in MEI Commentary, 20 August 2002. 78. Samii, “Dissent in Iranian Elections.” 79. Sami Zubaida, Law and Power in the Islamic World (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003), 186, 201. 80. The reform also transferred family jurisdiction from the civil courts to newly established family courts where women may now serve as “legal advisers,” albeit not judges. 81. In 2006 the prosecution was finally reinstated but only for lowerlevel criminal courts, not for the military, press, clerical, revolutionary, and upper-level criminal courts. 82. Mattei has developed a typology of legal systems, which suggests that societies have historically — irrespective of cultural and geopolitical experience— moved through several stages in the relationship between law, society, and power before a state of the rule of law was reached. The early state of “traditional law” is replaced with the formation of the modern state, which standardizes and systematizes law and places it under political administration. Law at this stage is “political law.” Ugo Mattei, “Three Patterns of Law: Taxonomy and Change in the World’s Legal Systems,” American Journal of Comparative Law 45, no. 1 (1997): 5– 44. 83. See “Profile: Iranian Academic Facing Death,” BBC, December 2, 2002, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2518835.stm (accessed June 1, 2005). 84. Bayat, Making Islam Democratic, 130. 85. Iran News, February 4, 2004, in ODVV Newsletter 246, February 4, 2004. 86. On the recommendation of the Supreme Leader, the Guardian Council revised the list and reduced the number of disqualified candidates from 3,605 to 2,500 (of 8,175) but not to the advantage of members of reformist parties. At the same time, it added three more serving parliamentarians from reformist parties to the original 84. See Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ), “Machtdemonstration des Wächterrates,” February 1, 2004.

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87. In addition to these, five reformist ministers, four vice presidents, one presidential advisor, the government spokesman, and seventy-six deputy ministers threatened resignation, which, as the head of the electoral supervisory board later pointed out, would be “subject to prosecution under the current circumstances.” See ODVV Newsletter 244, January 25, 2004. 88. Only seven years after Khatami’s spectacular victory in 1997, former ministers, directors of think tanks, publishing houses, and newly established civic associations found themselves in Iran’s most notorious Evin prison. Those that have been released since remain mostly silent and on the margins of public engagement. 89. See Mahan Abedin, “Iran after the Elections,” Middle East Intelligence Bulletin 6, no. 2– 3. 90. See Künkler, “Democratization, Islamic Thought and Social Movements,” chap. 6.

7 Executive Approval under Alternative Democratic Regime Types Ryan E. Carlin, Cecilia Martínez-Gallardo, and Jonathan Hartlyn

Among Alfred Stepan’s many contributions to the study of politics is his work on political institutions and, in particular, his research (in collaboration with Juan J. Linz and Cindy Skach) examining the differences in the institutional frameworks of parliamentarism and presidentialism and their effects on democratic survival. In what has been a long and heated debate, Stepan and his coauthors argue that parliamentary systems provide a variety of incentives that strengthen the likelihood of democratic consolidation. The case for parliamentarism built on arguments advanced by Linz (1978, 1990) and developed by him and others (Linz and Valenzuela 1994 [esp. Linz 1994 and Lijphart 1994]; Mainwaring 1993). It also relied on empirical evidence that parliamentary regimes have a better record of survival than presidential regimes. The main advantage of parliamentarism identified in these writings is that it reduces the costs of constructing governing majorities, even in multiparty settings. The incentives for coalitional cooperation, in turn, lead to increased efficacy and to a lower likelihood that executives will seek to govern in a way that circumvents the constitution or that a government crisis will escalate into a crisis of the regime or end in a military 203

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coup (Linz and Stepan 1996a; Linz and Stepan 1996b: esp. 141– 42; Stepan and Skach 1993: esp. 22). The scholarly debate regarding why presidential democracies have lower survival rates than parliamentary ones, however, is far from over. Although initial analyses appeared to substantiate the finding that lower survival rates were related to regime characteristics (in addition to work cited above, see Lijphart 1999; Przeworski et al. 2000), other scholars have disputed the specific mechanisms that underlie this relationship (e.g., Shugart and Carey 1992; Shugart and Mainwaring 1997; Cheibub 2007). Recent work has also shifted the focus from studying broad constitutional frameworks to examining government formation in presidential systems and how different types of governing coalitions affect policy success and regime survival within these systems (e.g., Altman 2000; Amorim Neto, Cox, and McCubbins 2003; Amorim Neto 2006; Cheibub, Przeworski, and Saiegh 2004; Pérez-Liñán 2007; Martínez-Gallardo 2009). The advantages of different democratic regime types in terms of governance also remain a subject of continuing debate (e.g., Gerring, Thacker, and Moreno 2009; Hellwig and Samuels 2007). In this chapter we provide an additional window into the discussion of differences across presidential and parliamentary regimes, focusing on the potential effect of regime differences on democratic accountability through citizen evaluations of executive performance. Here we understand accountability broadly as citizens’ capacity to reward or sanction elected officials (cf. Manin et al. 1999; Samuels 2004; Johnson and Schwindt-Bayer 2009; Johnson and Ryu 2010). Building on the insights advanced by Alfred Stepan, Juan Linz, and others, we develop arguments regarding the mechanisms through which different institutional frameworks translate into systematic differences in executive approval dynamics. We then use a new data set of public opinion data to present some empirical tests of these arguments. Concomitant with the emergence of an increased number and diverse types of democracies in the world, there has been a dramatic increase in the frequency and sophistication of public opinion surveys. These surveys provide an invaluable means to gauge citizen approval of political leaders between elections and provide us with what has been

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up to now a largely underexploited opportunity to test current theories on the factors that best explain executive approval in a fully crossnational setting. This new information allows us to examine the implications of different institutional configurations for the evolution of executive approval and provides a way to supplement the academic literature, which focuses on electoral accountability, by studying the evolution of citizen support for their leaders in nonelectoral periods. In the first section below we explore how differences across presidential and parliamentary systems related to electoral, party-system, and institutional characteristics lead to important differences in patterns of executive approval. More specifically, because of these differences, we expect presidents to begin their terms in office with higher levels of public approval than prime ministers, to complete their terms in office with lower levels of support, and to experience overall greater fluctuations in levels of approval. We then present an original data set on executive approval that we have constructed and explain the methodology (initially developed by James Stimson [1991, 1999]) we employ to compile and compare surveys within and across countries and discuss some cross-national results regarding differences across presidential and parliamentary regimes and within presidential regimes. These findings generally provide support for our arguments. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of future directions this research can take, advancing work in the spirit of Alfred Stepan’s inspiring research.

Executive Approval in Parliamentary and Presidential Systems

Trends in executive approval are not only widely reported in the media throughout the world but are also the theoretical focus of an extensive academic literature. One part of this literature has examined the factors that influence overall patterns in executive approval. Building from the classic work of Mueller (1970, 1973), the bulk of this literature centers on the dynamics of presidential approval in the United States (see Gronke and Newman 2003), though others have analyzed executive approval in the United Kingdom (e.g., Smith 2004; Clarke,

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Ho, and Stewart 2000; Clarke and Stewart 1995) and in other European as well as Latin American contexts. To date, analyses of factors that determine patterns of executive approval over time have focused on a number of political and economic variables. Mueller’s seminal work (1973) and much subsequent work identified three main forces affecting approval: a “honeymoon” period with initially high approval rates that decline over time; negative economic factors, which tend to hurt presidential approval; and international crises that typically generate positive “rally round the flag” spikes in approval. These issues have continued to be the focus of research and elaboration within and across countries. One such extension examines approval at the individual level rather than at the aggregate level. These studies have enabled more refined and contextualized understandings of executive approval dynamics while at the same time largely corroborating the major findings at the aggregate level (Gronke and Newman 2003: 505– 6). Another strand extends basic models built around these arguments to additional country cases. Such studies generally bear out Mueller’s theoretical expectations even in countries with significantly different socioeconomic backgrounds and democratic histories, including Russia (Mishler and Willerton 2003), Peru (Arce 2003; Morgan Kelly 2003), Uruguay (Luna 2002), and countries in Central America (Cuzán and Bundrick 1997), while revealing additional factors that affect executive approval such as political violence and ideology. In turn, other work has examined the implications of executive approval dynamics for other characteristics of the political system. Much of this literature has been focused on politics in the United States. Erickson, MacKuen, and Stimson (2002) examine its implication for macropartisanship and for election outcomes. Canes-Wrone and Shotts (2004) argue that reelection-seeking presidents are more responsive to public opinion as the next election approaches and as the president’s popularity moves from below average or above average to average, with important variations by policy issue. There has also been extensive research on the “diversionary war hypothesis,” examining whether and under what electoral or economic circumstances national executives with low approval levels seek to boost them by initiating a conflict abroad; the em-

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pirical results on this issue have been mixed (e.g., James and Oneal 1991; Gelpi 1997; Levy 1989; Morgan and Anderson 1999; Smith 1996). Also, Pérez-Liñán (2007) has examined the prominent role that sharp declines in approval rates have played in the impeachment of presidents in Latin America. What has been theorized or explored much less is whether there are significant differences in executive approval patterns across different democratic regime types and different types of institutional configurations, and what implications these differences might have for democratic accountability and governability. Differences in electoral and party politics in presidential and parliamentary regimes should lead to different patterns of executive approval by shaping the strategic environment in which leaders make decisions, as well as the environment in which citizens evaluate these decisions. We start from the definitions of presidential and parliamentary systems advanced in Stepan and Skach (1993). Presidential systems feature mutual independence between the executive and legislative branches: the legislative branch has a fixed electoral mandate that provides it with its own legitimacy, as does the president, though not necessarily the cabinet. Presidents serve fixed terms and remain in office unless they are impeached, resign, or are otherwise removed (as has in fact been the case recently in several Latin American cases; see Pérez-Liñán 2007); they can be reelected, though term limits are common. In contrast, in parliamentary systems, there is a mutual dependence between the two branches. The head of government (typically a prime minister) is supported by a majority in the legislature (or at least not opposed by a majority) and can fall if the government receives a vote of no confidence. The prime minister (typically together with the head of state) also has the capacity to dissolve the legislature and call for elections. Prime ministers remain in office until their terms are completed, they lose an early election, or they lose a vote of no confidence, with some limitations and variations across countries and time. Although there are a number of additional differences within these extremely broad categories, some of which we address below, these definitions capture the main dimensions on which these regimes vary that could affect executive approval patterns.1

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A first set of factors that affects whether voters identify (and identify with) the individual or party that wins the presidency and the extent to which this translates into higher initial rates of approval is related to the electoral system. The direct election of presidents, in particular, might affect the extent to which voters are willing to give presidents their support after the election. While presidents run as individual candidates in direct popular elections for the highest political office in the country, prime ministers are usually the leaders of their party and their selection typically takes place within the party itself. Presidential elections, which typically center more on the personality of the president than is the case for prime ministers, tend to create, in Linz’s (1990: 53) words, “an aura, a self-image, and a set of popular expectations which are all quite different from those associated with a prime minister, no matter how popular he might be.” The empirical question is whether this “aura,” this greater identifiability, translates into higher initial rates of approval for presidents than for prime ministers. The electoral calendar might reinforce this effect; in particular, in some presidential systems the electoral calendar separates presidential elections from elections to other offices and so places additional emphasis on the individual candidates. A factor working against the potential identifiability effect of direct (and concurrent) elections on initial levels of approval is the growing personalization of the office of prime minister in recent years and the presence of media-driven campaigns across all democratic regime types, which have partially offset the importance of incentives for the personalization of politics in presidential systems (cf. Campus and Pas quino 2006 on Italy; see McAllister 2007). Campaigns in parliamentary systems focus more and more on individual personalities (Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi is a good example), so parties have tended to select leaders that might succeed in this type of contest. If this trend is sufficiently strong across all parliamentary systems, then we should expect to see a smaller (or negligible) difference between the initial popularity of presidents and prime ministers. A second set of factors should have an impact on the executive’s initial support by determining the likelihood that the executive will win the election with a larger proportion of votes that will translate

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into larger approval rates. The first factor is the number of political parties competing in elections. In general, where fewer parties compete the likelihood that any one party will obtain a majority of the popular vote increases, strengthening the incumbent’s claim to legitimacy and, potentially, the number of people willing to support him or her initially. If this is the case, we should expect that the impact of direct elections in presidential systems should be most marked when the number of parties is smaller and the likelihood of a president garnering a higher percentage of the vote is higher. Likewise, we should expect prime ministers in systems with fewer political parties to start their terms with higher approval rates than those in parliamentary systems with a larger number of parties. Of course, one of the main determinants of the number of parties is the electoral system, and so, ceteris paribus, we should observe higher initial approval rates in majoritarian systems, which tend to produce fewer parties than proportional electoral systems.2 At the same time, the effect of a higher number of parties can be mitigated in presidential systems where electoral rules mandate a second-round runoff presidential election when no candidate wins a majority, or a modified plurality, in the first round. Runoff elections, or ballotage systems, have become common in presidential multiparty systems seeking to avoid presidents with weak popular mandates. This rule forces a second vote in which the electorate must endorse one of only two presidential candidates and could have the effect of boosting the initial popularity of presidents to levels higher than prime ministers can expect to achieve as they begin their terms in office. In general, vote tallies in the last election before taking office (in ballotage systems, the second-round runoff election) might be expected to correlate positively with levels of presidential approval in the early months of the administration. Across presidential systems, the presidential electoral system should also affect initial approval ratings. The clearest expectation is that, ceteris paribus, presidents elected in a single round of balloting should be more popular at the outset of their terms if they are elected with a majority of votes as opposed to a reduced threshold or a plurality. What is less clear is how the manufactured majority of the ballotage system

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compares to mandates generated by plurality and reduced threshold systems. While reformers champion the theoretical potential of the ballotage to strengthen presidents’ mandates in the context of multiparty competition, scholars cite unwelcome side effects. Runoffs could distort the preferences of the electorate more than plurality systems. Massive distortion, especially when combined with low voter turnout, could spoil an incoming president’s popular legitimacy. Runoffs could also weaken the popularity of presidents who, like Peru’s Alán Garcia in 2006, won the runoff but were not the highest first-round vote-getters (Payne, Zovatto, and Mateo Diaz 2007: 319). Another potential risk to legitimacy and representation are first-round winners who do not take part in runoff elections, conceding the election because they believe their ultimate victory is unlikely or other calculations. In the Argentine presidential contest of 2003, for example, Néstor Kirchner, the second highest vote-getter, assumed office having garnered only 22 percent of the first-round votes after Carlos Menem, who won almost 24.5 percent in the first round, pulled out ahead of the second round. Systematic crossnational approval data will enable more careful examination of the contested notion that ballotage systems are superior to plurality and reduced threshold systems for producing strong mandates. For now, we proceed with the expectation that ballotage systems indeed generate higher initial levels of presidential approval than plurality or reduced threshold systems. Another, related factor is that different coalitional dynamics across presidential and parliamentary systems can affect the evolution of executive approval. The clearest contrast is between presidents who achieve office through a majority victory (even one generated in a runoff election) and prime ministers who rise to power in a multiparty parliamentary system in which a coalition government must be agreed to by several parties after the election. It is easier for citizens to identify who the president is, and what his or her positions are on issues, when he or she is supported by only one party. And protracted coalition negoti ations might further dampen the initial popularity of party leaders. However, although they occur more often in parliamentary systems, coalitions are far from rare in presidential systems (Cheibub 2007; Amorim Neto 2006; Martínez-Gallardo 2009). Thus we could potentially find

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that governments in coalition presidential systems might also face lower initial levels of approval than single-party governments. An important difference remains, however: in presidential systems the leader of the governing coalition is always the president, and his or her direct election means that he or she remains highly identifiable. Finally, rules of government formation and dissolution shape the strategic environment in ways that make it more likely that prime ministers will leave office before their popularity reaches very low levels. Fixed constitutional terms for presidents mean that they typically complete their terms regardless of their levels of approval, whereas prime ministers can be removed through early election or votes of no confidence if their support fails.3 These latter alternatives endow prime ministers, or their parties and coalitions, with strategic opportunities that presidents do not enjoy. Endogenous electoral timing, then, can provide an important advantage for incumbent parliamentary governments, or for some coalition partners that can induce parliamentary dissolution, and thus avert major plunges in popular support that presidents can experience. There is some evidence, however, that endogenous electoral timing can negatively affect approval levels. Based on data from the United Kingdom, Smith (2004) argues that calling early elections (especially when they are earlier than otherwise expected) signals to voters that the government anticipates a decline in its future performance. Given this information, the public will adjust their expectations and respond by lowering their approval of the prime minister. If this effect holds across countries and is strong enough, the difference in approval levels at the end of the term of prime ministers and presidents may not be significant. In sum, various differences in the electoral and party systems of presidential and parliamentary systems should translate into different patterns of executive approval. Initial levels of approval should be higher where electoral incentives favor the development of a personal (and not party) reputation and, thus, contribute to the identifiability of the president. Majoritarian electoral systems, direct elections, and staggered elections all contribute to the personalization of the vote, even as competition between fewer political parties should also contribute to higher initial executive approval rates by vesting the executive with a stronger

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mandate. The same should be true of single-party governments compared to coalition governments. Finally, we should expect to see presidents reach lower levels of approval by the end of their terms than prime ministers, who can avert this situation by calling elections early or fall to a vote of no confidence. Although many of these variables distinguish between presidential and parliamentary systems, some, like the proportionality of the electoral system, cut across regime types. Therefore, we can also expect to see certain systematic differences in patterns of approval within constitutional regimes.

Methods, Data, and Results

Systematic testing of the arguments advanced above requires extensive, comparable cross-national approval survey data. One of the greatest challenges to a more systematic understanding of executive approval is the lack of comparable survey data across a wide cross section of countries. One partial solution to the challenge of gaining an understanding of executive approval dynamics across countries has been to employ surveys taken every several years in a large number of countries, such as the World Values Survey or the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) survey. There is also work based on more frequent but geographically circumscribed surveys, such as the Eurobarometer, and more recent barometer surveys in other regions, such as the Afrobarometer, Latinobarometer, Americas Barometer, and Asia Barometer (Heath, Fisher, and Smith 2005 review and list the major survey-related websites; see also Diamond and Plattner 2007 and related articles). Yet the limitations in the scope and frequency of these surveys preclude more rigorous statistical examination of the dynamics of executive approval; their paucity does not allow careful tracking of citizens’ views and their regional focus precludes wide cross-national comparisons. At the same time, generating a data set comprised of hundreds if not thousands of national surveys is practically impossible from a logistical and financial standpoint. However, there is a more feasible and still very promising alternative. Surveys worldwide typically ask a version of the question, “Do you

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approve or disapprove of the way that [name of executive] is handling his/her job as [title of executive position]?”4 In the United States, this question was first asked in 1938 and has been asked consistently since 1941. In the United Kingdom, a similar series since at least 1950 focuses on this question. The current “third wave” of democratization (with its limitations and partial reversals), coupled with a dramatic expansion in public opinion survey research worldwide, has further increased the countries and the time periods for which this question has been asked. These series provide a wealth of information that can be used to track executive approval over time in a large cross section of countries. For this chapter, we have gathered as much publicly available data as possible on survey marginals in presidential and parliamentary regimes.5 Our initial data collection effort has yielded data for 137 executives— 48 prime ministers and 89 presidents—in thirty presidential and parliamentary democracies.6 As expected, however, finding perfectly comparable data for more than a handful of country-years is impossible since these data vary from survey to survey with respect to question wording, length of series, missing data, time coverage, and sample frame. Thus, it is necessary to transform the disparate approval series into data that are comparable across administrations, countries, and time. Fortunately, a methodology has been developed to address this problem. The approach is well known in studies of macro-opinion in the United States (e.g., Erickson, MacKuen, and Stimson 2002; Ellis, Ura, and Robinson 2006; Enns and Kellstedt 2008) and is based on estimating countryspecific measurement models employing a dyad ratios algorithm (Stimson 1991). The algorithm is analogous to a time-series principal components analysis but is designed to deal with the irregular data we have—including different question wording and varied survey intervals. What this methodology does is confirm whether there is a single dimension within the data, which we call “executive approval,” and then generate estimates of this dimension to employ in our analysis.7 This method, then, seeks to harness all available data to produce a single measure that best represents what we know about executive approval in a given country over a defined time period. To our knowledge this is the most ambitious application of this approach to the study of crossnational executive approval.

214 | Ryan E. Carlin, Cecilia Martínez- Gallardo, and Jonathan Hartlyn Table 7.1 Mean Executive Approval in Parliamentary and Presidential Systems PM

Pres.

Diff.

t

(d.f.)^

50.1 50.8

55.9 56.9

–5.8 –6.2

–2.61** –2.62**

(117) (100)

Second Quarter 49.5 Δ Initial–Second Quarter 1.1 Proportion: Second/Initial Quarter 0.98

53.2 3.2 0.94

–3.6 –2.1 0.04

–1.51† –1.92* 1.73*

(119) (111.8)^ (107.6)^

Third Quarter Δ Initial–Third Quarter Proportion: Third/Initial Quarter

47.3 2.9 0.95

50.8 5.4 0.91

–3.5 –2.5 0.04

–1.38† –1.70* 1.37†

(118) (105.9)^ (102.8)^

Highest Quarter Lowest Quarter Range Highest-Lowest Quarter Range Highest-Lowest Quarter (Popularly Elected)

53.1 35.8 16.9 16.9

61.2 31.2 28.5 28.7

–8.1 4.6 –11.5 –11.8

Final Effective Quarter Final Quarter

40.6 40.6

38.5 40.8

2.1 –0.2

Initial Quarter Initial Quarter (Assumed Power Electorally)

–3.44*** 1.82* –4.99*** –4.92***

(87) (91) (79.2)^ (70.0)^

0.89 –0.13

(99) (92.3)^

Notes: ^ Where the assumption of equal variance across groups is violated Satterthwaite’s approximations of the degrees of freedom are calculated. *** p ≤ .001, ** p ≤ .01, * p ≤ .05, † p ≤ .10.

From the multiple time series for each of the thirty democracies in the sample, our measurement models consistently found that a single dimension, theorized to be executive approval, accounted for the larg est amount of common variance, typically well above 85 percent. Most series correlate highly with the latent factor, very often over 0.90. Such evidence gives us confidence that despite the differences between the data series in any given case, the information can nevertheless be harnessed to provide a valid measure of the phenomenon of central interest: executive approval. In the following paragraphs we use the data we have collected to date to provide some empirical tests of the primary implications of our hypotheses regarding variations in executive approval across and within

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democratic regime types. The results compiled for all 137 executives from thirty countries are presented in table 7.1. First, we examine initial approval levels across regime types. As we argued in the previous section, there are several reasons for expecting presidents to begin their terms with higher levels of approval than do prime ministers. A comparison of mean levels of first-quarter approval across the executives in our sample indicates that presidents do, in fact, enjoy significantly higher initial levels of approval. Whereas presidents average 55.9 percent approval in the first quarter, prime ministers garner the support of half the citizenry (50.1 percent). If we exclude from the analysis those executives who gained power through nonelectoral pathways, the discrepancy in initial popularity grows to just over six percentage points. Thus, there is at least initial plausible evidence of a considerable difference in initial approval ratings across regime types. We then examine the initial evolution of these approval levels. We find that the over-time trends of executive approval are distinct across executive types. The approval gap recedes somewhat in the second and third quarters, though a systematic difference of roughly three and a half points persists. From the first to the second quarter, prime ministers manage to retain a greater proportion of their initial approval ratings than presidents (98 percent compared to 94 percent). By the third quarter, prime ministers maintain 95 percent of their initial approval levels while presidents keep just 91 percent. So while presidential approval is, on average, higher than prime ministerial approval early on, it is comparatively less resilient. Next, we examine whether the over-time patterns of executive approval vary across regime type in ways congruent with the expectations we spelled out earlier. If initial approval levels for presidents tend to be inflated due to the party and electoral factors examined in the previous section, we should expect not only higher initial approval levels (as we in fact find) but also both more fluctuation and sharper declines. As table 7.1 indicates, there is a substantial difference in the highest mean quarter approval level for presidents and for prime ministers, of just over 8 percent. The difference on the low end, 4.6 percent, while not quite as great, is nonetheless statistically significant (p < .05). In considering the range from the highest to the lowest quarter, a substantial difference

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across regime types of 11.5 percent in the expected direction is evident. Hence these data clearly match our initial expectations. Next we examine our expectation that fixed-term presidents typically leave office with lower levels of support than prime ministers, who are capable of manipulating the timing of their departure or may leave due to a vote of no confidence. For prime ministers, we focus on the approval ratings the quarter they leave office, whether by a loss of general elections or a loss of confidence. For presidents we settle on two time periods of comparable significance: the quarter the next president is inaugurated (Final Quarter in table 7.1) and the quarter elections are held, officially making the president a lame duck (Final Effective Quarter in table 7.1). These are very often but not always the same quarters. However, means tests reported in table 7.1 show very little difference in the outgoing popularity levels of prime ministers and presidents, though the differences that do exist are in the expected direction. These trends hold regardless of whether we examine Final Quarter or Final Effective Quarter, as defined here. Indeed, presidents even appear to get a small bump in the polls on their way out of office. In sum, we do not find support for the notion that presidents leave office less popular than prime ministers. In the previous section, we discussed a series of expectations regarding the impact of the electoral system on initial executive approval levels within presidential systems. We take a two-pronged approach to this question. First, we correlate first-quarter presidential approval with the percentage of votes the presidents won in the most recent election. Where a runoff election took place we employ the result from it rather than the first-round election. The results show a positive but weak and insignificant relationship between vote tallies and initial approval levels (r = .08, p = .540). Second, we distinguish presidents by the nature of their mandate (see table 7.2). Specifically, we compare initial approval levels across five categories: (1) presidents elected by a majority in a single round; (2) presidents elected by a runoff majority; (3) presidents elected by rules of a reduced threshold; (4) presidents elected by plurality; and (5) presidents who assumed power in some way other than winning an election. Since we are most interested in testing the causal mechanism

Executive Approval under Alternative Democratic Regime Types | 217 Table 7.2 Presidential Mandates and Initial Levels of Quarterly Approval Mean Mean Diff. I – Jn (s.d.) (s.e.)

n

Min. Max.

20

45.0

83.4

Elected 1st Round Majority (I)

60.8 (12.1)

Elected Runoff Majority (J1)

54.8 (11.7)

6.0 (3.7)

19

30.8

74.8

Elected Reduced 1st Round Threshold (J2)

48.3 (13.0)

12.5* (5.4)

6

31.4

63.4

Elected Plurality (J3)

58.0 (10.3)

2.8 (3.9)

16

40.6

80.3

Assumed Power Nonelectorally (J4)

52.9 (11.3)

7.9* (4.0)

16

33.7

73.0

Total ANOVA: F = 1.99, d.f. = 4, p = .105, R2 = .010

56.1 (11.8)

77

30.8

83.4

Notes: Differences of means tests calculated with Least-Squared Difference (LSD) method. * p ≤ .05

involving the impact of presidential electoral mandates on initial approval ratings, as opposed to just the presidential electoral system by itself, group (1) includes presidents who managed to win a first-round majority regardless of whether the electoral rules dictated one or two rounds of voting. We find positive to mixed evidence that presidential electoral systems, and the mandates they generate, influence initial levels of presidential approval. The most popular presidents in our sample are those elected with a majority in a single round of elections, enjoying, on average, first-quarter approval ratings of almost 61 percent. This is twelve and a half points higher than their counterparts elected in a single round with a reduced threshold. First-round majority presidents received nearly eight (7.8) points higher approval than presidents who came to power without having won a national election. There is less reliable evidence

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that first-round majority presidents receive higher levels of starting approval than presidents elected by a plurality or a runoff majority. Based on this preliminary analysis, the debate about whether ballotage/runoff systems or plurality systems translate into stronger mandates is likely to continue: neither one consistently outperforms or underperforms the other. However, the middle-ground proposal, reduced threshold elections, may in fact be the least effective way to bolster presidential mandates. Reduced-threshold presidents begin, on average, with around 48 percent approval, compared to plurality (difference = 9.6 percent, p = .086) and runoff systems (difference = 6.5 percent, p = .234). One final note is that presidents who assume power without an electoral mandate average around 53 percent approval in their first quarter. While extraordinary circumstances bring these executives to office,8 the public appears to grant them, if briefly, a honeymoon period. Clearly, a larger sample size, and the addition of appropriate controls, would greatly boost our confidence in these effects.

Conclusion

The analysis of how institutions affect power dynamics and democracy has been a constant in much of Alfred Stepan’s research. In addition, his research has frequently employed survey opinion data. Here, we merge these two interests. Building on the scholarship of Stepan, Linz, and others, we advance several arguments about why executive approval dynamics should differ across and within democratic regime types. We argue that political institutions, in particular the electoral and party systems, affect executive approval dynamics by shaping the strategic environment in which political actors make decisions and citizens evaluate them. Employing a methodology that permits the aggregation of survey data across different polling companies and sampling frames and slight variations in question wording and allows cross-country comparison, we provide initial tests of the main directional implications of our arguments, with highly encouraging results. As we continue to expand our executive approval data set, future iterations of this research project will test our arguments in a multivariate context, incorporating electoral,

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institutional, and socioeconomic variables and seeking to clarify more precisely which of the various causal factors are most significant. Our research makes important contributions to several strands of the literature on comparative politics. The first is the literature that seeks to explain the evolution of executive approval over time. To date, this literature has mostly focused on trends within individual administrations and has stressed the effect of factors such as a honeymoon period, economic performance, and international wars on approval rates. As developed in the pages above, we argue that party and electoral factors based on institutional differences have been ignored and advance several hypotheses that link these factors to patterns of executive approval across democratic regime types as well as within presidentialism. Indeed, we show institutional choices greatly influence how much popular support executives enjoy at the beginning of their terms. Our exploratory analyses reveal that compared to prime minister popularity, presidential popularity dissipates more quickly, reaches higher peaks and lower valleys, and tends to fluctuate over a wider range. Further, the data strategy we employ in this chapter will allow further empirical tests of these hypotheses in a wider cross section of democratic regimes. Future work based on these data will also contribute to the literature on how different regime types, sometimes in combination with other institutional features, can have an impact on the way that citizens hold their executives accountable. Echoing Linz (1990, 1994), Stepan and Skach (1993) argue that one of the reasons why presidential democracies have been consistently shorter-lived than parliamentary ones is that incentives for accountability are weaker in these systems. That presidents cannot be removed except through a “too complicated and aridly legalistic” process of impeachment (Linz 1990: 53) makes accountability in presidentialism more difficult than in parliamentary systems, where the government can be defeated through a vote of no confidence. Others, in turn, have argued that accountability for economic policy is enhanced in institutional contexts where policy-making power is concentrated and there is “clarity of responsibility,” which is typically found more in separation of powers systems than under parliamentarism. Evidence in favor of these arguments has focused on electoral accountability, that is, the ability of voters to make elected officials accountable by voting

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for or against them (or their party) in periodic elections (e.g., Powell and Whitten 1993; Hellwig and Samuels 2007). However, there is some evidence that citizen evaluations of government performance have a direct effect on the government’s decisions about policy design and implementation (see, e.g., Canes-Wrone and de Marchi 2008; Canes-Wrone and Shotts 2004; Canes-Wrone, Herron, and Shotts 2001). If this is indeed the case, our approach will shed light on the relationship of accountability throughout an executive’s term (not only during elections) as well as on the question of how different political institutions condition this form of bottom-up accountability.

Appendix

Our data set covers the country-years presented in the table below. Country Argentina Austria Australia Bolivia Brazil Canada Chile Colombia Costa Rica Czech Republic Dominican Republic Ecuador El Salvador Germany Greece Guatemala Honduras Hungary Italy

Quarter/Year 4/1983–1/2009 1/2005–1/2009 1/1971–1/2009 3/2002–1/2009 1/1985–1/2009 3/1984–1/2009 1/1990–1/2009 3/1990–1/2009 2/1978–1/2009 3/1998–1/2009 3/2000–1/2009 3/1979–1/2009 2/1999–1/2009 4/1949–1/2009 2/2004–1/2008 1/2004–1/2009 1/2002–1/2009 3/1998–1/2009 2/2001–1/2009

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Mexico Nicaragua Panama Paraguay Perú Philippines Spain United Kingdom United States Uruguay Venezuela

4/1998–1/2009 1/2002–1/2009 3/2004–1/2009 3/1998–1/2009 4/1990–1/2009 2/1986–1/2009 3/1995–1/2009 1/1964–1/2009 2/1945–1/2009 3/1997–1/2009 1/1989– 2/2008

Notes 1. For now, we leave aside consideration of semi-presidential systems, which provide significantly more power to the head of state than in parliamentary systems and which can possess different dynamics depending upon whether or not the president and the prime minister belong to the same governing party or coalition. 2. It is important to note that this last variable does not distinguish neatly between presidential and parliamentary systems: while in general we expect executives in presidential systems to have higher initial approval rates, we should expect executives in majoritarian parliamentary systems (like the UK) to do better than those with more proportional electoral systems (like Italy). 3. Though presidents can be removed through a process of impeachment, this implies a break in normal politics. 4. Another survey question sometimes used asks which party or candidate respondents would vote for if presidential or parliamentary elections were to be held the following day (e.g., Mattila 1996). Given different electoral calendars, temporal dynamics, and voter participation rates across parliamentary and presidential systems, we believe this would be a highly problematic indicator in an extensive cross-national analysis. 5. As a practical matter, we employed Hellwig and Samuels’s (2008: 72) recent classification of presidential, semi-presidential, and parliamentary regimes. In terms of the case categorization and sampling frame, the only discrepancy that results from Stepan and Skach (1993) is that they categorize Ireland as parliamentary whereas we code it as semi-presidential and thus exclude it from the sample.

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6. Our intention is to collect data from all countries considered electoral democracies by Freedom House in 2007 and have populations of over one million people. The total potential number of countries is eighty-one. 7. While more technical treatments of these methods exist (Stimson 1991, 1999), in this note we explain briefly the approach’s key assumptions and basic logic. The first important assumption is that to the extent that any data series is a valid indicator of executive approval, the ratio of the values at any two times in the series is a relative indicator of executive approval. Employing all available ratios in a given series, the algorithm uses a recursive process to estimate values at regular time points (years, months, quarters) as specified by the researcher. Each series undergoes this step, resulting in N input ratio series. If the input ratio series indeed tap the same latent construct, executive approval, they should co-vary. The algorithm computes the communality (a validity estimate) of each of N input ratio series and, using the communality weights, it iteratively estimates the best single underlying series of latent approval. To sharpen the estimates, exponential smoothing on the raw series can remove random fluctuation due to sampling error. 8. The sixteen presidents in our data set that meet this classification are Argentina’s Eduardo Duhalde (2002– 3); Bolivia’s Carlos Mesa (2003– 5) and Eduardo Rodríguez (2005– 6); Brazil’s José Sarney (1985– 90) and Itamar Franco (1992– 95); Ecuador’s Fabián Alarcón (1997– 98), Gustavo Noboa (2000– 2003), and L. Alfredo Palacio (2005– 7); Paraguay’s Luis González Macchi (1999– 2003); Peru’s Valentín Paniagua (2000– 2001); the Philippines’ Maria Corazón Aquino (1986– 92) and Maria Gloria Macapagal Arroyo (2001–present); U.S. Harry Truman (1945– 53), Lyndon Johnson (1963– 69), and Gerald Ford (1974– 77); and Venezuela’s R. José Velásquez (1993– 94).

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Hellwig, Timothy, and David Samuels. 2007. “Electoral Accountability and the Variety of Democratic Regimes.” British Journal of Political Science 38, no. 1: 65– 90. James, Patrick, and John R. Oneal. 1991. “The Influence of Domestic and International Politics on the President’s Use of Force.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 35, no. 2: 307– 22. Johnson, Gregg B., and Sooh-Rhee Ryu. 2010. “Repudiating or Rewarding Neoliberalism? How Broken Campaign Promises Condition Economic Voting in Latin America.” Latin American Politics and Society 52, no. 4: 1–24. Johnson, Gregg B., and Leslie A. Schwindt-Bayer. 2009. “Economic Accountability in Central America.” Journal of Politics in Latin America 1, no. 3: 33–56. Levy, Jack. 1989. “The Diversionary Theory of War: A Critique.” In Handbook of War Studies, ed. Manus Midlarsky, 259 – 88. Boston: Unwin Hyman. Lijphart, Arend. 1994. “Presidentialism and Majoritarian Democracy: Theoretical Observations.” In The Failure of Presidential Democracy: The Case of Latin America, ed. Juan J. Linz and Arturo Valenzuela, 91–105. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 1999. Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries. New Haven: Yale University Press. Linz, Juan J. 1990. “The Perils of Presidentialism.” Journal of Democracy 1: 51– 69. ———. 1994. “Democracy, Presidential or Parliamentary: Does It Make a Difference?” In The Failure of Presidential Democracy: The Case of Latin America, ed. Juan J. Linz and Arturo Valenzuela, 3– 87. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Linz, Juan J., and Alfred Stepan. 1996a. “Toward Consolidated Democracies.” Journal of Democracy 7, no. 2: 14– 33. ———. 1996b. Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Linz, Juan J., and Arturo Valenzuela, eds. 1994. The Failure of Presidential Democracy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Luna, Juan Pablo. 2002. “¿Pesimismo estructural o voto económico? Sobre la racionalidad agregada del electorado uruguayo” (Structural Pessimism or Economic Voting? On the Aggregate Rationality of the Uruguayan Electorate). Revista Uruguaya de Ciencia Política 13: 123– 52. McAllister, I. 2007. “The Personalization of Politics.” In Oxford Handbook of Political Behavior, ed. R. J. Dalton and H. D. Klingemann, 571– 88. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Mainwaring, Scott. 1993. “Presidentialism, Multipartism, and Democracy: The Difficult Combination.” Comparative Political Studies 26, no. 2: 198– 228. Martínez-Gallardo, Cecilia. 2009. “Coalition Duration in Presidential Systems.” Paper prepared for presentation at the Latin American Studies Association meeting, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, June 11, 2009. Mattila, Mikko. 1996. “Economic Changes and Government Popularity in Scandinavian Countries.” British Journal of Political Science 26, no. 4: 583– 95. Mishler, William, and John P. Willerton. 2003. “The Dynamics of Presidential Popularity in Post-Communist Russia: Culture Imperative versus NeoInstitutional Choice?” Journal of Politics 65, no. 1: 111– 41. Morgan, T. Clifton, and Christopher Anderson. 1999. “Domestic Support and Diversionary External Conflict in Great Britain, 1950–1992.” Journal of Politics 61, no. 3: 799– 814. Morgan Kelly, Jana. 2003. “Counting on the Past or Investing in the Future: Economic and Political Accountability in Fujimori’s Peru.” Journal of Politics 65, no. 3: 864– 80. Mueller, John. 1970. “Presidential Popularity from Truman to Johnson.” American Political Science Review 64, no. 1: 18– 34. ———. 1973. War, Presidents, and Public Opinion. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Payne, Mark, Daniel Zovatto, and Mercedes Mateo Diaz, eds. 2007. Democracies in Development: Politics and Reform in Latin America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pérez-Liñán, Aníbal. 2007. Presidential Impeachment and the New Political Instability in Latin America. New York: Cambridge University Press. Powell, G. Bingham, and Guy D. Whitten. 1993. “A Cross-National Analysis of Economic Voting: Taking Account of the Political Context.” American Journal of Political Science 37, no. 1: 391– 414. Przeworski, Adam, Michael E. Alvarez, José Antonio Cheibub, and Fernando Limongi. 2000. Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Well-Being in the World, 1950–1990. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shugart, Matthew, and John Carey. 1992. Presidents and Assemblies: Constitutional Design and Electoral Dynamics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shugart, Matthew Soberg, and Scott Mainwaring. 1997. “Presidentialism and Democracy in Latin America: Rethinking the Debate.” In Presidentialism and Democracy in Latin America, ed. Scott Mainwaring and Matthew Soberg Shugart, 12– 54. New York: Cambridge University Press. Smith, Alastair. 1996. “Diversionary Foreign Policy in Democratic Systems.” International Studies Quarterly 40, no. 1: 133– 53.

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———. 2004. Election Timing. New York: Cambridge University Press. Stepan, Alfred, and Cindy Skach. 1993. “Constitutional Frameworks and Democratic Consolidation: Parliamentarism versus Presidentialism.” World Poli tics, 46, no. 1: 1– 22. Stimson, James A. 1991. Public Opinion in America: Moods, Cycles, and Swings. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. ———. 1999. Public Opinion in America: Moods, Cycles, and Swings. 2nd ed. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

8 Cautionary and Unorthodox Thoughts about Democracy Today Juan J. Linz in collaboration w ith Thomas Jeffrey Miley

I write from a disillusioned or at least realistic view of democracy. Some of you might at the end of this believe that I am not totally a bona fide democrat. I certainly do not embrace the National Endowment of De mocracy kind of ideology or the one that some American intellectuals and politicians are trying to sell. I am in some ways closer to Churchill in thinking that democracy is “the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.” He said that in November 1947 in the House of Commons. My thinking starts from a set of questions that we have to ask about a set of problems we have to confront, which we did not have to ask before the fall of the Berlin Wall. In addition, we have to ask questions about democracy outside of our Western world of established states, and I do not know if we have all the tools for that. In some ways the collaboration will have to be more with anthropologists and historians, perhaps, than sociologists. We could work with sociologists and with public opinion data, but that may be somewhat misleading. Against the Pan-Democratic Ideology

We are living in a world in which all kinds of ideologies have been declining. Therefore there is room for something that I would call 227

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“pan-democratic ideology.” It is the idea that democracy can solve all the problems of the world, that democracy always produces good results, that freedom is guaranteed by democratic institutions necessarily, and that all institutions of society should be democratized, and so on. We have to be very careful with those ideas and look at the pros and cons. Democracy in some contexts does not do what we might wish it to do. Over the past several decades, there has been an expansion and consolidation of democracy in a number of countries, which might have contributed to a hubris of believing in the universality of the process of democratization by whatever means. This has been accompanied by a flood of theoretical writings on democracy—many of them brilliant but in some respects misleading. This weakness of some theoretical perspectives indirectly contributes to serious political problems and even blunders.

Responsiveness, Responsibility, and Accountability as Three Dimensions of Representative Democracy

The basic premise from which I start is that any real rather than uto pian democracy is based on a mix of responsiveness, responsibility, and accountability. This assumes a commitment to govern in the interest of a collectivity rather than the exclusive interest of the rulers, and of a collectivity enjoying a reasonable amount of freedoms. In any democracy there is a different mix of these elements, institutions that privilege one or another dimension, although accountability is perhaps the only one that can, in principle, be assured through institutions like periodic elections. However, to identify democracy with any of those dimensions, undervaluing the others, would be a serious error of grave consequences. Unfortunately, contemporary democratic theory, the thinking and research about the quality of democracy, focuses on responsiveness to the neglect of responsibility. Too often when we talk about democracy, we are talking about one part of the word, which is the demos. Much of the thinking and writing about democracy is focused on the demos, in part, because we have the possibility of simpler indicators. We have the

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possibility of public-opinion data, which I am not going to criticize. I served as president of the World Association of Public Opinion Research, and I certainly believe in public opinion research, but we should use it in the context of a much broader way of approaching the problems. But the demos in a sense is being made the sole focus. When you read some of the democratic audits for democratic performance and the efforts in that direction, they always focus on the participation of people, the opportunity for participation, the quality of the electorate having a chance to express itself, but the kratos, the people who rule in a democracy, are generally underanalyzed.1 Some definitions of democracy may be in some ways misleading. I quote among them some of those of my closest friends and teachers. Robert Dahl says that “a key characteristic of a democracy is the continuing responsiveness of the government to the preferences of citizens, considered as political equals,” or the quality of being completely or almost completely responsive to citizens.2 The emphasis is on responsiveness. This is an important part of democracy, but some other parts have been neglected: responsibility and accountability. Those issues are not necessarily linked to being responsive or not responsive but to the quality of the decision making and the policies of the leadership. The simplistic perception of responsiveness neglects one of the main functions of political leaders, which is to convince citizens of certain policies, argue with them, and legitimize them by the support of the voters, but certainly not simply reflect them. Another notion that goes with responsiveness is that political elites should be a mirror image of society. This perspective assumes that if the leadership is composed of people of certain characteristics, they will also respond to the interests of the people, of the groups from which they are recruited. This is not true; some people may be in key positions because they fulfill certain quotas, but they do not necessarily reflect the interests of those who are to be taken into account in policy making. The analysis of unresponsiveness does not deal with the problem of the degree to which the politicians are motivated by various considerations other than being responsive to an electorate. Let me quote from Edmund Burke’s famous classic address to the Bristol electorate:

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My worthy colleague says, his will ought to be subservient to yours. If that be all, the thing is innocent. If government were a matter of will upon any side, yours, without question, ought to be superior. But government and legislation are matters of reason and judgment, and not of inclination; and what sort of reason is that in which the determination precedes the discussion, in which one set of men deliberate and another decide, and where those who form the conclusions are perhaps three hundred miles distant from those who hear the arguments? To deliver an opinion is the right of all men; that of constituents is a weighty and respectable opinion, which a representative ought always to rejoice to hear, and which he ought always most seriously to consider. But authoritative instructions, mandates issued, which the member is bound blindly and implicitly to obey, to vote, and to argue for, though contrary to the clearest conviction of his judgment and conscience,—these are things utterly unknown to the laws of this land, and which arise from a fundamental mistake of the whole order and tenor of our Constitution. Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests, which interests each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates; but Parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole—where not local purposes, local prejudices ought to guide, but the general good, resulting from the general reason of the whole.3 Representative democracy should be based on the Burkean ideal. Politicians should have their own opinions, and they should make their own decisions on the basis of their (presumably) greater knowledge, information, and analysis than most voters. To do so, they should form the opinion of the citizens, educate them, tell them about the complexity of the issues, and disabuse them of their simplest predispositions, ideas, and sentiments. That is part of their “responsibility,” which might be in conflict with trying to be “responsive.” The recently deceased Robert McNamara could hardly have put the point more poignantly than he did in reflecting upon the mistakes he made while serving as secretary of defense in both the Kennedy and

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Johnson administrations, lamenting the role he played in the unfolding of the avoidable disaster in terms of needless human suffering related to the Vietnam War. In an interview with Charlie Rose, McNamara was asked: When you look now at the future and the lessons that are to be learned, is there some lesson about the people in power . . . some lesson about listening, some lesson about making sure . . . ? McNamara replied: I’m going to give what you think is the wrong answer. Don’t always listen to the polls, don’t always listen to the majority of the Congress, don’t always listen to the majority of the press. The majority of the people through the polls, the majority of the Congress, the majority of the press were in support of what was going on during much of that period. That doesn’t absolve us as leaders of what we did. We were responsible to lead, not follow, and we led wrongly. So that’s one lesson, and I hope people will understand that, that leaders are responsible to lead, not follow, that’s the first point.4 We should remember the Burkean ideal that McNamara invokes whenever we hear politicians say things like, “I cannot take this position because the people will not be responsive to it,” “they don’t like it,” “I cannot say this because that will be unpopular,” “I have to consult discussion groups, look at the latest surveys to make my decisions, and if the people have nothing to tell me, I better keep quiet.” They therefore limit themselves to rehearsing banalities during an election campaign. The responsiveness model of democracy and the mirror-imageof-society model of democracy is not what the word democratic means. Kratos means “governing,” “ruling.” Democracy is ruling with the support of the voters, of the people, and also the power of accountability. This gets into some very difficult problems about how institutions do or do not ensure accountability. When somebody cannot be reelected, obviously he cannot be made accountable for his mistakes. President George W. Bush left office, and the party suffered the electoral

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consequences, but he himself did not. Obviously with a vote of no confidence that would be different, but that issue would take me back to my work and Al Stepan’s on presidentialism and parliamentarism.5 When “real” democracy works best, except perhaps at election time, it is based on the “responsible” action of the elected leaders. Leaders must be capable of response, not to a diffuse public opinion, but to changing conditions and problems. They must be able to change as a result and to explain those problems to the electorate and convince it of the need for specific policies, based on facts rather than emotions and ideological (or rhetorical) commitments.

Problems Measuring Responsibility

We have developed instruments to “measure” responsiveness, which in turn make responsiveness the main criterion of democracy. We are even tempted to link accountability directly to responsiveness. In the process, the complex dimension of responsibility — the consequences of governing for the people—gets undervalued and even weakened. This in part is associated with an emphasis on participation rather than representation in democratic theory. It is also related to an idealization of the citizen and a negative image of the politician. It tends to see democracy being created by the citizens, by “civil society,” from the grassroots, rather than by “political society,” elites committed to and mobilizing popular support for democracy. The contemporary literature on the quality of democracy has tended to privilege responsiveness over responsibility, citizen participation over the role of representatives. The focus on “responsiveness” has dominated political reality since public opinion research and focus groups have allowed politicians to know (or think they know) the issues that concern the people, the themes to which they are likely to respond, the things they want to hear, and those they do not want to hear. Politicians are likely to tune their message to the mood of relevant electorates and are advised not to raise other issues or tell unpleasant truths. They are supposed to be responsive, and at least at election time they try. Reality obviously forces them to ignore their campaign promises, some-

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times unfortunately but other times fortunately. However, they are not likely to be held accountable for their performance or for the results of their policies, as much as for the fulfillment or not of the promises made. This contributes to disillusionment with politics. Too much of our thinking about democracy implicitly relies upon a misleading image of society as a flat arena composed of individuals who may join associations and who organize social life and political life spontaneously in creating a “civil society” while tending to ignore the hierarchical, complex, antagonist structures in society—tribal and ethnic structures, clientelistic networks, family networks, sects and religious groups, sporting clubs, machine politics, secret societies, and so on—that preexisted the moment of transition to democracy and that play a role in the process of creating democracy. In places like Iraq, this type of thinking led many people to embrace the overly optimistic expectation that all that was required for “civil society” to flourish and thereby bear the fruits of democratic stability was to hang the dictator and to purge the state of his acolytes. However, after this turn of events, what happened was not the spontaneous emergence of various associations from the “grassroots” but the creation of political parties at the initiative of preexisting leadership structures—most notably those of religious leaders and tribal groups. The emphasis on participation in the literature on the quality of democracy, moreover, tends to assume a somewhat idealized concept of the average citizen. The literature often advocates participatory forums intended to provide opportunities for “bringing democracy” closer to the average citizen, or for facilitating a more direct say on the part of citizens by bypassing elected politicians, assuming that such outlets are likely to counteract the oligarchic tendencies inherent in representative democracy, and thereby ignoring the distinct possibility that such fora can be monopolized by activist minorities with “axes to grind.” Many citizens have low interest in politics and are even less interested in devoting a large amount of time to political participation. This important consideration justifies delegating decision-making power to democratically elected representatives. However, we do not have good indicators for measuring how devoted the representatives are to collective interests, how willing they are to devote their energies to

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the citizens, or how prepared they are to provide leadership for voters on the issues. Whereas we know how to measure “responsiveness” and participation, we largely lack indicators for gauging responsibility. Admittedly incipient comparative measures are being proposed for the frequency of corruption in different countries.6 Even so, with many indicators of performance it is difficult to distinguish the consequences of political decision making from those of market forces and economic cycles and those of the underlying infrastructure of the society. Social and economic factors may be as important as or more important than the political leadership and the quality of its decisions. Furthermore, different groups in the society value the consequences of policies very differently, and there is no simple common standard except for some measures, for example, in the field of health care performance. Indicators for measuring negative performance are easier to formulate compared with those for positive performance. Yet undoubtedly, the dimension of “responsiveness” is much less value-laden than that of “responsibility,” and this poses a difficult problem for social scientists seeking to measure the overall quality of democratic life. The criteria for measuring the quality of political performance— for measuring political success and failure—are themselves subject to fierce contestation. We have only to look at the debate over determining which targets are to be pursued in Iraq and Afghanistan for measuring success or failure to recognize this fact. Moreover, citizens’ evaluation of performance is rarely the same as the one that an objective, outside investigator would reach by systematic study. In many ways the most important criteria for measuring the overall performance of a federal democratic regime is related to what the Germans call Bundestreue (federal loyalty).7 A well-functioning federal democratic regime would be imbued with sentiments of Bundestreue broadly diffused across the spectrum of political leaders and across all significant segments of the citizenry. But all too often in democratic debate, the different sides accuse each other of lacking Bundestreue. Bundestreue, it turns out, largely lies in the eyes of the beholder. This difficulty in establishing empirically verifiable, ideologically impartial (or value-neutral) criteria for gauging the performance of a

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government poses a problem not only for understanding the dimension of responsibility but for understanding the dimension of accountability as well. Recent research shows some independence between government performance and the punishment or reward of governments or parties in elections, which we presumed would be an indication of accountability.8 We presumed that a party that has made a mess would lose elections and that the party that has done things well would be rewarded. This is not always the case. (Furthermore, obviously the no-reelection principle deprives the voter of a chance at accountability.) In the absence of clear measures of performance and agreement on them, it is tempting to link accountability with the realization or not of the promises or expectations generated during the election campaign. This is in spite of the fact that we would like governors to be rewarded or punished for their performance in office. The overall low levels of trust in institutions, parties, and leaders (regardless of party), a trend evident across a large number of stable democracies, reflects an exercise of accountability of sorts but not of the type we would wish in a democracy. Obviously these problems of accountability get compounded if we focus on individual representatives rather than collective actors like political parties. The fragmentation of representation obviously makes accountability for all policies and to the whole electorate extremely difficult. Investigation into the contested terrain of conceptualizing and measuring democratic performance and responsibility, and for gauging the criteria that are in fact taken into account when it comes to accountability, will be an essential task for systematic comparative research in the coming years. Analysts and citizens alike frequently blame politicians for everything that goes wrong, while at the same time we expect them to do everything to make it work. Neither expectation can fit reality. We need to know much more about the pool of people ready to assume political leadership roles, as well as about the incentives and disincentives for doing so. We also need to know much more about how elected politicians themselves conceive of their role as representatives. We need much more research on the incentives and disincentives for going into and staying in politics in different societies and at different

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levels. Certainly the threat of terrorism in some societies and in some contexts is a major disincentive. Alternative opportunities in different societies need also to be taken into account. Such factors evidently need systematic study and comparison, intercountry and intracountry comparisons, as they are likely to affect the quality of leadership and thereby of democracy. Let us recall Schumpeter’s warning: The first condition [for the success of the democratic method] is that the human material of politics — the people who man the party machines, are elected to serve in parliament, rise to cabinet office — should be of sufficiently high quality. This means more than that individuals of adequate ability and moral character must exist in sufficient numbers. . . . [T]he democratic method selects not simply from the population but only from those elements of the population that are available for the political vocation or, more precisely, that offer themselves for election. All methods of selection do this of course. All of them therefore may, according to which a given vocation attracts talent and character, produce in it a level of performance that is above or below the national average. But the competitive struggle for responsible office is, on the one hand, wasteful of personnel and energy. On the other hand, the democratic process may easily create conditions in the political sector that, once established, will repel most of the men who can make a success at anything else.9 Our research on elites is at an impasse because elites are not that different today; at least in our advanced societies, they are very similar. They are not on the one side trade unionists, like in the British Labour Party of the 1920s or so, and on the other side landlords, and so on. Rather, they are all graduates of business schools and professionals and engineers and what not, economists particularly. The parties are not differentiated on the basis of politicians’ occupations. Who goes into politics is something we have not worked on much, and it is difficult, but important and feasible. I wish that more scholars would focus not so much on what the people in the slums feel about how miserable life is but on how the people who are in power came to think that they should

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be ruling the country and what they think the country needs. We should focus more on the kratos. How can we find leaders who have a nobless oblige conception, who are willing and able to serve some kind of collective interest? The selection process need not necessarily be fully egalitarian or fully democratic, and the more egalitarian or fully democratic selection processes are not necessarily the best at finding leaders capable of or disposed to exercise a responsible use of power. We do not know the answer to this question. We have had historical processes that have led to the formation of certain nobilities. We have certain processes such as the formation in the universities over the centuries of a certain kind of cadre of legally trained people. We have the officer corps, which were trained in some values in some systems. Some police forces have even had some kinds of things like that: the French gendarmerie and the Italian carabinieri, for example, followed a certain model, which still has a certain permanence. We may have to look at the socialization institutions for some of those things. But for the political elite, we need to give more thought to several problems. One is that we are creating incompatibilities, barring many people from entering politics. While this may or may not be an effective mechanism for assuring the independence of politicians, it certainly reduces the pool of candidates. The kind of life to which we subject politicians because of the media and other things makes it unattractive to many people to enter politics. The problem of dispensability posed by Max Weber, which made political vocation possible, has become much more complicated given the full-time demands for professional activity and the full-time demands of politics compared with the past.10 We have to think more about how parties select candidates. The process may have been displaced from parliaments to television roundtables and discussion groups. This means the media are becoming, perhaps, the selectors, and I’m not sure that they are better than politicians selecting candidates among themselves. With primaries and elections, in some societies, money has become the decisive criterion for winning election. We should give some thought to the effects of certain, presumably democratizing, institutions, like primaries or, as is now being debated in Spain, open lists

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instead of party lists. If you have to compete for a position on the list in the city of Madrid, how do you do it? Well, by putting a picture on every electric pole in the town. How much does that cost? And how much does it increase the opportunities of the citizens who choose? Or do you give free time on television? I was in Spain when free time was given equally to all political parties, at random. Every day after lunch, there was one fascist party, two communist parties, one reactionary party, and then maybe the UCD, and the PSOE, the really important parties. You had to listen for something like ten days or so, every day, to any number of parties, which had the equal opportunity to express their views. That does not seem to work. So how do you regulate all these institutions of democracy to assure meaningful competition that allows different people to enter the political process? That is a $64,000 question: there is no simple answer. I do not know how we can find a pool of competent and responsible candidates for leadership. Some societies are lucky enough to have them. Some societies do not. How to create them? That is part of the educational process; religious institutions and all kinds of institutions can contribute to that. Certainly, the defamation or the negative view of the professional politician that is so widespread, and the bashing of politicians and bashing of Washington, of the insiders, is not the best way to recruit competent leaders. We have to look for answers in much more systematic and comparative research.

Democracy and Freedom

Democracy is not necessarily equal to liberalism. Liberalism and de mocracy have a great affinity, and without certain liberties — the ar ticulation of alternatives for contestation and for elections and for political life and for political parties—no democracy would be possible. But that does not mean that democracy assures all the liberties and freedoms. If the voters and the people in a society do not agree with certain freedoms and certain liberties, there is a problem. Shall it be imposed on them from the outside, or shall they make a decision that we would consider from our values and our conception of society un-

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desirable or we would not like to see? This is the problem of the relationship between democracy and freedom or liberalism that was at the center of much political theorizing of the late nineteenth century and twentieth century. When you read Hans Kelsen (1881–1973) and others, you see that this relationship is not as simple as we tend to think today. Today we say, “Bring democracy, and freedom will come with it, women’s rights, rights of gays, everything will come with democracy.”11 Maybe not. In fact, democracy may restrict some freedoms that people enjoyed under nondemocratic rule and that get lost when democracy comes. Look at some things that are happening in Iraq, for example, today.

Democracy and Bureaucracy

We make assumptions about the relation between democracy and the democratization of other institutions or limits on the power, on the autonomy of other institutions. The deeper democratization, the deeper the politicization of the civil service, as has been so meaningfully and interestingly studied by Ezra Suleiman in his book, Dismantling Democratic States. Suleiman raises some very serious questions. He writes: “Good” governance has several constitutive elements that distinguish it from “bad” democratic, or nondemocratic, forms of governance. One of the crucial elements that contributes to, or detracts from responsiveness, accountable, effective, and legitimate government is through which all governments exercise authority—the state bureaucracy. It is not an accident that modern mass democracy and the development of what came to be recognized as the modern bureaucracy went hand-in-hand. The modern democratic state was built upon the bureaucratic structure that undergirds this state. Political leaders of the emerging states from the early nineteenth century to the late twentieth century recognized that whatever the goals of the state—controlling a vast empire, creating an educational system,

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guaranteeing democratic procedures, conducting war, establishing the welfare state, collecting taxes—each necessitates a highly organized, basically nonpolitical instrument at its disposal.12 In Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, Schumpeter listed the conditions for successful and stable democracy. He said that democracy needs a bureaucracy: Democratic government in modern industrial society must be able to command, for all purposes the sphere of public activity is to include—no matter whether this be much or little—the services of a well-trained bureaucracy of good standing and tradition, endowed with a strong sense of duty and a no less strong esprit de corps. Such a bureaucracy is the main answer to the argument about government by amateurs. . . . It is not enough that the bureaucracy should be efficient in current administration and competent to give advice. It must also be strong enough to guide, and if need be, to instruct the politicians who head the ministries. . . . Again, as in the case of the personnel of politics, the question of the available human material is all-important. Training though essential is quite secondary to this.13 Schumpeter here insists upon the need not only for a bureaucracy, but for a bureaucracy with a sense of esprit de corps and a sense of its importance and autonomy. This is because, as he emphasizes, democracy is rule by amateurs. Therefore, if the political leaders don’t have the professionals and knowledgeable experts at their service, they will not be able to make some of the best decisions. So the notion that bureaucracy and democracy are in conflict is misleading—although they can be in conflict, obviously. But very often the absence of a bureaucracy of some quality may be a real problem. Bureaucrats must have a certain independence, autonomy, and security, and indeed, even an “esprit de corps.” You need that kind of bureaucracy to have a successful democracy. That sounds awkward and unorthodox, but we have to entertain some unorthodox thoughts.

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The formation of a competent, nonpoliticized, professional bureaucracy in Europe constituted one element of the construction of the modern state, which assured a certain equality and independent judgment. State functionaries may not have been representative of the total class structure, but they were not recruited simply by political criteria. Instead, they were recruited by certain universalistic standards of professional competence, particularly out of the legal profession. I obviously have lived in a society where that was the most prestigious opportunity, and in fact it was much more open than some other activities. The bureaucracy served Spain in the transition very well and has served every government. It is very desirable that countries have professionals who are ready to obey governments and regimes when they change, but according to certain rules and procedures. I suspect it is missing in many parts of the world. And democracies are worse off unless they have a competent, nonpoliticized, professional bureaucracy. Moreover, the privatization of public activities and services is dismantling the modern state. Some people may think that that is liberal and democratic; I think it is neither of the two things.

Democracy and the Subordination of the Military to the Civilian Authorities

Another unorthodox thought is that we always talk about the subordination of the military to civilian authority. The problem of the mili tary and civilian authority, particularly from the perspective of Latin America, for example, is in some ways very simple. But it is not so simple, particularly in stable democracies. All you have to do is read some recent debates in Fort Leavenworth about these issues, and you will be forced to think a little bit differently. According to a 2007 article in the New York Times: Much of the debate at Leavenworth has centered on a scathing article, “A Failure in Generalship,” written last May [2007] for Armed Forces Journal by Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, an Iraq veteran and deputy commander of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment who holds a

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master’s degree in political science from the University of Chicago. “If the general remains silent while the statesman commits a nation to war with insufficient means, he shares culpability for the results,” Colonel Yingling wrote. . . . Col. Gregory Fontenont, a Leavenworth instructor, said it was typical of young officers to feel that the senior commanders had not spoken up for their interests, and that he had felt the same way when he was their age. But Colonel Fontenot, who commanded a battalion in the Persian Gulf War and a brigade in Bosnia and has since retired, said he questioned whether Americans really wanted a four-star general to stand up publicly and say no to the president of a nation where civilians control the armed forces. . . . Some of the young officers were unimpressed by retired officers who spoke up against Mr. Rumsfeld in April 2006. The retired generals had little to lose, they argued, and their words would have mattered more had they been on active duty. “Why didn’t you do that while in uniform?” Maj. James Hardaway, 36, asked. Yet, Major Hardaway said, General Shinseki had shown there was a great cost, at least under Mr. Rumsfeld. “Evidence shows that when you do that in uniform, bad things can happen,” he said. “So it’s sort of a dichotomy of, should I do the right thing, even if I get punished?”14 Let me quote another relevant text in which the language is more Hegelian, a little bit complicated—from one of the classics in political and sociological theory, but which normally I do not think most of you would have read, although it is a very important book to read: Clausewitz’s On War. I suspect that if some of the military had read Clausewitz, they would not make some decisions the way they make them. Clausewitz argues: War is not a mere act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political activity by other means. What remains peculiar to war is simply the peculiar nature of its means. War in general, and the commander in any specific instance, is entitled to require that the trend and designs of policy shall not be inconsistent with these means.15

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Clausewitz reminds us that a military needs a sense of its own professional commitments, values, and competence. While the politicians set the goals, war is a continuation of politics with other means. Certainly it cannot disregard the nature of the instrument. In any theorizing about civil-military relations, this fundamental point about the need for an independent and professional military hierarchy should not be forgotten for the sake of the other side of the argument, which is the need for the subordination of the military to the civilian authority. Obviously, we admire Colonel Stauffenberg,* and we would have admired some of the German generals if, after the murders by Hitler’s SS troops of Generals Kurt von Schleicher and Ferdinand von Bredow during the Night of the Long Knives (June 30, 1934), they would have led a putsch. A putsch against Hitler in 1934 would have been very welcome. I certainly would have been happy had it happened. The need for an independent and professional military is not limited to the extreme case of a dictatorship; democracies also face this problem. That is another dimension of democracy where we should not be content with some of the simple thinking that we sometimes see.

Representative Democracy versus the Democratization of Society

Along the same lines is the problem of the democratization of all institutions. Democracy is very good for governing a state and giving the citizens participation—because all citizens in principle become equal, though they are not equal in reality. But at least in one sphere they are equal, which is when they vote. However, in other spheres of society, it is dubious. In some societies democratization of the institutions could easily lead to what the Nazis liked to call Gleichschaltung, which puts everything at the same kind of current; everything is responsive to the same climate of opinion or the same ideology. If we democratize certain institutions, that outcome is not improbable in some areas. Let us remember the way in which the German Protestant Church in church elections was controlled in many parts of Germany, many dioceses, by the Glaubensbewegung Deutscher Christen. With the vote of people who had the right to vote, they were baptized, and they could go to the churches to vote. The churches were never as full as on voting day, and

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Hitler himself appealed to their vote in the church elections.16 Those were extraordinary circumstances, but it is not so unlikely that in a society in which there is pluralism of institutions with different values, with different conceptions of organization, with different characteristics, freedom would be better protected, because individuals have their own opinions and rights. But individuals alone cannot assure the protection of many things. Civil society is more complex than aggregates of individuals. And this is another area in which we have to give more thought to what democracy means and does not mean. I have written elsewhere about a potential danger for representative democracy implicit in calls to democratize all societal institutions. Such calls constitute another dimension of what I above called the “pandemocratic ideology.” Let me take the liberty to quote myself at length: The question to be raised is whether there are dangers to an open society derived from the democratic ideology itself. Alexis de Tocqueville long ago discussed the spectre of the illiberal consequences of equality.17 I can see such a threat only in a democracy which neither values the freedom of individuals nor the existence of social pluralism, a democracy, in other words, which is deformed as a result of a radical interpretation of the democratic principle. The situation that I have in mind is one in which all the institutions and organizations in the society are to be opened to all on an equal basis as part of the definition of citizenship, rather than with due respect for their own principles and their views on what criteria shall form the foundations of membership. Some democrats add to this principle the proposition that the leadership of all institutions should be elected rather than selected on the basis of some other principles like criteria or professional competence not subject to the vote of the members, career seniority or the principles established by the original founders of the organization.18 The cases in point are religious institutions, academies or universities. The combination of these two principles could very well destroy the social pluralism, i.e. the diversity of social organizations with a large measure of autonomy with respect to one another, on which modern large democracies are based. It could destroy democ-

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racy because the application of these two principles would make all associations, organizations and institutions easily penetrable. It would also mean a drive toward homogenization of the values professed by different sectors within the framework of organizational pluralism. In such a context the majority could democratically achieve a Gleichschaltung of the society that would not allow the survival of organized minorities, although individual members of the minority would not be deprived of their freedom to express their opinions and remain a minority in all those bodies. What is crucial, however, is that those institutions and organizations would be unable to represent the values of the minority; they would instead only serve to reinforce the hegemony of the temporary majority. It will be a situation of minority individuals without minority institutions and organizations. This, in turn, could lead to a spiral of silence on the part of individuals finding themselves in such a predicament. . . . [I]t is plausible that in highly politicized societies with strong party loyalties and organizations, the democratization of all institutions will transform them into political ideological arenas and prevent them from reflecting their distinctive values. Paradoxically, democratization which is taken to the extreme may undermine their capacity to hold on to those values, appearing to be unpopular at the time, and ultimately destroy the distinctive identity of the organizations. To give another example, if the tenured journalists of a newspaper were to claim the right to collectively decide the editorial policy without interference from the owner of the paper, a communist party paper could end not being communist and the Wall Street Journal could cease to be pro-business. Instead, the professionals trained in the same journalism schools would impose their common outlook to the detriment of the diversification of views vital to democracy.19

Democracy and the State

We need to expand our thinking about democracy, and to recognize that things that are true and valid for democracy in certain societies may not be valid in all of them, and not in all historical contexts and

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circumstances. This brings me to another theme that Stepan and I made a central part of our thinking: without a state, there can be no democracy. You cannot even start organizing a democracy. You have to have a law that regulates the elections and some kind of administration of the elections. You have to have some kind of body to which you elect people. All that has to be decided by somebody before the elections; and that is where the state is very important to make democracy possible. Second, the state is essential for democracy in another sense: without a state, you cannot administer justice, police the public order, or collect taxes to provide basic services to people. The creation of tax collectors, bureaucracies, and so on, has very little to do with the process of democratization. A democracy that is not capable of doing all those things will not be successful. In fact, if democracy is not successful, somebody who might have somewhat authoritarian tendencies may appeal to the people and may even get democratically elected into a position of power; Russia in the posttransition period is an example. That means a well-functioning state is a requirement for a democracy to succeed. A state is a population, some borders, and a monopoly of legitimate violence. In Colombia, for example, there is certainly no monopoly of legitimate violence, and therefore it is an imperfect state. Maybe it is not a failed state in the sense of Liberia or Somalia, which are nonexistent states almost, but it is certainly an imperfect state. An imperfect state is a poor basis for democracy.

Federalism, Multinationalism, and Democracy

This brings us to another theme Stepan and I have been working on, which is federalism and multinationalism. Many people assume that the nation preexists the state. Historically, however, this has not been the case. European states appeared long before nations in Europe. At least that is my way of looking at nationalism; there is obviously some difference in opinion among students of nationalism. But assuming that the history of nationalism deals with a particular social phenomenon called the identification with a nation and the legitimation of the state by being a nation-state, the fact is that nations—France and Sweden and Portugal

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and so—were creations of the state, rather than the state being the creation of the nation. In fact, none of the states that exist in today’s world were created by a nationalist movement alone. It could be created only if a state gave in to the demands for independence of a nationalist movement or if the international community—the breakup of the AustroHungarian Empire, the breakup of the Ottoman Empire and the Russian tsarist empire—were the result of international processes. The creation of the new states was not a creation by nations. Look at Iraq: it is a state, or was a state, and it was certainly not created by an Iraqi nation or nationalist movement. That does not exist. A state may be able to contribute to the creation of a nation, although not in the way that it could in the nineteenth century or the beginning of the twentieth. But without a state or an international community supporting a state or taking on the burden of creating nation-states, there is no way of creating nations. Nations have no organization, and they cannot be democratic because the only way that a national movement can be democratic is through democratic parties, elections, and parliaments. The electoral rules and the election possibility have to be determined by somebody from outside. You might think that the Jewish community in Palestine created its own political institutions under the British mandate, but it was because a mandatory power tolerated and accepted it. The notion that you can start the whole process, mobilizing first nations, and then nations creating states, and the nations becoming an agent of democracy, and then democracy breeding the state, does not work very well. The other way around may not work either; the state may not create a nation, and the state may not support and create a democratic political system. But certainly the sequences are not as simple as some people would like to think, where state building and nation building are confused as the same thing, and where democracy is a way of creating a state and a nation. Democracy does not create states. Democracy even less creates nations; therefore, states are a presumption for democracy and are a main creator of nations; but democracy, states, and nations have different mechanisms and factors involved in their creation. To assume that democracy can achieve the process of state building or nation building is dubious.

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Democracy and Self-Determination

One of the most misleading and dangerous applications of the democratic principle is to say that plebiscites should decide on the claims for independence of nationalist movements. There are many arguments against this simplistic idea. One is the false analogy between an election and such a plebiscite. An election decides who shall govern pro tempore, for a limited time, while the plebiscitarian decision is permanent should the answer be affirmative (i.e., in favor of independence).20 Another, already noted by Ivor Jennings, is that the plebiscite presumes a prior, nondemocratic decision of who determines which individuals are eligible to vote. In Jennings’s words, “On the surface it seemed reasonable: let the people decide. It was in fact ridiculous because the people cannot decide until somebody decides who are the people.”21 The argument that the people should decide in a plebiscite presumes prior decisions about the minimum levels of participation and proportion of votes required. Given our knowledge of public opinion and elections, there is no veil of ignorance, and therefore parties’ acceptance of a plebiscite is based on their prior knowledge about popular preferences. Even more dramatic and often traumatic are the social and human consequences of forcing people to make a choice between dichotomous alternatives that ignore that history and social interactions have created different degrees of dual identities and social ties. Al Stepan and I have devoted much effort to analyzing dual identities and how state-nations22 rather than nation-states are compatible with them, and how federalism is a better solution than “democratic choice” in plebiscites. Plebiscites may be useful for deciding the fate of smaller areas, particularly border communities, but not of large political units.

State, Society, Nation, and Democracy beyond Europe

We need to go back much more to the history of how states, nations, and democracies emerge. We also need to be much more aware of how those processes took very different routes in different parts of the world. When we do so, we are confronted with another pressing problem: How

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do we deal with a world that is not the one of the European and expanded transatlantic, trans–Indian Ocean, and maybe export the European model of Rechtstaat, of a bureaucracy, of some institutions before the full development of democratic authority begins? Here we get into the problem of how we link with the realities of those societies. Some of our thinking about democracy, totalitarianism, and authoritarianism does not respond fully to that problematique. In an essay in a book on human rights, Ernest Gellner goes back to Ibn Khaldun and rightly notes that the politics in the context of the countryside was very different from the cities in the Islamic world. The cities in the Ottoman Empire of imperial rule created something closer to what we call the state today, but in the countryside tribal loyalties prevailed. According to Gellner, “As Ibn Khaldun elegantly put it, it is the state which prevents injustice, other than such as it commits itself. It holds, as you might say, a monopoly of injustice, and does not allow others to encroach on it. This monopoly, however, applies only in towns and some peasant areas: it does not extend to the tribal regions.”23 Likewise, Kathleen Collins’s book on the Central Asian republics that emerged out of the Soviet Union, the southern tier there, reminded me of the context described by Gellner.24 Tribal loyalties often prevail. We hear after all the democratic elections that people expected that civil society would produce political parties in Iraq. However, certain parties are really linked with a tribal group. When we read about Afghanistan, there is even a stronger sense of tribalism or clans. We have suddenly discovered that tribal or clan loyalties are not eroded by political parties. Political parties may be based on the assumption of individual citizens who have opinions and shift from one group to another—though this is admittedly a gross simplification in any context, since we know about the inflexibility of the electorate—but still the citizen has a right to shift his allegiance from one group to another without being sanctioned for doing so. However, if a person betrays his tribal loyalties, the consequences are severe. It follows that a party system structured around tribal loyalties is not going to be the same as one composed of parties built around ideologies or around universalistic conceptions of society. Democracy in many parts of the world may be something very different from what we are used to seeing in the past.

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Conclusion

Our hope is that the general considerations just presented will stimulate thinking and research, particularly systematic comparative research in comparable democracies. We are sure that Al Stepan in his future work will contribute to it.

I have been associated with Al Stepan for almost my entire academic career, from my days as his professor at Columbia to our volume, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes (Johns Hopkins, 1978), and our book, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation (Johns Hopkins, 1996), to the most recent Crafting State-Nations: India and Other Multinational Democracies (Johns Hopkins, 2011), also coauthored by Yogendra Yadav. Endless days and nights arguing, writing, in many different places in America and Europe mostly centered on the fate of democracy, up to the present crises in Tunis, Egypt, and Libya. Here I want to leave a tribute to him in gratitude for our many hours of intellectual exchange and our friendship.

Notes 1. On “democratic audits,” see Guillermo O’Donnell, Jorge Vargas Cullell, and Osvaldo M. Iazzetta, eds., The Quality of Democracy: Theory and Applications (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004). 2. Robert A. Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), 1. 3. “Speech at Mr. Burke’s Arrival in Bristol,” in The Portable Edmund Burke (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 155– 57; original emphasis. 4. Charlie Rose and Robert McNamara (minutes 22– 24), accessible online at www.charlierose.com/view/interview/10459. 5. Juan J. Linz, “Presidential or Parliamentary Democracy: Does It Make a Difference?,” in The Failure of Presidential Democracy: Comparative Perspectives, vol. 1, ed. Juan J. Linz and Arturo Valenzuela (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 3– 87; Alfred Stepan and Cindy Skach, “Presidentialism and Parliamentarism in Comparative Perspective,” in Linz and Valenzuela, The Failure of Presidential Democracy, 1:119– 36.

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6. See Susan Rose-Ackerman, “Controlling Corruption: Government Accountability, Business Ethics, and Sectoral Reform,” in The Construction of Democracy: Lessons from Practice and Research, ed. Jorge I. Domínguez and Anthony Jones (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 177– 200. 7. On the concept of Bundestreue, see Bertus de Villiers, “Bundestreue: The Soul of an Intergovernmental Partnership,” Occasional Papers (Johannesburg, RSA, March 1995). The German Constitutional Court has developed the concept as a constitutional norm. As de Villiers explains, “In one of its very first decisions (21 May 1952) the court concluded as follows: ‘The federal principle brings about a constitutional obligation that the member states of the Federation must act in good faith and trust towards one another as well as towards the Bund. The constitutional obligation in the federal state places the Bund and the member states under a justiciable duty to friendly relations.’ The approach of the court ever since has been that Bundestreue originates in the very soul of the federal principle and that, although no explicit mention is made of the concept in the Basic Law, it should be regarded as an ‘unwritten constitutional principle’. One of the effects of this, according to the court, is that it prevents the Bund and Länder from acting in an ‘egoistic’ manner, and concentrating only on their own interests. It encourages, and even forces, the parts of the federation to act together in good faith for the well-being of the nation as a whole” (15). 8. See José María Maravall and Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca, eds., Controlling Governments: Voters, Institutions, and Accountability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 9. Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: HarperPerennial, 1975), 290. 10. For an elaboration of this theme, see my essay, “Parties in Contemporary Democracies: Problems and Paradoxes,” in Political Parties: Old Concepts and New Challenges, ed. Richard Gunther, José Ramón Montero, and Juan J. Linz (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 291– 317. 11. Hans Kelsen, Verteidigung der Demokratie. Abhandlungen zur Demo kratietheorie (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006). 12. Ezra Suleiman, Dismantling Democratic States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 7. 13. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 293– 94. 14. “At Army School for Officers, Blunt Talk about Iraq,” New York Times, October 14, 2007. 15. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 87. *Editors’ note: A German, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg (1907– 44), was involved in the attempt to assassinate Hitler in 1944. He was executed after the attempt failed.

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16. On the elections in the Protestant churches in 1933, see Kurt Meier, Der evangelische Kirchenkampf, vol. 1, Der Kampf um die ‘Reichskirche’ (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1976), 56– 76, 103– 8; Klaus Scholder, The Churches and the Third Reich: Preliminary History and the Time of Illusions, 1918–1934 (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), chap. 9, 414– 40, for the theological-political factions; and chap. 10, 441– 92, on the establishment of the Reich Church (July– September 1933) and the July 1933 election, on the eve of which Hitler appealed on the radio to the “church electorate,” 441– 49. 17. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (London: Oxford University Press, 1950) (first published in 1855 and 1840), concluding chapter. The antiliberal, ultimately antidemocratic potential of certain conceptions of democracy was highlighted by J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1960). 18. Robert A. Dahl in some of his more recent writings tends to favor this expansion of the democratic principle to realms outside the political institutions. The same is true for many of the writings on “participatory democracy” after 1968. 19. Juan J. Linz, “Types of Political Regimes and Respect for Human Rights: Historical and Cross-national Perspectives,” in Human Rights in Perspective: A Global Assessment, ed. Asbjørn Eide and Bernt Hagtvet (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 177– 222. Quote from 192– 93. 20. See my essay, “Democracy’s Time Constraints,” International Political Science Review 19, no. 1 (1998): 19– 37. 21. Ivor Jennings, The Approach to Self-Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), 6. 22. In the context of my work on Spain, in “State Building and Nation Building,” European Review 1, no. 4 (1993): 355– 69, I distinguished between nation-states and state-nations. Stepan and I developed this theme in our book with Yogendra Yadav: Crafting State-Nations: India and Other Multinational Democracies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), chap. 1. We contrast the ideal type of classical nation-state with that of state-nation and the different policies associated with crafting them (see table 1.1) on the basis of the different sense of belonging, multiple cultural, often dual, identities, allegiance to different institutions rather than a unitary state. 23. Ernest Gellner, “Human Rights and the New Circle of Equity: Muslim Political Theory and the Rejection of Scepticism,” in Eide and Hagtvet, Human Rights in Perspective, 113– 28, quote from 115. 24. Kathleen Collins, Clan Politics and Regime Transition in Central Asia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Part IV Federalism and Democracy

9 Holding China Together Democratic Solutions for Resolving Ethnic Conflict Ashley Esarey

There is much debate among Western scholars about whether China will democratize but very little debate about how China should arrange its affairs, institutionally speaking, if the country succeeded in doing so. Due to the many contributions of Alfred Stepan, the political science literature on federalism leaves us equipped to consider the challenge of “holding together” democratic China. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is a modern-day empire claiming sovereignty over a vast amount of territory. The political scientist Lucian Pye once remarked, “China today is what Europe would have been if the unity of the Roman Empire had lasted until now and there had not been the separate emergences of the separate entities of England, France, Germany and the like.”1 Chinese territorial claims remain disputed by a substantial number of Tibetans, Uyghurs, and Taiwanese and even some Hong Kong residents. A democratic China would need to extend to all citizens civil and political rights essential to legal forms of political contestation and political participation, such as freedom of speech, media freedom, and the right to assemble and organize. Yet extending equal political rights to restive regions could cause ethnic nationalists to take advantage of new freedoms to champion secession as well as launch strikes or boycotts. Without carefully crafted and stable democratic institutions, simmering nationalist movements .

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could erupt into separatist violence, social movements, or “everyday forms of resistance,” which individually or collectively could tear apart the fabric of Chinese society.2 Maintaining unity among territories where PRC sovereignty is contested has proven to be a delicate enterprise. Ethnic riots claimed hundreds of lives in Tibet and Xinjiang in 2008 and 2009, until the central government quelled unrest through martial law and thousands of arrests. Yet coercion, or the threat of state violence, is a bloody and unreliable means of resolving what Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan have identified as “stateness problems,” or profound differences over a state’s territorial boundaries and citizenship rights.3 Through carefully crafted democratic reforms, Beijing could forge mutually advantageous institutional bargains by granting autonomy to regions with different customs, religions, languages, and national identities distinct from the Han Chinese majority dominating the government apparatus.4 Forming a Chinese state-nation, in which ethnic diversity is celebrated and individual rights are protected, requires the creation of “broadly accepted constitutional provisions and mechanisms to ensure that both the central and regional governments act within the law.”5 It is in the interest of theorists, policy makers, and activists in China and beyond to identify a blueprint for addressing these critical concerns. This chapter considers political institutions capable of holding together territories claimed by the People’s Republic that contain regional nationalist movements. It recommends implementing a combination of asymmetrical federalism and federacies to foster complementary identities in a multinational and democratic China.

Chinese Democracy

In the twilight years of the Qing dynasty, which lasted from 1644 to 1911, intellectuals vigorously debated whether leaders should reform the imperial government, create a constitutional monarchy, or found a republic. Scholars such as Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao wanted to modernize the faltering Qing state, while Zhang Binglin and Sun Yat-sen sought to destroy it. The Chinese debate over the merits of federalism commenced in the 1890s, when advocates saw local self-government as

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the cure for warlordism. Last-ditch reforms by the Qing dynasty in the years prior to the 1911 Revolution reflected the goal of increasing national strength through zizhi, or self-government.6 After the Revolution, warlords and not federalists proved victorious politically. Yet representative forms of government eventually appeared in various manifestations, from the election of the city council of Chinese Shanghai to autonomous political parties competing in a general election in 1913. During the May Fourth Movement of 1915– 21, minzhu, the Chinese rendering of “democracy,” was one of the principal causes advocated by Chinese students and intellectuals, who desired to cast off the yoke of imperialism.7 After returning to power in 1928, the Nationalists expressed commitment to democratic ideals while asserting that China required a period of tutelage under one-party rule. This effectively ended Chinese experimentation with democracy, until the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) sanctioned low-level elections for village committees in the 1980s.8 Although China under CCP rule fails to satisfy Dahlian criteria for democracy, there have been important moments of pluralism, most notably in the ill-fated Hundred Flowers Movement (1956– 57), the De mocracy Wall Movement (1978– 79), and the Tiananmen Square demonstrations (1989). Furthermore, the Communists have frequently invoked the term democracy (minzhu) in state propaganda, drawing attention to their “democratic revolution,” “democratic reforms,” and “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat” and even calling China a “democratic” country. During a report to China’s Seventeenth Party Congress in October 2007, President Hu Jintao mentioned democracy more than sixty times. There is confusion in China concerning how the CCP definition of “democracy” differs from the brand advocated by Western leaders. (The term is often used to describe China’s current political system.)9 Yet Chinese are clearly cognizant of the advantages of democratic governance, although prominent scholars, such as Peking University’s Pan Wei, have argued against democracy and suggest that rule of law (like that of Singapore) would be best for the country. Most Chinese with experience using the democratic process to address issues of poor governance and corruption, however, are participants in village elections. As Thomas Bernstein and Xiaobo Lü have pointed out, competitive

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elections in the countryside demonstrate that electing more accountable village leaders can mitigate some of the excesses of the CCP monopoly on political power.10 Can China democratize? Optimists such as Bruce Gilley have argued that democratization is inevitable as the size of the Chinese middle class grows, the CCP becomes increasingly out of touch with mainstream society, the regime demonstrates its inability to effectively manage the country’s market economy, and the party-state loses control of the marketplace of ideas. Gilley predicts that pro-democracy leaders inside and outside the party will join forces to create credible democratic institutions, by cooperating with China’s competent bureaucracy.11 The historian Merle Goldman’s work highlights the capacity of Chinese intellectuals to lead a democracy movement. In Sowing the Seeds of Democracy in China, Goldman examines the group of reformers with ties to Hu Yaobang, the former party general secretary, whose death sparked the Tiananmen demonstrations in spring 1989. She argues that the “roots” of Chinese democracy grew stronger with each successive attempt by the party to tear them out. Goldman focuses on the emergence of independent political organizations, ideological diversity, liberalism, and the founding of China’s first opposition party since 1949, the China Democracy Party. She also examines the growth of “rights consciousness” among citizens, who increasingly use legal arguments to appeal to the courts to protect their rights to freedom of expression, liberty, and property. While Goldman acknowledges that attempts to assert political rights have been suppressed by the CCP, she concludes that a significant change has occurred in the relationship between citizens and the state in the post-Mao era, as rights consciousness has spread from the elites to the masses.12 Li Cheng’s research suggests that China’s future leaders are well educated and better schooled than their predecessors in Western political thought. Unlike the technocrats who have ruled since the 1990s, 69 percent of China’s rising stars have received training in social science, law, and politics. The hardships they experienced during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), Li argues, “endowed them with humility, resourcefulness, and other valuable characteristics for leadership,” including perhaps more open-mindedness than China’s present leaders.13 Might not the CCP’s next generation of leaders consider federalism?

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Many scholars are less sanguine. They see the future of the Chinese state as collapse, resilient authoritarianism made possible by political adaptation, or stagnation without democratic reform. In the 1990s a number of scholars and policy experts predicted the collapse of the Chinese state due to a host of problems ranging from “floating” populations of millions of disenfranchised migrant workers to dissatisfied minority populations, moral decay, low state capacity, and a growing disparity of wealth between coastal and inland regions.14 Dali Yang, however, has suggested that the CCP has strengthened its hold on power by improving the performance of state institutions and recentralizing control over key policy areas.15 Elizabeth Perry has argued that the Chinese political regime is more stable than many analysts believe. The rapid increase in the number of large-scale protests in the past decade, she asserts, stems largely from the desire for social justice and economic equality rather than civil rights as understood in the West. “In a country where rights are seen more as state-authorized channels to enhance national unity and prosperity than as naturally endowed protections against state intrusion,” she writes, “popular demands for the exercise of political rights are perhaps better seen as an affirmation of—rather than an affront to—state power.”16 Andrew Nathan claims that the CCP survives because it has avoided the succession crises that often plague nondemocratic regimes. By making the transitions between top party leaders “norm-bound,” aging leaders step down when their term limits end. Furthermore, Nathan points out that China’s leaders are increasingly technocratic. They have reformed state institutions to allow effective management of the economy, as well as incorporate public concerns into government policy, while repressing dissent perceived as threatening the power of the partystate.17 Minxin Pei argues that China is caught in a “trapped transition,” in which “partially reformed economic and political institutions support a hybrid neoauthoritarian order that caters mostly to the needs of a small ruling elite” to the detriment of the national interest.18 But authoritarian regimes, to quote Nathan, are “not forever. . . . [T]hey live under the shadow of the future, vulnerable to existential challenges that mature democracies do not face.”19 Thus, while optimists believe that China will democratize and point to inevitable political change on the horizon, pessimists think

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that China’s authoritarian resilience will persist, perhaps for a very long time. Pessimists conclude that the Chinese state has adapted proactively, so as to stay in step with an increasingly capitalist society, or assert that business elites are reluctant to lead a democratic movement, due to cooptation by the CCP establishment, fear of repression, or unwillingness to forgo business opportunities in the booming Chinese economy.20 Neither optimists nor pessimists say China will not democratize at some point in the future. For the purposes of this chapter, it is sufficient to acknowledge the possibility that forces such as economic malaise or hyperinflation, corruption scandals, the outbreak of a pandemic, or the adverse effects of postindustrial pollution could lead to a chain of events that includes developments such as large-scale demonstrations, factionalism among top party leaders, or an elite-led democracy movement, any of which could help spur a democratic transition. Such a transition might proceed gradually within the existing political system, as occurred in Taiwan during the 1980s and 1990s; rapidly and haphazardly, as was the case in Eastern European countries in 1989; or in the style of Russia’s shift from “party-state rule to anarchic democracy.”21 Few scholars have discussed the sort of institutions China would need to avoid Balkanization or rapid dissolution as experienced by the Soviet Union. While federalist solutions cannot mitigate all the problems associated with democratization, the merits of federalism deserve serious consideration as increasing the likelihood that Chinese democracy could survive long enough to become the only game in town and thereby improve political rights and civil liberties for one-fifth of the world’s population. It is essential to consider the sort of institutional framework that could hold China together in the event of a democratic transition or related reforms.

Symmetrical and Asymmetrical Federalism

Alfred Stepan’s empirical research on federalism has shown that, with the exception of the United Kingdom, all long-standing multinational or multilingual democracies are federations.22 If China were to democ-

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ratize, it would almost certainly require a federal system of government; the structure of a federal system, contra Riker, makes a considerable difference for policy outcomes.23 Even stable democracies have struggled to satisfy diverse, multiethnic populations. Canada has faced the specter of Quebecois separatism; Spain has agonized over Basque secessionist violence; and Switzerland faced secession from Catholic cantons in 1848.24 By comparison, nondemocratic federations have proven far more difficult to hold together.25 As Stepan has observed: Out of the nine states that once made up communist Europe, six were unitary and three were federal. The six unitary states are now five federal states (East Germany has reunited with the Federal Republic), while the three federal states—Yugoslavia, the USSR, and Czechoslovakia — are now 22 independent states. Most of postcommunist Europe’s ethnocracies and ethnic bloodshed have occurred within these postfederal states.26 With this stark warning of what can go wrong with nondemocratic federations, the analysis below is restricted to federations that are constitutional democracies, wherein the actions of the federal government visà-vis the “periphery” or federal units are credibly constrained.27 Absent constitutional democracy, the sphere of policy-making autonomy at the federal and local levels is likely ephemeral at best, because the center does not face binding restrictions to prevent arbitrary change of the federal bargain.28 If democratic China were to select a federal system of government, it would, generally speaking, have the following two models from which to choose: 1. A “symmetrical” federation, whereby each unit of the federation has an equal number of votes (typically found in the territorial chamber of a bicameral parliament). The common choice of mononational states, symmetrical federations are usually “demos constraining” in the sense that less populous units in the federation are often vastly overrepresented.29 For example, the small U.S. states of Wyoming and Vermont, which in 2010 had respective populations of 563,626 and 625,741, had the same Senate representation as California, a

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state with a population of over 37 million. In the case of China, such an arrangement might mean that the autonomous regions of Xinjiang and Tibet if converted into federal units would have the same representation as the vastly more populous provinces of Hunan and Sichuan. By introducing a mechanism that privileges less populous and restive units, whose history inclines them toward secession, symmetrical federation could provide an incentive for these regions to remain in the federation. Those who believe democracy is based on the principle of “one person, one vote,” however, may oppose such a representation scheme. Scholars have demonstrated that departure from this principle has negatively affected the efficacy of democratic governance in countries such as Brazil, where “a group of senators representing less than 9 percent of the electorate can produce a ‘winset’ to block major legislative reform.”30 Problems related to political efficacy, moreover, are particularly crucial in young democracies that must demonstrate to skeptics the advantages of a new political system during the process of democratic consolidation. 2. An “asymmetrical” federalism, which grants different federal units containing certain ethnic or linguistic groups special policy privileges or special rights of political participation. It has effectively held together countries such as India and Spain, where the architects of federal systems recognized the need to make special accommodations for regions with populations that favored separatism. This type of federalism, as demonstrated by India, is “demos enabling” in the sense that representation is much closer to the principle of one person, one vote, when the votes of individual territorial units are calculated based on the population of each unit. Some federal systems, such as the German model, guarantee a minimum number of votes for each unit and then adjust the unit’s votes in accordance with population totals.31 Typically, neither symmetrical nor asymmetrical federalism allows units the right of voluntary exit. Crafting the initial federal bargain thus takes on enormous importance. An asymmetrical federation may function better when it utilizes what Arend Lijphart dubs “consociational practices,” which involve power-sharing agreements between groups or political parties.32 The ideal scenario is a parliamentary system of government in which popu-

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lation determines membership in the lower house. It is also advisable to use substantial, closed-list proportional representation in the upper house and polity-wide (as opposed to local or ethnic) political parties. In the interests of reducing interethnic tensions, constitutional provisions should exist, as is the case in India, which grant the center the power to adjust boundaries of federal units by a simple majority vote in the upper and lower houses. At the federal level, the existence of a strong constitutional court, a common “link” language—in China’s case, Mandarin—and opportunities to participate in a federal civil service would increase the durability of the federation by resolving legal conflicts and improving economic integration, interethnic communication, and factor mobility. In evaluating the Indian federation, Stepan reasoned that “it is also possible that in a multi-national polity, some groups can only participate fully as individual citizens, if as a group they acquire the right to have some schooling, mass media, religious or even legal structures that respond to the specifics of their culture.”33 The combination of federal integration and localization of government policies is crucial both to foster a sense of belonging in the federation and to empower certain groups or regions.

Federalism and Restive Regions: Tibet and Xinjiang

Of the two federal models, the most flexible and normatively advantageous one for multinational or multilingual countries is asymmetrical federalism in combination with parliamentarism and proportional representation in the electoral system.34 Properly constructed, asymmetrical federalism could provide a measure of national representation and policy autonomy to areas such as Tibet that have a long history of independence from China.35 More important to Tibetan Buddhists, a constitutionally embedded form of asymmetrical federalism could cede authority over religious matters, education, and cultural affairs—such as control over policy affecting the use of the Tibetan language in schools— to Tibetan government leaders elected only by Tibetans or Chinese who have lived in the Tibetan area for a specified, uninterrupted period. Such measures could help to preserve Tibetan identity, strengthen Tibetan

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political and social rights, and provide considerable incentive for Tibetans to avoid the high cost of secession, possibly involving bloody struggle with the People’s Liberation Army and lost opportunities for economic development. Following the completion of the Qinghai-Tibet railway in 2006, tens of thousands of Chinese have traveled to Tibet—a situation that could change the ethnic makeup of traditionally Tibetan areas over the long term. Since 2000, according to official census data, more than half of working-age males in Lhasa have been non-Tibetans.36 Racial tensions have increased apace with the arrival of Chinese settlers. The freedom of information associated with democratic society would likely strengthen Tibetan identity, creating pressure for institutional accommodation for traditional Tibetan areas. Eventually, revising the borders of the current Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) could become a highly contentious and crucial issue. Although the TAR comprises over 10 percent of the People’s Republic of China, ethnographic Tibet includes parts of Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan, and Yunnan provinces. The central government could potentially resolve divisive border issues if it possessed the constitutional authority to carry out such a task, as is true in India where “rapid, linguistic boundary adjustments were made.”37 The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region has a sizable population of non-Han peoples who are predominantly Muslim. The Uyghur people possess a language and customs more closely tied to Turkic Central Asia than to China. While the Chinese have largely managed to subdue Tibetan separatism since the late 1950s, separatists in Xinjiang seeking to create an independent state of East Turkestan have gained strength apace since the early 1990s. They have carried out a spate of attacks, aided by cellular phones, the Internet, and international sympathizers.38 With the independence of Soviet Central Republics, including neighboring Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, aspirations grew among Muslim separatists for the founding of an independent East Turkestan. The Chinese have responded with a series of crackdowns resulting in the imprisonment of thousands of Uyghurs and hundreds of executions. Amnesty International estimated that the number of executions in Xinjiang was the highest of any provincial-level unit in China (1.8 per week), with mostly Uyghurs executed.39

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Devolution of power over educational and especially religious matters to Xinjiang residents could provide Uyghurs and other Muslims living in the present autonomous region with incentives to remain within a Chinese federation. For both Tibet and Xinjiang, opportunities for politicians to serve in polity-wide political parties and a federal civil service might dampen support for separatism and increase the likelihood that dual and complementary identities will emerge. The creation of an effective federal safety net to provide public goods, such as welfare, unemployment, and retirement benefits, could provide further incentives to support a Chinese federation.40

The Federacy Option: Hong Kong and Taiwan?

For areas with considerable cultural and linguistic differences and a history of political autonomy, federacies—constitutionally guaranteed division of powers between a central government and a culturally or linguistically distinct local unit — have proven effective.41 Federacies typically cede most if not all power over foreign policy and the military to a central government in exchange for guaranteed local government autonomy over most other matters. Contemporary examples of federacies are Puerto Rico (U.S.), Greenland (Denmark), and the Åland Islands (Finland), Crimea (Ukraine), Nunavut (Canada), the Azores and Madeira (Portugal), Gagauzia (Moldova), New Caldonia (France), the Netherlands Antilles (the Netherlands), Zanzibar (Tanzania), and South Tyrol (Italy).42 The concept of a federacy is most similar to the sovereignty arrangement in use for Hong Kong, a former British colony that is currently a Chinese Special Administrative Region (SAR), with per capita incomes on par with developed countries and considerable political and fiscal autonomy. Hong Kong’s autonomy is protected by Basic Law, an agreement that grants the Hong Kong government power over politics within the SAR but which is subject to interpretation by the National People’s Congress in Beijing. In Hong Kong, dissatisfaction with Chinese policies and the desire for a more accountable government has led to popular support for increased democratization and even formal independence

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from China. For a polity so long accustomed to a high degree of political autonomy, joining a symmetrical federation would be undesirable and highly improbable unless the central government employed coercion. The federacy option would protect the autonomy of Hong Kong’s economic, political, and legal systems while allowing the federacy to benefit from economic opportunities in “greater China.” Fostering Mandarin Chinese as a national “link” language and providing opportunities in a national civil service would aid in the formation of dual and complementary identities. Applying the concept of a federacy to Taiwan, a country with de facto independence, is more problematic and vastly more difficult to achieve through coercion. Taiwan freely elects its top leaders, maintains a sizable military, and has official international relations with more than twenty countries and unofficial relations with hundreds more. The island’s security is protected under U.S. law by the Taiwan Relations Act. Former President Chen Shui-bian was a longtime advocate of a distinct Taiwan national identity; Taiwanese public opinion has tended to be more in favor of independence than unification with nondemocratic China. Therefore, one cannot preclude outright independence as an option for achieving harmonious relations across the Taiwan Strait. Economic, political, and cultural ties with the People’s Republic have grown stronger under the leadership of President Ma Ying-jeou. While controversial in Taiwan, the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) reached by Beijing and Taipei in June 2010 marks a major step forward for free trade and economic integration. ECFA promises to reduce tariffs by nearly $18 billion for over eight hundred products sold on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.43 The two sides have also agreed on a financial framework agreement that provides new opportunities for Chinese investment in Taiwan’s economy, regulatory agreements related to food safety, and cooperation concerning the prosecu tion of fraud.44 Since President Ma’s election in 2008, Taiwan has agreed to significant increases in the number of visitors from the PRC. Travelers now take regularly scheduled direct flights from Taiwan to major Chinese cities. For nearly sixty years air traffic had to travel through a third destination. Conveniently, for the purposes of a political union, the lingua franca in Taiwan is Mandarin Chinese (despite the resurgence of Taiwanese-language education).

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With constitutionally guaranteed political autonomy, Taiwan might agree to a phased demilitarization in exchange for Beijing’s agreement to grant Taiwan the special status of “republic” and permit Taiwan to have representation in the United Nations and the World Health Organization. The enlargement of “international space” (guoji kongjian) would appeal to Taiwanese advocates of independence, who argue that membership in international organizations will increase Taiwan’s national security.

Making a Chinese State-Nation

Although deep differences over the territorial boundaries of the Chinese political community and citizens’ rights may seem to pose intractable stateness problems, countries such as India largely overcame similar challenges through the formation of an asymmetrical federation with demos-enabling institutions. By comparison, China has a stronger common link language with Taiwan, and to a lesser degree with Cantonesespeaking Hong Kong and formerly Portuguese Macau, Tibet, and Xinjiang, although the PRC enjoys high economic integration with all these territories. China is also far wealthier today than India was in the 1950s, average educational levels are higher, and a smaller percentage of the total Chinese population is sympathetic to separatist activism. It is difficult, therefore, to argue that forging institutional arrangements capable of holding China together is an impossible task. If China can overcome the hurdles of liberalization and democratization, the primary obstacles to reimagining China as a democracy are the absence of a tradition of rule of law and protection of individual rights and the historical reliance on coercion to achieve the assimilation of non-Han ethnic groups. For skeptics, this seems a very tall order. Moreover, federalism is far from a panacea for China’s political problems. If handled improperly, incautiously, or too rapidly, federalism could breed chaos and separatism or simply evolve in the direction of unitary government that is less capable of representing minority interests. As Daniel Ziblatt has observed, “At the moment a federal state is founded, a dilemma emerges. How can a political core be strong enough to forge a union but not so powerful as to overawe the constituent states, thereby forming a unitary state?”45 In a

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comparison of the origins of federalism in nineteenth-century Germany and Italy, Ziblatt argues that federalism is more likely to prevail if “preexisting units of a potential federation are highly institutionalized and are deeply embedded in their societies—and hence are capable of governance.”46 The People’s Republic and the territories it claims possess a high degree of institutionalization and are connected with a modern and increasingly effective infrastructure. Hong Kong and Taiwan are tightly bound, economically, to provinces that make up the core of the predominantly Han Chinese PRC. Any effective institutional design for a Chinese federation would necessarily reflect the country’s distinct political legacy and require delicate crafting by Chinese scholars, policy makers, and reformers. Yet founders of a Chinese democracy should consider the merits of asymmetrical federalism for Tibet and Xinjiang and federacies for Hong Kong, Taiwan—areas with highly institutionalized autonomy. Federal institutions are the most effective means of achieving territorial unity and respect for China’s cultural and political diversity, although the transition from unitary authoritarian government to federalism will not be easy. As Stepan has advised, “Our research agenda on multinational federalism needs to focus on what political practices and incentives contribute to multiple and complementary identities, civic peace, and democracy, and which practices and incentives contribute to polarizing identities, fratricide, and ethnocracies.”47 This chapter has embraced the spirit of Stepan’s advice through a consideration of the history of democracy in China, contemporary political analyses, and the literature on federalism. Human civilizations, however, seldom evolve predictably. The challenge of “holding together” democratic or authoritarian China is almost certain to prove difficult as well as to merit future scholarship.

Notes The author would like to thank the editors, Doug Chalmers and Scott Mainwaring, as well as Julia Famularo, Evelyne Huber, Allison Stanger, Alfred Stepan, and an anonymous reviewer, for insightful comments.

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1. Dru Gladney, Dislocating China: Reflections on Muslims, Minorities, and Other Subaltern Subjects (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 16. 2. The examples of Yugoslavia in the 1980s and 1990s and Rwanda in the mid-1990s demonstrated the particular dangers of nationalism to democratizing countries, especially when institutions facilitating free debate do not have a long tradition and can, therefore, be easily manipulated by nationalist leaders. See Jack Snyder and Karen Ballentine, “Nationalism and the Marketplace of Ideas,” International Security 21, no. 2 (Fall 1996): 5– 40. 3. Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 16. 4. For excellent research deconstructing Han Chinese nationalism (and explaining the nature of resistance to it) in areas with substantial non-Han populations, see Gladney, Dislocating China. 5. Alfred Stepan, “Federalism, Multi-National Societies, and Negotiating a Democratic ‘State-Nation’: A Theoretical Framework, the Indian Model, and a Tamil Case Study,” in Ethnonationalism in India, ed. Sanjib Baruah (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 353. 6. Arthur Waldron, “Warlordism versus Federalism: The Revival of a Debate?” China Quarterly, no. 121 (March 1990): 116– 28. 7. The Chinese understanding of minzhu (popular sovereignty) and the Western understanding of “democracy” differ considerably. Informed by the writings of Tocqueville, Schumpeter, and Dahl, the latter implies a vigorous and autonomous civil society, competition for public support and the exercise of political power through institutions, and the presence of civil rights and liberal discourse, whereas the former involved rule by enlightened elites who enjoyed popular support not necessarily channeled through electoral institutions. For an excellent review of the literature on Chinese de mocracy, see Edmund S. K. Fung, In Search of Chinese Democracy: Civil Opposition in Nationalist China, 1929–1949 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1– 25. 8. Initially, the period of “training” for the masses was to last until 1935, after which a constitutional democracy was to be implemented. In the end, however, the authoritarian tendencies of the Nationalist Party prevailed. Lloyd E. Eastman, The Abortive Revolution: China under Nationalist Rule, 1927–1937 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 140– 80. For analysis of the origins of village elections in China, see Kevin J. O’Brien and Lianjiang Li, “Accommodating ‘Democracy’ in a One-Party State: Introducing Village Elections in China,” China Quarterly, no. 162 (June 2000): 465– 89. 9. Andrew J. Nathan, “China’s Political Trajectory: What Are the Chinese Saying?,” in China’s Changing Political Landscape: Prospects for Democracy, ed. Cheng Li (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2008).

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10. Thomas Bernstein and Xiaobo Lü, Taxation without Representation in Contemporary Rural China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 11. Bruce Gilley, China’s Democratic Future (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). Andrew J. Nathan comments on Gilley’s work in “Present at the Stagnation: Is China’s Development Stalled?,” Foreign Affairs 85, no. 4 (July– August 2006): 177– 78. 12. Merle Goldman, From Comrade to Citizen: The Struggle for Political Rights in China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 13. Cheng Li, “Will China’s ‘Lost Generation’ Find a Path to Democracy?,” in Cheng Li, China’s Changing Political Landscape, 114. 14. For a review of related literature, see Barry J. Naughton and Dali Yang, eds., Holding China Together: Diversity and National Integration in the Post-Deng Era (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 2– 5. 15. Dali Yang, Remaking the Chinese Leviathan: Market Transition and the Politics of Governance in China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). 16. Elizabeth Perry, “Chinese Conceptions of ‘Rights’: From Mencius to Mao—and Now,” Perspectives on Politics 6, no. 1 (2008): 37– 50. 17. Andrew J. Nathan, “Authoritarian Resilience,” Journal of Democracy 14, no. 1 (January 2003): 6–17. 18. Minxin Pei, China’s Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmental Autocracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 9. 19. Andrew J. Nathan, “Authoritarian Impermanence: China since Tiananmen,” Journal of Democracy 20, no. 3 (2009): 38. 20. Bruce Dickson, Red Capitalists in China: The Party, Private Entrepreneurs, and Prospects for Political Change (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Kellee Tsai, Capitalism without Democracy: The Private Sector in Contemporary China (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007). 21. Goldman, From Comrade to Citizen, 230-31. Goldman suggests that China is more likely to evolve in a manner similar to Taiwan, a loosely controlled Leninist party state in the 1980s, than the countries of Eastern Europe, due to the emergence of unofficial civil society and the support of private business interests for independent journals and think tanks. See also Merle Goldman and Ashley Esarey, “Intellectual Pluralism and Dissent in Taiwan and China,” in Political Change in China: Comparisons with Taiwan, ed. Larry Di amond and Bruce Gilley (Washington, DC: Lynne Rienner, 2008). 22. Alfred Stepan, Arguing Comparative Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 315. 23. Alfred Stepan, “Toward a New Comparative Politics of Federalism, Multinationalism, and Democracy: Beyond Rikerian Federalism,” in Federalism and Democracy in Latin America, ed. Edward L. Gibson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). 24. Alfred Stepan, “Federalism and Democracy: Beyond the U.S. Model,” Journal of Democracy 10, no. 4 (1999): 19. The exception of the United King-

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dom is noted in Stepan, “Federalism, Multi-National Societies, and Negotiating a Democratic ‘State-Nation.’” 25. One of the foremost theorists of federalism, William H. Riker, assumed that federations result from a bargain between previously sovereign polities in which these bodies agree to cede partial sovereignty in exchange for greater collective resources to achieve lower-cost public goods, such as national security, and to improve economic development. Riker included nondemocratic regimes such as Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union in his set of federal countries. William H. Riker, “Federalism,” in Handbook of Political Science, vol. 5, ed. Fred Greenstein and Nelson W. Polsby (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1975), 93–172. For a critique of Riker’s views, see Stepan, “Federalism and Democracy: Beyond the U.S. Model.” 26. Stepan, “Federalism and Democracy: Beyond the U.S. Model,” 19. 27. Robert A. Dahl, Democracy, Liberty and Equality (Oslo: Norwegian University Press, 1986), 114. Constitutional democracy here refers to rulebound political competition in which a country’s top political positions are filled through periodic elections in which all citizens may participate. 28. Barry Weingast and colleagues famously argued that China had a de facto federal system in the 1980s in which the center and provinces each had self-perpetuating spheres of autonomy. In the 1990s, however, the center centralized power in key areas such as the state tax system, financial markets, and the mass media. Gabriella Montinola, Yingyi Qian, and Barry R. Weingast, “Federalism, Chinese Style: The Political Basis of Economic Success in China,” World Politics 48, no. 1 (October 1995): 50– 81. 29. Stepan has argued that “All (or all but one) of the long-standing multinational federal democracies are constitutionally asymmetrical.” See Stepan, “Toward A New Comparative Politics of Federalism,” 40; original emphasis. 30. Stepan, Arguing Comparative Politics, 339. 31. Ibid., 342. 32. Stepan, “Federalism, Multi-National Societies, and Negotiating a Democratic ‘State-Nation.’” 33. Ibid. 34. Stepan and others have suggested this combination of institutional arrangements for the establishment of a democratic political system in multiethnic Burma. Andrew Reynolds, Alfred Stepan, Zaw Oo, and Stephen Levine, “How Burma Could Democratize,” Journal of Democracy 12, no. 4 (2001): 95–108. 35. Historically, Tibet possessed considerable independence despite Chinese claims, which grew stronger during the Qing dynasty, that Tibet was an integral part of Chinese territory. Chinese control over Tibet’s traditional capital and much of Tibetan territory did not occur until after 1951, following the effective military campaign by the People’s Liberation Army the preceding year. Tsering Shakya, The Dragon in the Land of Snows: A History of Modern Tibet since 1947 (New York: Penguin, 1999).

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36. Robert Barnett, “Why Doesn’t China Want the Dalai Lama to Resign?,” Foreign Policy, March 21, 2011, accessed March 22, 2011, at www.foreignpolicy .com/articles/2011/03/21/Why_Doesn%27t_China_Want_To_Let_the_Dali_ Lama_Resign?page=0,0. 37. Stepan, Arguing Comparative Politics, 359. 38. Beijing attributed the deadly violence in July 2009 to instigation by the World Uyghur Congress and the U.S.-based activist Rebiya Kadeer, who CCP leaders see as a separatist. Georgetown University scholar James Millward and others have argued these charges are false. Uyghur students, who demonstrated in Urumqi, sought legal justice for victims of deadly mob violence in a Guangdong factory; students marched under the banner of the People’s Republic of China! See James Millward, “The Urumchi Unrest Revisited,” China Beat, July 29, 2009. 39. Xinjiang and Tibet are autonomous regions, administrative units with a status at the same level as provinces. Dru Gladney, “Xinjiang: China’s Future West Bank?” Current History 101, no. 656 (September 2002): 267. 40. Michael C. Davis, “The Case for Chinese Federalism,” Journal of De mocracy 10, no. 2 (1999): 124– 37. 41. David A. Rezvani, “On the Emergence and Utility of ‘Federacy’ in Comparative Politics,” paper presented at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, May 14, 2004; David A. Rezvani, “The Basis of Puerto Rico’s Constitutional Status: Colony, Compact, or ‘Federacy’?,” Political Science Quarterly 122, no. 1 (2007): 115– 40. The prospect of a Taiwan federacy was considered by Linda Jakobson in “A Greater Chinese Union,” Washington Quarterly 28, no. 3 (2005): 27– 39. 42. Rezvani, “The Basis of Puerto Rico’s Constitutional Status,” 117. 43. Daniel Blumenthal, “Why the China-Taiwan Trade Agreement Doesn’t Solve Everything,” Foreign Policy, June 29, 2010. Accessed July 1, 2010, at http:// shadow.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/06/29/why_the_china_taiwan_trade_ agreement_doesn_t_solve_everything. 44. Merrit T. Cooke, “Taiwan’s Economy: Recovery with Chinese Characteristics,” Brookings Institution, November 2009. Accessed December 12, 2011, at www.brookings.edu/opinions/2009/11_taiwan_economy_cooke.aspx. 45. Daniel Ziblatt, “Rethinking the Origins of Federalism: Puzzle, Theory, and Evidence from Nineteenth-Century Europe,” World Politics 57 (October 2004): 70. 46. Ibid., 71. 47. Stepan, Arguing Comparative Politics, 360.

10 Of Swords and Shields Federalism and Territorial Democratization in the United States Edward L. Gibson

Justice Stevens in effect managed to use federalism as a sword rather than a shield. —New York Times, April 3, 2007 Federalism has never been more crucial for the study of democracy and comparative politics. —Alfred Stepan, “Toward a New Comparative Politics of Federalism, Multinationalism, and Democracy”

Alfred Stepan has long called for theory building about the relationship between federalism and democracy. As one of the founding fathers of the now-burgeoning field of comparative federalism, Stepan has also generated important theories of his own about this relationship. His insights into how federalism can constrain the weight of democratic majorities at the center in national decision making provided new ways of comparing federal systems. They also revealed that federalism divides countries not only into multiple and overlapping governments but also into multiple and overlapping electorates. How they are structured in 273

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relation to one another tells us much about power and representation in federal democracies. In this and more recent work, Stepan has revealed the tight institutional interconnections that exist between federalism and democracy, as well as the significance for democratic regimes of how such institutional arrangements are “crafted” by political actors. This chapter is an attempt to respond to Stepan’s call for theoretical development of federalism’s relationship to democracy. It is about how institutional change in federalism is linked to institutional change in democracy. It also focuses on institutional “crafting” by political actors. This crafting is carried out by actors in political conflict, seeking to alter the architecture of federalism over time as a result of continuing conflicts about democracy. As a result, federal institutions are permanent objects of contestation in struggles about democracy (and in struggles about many other things). I explore how actors pursue changes in federalism in order to affect outcomes in the democratic regime. In doing this, I also seek to show that the institutional evolution of federalism in the United States, the world’s oldest federal democracy, has been inextricably tied to conflicts about democracy. Years back, Alfred Stepan asked the question, how does federalism constrain the will and influence of national majorities? Here I ask a different question: how does federalism constrain the expansion of democratic institutions across the subnational jurisdictions of a country? In asking this question I am addressing a dimension of democratization that has been largely neglected in the comparative democratization literatures, the spread (or nonspread) of democratic institutions across territory within the nation-state. I am also focusing on the United States, a country that because of its status as one of the world’s oldest “consolidated” democracies is seldom mined for insights into contemporary democratization problems. However, few countries can illuminate as much about the little-understood process of subnational democratization as the United States. Its conflicts over the democratization of the states were wrenching, massive, and prolonged. Furthermore, these conflicts were inseparable from conflicts about federalism. Would federalism be a sword that could be used against entrenched authoritarian structures in the states, or would it be a shield for local incumbents against democratizing pressures from the center? In essence, this ques-

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tion was about how the territorial organization of the polity would shape the territorial organization of democracy within the country’s borders. The battle to decide this tells us much about why federalism in the United States looks the way it does today. This battle was obviously a very long and complex one, certainly longer and more complex than can be covered in one essay. I will thus focus on one (very revealing) historical instance of this longer struggle: the conflict during the immediate post–Civil War period known as Reconstruction (1866 – 77), in which institutional crafters fought to answer a fundamental question about U.S. federalism: does the national government have the power to define and enforce a uniform standard of democracy on the states of the federation?

“Substantive” Democratization and “Territorial” Democratization

“Democratization” is a well-worn concept, yet another conceptual distinction might aid the study of subnational processes of democratization. We can conceive of two distinct patterns of democratization within the nation-state: substantive democratization and territorial democratization. Substantive democratization is the granting of rights that had not been previously granted in the country, either a new concept of rights or the extension of existing rights to new categories of people. Suffrage is an obvious example. Granting the right to vote for political leaders is usually the criterion that marks the move from an authoritarian to a democratic regime. Following this, the extension of the vote to previously disenfranchised categories of people (non–property owners, illiterates, women, minorities, etc.) is a manifestation of continuing or deepening democratization.1 Territorial democratization is the expansion of clusters of rights or democratic practices across a country’s political jurisdictions. It involves the granting of rights already available to inhabitants of one part of a country to inhabitants of other parts of the country. The extension of full representation in the national congress to inhabitants of Washington, D.C., today or the granting of full rights of citizenship to inhabitants of territories (not states) would be one set of examples. The

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struggles that ended Jim Crow and single-party rule in the U.S. South would be another.2 Territorial democratization, as with substantive democratization, should not be seen as an inevitable or unidirectional process. Once the establishment of a national government meeting the minimal procedural characteristics of a democracy is established, two political processes will tend to be unleashed in a country, struggles over the continued substantive democratization of the national government and struggles over territorial democratization. Advances in territorial democratization are not necessarily permanent but are continuously affected by local political dynamics and the interactions of political forces throughout the national territorial system.

The United States, Federalism, and the Struggle for Democracy Why the United States as a Comparative Case?

Territorial democratization is a major contemporary issue in much of the developing and postcommunist world today. However, we are short of theoretical and historical “models” of this phenomenon that can help us make sense of the processes unfolding before us in those parts of the world. This makes it all the more surprising that our comparative literatures on democratization are so little informed by the “civil rights” struggles in the southern United States.3 In comparative literatures the United States tends to be seen as a long-standing consolidated democracy. This meant that, for these literatures, the democratic nature of the U.S. government was pretty well settled.4 Furthermore, the struggles over the “substantive” democratization of the national government (the expansion of the franchise and the spread of political equality to new groups of citizens) followed patterns repeated in other early democratizing countries. Where democracy in the United States is analyzed for comparative purposes, the analyses tend to focus on the operation of democratic institutions in the national polity. This has made the United States as a comparative case far more valuable to those working on functional theories of democracy rather than theories of democratization.5

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However, if we turn our attention to “territorial democratization,” we can quickly see that the United States possesses a potential mother lode of historical information and insight for comparativists. In the United States the major conflicts about democracy have been about the democratization of subnational governments. It can be safely asserted that in no other country in the world have struggles over subnational democratization (the democratization of the states) so defined the country’s historical evolution. Furthermore, in no other country to date have conflicts over subnational democratization been the dominant politywide issue of the day. And last, in no other country did this turn into a long-standing national conflict about the design, nature, and jurisprudence of federalism. Furthermore, the consequences of the long struggle over subnational democratization in the United States have been massive, in a comparative sense. As Richard Valelly has pointed out, American history contains an anomaly in the history of democracy worldwide.6 The massive enfranchisement of southern blacks in the late nineteenth century, and their massive disenfranchisement shortly thereafter, is the comparative anomaly. Never before or since in a democracy (absent a coup or regime change) has a large group of people become enfranchised and then disenfranchised. Rights granted to massive numbers of people, once granted, are not taken away under a democratic regime. In the United States, however, it happened. And it took nearly a century of struggle to produce a second wave of reenfranchisement. Any serious effort at comparative theory building about territorial democratization cannot afford but to start with the United States. Territorial democratization, in any setting, is obviously a multifaceted process, and the age and institutionalization of democratic politics in the United States makes this even more so. The particular fight in one particular moment of U.S. history that I focus on here — Reconstuction — was about federalism, and it centered on the fundamental question of whether the right to vote comes from the national government or from the states. This particular fight has the methodological virtue of shedding light on two interlocking stories, one about federalism and another about democracy. The federalism story is the struggle between political

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antagonists to define the division of key powers between the central government and the constituent subnational governments of the U.S. federation. The democracy story is the outcome of this struggle, the enfranchisement of millions of people (the vast majority black) in the South when the question was decided in favor of the national government in the 1860s and 1870s and the disenfranchisement of those populations when the question was subsequently redecided in favor of the states. Nineteenth- Century Federalism and Citizenship

It is quite clear that there is a citizenship of the United States, and a citizenship of a State, which are distinct from each other. —U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Miller, Majority Opinion, the Slaughterhouse Cases, 1873

In 1833 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Bill of Rights restrained only the powers of the national government (Barron v. Baltimore).7 State governments were under no legal obligation to provide its protections under their constitutions. At stake in the court case was the answer to a question that has shaped the evolution of federalism in the United States profoundly: are civil and political rights defined nationally, or is their substantive content to be decided by the states? Put in more general terms, does the central government have the power to define and enforce a uniform standard of citizenship throughout the country? The 1833 Supreme Court decision settled the question unambiguously. Under the U.S. Constitution the central government’s power to do so was limited. The power to define the substantive content of local inhabitants’ rights in their dealings with state authorities was a power delegated to the individual states. Therefore, by today’s standards—indeed, by the standards incorporated in the national constitution—state power holders had the legal power to craft and enforce nondemocratic subnational political regimes. This historical fact reveals a great deal about the relationship between federalism and the development of democracy in the United States. In their landmark volume on democratization, Transitions from

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Authoritarian Rule, Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe Schmitter note that the basic underlying principle of democracy is that of citizenship. The “citizenship principle” is one of political equality, and “democratization” is the process by which political equality is extended to broader segments of the population.8 In nineteenth-century American federalism a basic principle of constitutional law was dual citizenship. Individuals were at once citizens of the nation and citizens of the state. National and state authorities, however, could have different concepts of citizenship. Individuals could be subject to two separate standards of citizenship at the same time. The federal government could guarantee a range of citizen rights, but the state could deny those very same rights in its own dealings with people. Given the proximity of state governments to the daily lives of people, it was clearly the state concept of citizenship that was of greatest relevance to one’s “citizen experience.” Establishing a nationally uniform standard of citizenship required, therefore, a radical change in territorial organization of the state. A uniform standard would only be possible if the central government were given the power to impose its definition of citizenship on all units of the federation—in other words, via the political centralization of federalism. Altering Federalism: the Institutional Topography of U.S. Federalism

In the universe of federal countries, the U.S. Constitution is one of the hardest to change. Arend Lijphart classifies the United States as possessing one of the most “rigid” constitutions in the world.9 Rigid constitutions require supermajorities to be amended. As the U.S. Constitution requires a supermajority of Congress as well as a supermajority of states to be amended, we have two hurdles blocking change, legislative minorities and territorial minorities. In case that were not enough, the United States is also marked by the tradition of judicial review. In such a system it is the courts (ultimately a supreme or constitutional court) that decide on the constitutionality of laws passed by the national legislature. In countries without judicial review it is usually the parliament that decides on the constitutionality of its own laws. Federal countries tend to have judicial review but not always (Switzerland is very federal but has no judicial review).

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This means that any significant process of change in U.S. federalism will likely involve the courts. Federal courts, in particular the Supreme Court, thus become key actors in any long-term study of change in federalism. Therefore, in addition to its political dimension, the battle to alter federalism will also have an important jurisprudential component. Following Valelly, we can visualize this long-term process as involving repeated cycles of coalition building and jurisprudence building over time.10 Altering Federalism: Actor Preferences and Strategies

We can now provide some basic analytical and descriptive models of the struggles over territorial regime design during the post– Civil War and Reconstruction periods: the protagonists can be divided into two camps, each with opposing preferences about the autonomy and prerogatives of the states. The preferences about federalism are driven by goals about the political regimes in the states, namely the installation (or noninstallation) of competitive democratic regimes in the states. The first group, which I will call the “boundary openers,” is united by the goal of democratizing the Southern states. They thus seek the redesign of federalism to give the central government the power to define a uniform standard of democracy (the right to vote for all citizens) and to enforce that standard throughout the states. In the post–Civil War period this group was largely represented by the dominant coalition of the national Republican Party. The second group, which I will call the “boundary closers,” is united by the goal of preserving single-party white supremacist rule in the states.11 It seeks to preserve the pre–Civil War status quo division of powers under federalism, which shielded the states from federal control over local political regimes. In the post–Civil War period this group was represented largely by leaders of the national Democratic Party and their allies in state-level Democratic parties in the South. The sequence of events in the struggle over the design of federalism can be abstracted as follows: 1

Boundary opening actors emerge with specific political goals regarding democracy in the states, and they form coalitions and gain

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2.

3.

4.

5.

control of political branches of the government (in this case, the national legislature). Federalism is the main institutional obstacle to the attainment of democracy goals in the states. As a first step they must reform federalism. The first battle is over the theoretical question. They must establish the theoretical principle that the central government has the power to pursue their goals. Having established the principle, they enact measures to enforce it, to make it effective. They pass laws, amendments, and statutes putting the principle into effect. Political and statutory actions are then tested in the courts under a system of judicial review. These decisions confirm the legal mapping of federalism that actors must contend with in their pursuit of political goals in the states. Boundary openers are either empowered or hindered by judicial decisions. The new phase of political activity follows accordingly.

The Struggle over Federalism in the United States

After the Northern states’ victory in the Civil War, a “nationalist” (meaning pro– central government) coalition in the Republican Party controlled the Congress. The main bastions of states’ rights, the Southern states, were physically and politically subjugated. The chief protagonists of the centralizing movement were known as the Radical Republicans in the Congress, and they had major plans for the political transformation of the political systems of the Southern states. Whether these designs were noble (democratizing the region, destroying the plantocracy, granting full citizenship to blacks) or strategic (building a southern Republican party and empowering its new constituencies) is immaterial.12 Either plan required the democratization of the states (massive enfranchisement, voting rights, and civil rights). These architects of radical (or congressional) reconstruction in the mid-1860s first actively sought a constitutional basis for their designs on the South. The federal regime of the first half of the nineteenth century stood in their way. The radical reconstructionists needed first to

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find and develop the rationale on federalism grounds for granting the national government the power to intervene in the states and reshape their local political systems. The first battle in the struggle over democracy in the states was thus to be a battle over federalism. The Theoretical Principle

Radical Republicans were proponents of what Valelly calls “Reconstruction Constitutionalism.” Doctrinally, Reconstruction Constitutionalism held that “the constitution was not simply a set of limits on government but a source of sovereign, positive, regulatory government able to establish and enforce national rights.”13 According to Foner, Radical Republicans were deeply committed to black emancipation and suffrage and saw the central government as the instrument of their realization: “the driving force of Radical ideology was the utopian vision of a nation whose citizens enjoyed equality of civil and political rights, secured by a powerful and beneficent national state. . . . To this egalitarianism, the Civil War wedded a new conception of the powers and potentialities of the national state. More fully than other Republicans, the Radicals embraced the wartime expansion of federal authority, carrying into Reconstruction the conviction that federalism and state rights must not obstruct a sweeping national effort to define and protect the rights of citizens.”14 But how to accomplish this? Radical Republicans may not have wanted federalism to stand in the way of citizenship expansion, but they had to find the initial justifications for central government action in the territorial system itself. Reconstruction, basically a program to occupy states and reshape them politically, needed constitutional justification. They found it first in an obscure clause in the Constitution, the clause guaranteeing each state a republican form of government. Originally designed to permit the federal government to suppress insurrections and prevent a rebirth of monarchical and aristocratic institutions, the guarantee clause lay dormant until the Civil War. But Radical Republicans found it attractive because it might impart legitimacy to federal intervention on behalf of citizens’ rights: “Massachusetts Senator Sumner called it ‘a sleeping giant’ . . . never until this recent war awakened, but now it comes forward with a giant’s power. There is no clause

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in the Constitution like it. There is no other clause which gives to Congress such supreme power over the states.”15 Making the Principle Effective: The Statutory Battle to Centralize Federalism

The guarantee clause became an important justification for central usurpation of power and occupation of the states. The next step was to push legislation that gave the government powers to transform the subnational polities it now controlled. The first big attempt was the Civil Rights Bill of 1866. Radical Republicans succeeded in pushing the bill through, and in a further demonstration of their institutional power led a successful override of President Andrew Johnson’s veto of the bill. The bill did many things, paramount among them redefining the traditional concept of dual citizenship in American federalism. The bill defined all persons born in the United States as national citizens and outlined rights they would enjoy regardless of race. As Foner writes, “No state law or custom could deprive any citizen of what Trumbull [the bill’s author] called these ‘fundamental rights belonging to every man as a free man.’” Foner then goes on to note the bill’s implications for federalism: “As the first statutory definition of the rights of American citizenship, the Civil Rights Bill embodied a profound change in federalstate relations” (244). The Civil Rights Act and some accompanying measures were the first major statutory actions by the Congress to make the national regulation of southern political regimes effective. They followed this up with a flurry of institutional changes. Two constitutional amendments were passed, the Fourteenth Amendment and the Fifteenth Amendment, granting civil and political rights to blacks and imposing them on the states. Again, the power to pass constitutional amendments— in one of Lijphart’s “rigid” constitutional systems—reflects the power of the Radical Republican coalition. These amendments then led to major statutory action to nail the whole thing down. Valelly writes that “after the Fifteenth Amendment’s ratification (March 30, 1870), Reconstruction constitutionalism truly burst forth, as congressional Republicans passed major enforcement and civil rights statutes.” The most important of these was the Enforcement Act of 1870, which stated that

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“all citizens of the United States are entitled and allowed to vote . . . any constitution, law, custom, usage, or regulation of any State or Territory . . . to the contrary notwithstanding” (my emphasis). The act also gave broad powers of federal enforcement. The Centralization of Federalism and the Democratic Transition in the Southern States

The centralizing measures enacted by national Republicans revealed the enormous consequences of enhanced federal powers for territorial democratization in the United States. They unleashed a wave of enfranchisement, party building, and rights enforcement throughout the South, and stand as catalysts to the most dramatic case of territorial democratization in history. In the initial phases of Reconstruction over 700,000 blacks were registered as new voters, as well as over 600,000 whites.16 The number of black voters grew steadily in subsequent years, exceeding one million in the early 1870s.17 However, most of the new voters were registered during the summer of 1867, a period of major political mobilization and enfranchisement labeled by one historian a “registration summer.”18 Valelly reports that between December 1866 and December 1867 the proportion of blacks eligible to vote in the United States soared from 0.5 percent to 80.5 percent. All of this increase took place in the former Confederate states.19 The pace and scope of political mobilization throughout the South in 1867 was dizzying. Foner characterizes it as an “annus mirabilis,” in which the demise of local authority “opened the door for political mobilization to sweep across the black belt.”20 National actors—Republican Party agents, soldiers, central government bureaucrats, clergymen, and civic leaders—flooded the states to enfranchise blacks and poor whites, forge cross-sectional associations, build party organizations, and organize biracial cadres of new political leaders and activists. Valelly documents the frantic pace of outside involvement in Southern political mobilization and infrastructure building during this period. In the “registration summer” of 1867, he reports, up to 135 Republican Party organizers toured the Southern states seeking to bolster local party building. Military-appointed registrars, a significant proportion of them black, traveled in every county in ten of the former Confederate states

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to register voters.21 The Republican Party also embarked on a crash program to establish “Union Leagues” throughout the South. The Leagues were Republican-affiliated clubs developed in the North (and clandestinely in the South) to support the Union cause during the Civil War. They now spread throughout the region as a vehicle for the political organization of former slaves. The Freedmen’s Bureau, the central government agency charged with providing social assistance to newly freed blacks, now ratcheted up its political activities as a vehicle for the identification, training, and organization of black political leaders with the intent of promoting “the rise of an entirely new political class.”22 The historical outcasts of the Southern political order responded in kind. Recent historiography on the Reconstruction period has revealed the extent to which blacks were not merely the object of outside political mobilization. They actively exercised their rights and challenged local authorities. Black political mobilization also provided a social and institutional infrastructure to advance the democratizing potential of Reconstruction to the South’s remotest corners. Veterans of black Union army regiments volunteered as voter registrars and members of armed militias that protected black political activity. Church congregations poured their energies into civic activism and education for illiterate former slaves. Civil society organizations saw their memberships swell, and brought instances of malfeasance by local authorities to the attention of federal officials. Valelly documents that by the summer of 1867 the Union League organizations in the South reported 200,000 to 300,000 members, most of them black, and they were organized into about two thousand to three thousand local chapters.23 Foner also writes that “by the end of 1867, it seemed, virtually every black voter in the South had enrolled in the Union League or some equivalent political organization.”24 Black office holding was also a hallmark of the period, at the local level where blacks formed electoral majorities, in state legislatures, and in Congress.25 The centralization of federalism shattered the parochial confines of Southern state politics. Under the federal government’s protection Republican-led cross-regional coalitions moved to transform the Southern states’ constitutional orders. In 1867 and 1868 new biracial electorates in state after state elected constitutional conventions, staffed them, gave them the voter ratification required by federal law, and took

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control of the postconvention political orders. These new constitutions affirmed their state governments’ commitment to political equality and full citizenship rights, contained provisions for unrestricted access to the ballot box by registered voters, and mandated the election of judges and local administrators. They also struck down restrictions on office holding and political organization, guaranteed equal access to public services and accommodations, and in many cases also expanded state roles in the provision of social services and workplace regulation.26 In sum, this experiment in territorial redesign unleashed one of the most sweeping enfranchisements of citizen populations in the history of modern democracy, and may stand as one of the first momentous instances of territorial democratization. However, the redesign of federalism by Republican boundary openers had tremendous jurisprudential implications that had yet to be tested in the courts. Foner notes that the 1866 Civil Rights Bill, “reflecting the conviction that the federal government possessed the authority to define and protect citizens’ rights[,] . . . represented a striking departure from American jurisprudence” (245). And as a striking departure from the legal status quo, its legal test was only a matter of time. The outcome of this test in the U.S. Supreme Court would shatter the remapping of American federalism crafted by Radical Republicans. It handed a major victory to Southern boundary closers in the battle over federalism’s design. Its consequences for democracy in the Southern states would be devastating and long-lasting. The Jurisprudential Battle and the Collapse of Reconstruction Federalism

In the mid-1870s a string of Supreme Court decisions reaffirmed earlynineteenth-century views of federalism, struck down key laws passed by Congress, and interpreted the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments so narrowly that the central government’s power to shape the substantive content of subnational political regimes was effectively defanged. The first jurisprudential blow came in 1873, with a Supreme Court decision known as the “Slaughterhouse Cases.” It was not a case about voting rights—it was about whether Louisiana could regulate sanitary conditions in slaughterhouses—but its repercussions extended widely to national enforcement of civil and political rights. In the decision the

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court “flatly rejected the idea that the 14th Amendment incorporated the Bill of Rights” into state constitutions.27 The Court also reaffirmed the concept of dual citizenship under federalism and asserted that there were very few “national” rights. To construe the Reconstruction amendments as establishing a wide array of “national” rights would mean “a great departure from the structure and spirit of our institutions.” The Court stated further that it felt compelled to defend, “with a steady and even hand, the balance between state and federal power.”28 This decision was followed by two other key decisions, Cruikshank and Reese, that narrowed the interpretation of the national government’s powers under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Cruikshank confirmed the restricted powers of civil rights enforcement of the national government, and Reese struck down key aspects of the 1870 Enforcement Acts that were intended to protect voting rights. The cumulative effect was devastating to Northern boundary openers’ redefinition of federalism. According to Valelly, “by 1876 the Supreme Court had obviously damaged Reconstruction constitutionalism. In the end, the genuinely expansive implication of the Republican-led rights revolution frightened the Court. For one thing, Reconstruction constitutionalism betokened a fundamental change in federalism.”29 By undoing Reconstruction Constitutionalism’s remapping of U.S. federalism, the Supreme Court decisions greatly weakened the coalitionbuilding and political activities of the Republican Party in the South. Soon thereafter the coalition fell apart, and an 1876 “deal” to permit the presidential election of Rutherford Hayes ended Reconstruction. Federal military forces withdrew from the states. The subsystemic autonomy of the states that the Court decisions had reaffirmed legally became a political reality, and “home rule” was reestablish in the Southern states. Statelevel power holders began the process of reversing voting and civil rights measures and establishing Democratic Party monopolies in the states. Federalism and the Construction of the “Solid South”: Institutional Bases of Disenfranchisement

The construction of the bloc of authoritarian states known as the Solid South did not occur immediately. It would take some time for the Solid South’s designers to recognize the opportunities that nineteenth-century

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federalism provided them for constructing a powerful institutional architecture of state-level authoritarianism. In the late 1870s and 1880s they employed tactics they had learned during their long struggles against occupation by the national government. Democratic Party leaders relied on combinations of fraud, voter intimidation, and violence to manufacture electoral victories.30 They also relied on “informal arrangements” between party, state, and local officials to restrict organized challenges, co-opt dissidents, and secure the de facto disenfranchisement of voters. These tactics were remarkably effective. Democrats won almost all state and local contests during the 1880s. They lost control of only two states during this period, Tennessee and Virginia, and only for a short period. Elsewhere throughout the South they held on to power. However, the tactics were deficient on critical levels. First, they did little to quell political activity. Legacies of the democratic transition sparked by the national government occupation period endured. Electoral challenges and voter turnout (both black and white) remained high, sustaining Reconstruction-era turnout levels throughout the 1880s.31 Southern elections were tumultuous affairs, and the officially sanctioned violence and fraud only intensified them. Furthermore, local power holders’ reliance on fraud and violence drew national attention to fraudulent local elections. And this revealed the most important deficit in such strategies: they were inadequate for insulating the states from pressures from the national democratic polity. In fact, they increased the vulnerability of local political systems to outside intervention. Spurred on by media and public outrage in the North about political conditions in the South, congressional Republicans constantly threatened to pass new federal election monitoring bills. Even in the national executive branch, top Republican cabinet officials threatened federal action against the states. After the 1888 elections, when Republicans regained majority control of both houses of Congress, the threats acquired new levels of immediacy. External threats thus prompted a shift in local strategies and resulted in a new institutional morphology of Southern authoritarian control. Illegal and informal political arrangements to secure Demo-

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cratic Party hegemony were gradually replaced with legal measures. What was previously done by private individuals or under informal arrangements would now be achieved by the legal authority of the states. Between the late 1880s and the late 1890s an institutional revolution swept the South that codified and consolidated subnational authoritarian rule. A wave of state constitutional reforms and widespread recrafting of electoral laws and regulations took place during this time. As J. Morgan Kousser stated it, “Folkways became stateways,” and a new legal architecture shielded Southern incumbents from the dual threat of Republican partisan incursions and federal regulation of local political regimes.32 The logic behind the institutional revolution was simple and powerful. The formal autonomy granted by U.S. federalism gave states the power to design their political institutions and define the substantive content of political rights. Disenfranchisement could thus be designed along legal lines. Under these conditions, federal enforcement of local electoral laws would actually enhance disenfranchisement, not hinder it. Were the states to make the suppression of democracy legal, their relationship to the national polity would change dramatically. Substituting legal for extralegal methods would alter the meaning of federal monitoring of local electoral processes. A legal foundation would also give the authoritarian systems of the South a veneer of national legitimacy. The 1880s had confirmed that the autonomy conferred on states by American federalism was an autonomy conditioned by political decorum. There were limits on how extralegal local authoritarianism could be in a nationally democratic country. As one author put it, “Any general acceptance of disenfranchisement required a show of democracy.”33 In other words, local authoritarian rule had to be made institutionally compatible with the national democratic polity. The effects of legal disenfranchising measures on voter turnout were significant. Kousser reports immediate effects in elections following their enactment. He calculates that in the elections following the passing of restrictive laws, the depression of voter turnout across the region averaged 37 percent, and the average drop in black voter turnout was 62 percent.34 Matters would get worse for black voters as years

290 | Edward L. Gibson Table 10.1 Black Voter Turnout in the Southern Former Confederate States

1880

1892 (1st Reform Wave)

1900 (2nd Reform Wave)

1912

61%

36%

17%

1.8%

Source: Averages calculated from Redding and James, “Estimating Levels and Modeling Determinants of Black and White Voter Turnout in the South.”

went by. In 1880, when voter suppression was pursued largely by illegal means, black voter turnout in the eleven former Confederate states averaged 61 percent. By 1912, when the legal architecture of disenfranchisement was well established, black voter turnout in the former Confederate states averaged 1.8 percent.35 It would remain at those levels for decades. Table 10.1 reveals the progression of disenfranchisement as the South’s “institutional revolution” spread over time. It would take many decades of slow jurisprudential battles and coalitional strategies to gradually reform federalism and establish the principle of national enforcement of political rights in the states.36 The incremental effect of these reforms of federalism would be the groundwork for a new “democratic transition” that produced the massive reenfranchisement of Southern black citizens in the mid-twentieth century. This, however, is a story that exceeds the bounds of this chapter and has been amply told by others.

Conclusion

This study has explored dynamic connections between federalism and democratization in U.S. political development. It confirms Alfred Ste pan’s intuition that federalism and democracy must be understood as interrelated institutional arrangements. Developments in one have profound implications for developments in the other. Scholars of democratization in federal countries should be cognizant of the fact that the evolution of a democratic regime over time is intimately related to its interactions with federalism. Similarly, scholars of federalism must be cognizant of how closely tied its development is to changes in the democratic regime.

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This close developmental relationship has not escaped the notice of political engineers across history, who have used federalism as a means to shape the organizational structure and territorial reach of democracy in their countries. The story of the Solid South is one such story. Democratization of the U.S. Southern states in the late nineteenth century was predicated on the political centralization of federalism— namely, granting the national government the power to define the substantive content of rights in the states and the power to enforce them. Under Reconstruction Constitutionalism national Republicans forged federalism into a sword with which to strike down authoritarianism in the Southern states. The defeat of their centralization project converted federalism into a shield that gave Southern elites institutional cover to consolidate local authoritarian rule. What tentative perspectives can we gain from this study of the U.S. case for the issues raised by Stepan’s scholarship on federalism and, more generally, for the comparative study of federalism and democracy? As a long-standing federal democracy, the United States raises a number of issues that are relevant to the problems and controversies currently facing developing countries and postcommunist federal countries. The Institutional Evolution of Federalism

A first issue is how federal institutions evolve. In a number of studies Stepan has revealed how political actors have “crafted” federal institutions seeking such varied goals as territorial unity, policy-making effectiveness, or political advantage.37 Other scholars of change in federations tend to focus on “founding moments,” or “punctuated equilibrium”-type patterns of change. They also tend to be design oriented, where the prescriptive or normative orientations of scholars drive explorations into the redesign of federal institutions at what would by definition be criti cal juncture events.38 The United States, with its long continuous history, can offer support for these perspectives. However, despite the moments of great drama it has revealed, it has also displayed a more prosaic, yet equally important, pattern of change—one that is incremental and instrumental. For Kathleen Thelen, institutional change tends to be an ongoing, usually incremental, process whose effects are cumulative and perceived

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over time. They may be incremental, but they are often very significant. And driving these institutional change processes are political coalitions motivated by other political goals.39 What I have explored in this chapter, party building and democracy goals pushing power holders to reform federalism, is one example. The long process touched on at the end of the case study, the nationalization of the Bill of Rights, is another. Any theories of federal institutional change must take into consideration a number of points. First, federal systems are permanent objects of contestation and negotiation by political actors pursuing political goals. Second, there is not one particular direction we should assume that the evolution of federalism (or, for that matter, a unitary system) will take.40 Thus, the institutional evolution of federalism is an ongoing process: the structure and norms of a territorial regime are constantly subject to change, and, in addition to the founding and high-drama moments of political change, we also need to develop a theoretical understanding of this process of incremental and ongoing change. Observing the dynamic relationship between federalism and democracy over time is one way to accomplish this goal. Citizenship and Federalism

The central question that U.S. power holders fought over after the Civil War—are political and civil rights to be defined nationally or locally?— is of considerable relevance to federations in the developing world today. The notion of dual citizenship that federalism often contains is an understudied subject in studies of contemporary federations. Yet it goes to the heart of Alfred Stepan’s distinction between the demos of a federal country and its demoi in subnational jurisdictions.41 In making this distinction, Stepan was concerned primarily with the power of the demoi, particularly minority coalitions, to constrain the actions and preferences of the national demos. This study has shown, however, that in the question of citizenship, the system might also be rigged against the demoi. In the nineteenth-century U.S. case, members of the national “demos,” seen as citizens of the United States, enjoyed a broad range of rights in their relationship with the national government. Citizens of states were denied such rights in their relationships with state governments in many

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cases. The demoi in this case were the constrained parties. Without the protections and guarantees provided by the national government to a national demos, many of the demoi of subnational jurisdictions were cast into the shadowy peripheries of democratic citizenship within the country’s national borders. The clash between citizenship rights guaranteed at the national level and those guaranteed at the subnational level has many other potential dimensions that merit further study in scholarship on federalism. In Latin America, for example, the conventional wisdom has been that rights are guaranteed nationally, but the texts of constitutions are less than categorical, and as new issues shaping the consolidation of democracy unfold, there will probably be many surprises when submitted to judicial tests. One such area is the development of new local rights regimes for indigenous populations. For example, in Mexico and in other countries quasi-federal “Usos y Costumbres” arrangements in which indigenous populations enjoy limited self-government are in effect or are being debated. Under these arrangements local political practices are partially insulated from national laws or political institutions. However, experience in Mexico so far has revealed a conflict between local political traditions and rights guaranteed by the national constitution (equal protections and rights for women, for example). The existence of Usos y Costumbres creates new demoi within the federal system by providing a local definition of political rights for some segments of the population. However, the conventional wisdom in Mexico is that when in conflict, national rights or norms prevail over local rights or norms. This, however, has been contradicted by political practice. It will ultimately be a matter for national courts to decide, and the U.S. conflicts studied in this chapter may provide guidance about how such debates will unfold. Subnational Political Regimes in Federal Systems

Stepan mapped out the key institutional features driving the “demosconstraining” nature of federal systems and identified four variables shaping it: the degree of overrepresentation of the national senate, the “policy scope” of the national senate, the degree to which policy making

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is constitutionally allocated to subunits of the federation, and the degree to which the party system is polity-wide in its orientation and incentive systems.42 Based on this study of the United States we can add another variable: the degree to which subnational authorities have the local autonomy to craft local electoral laws and regime features in subnational constitutions. This has enormous implications not only for the national demos-constraining features of the system but also for the democratic quality of systems governing the demoi of subnational jurisdictions. Federal systems grant varying degrees of autonomy to subnational units in the design of local political institutions. In some cases federalism grants powers to subnational units that create patterns of party competition for local offices that are independent of national patterns of party competition. In others, local authorities have far fewer prerogatives in local institutional design. An important question, then, and one related to the national rights question, is, what are the legal powers of the national governments to shape the subnational political regimes? To what extent are local electoral laws drafted locally? Can the national government intervene locally to craft local constitutional structures, electoral systems, and related institutional structures? These are questions of considerable import to subnational institutional development and to the incentives faced by local politicians. They are also, at this very moment, undoubtedly the objects of conflicts that, in the shadows of subnational politics, are shaping the evolution of federalism and the territorial structure of democracy in federations across the globe.

Notes Substantial parts of this chapter have been excerpted from Edward L. Gibson, Boundary Control: Subnational Authoritarianism in Federal Democracies (New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). 1. Although these examples are at the national level, it should be noted that substantive democratization can occur at subnational levels as well. 2. In a federal system one could also add the extension of rights across levels of government (i.e., from the national government to subnational governments) to the concept of territorial democratization. Territorial democra-

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tization therefore, can be seen as taking place both across territorial jurisdictions and across territorial levels of government. 3. One notable exception is Robert Mickey, Paths Out of Dixie: The Democratization of Authoritarian Enclaves in America’s Deep South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). 4. A more nuanced view of U.S. national democracy that took the authoritarian conditions in the U.S. South into account, and which took the rare step of analyzing the United States as a “comparative case” of democratization, can be found in Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens, and John D. Stephens, Capitalist Development and Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 5. Dankwart Rustow first noted the distinction between “functional” and “genetic” explanations of democracy in “Transitions to Democracy: Toward a Dynamic Model,” Comparative Politics 2, no. 3 (April 1970): 337– 63. 6. Richard M. Valelly, The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 7. Stanley I. Kutler, The Supreme Court and the Constitution: Readings in American Constitutional History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969). 8. Guillermo O’Donnell, Philippe Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). 9. Arend Lijphart, Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). 10. Valelly actually says “party building and jurisprudence building.” For comparative purposes, I employ the broader term coalition building, since depending on local party and party system dynamics, actor strategies could be purely partisan or aimed at broader groupings of parties and/or power holders. 11. This language is taken from Edward L. Gibson, Boundary Control: Subnational Authoritarianism in Federal Democracies (New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). 12. The latter notion is advanced by Valelly, The Two Reconstructions; the former by Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: HarperCollins, 1988). 13. Valelly, The Two Reconstructions, 105; my emphasis. 14. Foner, Reconstruction, 231– 32; my emphasis. 15. Foner, Reconstruction, 232; my emphasis. This quotation certainly captures the majesty of moments when political actors first grasp the potential power of institutional design. It should be noted, however, that while U.S. politicians first discovered this “sleeping giant” in their constitution in 1866, Argentine leaders had spotted it and understood its potential thirty years earlier. In fact, the designers of the 1854 Argentine Constitution (as they circulated drafts

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during the 1840s) liked this clause so much that they copied it and added an implementation clause specifying how the federal government could intervene in the provinces. 16. John Hope Franklin, Reconstruction after the Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961). 17. Michael D. Cobb and Jeffrey A. Jenkins, “Race and the Representation of Blacks’ Interests during Reconstruction,” Political Research Quarterly 54, no. 1 (March 2001): 181– 204; Valelly, The Two Reconstructions, 73. 18. Julie Saville, The Work of Reconstruction: From Slave to Wage Labor in South Carolina (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 160. 19. Valelly, The Two Reconstructions, 3. 20. Foner, Reconstruction, 282. 21. Valelly, The Two Reconstructions, 41. 22. Richard Lowe, “The Freedmen’s Bureau and Local Black Leadership,” Journal of American History 80, no. 3 (December 1993): 990. 23. Valelly, The Two Reconstructions, 39. 24. Foner, Reconstruction, 283. 25. Twenty blacks were elected to the U.S. House of Representatives between 1869 and 1901 and two to the U.S. Senate (both from Mississippi). In total, it is estimated that two thousand blacks served in elective offices at the local and national levels. For information on black office holding, see Carol M. Swain, Black Faces, Black Interests: The Representation of African Americans in Congress (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Eric Foner, Freedom’s Lawmakers (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996); and Terry Seip, The South Returns to Congress (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983). 26. For information on this period of state constitutional reform, see Jack B. Scroggs, “Carpetbagger Constitutional Reform in the South Atlantic States, 1867–1868,” Journal of Southern History 27 (November 1961): 475– 93; Rich ard L. Hume, “Negro Delegates to the State Constitutional Conventions of 1867–1869,” in Southern Black Leaders of the Reconstruction Era, ed. Howard N. Rabinowitz (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 129 – 54; Richard L. Hume, “Carpetbaggers in the Reconstruction South: A Group Portrait of Outside Whites in the ‘Black and Tan’ Constitutional Conventions,” Journal of American History 64 (September 1977): 313– 30; and John Hope Franklin, “Public Welfare in the South during the Reconstruction Era,” Social Service Review 44 (December 1970): 379– 92. Valelly, The Two Reconstructions, 80– 81, also provides a very instructive summary list of policy and constitutional innovations during this period. 27. Stanley I. Kutler, The Supreme Court and the Constitution: Readings in American Constitutional History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), 192. 28. Ibid., 225; my emphasis. 29. Valelly, The Two Reconstructions, 119.

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30. A local observer described in vivid terms the methods used in a Mississippi election: “Independent candidates were run out of their counties, beaten, or murdered. . . . Ballot boxes were stuffed, fraudulent returns were made, and thousands of opposition votes were thrown out on technicalities. With mock solemnity, newspapers reported that boxes containing antiDemocratic majorities had been eaten by mules or horses.” Quoted in C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), 105. 31. J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880–1910, Yale Historical Publications. Miscellany 102 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 12–15. 32. Ibid. 33. Valelly, The Two Reconstructions, 125. 34. Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics, 240– 42. 35. Kent Redding and David R. James, “Estimating Levels and Modeling Determinants of Black and White Voter Turnout in the South: 1880 to 1912,” Historical Methods 34, no. 4 (2001): 141– 58. 36. This was captured in a long process (starting in the late nineteenth century and concluding in the 1940s) known as the “nationalization of the Bill of Rights.” In a series of decisions, the Supreme Court and federal courts, acting largely in response to business interests seeking federal protection of property rights, compelled states to incorporate most rights contained in the national Bill of Rights into state constitutions and state laws. The incremental outcome of these decisions was a significant political centralization of federalism. The precedents established by these decisions on civil rights opened the way to landmark Supreme Court decisions on voting rights, starting with the 1944 Smith v. Allright decision, which struck down the “white primary” in Texas and is seen by many observers as the legal spark that ignited the unraveling of the Solid South by the civil rights struggles of the mid-twentieth century. See, e.g., Mickey, Paths Out of Dixie. 37. See, e.g., Alfred Stepan, “Federalism, Multinational Societies, and Negotiating a Democratic ‘State Nation’: A Theoretical Framework, the Indian Model, and a Tamil Case Study,” in Democracies and Diversity: India and the Indian Experience, ed. S. Bajpai (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); See also Alfred Stepan, “Federalism and Democracy: Beyond the U.S. Model,” in Federalism and Territorial Cleavages, ed. Nancy Bermeo and Ugo Amoretti (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); and Stepan, “Electorally Generated Veto Players in Unitary and Federal Systems,” in Federalism and Democracy in Latin America, ed. Edward L. Gibson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). 38. See, e.g., Mikhail Filippov, Peter C. Ordeshook, and Olga Shvetsova, Designing Federalism: A Theory of Self-Sustaining Federal Institutions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

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39. See Kathleen Thelen, How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 40. Thus Riker’s assertion that a “centralized” federalism would evolve toward greater centralization as the central government “overawed” the federal subunits and that “peripheralized” federalisms would evolve in the other direction should not operate as an assumption in the theoretical study of federal change. 41. See Alfred Stepan, “Toward a New Comparative Politics of Federalism,” in Gibson, Federalism and Democracy in Latin America, 29– 84. 42. Stepan, “Toward a New Comparative Politics of Federalism,” 53.

11 Oil and the Corporate Reintegration of Russia The Role of Federal Oil Companies in Russia’s Center-Periphery Relations Shamil Midkhatovich Yenikeyeff

Alfred Stepan’s comparative work on federal systems has inspired this study on Russian federalism and the important role corporations could play in shaping center-periphery relations within a federation system.1 Russia’s political and economic transition under the first Russian President Boris Yeltsin and his successor, Vladimir Putin, was shaped by the asymmetrical nature of the Russian Federation. Stepan highlights that in Russia the “constitutionally embedded differences between the legal status and prerogatives of different subunits within the same federation” were further exacerbated by “extraconstitutionally negotiated” bilateral treaties between the center and the regions, as well as by unconstitutional acts enacted by regional authorities.2 As a result, during Yeltsin’s era, Russian asymmetrical federalism presented significant challenges to the territorial integrity of the state as well as to its democratic transition. In their comprehensive comparative study of countries undergoing transition, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation, Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan highlight the importance of democratic legitimacy as a way of state reconstruction. Unfortunately, after the 299

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collapse of communism, Russia became a vivid example of an “inverted legitimacy pyramid,” a term that Linz and Stepan coined to refer to situations in which governments prioritized “virtually unregulated and highly unequal” privatization over key democratic processes such as free elections, multiple parties, and free speech.3 The battle for economic resources between Moscow and regional elites became the main theme of center-periphery bargaining in Russia in the late 1980s– early 1990s, which threatened the very existence of the Russian state. Subsequently, Russia’s inverted legitimacy pyramid ensured that state reconstruction (in the form of reintegration of the loose federation) was primarily aided by federal corporate actors rather than multiple parties or other democratic political processes.4 This chapter examines these issues. After the dissolution of the USSR in December 1991 many observers predicted the fragmentation of the newly emergent Russian Federation, which, mirroring the Soviet federal system, featured formally institutionalized ethnic territorial units and administrative self-governing bodies of national minorities.5 In the opinion of many, “the federal structure offered an organizational framework and political legitimacy for the protection and advancement of the interest of national groups.”6 With a weak central government and the political, economic, and sociocultural tensions of a transitional period, the very existence of the federal state was threatened.7 This belief was confirmed by the events of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Russia’s regional elites (first in ethnic republics, followed by other regions) challenged the authority of the Russian leadership in the hope of becoming economically and politically independent from the federal center. By pressuring the federal leadership with possible separatist and nationalist upheaval in localities, regional bosses secured firm control over peripheral industries as well as considerable political autonomy from the Kremlin. The dominant role of ruling elites in political and economic pro cesses in Russia in the 1990s was determined by the preexisting institutional arrangements from the Soviet period. In the late 1980s and early 1990s the introduction of competitive elections resulted in the victory of the old political and industrial elites over the emerging and, therefore, weak social forces. The old elites’ access to administrative and economic resources ensured their presence in the regional legislative bodies democratically elected in 1990.8 Alfred Stepan aptly highlights that

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in the Soviet Union “the first competitive elections for executive power were held not in the center, but in the provinces.”9 The weakness of the developing multiparty system and civil society resulted in a situation where regional elites became the only powerful force in the country to which federal leaders might appeal for support.10 As a result, the regional bosses’ victory at this peripheral level made them winners at the national level. The weakness of polity-wide parties that could provide support to the chief executive can also be explained by the fact that Boris Yeltsin, in his capacity as president, “never belonged to any political party, never campaigned for political parties in the parliamentary elections, and never, between January 1992 and July 1998, had anything close to a majority in the lower house.”11 In the early 1990s Yeltsin needed the backing of regional bosses in his political struggles in the center, first with the Soviet leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev and then with the Russian parliament—the Supreme Soviet.12 In the late 1990s Yeltsin turned a blind eye to numerous violations in regional elections in return for regional bosses’ support in the 1996 presidential elections. As a result, center-periphery relations in Russia represented an ongoing bargaining process between federal leaders and regional bosses over political survival and economic resources. At that time, Russian federalist theories viewed the bargaining interaction between federal and regional authorities as central to the analysis of disintegrative/integrative trends in the federation. This chapter asserts that under certain conditions corporations can shape center-periphery institutional arrangements within a federation. To illustrate this, my study focuses on the most dominant sector in the Russian economy—the oil industry—including a selection of relevant regions and oil companies. The choice of the regions is explained according to their special administrative status within the asymmetric Russian Federation, their significant share in the overall national oil production and strategic location for the transportation of oil and petroleum products, as well as their separatist political and economic activism in the 1990s. Oil companies are chosen on the basis of their share in the domestic oil production and their overall financial standing. This chapter also focuses on how these oil companies’ influence in Russia’s economic and political spheres evolved during two periods, under the Yeltsin and Putin presidencies.

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Overall, this study argues that following the collapse of the USSR, Russia’s federal oil companies helped the weak central government not only to maintain the integrity of the loose federal state but also to undermine regional power and hence bring some of the most autonomous provinces back into the federal orbit. The Case of the Oil Sector

The development of the Russian oil sector provides an illustrative case study of how the center-periphery bargaining game has evolved over time. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, commodities such as oil, gas, diamonds, precious metals, nickel, and aluminum have generated considerable economic rents under the conditions of the transforming Russian economy. Of the five commodities mentioned, only oil was contested by the emerging political and economic actors at the federal and regional levels, due to the fact that the national oil sector has traditionally occupied a dominant role in the Soviet and Russian economy.13 Moreover, the oil industry’s infrastructure spreads throughout the federation (unlike the gold, diamond, nickel, and aluminum industries), and its preexisting organizational structure allowed for its division into semiautonomous segments during the center-periphery struggle for political and economic power.14 Although the oil and gas sectors are interrelated and are often treated as a single component in the national energy complex,15 the gas industry does not represent a good political-economic case of the Russian federal system in transition. The nature of natural gas trade, which requires pipeline networks for its transportation and sales, prevented the fragmentation of the Russian gas industry along the territorial boundaries of Russian regions. Contrarily, oil is a tangible commodity with far greater diversity in terms of transportation (pipelines, rail, barge/tankers) and retail opportunities for refined petroleum products. As a result, the Russian oil industry has been a vivid illustration of disintegrating trends in the economic and political system of the federation of the early 1990s and subsequent corporate attempts at reintegration. At the time of the Soviet Union’s disintegration, the federal center and the regions exploited oil as a means of generating considerable rents

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under volatile economic conditions, thus ensuring a certain degree of social stability and political survival of the ruling elites. Initial arrangements in the early 1990s between the federal executive and regions with regard to the oil sector played a major role in establishing an institutional framework for the business activities of federal oil companies throughout the federation. These arrangements established an increased authority of regional elites over the oil industry’s infrastructure, natural resources, petroleum sales, oil exports, and taxation. During this period, the remnants of the Soviet Oil and Gas Ministry were being reconstructed into corporate entities and therefore were unable to participate in the early stage of the center-periphery bargaining game. Subsequently, however, the newly formed federal oil companies initiated considerable changes to previously made center-periphery arrangements. The following factors are especially useful for explaining the role of federal companies: • •

• •

the level of regional dependency on the economic resources accessible through federal oil companies; the regime type of a specific region (and particularly its organizational strength, the unity of its elites, as well as the degree of control over their domestic economic and administrative resources); the level of access for federal oil companies to the federal executive’s resources; and the federal executive’s dependency on the specific region.

These factors determine the outcomes (system stability, system change, and system erosion) of federal corporate attempts to change preexisting center-periphery institutional arrangements. The diversity of regional control over components of the Russian oil industry in the mid-1990s derived from varying levels of bargaining power of individual provinces. Among the factors determining those levels were the regions’ administrative statuses, their economic standing and resource endowment, the unity of their local elites, and the ability of the regions’ elites to present a credible ethnic nationalist threat to Moscow by mobilizing popular support for greater sovereignty in economic and political affairs.

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The Power of Regional Elites

In the early 1990s, the administrative status of a given region in the federation played an important role in establishing the initial bargaining power of local elites.16 Constitutionally, Russia’s twenty-one ethnic republics had higher status within the federation than its “‘territories,’ ‘regions,’ ‘federal cities,’ ‘autonomous regions,’ and ‘autonomous areas.’”17 This asymmetric federalism is best demonstrated by examining Russia’s oil-rich regions. The federation’s six richest oil provinces include two ethnic autonomous territories (Khanty-Mansi and Yamalo-Nenets okrugs) and four ethnic republics (Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Komi, and Udmurtia). These six regions have traditionally been responsible for over 80 percent of the national oil extraction. The federation’s top two oil-rich regions (65 percent of the national oil extraction), KhantyMansi and Yamalo-Nenets, had the status of autonomous okrugs (AOs) within the larger nonethnic territory, Tyumen oblast. In the early 1990s, the two provinces raised their status and became subjects of the federation in their own right, as recognized by the 1993 Russian Constitution. Unlike Khanty-Mansi AO, Yamalo-Nenets AO declared sovereignty in local affairs,18 but it (as well as other AOs) never adopted a local constitution or declared the supremacy of local legislation over federal laws, as most of the oil-rich ethnic republics did. Similarly, the six oil-producing okrugs never asserted their exclusive right to natural resources. Their dual status, as subjects of the federation and as territorial units of larger provinces, has contributed to their inability to advance separatist claims similar to those pushed forward by the republics.19 The status of “autonomous okrugs” also implied a considerable degree of subordination of these territories to their host region in terms of budgetary and administrative authority. The absence of strong local elites or any sizable local ethnic groups also contributed to the lack of separatist activism in oil-rich YamaloNenets and Khanty-Mansi AOs, which were predominantly populated by migrant oil workers. As a result, these two regions, in spite of their economic resource endowment, were never able to raise their administrative status to that of an ethnic republic.20 In the USSR the ethnic autonomous republics were directly subordinated to Moscow and thus

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possessed a higher degree of local authority, at least nominally. The 1992 Russian Federal Treaty also recognized the special status of ethnic republics as regions in which regional elites had considerable political autonomy from the federal government. This special status enabled ethnic republics to reduce Moscow’s involvement in local affairs.21 In the 1990s a key privilege of the republics was direct elections of their heads by popular vote rather than their appointment by the federal president (as was the case in nonethnic regions). This facilitated a “smooth seizure” of local resources by an alliance of provincial political elites and enterprise directors. In ethnic republics (such as Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, and Yakutia) as soon as the “red directors” and the old Communist Party officials were elected to provincial legislatures, they immediately proclaimed all local industrial assets and subsoil resources to be under their direct regional jurisdiction.22 In contrast to their colleagues in nonethnic provinces, elites in ethnic homelands relied on their ability to use nationalist sentiment to extract concessions from the federal center. Despite their greater nominal autonomy, not all republics possessed effective bargaining power vis-à-vis Moscow. Of Russia’s four most oil-abundant republics only Tatarstan and Bashkortostan (the third and fourth richest oil provinces respectively) opted to press for regional separatism. Their demands for greater autonomy were surpassed (although with devastating consequences) only by another oilproducing region, the republic of Chechnya.23 Other oil-rich republics, such as Komi and Udmurtia, did not follow in Tatarstan’s and Bashkortostan’s separatist footsteps by refusing to sign the Russian Federal Treaty in March 1992. Tatarstan never recognized the treaty, whereas Bash kor tostan endorsed it only after pressuring Moscow to grant numerous concessions through a supplementary bilateral agreement. This paved the way for the widespread practice of bilateral agreements between the federal center and the regions, which, as noted by Stepan, violated “the federal constitution (and sometimes even the constitutions of the signatory republics).”24 Moreover, Tatarstan and Bashkortostan (as well as the Republic of Ingushetia) were the only ethnic republics to conduct a public referendum in support of their separatist claims (see table 11.1).

306 | Shamil Midkhatovich Yenikeyeff Table 11.1 The Regional Bargaining Power in the Top Four Oil-Rich Republics

Bargaining Power and Its Outcome Political Variable Elite unity Ethnic nationalist/separatist threat Sovereignty declaration Mass mobilization (sovereignty referendum) Political-Economic Variable Privatization of the regional oil sector on local terms Oil licensing without federal involvement Exclusive authority over oil taxation Stake in the national oil transportation monopoly Transneft TOTAL OUTCOME Bargaining power Autonomous revenues

Tatarstan Bashkortostan Komi Udmurtia + +

+ +

-

-

+ +

+ +

+ -

+ -

+

+

-

-

+

+

-

+

+

+

-

-

+

+

-

-

8/8

8/8

1/8

2/8

High High

High High

Modest Modest Low Low

Several factors contributed to Tatarstan’s and Bashkortostan’s signifi cant bargaining power. Both regions had very strong local oil-industrial lobbies that strived for greater independence from Moscow. The separatist determination of the Bashkir and Tatar oil industrialists won the support of local nomenklatura (Communist Party officials and economic administrators) who at the time of widespread economic crisis in Russia considered the local oil industries guarantors of regional socioeconomic stability. An alliance of local oil industrialists and party apparatchiks skillfully cloaked their struggle for local economic resources and

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political-administrative autonomy under the garb of ethnic revival. Nationalism in these republics was initiated by the indigenous cultural intelligentsia, which as early as 1987 began to voice the social problems of the titular nationalities associated with the linguistic and cultural domination of Russian and other nontitular ethnic groups.25 The elites swiftly co-opted the institutionally and financially weak nationalists and turned them into a political scarecrow to pressure the Kremlin into giving up economic resources to the regional authority.26 Since Bashkortostan and Tatarstan had a history of independent statehood and were predominantly Muslim, the nationalist and separatist demands of local elites became a credible threat to Russia’s integrity in the eyes of the federal center.27 In the 1990s the two regions were also the third and fourth richest provinces in Russia, responsible for 13.1 percent of national oil extraction, with a well-developed oil industrial infrastructure and direct access to the Russian oil trunk pipeline network. The fact that the key national oil pipelines from the oil-rich regions of Siberia traverse the territories of Bashkortostan and Tatarstan makes it impossible for Moscow to block Bashkir and Tatar access to the oil export network. Hence, pipeline politics defined the Kremlin’s strategy and actions toward separatist regions. In contrast to the case of Chechnya, Moscow never used military force to deal with the other two of its less integrated provinces, Bashkortostan and Tatarstan. The Kremlin’s calculations were simple, since the Chechens controlled 1 to 3 percent of national oil flows, whereas Bashkortostan and Tatarstan could block 65 percent of Russian oil (transported from Western Siberia) and an additional 13 percent of national oil output that originated from these regions. In other words, a full-scale military conflict in the Middle Volga region would have had devastating consequences for the Russian economy.28 Moreover, in order to appease the two regions, in 1993– 94 the Kremlin granted them open access to the national pipeline network and even provided them with stakes in two subsidiary companies of the national monopoly (Transneft) that used Bashkortostan’s and Tatarstan’s territories for oil transportation.29 As a result, Tatarstan obtained 36 percent of shares in the open joint stock company North-Western Trunk Oil Pipelines and Bashkortostan received 24.5 percent in the company

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Ural-Siberian Trunk Oil Pipelines.30 Thus, the two republics have been the only regions to receive stakes in the Russian national oil transportation monopoly.31 These two regions also secured considerable authority over all aspects of oil production, including oil resource licensing and the allocation of oil export quotas within their domains, as well as oil taxation. Tatarstan and Bashkortostan managed to retain most oil and gas excise taxes in their local budgets, whereas other oil-rich provinces had to transfer 100 percent of such excise taxes to the federal budget.32 In reality, however, throughout the 1990s both republics unilaterally exceeded the provisions of their bilateral budgetary arrangements with Moscow. For example, in 1997– 98 Bashkortostan, in addition to tax excises on oil and gas, retained other taxes and rents, parts of which were by law transferable to the federal budget. As a result, Bashkortostan did not send to Moscow 100 percent of its petrol and gasoline excises, 3 percent of its geological fees, 40 percent of its rental payments for subsoil use, 10 percent of its environmental (pollution) charges, 30 percent of its land tax, and 40 percent of its surface water user fees.33 In addition, Bashkir and Tatar authorities secured full control over local petrochemical and oil industries and petroleum traders and consequently set up the only two regional vertically integrated fuel energy companies, Bashneft and Tatneft, which to date remain among the top ten national oil conglomerates of Russia. Unlike the separatist Middle Volga regions of Bashkortostan and Tatarstan, the other two oil-abundant republics of Komi and Udmurtia (representing 5.5 percent of Russia’s oil extraction) had weak and divided local elites who were unable to manipulate the threat of ethnic upheaval. Although the Komi and Udmurt parliaments initially pursued the examples of Bashkortostan and Tatarstan by adopting sovereignty declarations, they subsequently failed to adopt a comprehensive bargaining policy toward Moscow.34 For example, in Komi republic, the local industrial lobby occupied a prominent role in the parliament but failed to recognize the growing local nationalist movement as a possible bargaining tool in their relations with the federal center.35 In fact, the Komi regional elite conducted its bargaining relations with Moscow only through administrative-legislative channels without any mass

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mobilization for a “separatist cause.” A similar situation developed in oil-rich Udmurtia. Apart from Bashkortostan and Tatarstan, which obtained dominant authority over the local oil industries, the federal center, nevertheless, bestowed less, but still significant, authority to other oil-rich provinces. In order to secure the political support of local elites the federal center provided them with administrative and economic resources aimed at ensuring socioeconomic stability. These included devolving regulatory authority in relation to oil taxation and petroleum markets, transferring federal shares in some local oil and petrochemical companies to provincial authorities, turning regional administrations into oil exporters, and introducing the two-key system of oil licensing. The two-key system meant that any federal oil company wishing to explore oil resources in a given region had to obtain a license jointly granted by the relevant federal agencies and by the specific regional administration where the resources were located.36 If one of the two authorized bodies was against granting a license to a specific oil company, the license could not be issued. The same principle was applied when one of the two licensing authorities wished to revoke a previously issued license.37 Initially the two-key licensing procedure did not affect federal oil companies. From 1992 to 1995 Russian oil companies received free licenses to explore oil fields that had already been under the control of their production units in Soviet times.38 In reality, oil companies simply “inherited” the licenses of their Soviet predecessors and, as a result, obtained control over 64 percent of national mineral resources.39 The 1992 federal decision to grant oil licenses at no cost enabled the federal government to avoid any possible difficulties with the subsequent privatization of the national oil sector during the period of falling oil production and the economic crisis. This decision also sought to appease regional separatism by making a special exemption to Russia’s republics by asserting that such regions do not have to implement free licensing and may adopt their own procedures. In fact, throughout Yeltsin’s presidency the described two-key system of natural resource licensing did not work in the four ethnic republics of Bashkortostan, Tatarstan, Yakutia, and Udmurtia.40 Having

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proclaimed their sole ownership over local resources, Bashkortostan and Tatarstan issued licenses to their own regional oil companies, Tatneft and Bashneft, without any federal involvement.41 Unlike an elected president of an ethnic republic, a Kremlinappointed governor was too institutionally weak to create serious obstacles for regional activities of a given Moscow-based oil conglomerate. Naturally, an appointed governor could easily be dismissed if his decisions were not welcomed in the Kremlin. However, in the mid-1990s federal companies began to experience the full scale “diktat” of provincial authorities over oil licensing when all regional heads began to be elected by popular vote. The regions use their control of the “second key” to extract concessions from the oil companies operating in their territories in the form of various social, financial, construction, and environmental projects. A federal oil company was likely to lose or be refused access to local oil fields if it could not meet regional demands, as occurred in the case of the Russian oil company Lukoil in the Nenetsk AO under Governor Butov. In the late 1990s– early 2000s the governor, as the holder of the “second key,” refused to approve relevant documents of fortythree licensing agreements held by Lukoil’s subsidiary, Arkhangelskgeoldobycha. Instead, the governor provided preferential treatment to a company that he created, the Nenetsk Oil Company.42

The Impact of Corporate Players

The semi-disintegrated state of the federation, with numerous legal, economic, and administrative barriers created by the regions, led to large transactional costs for federal oil companies, thus becoming an obstacle to Russia’s future economic development as a unified state. However, as soon as vertically integrated federal oil companies were institutionalized in the mid-1990s, they began to play an important role in forging additional economic and political links between Moscow and the regions. Therefore, the growing influence of federal oil companies in center-periphery bargaining relations led to a considerable alteration of the preexisting rules of the game.

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Initially, in the early to mid-1990s, federal oil companies furthered their positions within the existing institutional framework. During this period, federal corporate penetration into the regions was rather limited and predominantly nonaggressive. Oil companies were weak in institutional terms since they were only just undergoing transformation into corporate entities. The newly formed oil conglomerates needed to secure control of key industrial assets essential for incorporating the entire technologically linked chain of oil production, refining, and petroleum product sales. However, their assets and resources often did not represent those of a solid corporate body and initially lacked a comprehensive management structure. In other words, Russian federal oil companies resembled patchwork quilts rather than vertically integrated corporations, as they described themselves. As a result, they often lacked the necessary economic and political resources to undermine the power of regional elites, especially in contrast to the economically advanced regions featuring strong and united local elites. Moreover, this period was characterized by intensive rent-seeking behavior at the federal and regional levels, where emerging corporate entities were often involved in bitter competition over scarce economic resources allocated by the Kremlin and regional elites. Since President Yeltsin built his power base on granting substantial authority to regional elites in return for their political loyalty and their help in preserving the territorial integrity of the federation, the Kremlin discouraged federal oil companies from taking an encroaching stance toward the regions. As a result, the relationship between federal oil companies and the regional elites mirrored that of the Kremlin’s bilateral relations with the provincial administrations. Yeltsin’s administration even openly encouraged federal oil companies to sign cooperation agreements with those regions where they intended to operate. In the mid-1990s, the two federal energy conglomerates, Lukoil and Gazprom, pioneered the practice of signing bilateral cooperation agreements (soglashenie o sotrudnichestve) with regional administrations. However, the agreements arranged by these two companies served different purposes. Gazprom viewed its agreements as a way of tackling the nonpayment and debt problems with its regional gas consum ers.43 Lukoil’s agreements paved the way for the company’s regional

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production, operational, and sales activities. Similar to center-periphery bilateral treaties,44 each of Lukoil’s agreements was tailored according to the political, legal, and economic environment of the individual region as well as the specific interests of the signatories. As a result, each agreement was designed to fit the demands of individual regional authorities and Lukoil’s own interests in the given province.45 Lukoil’s early cooperation agreements with regional administrations, signed in 1994– 98, sought to forge close working ties with the administrations of its host provinces. Lukoil’s “home regions” included Perm oblast (Permnefteorgsintez), Khanty-Mansi AO (Langepasneftegaz, Uraineftegaz and Kogalymneftegaz), and Volgograd oblast (Volgogradneftepererabotka). Two other federal oil companies, Yukos and Sidanko, quickly adopted Lukoil’s regional strategy. By 1997, 34 regional administrations had signed treaties on cooperation with three federal oil companies: 16 regions agreed to work with Lukoil, 11 with Yukos, and 7 with Sidanko.46 By the late 1990s the majority of Russian federal companies used cooperation agreements to secure regional expansion, tax exemptions, and other privileges.47 By 2000 there was virtually no regional administration that had not signed a bilateral agreement with a federal oil company.48

Regional Economic Dependency and Local Political Regimes

Throughout the 1990s federal oil companies were highly dependent on regional elites for tax breaks and access to new oil fields, petroleum markets, and support services. However, the corporate dependency on provincial elites varied across the federation according to the type of local regime (such as the degree of elite unity and its political and economic authority) and the degree to which they were dependent on federal oil companies. For instance, oil companies found it easier to enter those regions where local elites were weak and disunited (such as Kirov oblast) and thus did not exercise effective control over the local economy and poli tics. Often, such regions were also dependent on large federal oil com-

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panies for fuel energy products. Oil conglomerates also tended to monopolize local petroleum markets in such regions very quickly. Regions with strong and united local elites and with developed oil industrial infrastructure, such as Sverdlovsk and Saratov oblasts, managed to benefit considerably from the newly emerged federal oil companies. Strong local elites would secure segments in the regional retailpetroleum market, as well as in oil extraction and refining facilities. In some cases, elites in resource-rich provinces such as Khanty-Mansi and Yamalo-Nenetsk AOs and Tyumen oblast would set up small private or region-controlled oil companies that would subsequently be sold to major Russian oil conglomerates for a hefty profit. Federal oil companies themselves often offered strong provincial elites a stake in their local businesses. This was done either through a formation of joint ventures with regional administrations or through informal “nepotistic” arrangements where relatives of prominent local politicians would be given well-paid jobs in companies’ provincial subsidiaries. The most economically self-sufficient regions with strong ethnic paternalistic regimes, such as Bashkortostan and Tatarstan, were endowed with large oil and petrochemical industrial infrastructures and substantial oil reserves, along with sizable local industrial and agricultural consumers for their products. They had also secured access to the national pipeline network, which enabled them to export their oil freely. In addition, these ethnic republics taxed and licensed the local oil industries without federal involvement. However, there were two major flaws with these seemingly self-sufficient oil-rich regions. Both Tatarstan and Bashkortostan were producers of low-quality oil with high sulfuric content, which could only be exported as Russia’s Urals blend when mixed with West Siberian oil of higher quality. Yet their oil refining capabilities were either inadequate (as in the case of Tatarstan) or depen dent on external oil suppliers (as in the case of Bashkortostan). Moreover, low-quality oil also meant that Bashkortostan’s and Tatarstan’s oil companies incurred considerably higher production and refining costs than their federal competitors. In addition, the local oil fields of Bashkortostan and Tatarstan are relatively old and, in geological terms, are considered predominantly depleted. As a result, the two provinces’ “sovereign existence,” based on economic self-sufficiency and the highest

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degree of regional administrative authority ever granted by the federal center, was unsustainable in the long run. Having realized this, the two regions began seeking access to external resources controlled by the federal executive, federal oil companies, or other respective regional elites, such as the oil reserves in Tyumen oblast. This process led to an increased economic dependency of Bashkortostan and Tatarstan on external players. Nevertheless, as long as the federal executive remained dependent on regional elites, the two “separatist” republics continued to enjoy considerable political autonomy from the Kremlin and from federal oil companies.

1992 – 1998: The Lack of Federal Corporate Impact on Regions

From 1992 through 1998, federal oil companies had limited impact on regional politics or economics due to their institutional weakness, inadequate financial resources, intensive rent-seeking, and the federal executive’s dependency on regional elites for political support. Most local elites, both weak and strong, played one company off against another without losing control over the regional economy and politics. A typical regional leader would act as a protector of local political and economic interests and as an arbiter of possible conflicts between regional and federal oil companies. The majority of interactions between regional elites and federal oil companies resembled barter relations without active corporate participation in local politics or economy. This situation, however, began to change after the August 1998 Russian financial crisis and the election of Vladimir Putin as Russian president in 2000.

1998 – 2004: Corporate Power

The August 1998 Russian financial crisis put an end to profitable speculations with Russian debt guarantees and forced Moscow-based financialindustrial groups such as Menatep, Unexim, and Alfa Group to move the core of their business from the collapsed banking sector to resource exporting industries, namely oil, nickel, and aluminum production. This

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process resulted in the relatively quick corporate growth of federal oil companies controlled by banking groups such as the Tyumen Oil Company, TNK (Alfa Group), and Yukos (Menatep). The rapid rise of oil prices in the late 1990s and early 2000s led to a considerable increase in oil export revenues, enabling federal oil conglomerates to consolidate their existing assets and make further acquisitions in the oil sector. Oil companies also used this larger financial base to increase their role in federal and regional administrative and legislative bodies in order to secure a more beneficial political-economic and institutional environment for their continued corporate growth.

The Changing Federal Executive’s Dependence on the Regions

Federal oil companies were more successful in amending the rules of the game under Putin than they were under Yeltsin. Largely this was due to the fact that the first Russian president built his power base by giving power to regional elites, since he did not rely on polity-wide political parties, did not have a majority in the lower chamber of the parliament, and did not enjoy the same high popularity ratings as his successor, Vladimir Putin.49 Thus Yeltsin turned a blind eye to “sovereign” paternalistic regional regimes, since their authoritarian control over local political processes always ensured a favorable outcome in federal elections for the Kremlin. As long as the federal executive was dependent on strong regional elites, federal oil companies were unable to initiate major institutional changes of the existing center-periphery arrangements. However, unlike his predecessor, Vladimir Putin opted to build his political power by taking it away from the regions. Putin’s public approval ratings of over 70 percent gave him the popular mandate to initiate a series of reforms intended to undermine the old system of federal dependency on the periphery. As a result, seven federal districts were created to take local branches of federal law enforcement bodies back under federal control and to bring contradictory “sovereign” regional laws in line with federal legislation. Though this had a rather limited impact on ethnic republics, such as Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, nevertheless the

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Kremlin’s new stance on regional elites opened new opportunities for federal oil companies in their dealings with the provinces.

Corporate Expansion under Putin: The Economic Dimension

The first four years of Putin’s presidency (2000– 2004) witnessed not only further consolidation of economic resources in the hands of federal oil corporations but also their increased commitment to divide regional markets according to their spheres of interests. Having consolidated its own assets under one vertically integrated corporate umbrella, a given federal company now focused on obtaining greater control over the oil production infrastructure responsible for transporting oil from wells to the national oil trunk pipeline network. In 2000 federal oil corporations used this control to leverage access of small and mediumsized oil companies to the pipelines.50 The aim was to drive these smaller companies (which were often controlled by local elites) and other competitors into bankruptcy or forced sale of their equity and assets, and (in some cases) to take over their fields. In 2000, for example, the Tyumen Oil Company (TNK) used this strategy to gain control over the oil concern Yugraneft.51 Similarly, in 2003 Lukoil restricted access of the company Nobel Oil to its infrastructure allegedly due to technical problems. In turn, medium and smaller oil companies tried to work around this problem by shipping their oil by rail or barge.52 In 1999– 2004 higher profits from oil exports enabled federal oil companies to further consolidate their control over regional petroleum markets. The rapid recovery of the economy, and particularly the industrial sector, after August 1998 boosted the domestic petroleum market, which became the second largest revenue-generating sector for Russian oil companies.53 Since growing oil exports resulted in the extraction of more oil than the national oil trunk pipelines could handle, federal oil companies began to produce more petroleum products for local consumers.54 Hence, oil companies focused their strategies on securing regional markets for their products. As stressed earlier, in 1992– 98 federal oil companies were heavily dependent on regional elites for consolidation of their assets in the prov inces. During this period, regional authorities promoted the emergence

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of independent petroleum traders connected to local elites. Simultaneously, criminal gangs set up their own trading companies, which sold petrol and diesel stolen from the refineries loosely integrated into federal oil companies. In 1996 – 99 the major Russian oil conglomerates, with the help of regional elites and federal law enforcement bodies, consolidated control over their refineries and distribution. Federal oil companies realized that the best way to promote corporate expansion in the provinces was to make governors personally involved in corporate affairs. In this respect, the major Russian companies began to actively use co-optation of regional elites by employing relatives of governors as well-paid local managers. For example, in 2000 the oil company Yukos, interested in securing its base in Samara oblast, “promoted” Alexei Titov, son of the Samara region governor, Konstantin Titov, to a top position in its financial subsidiary Solidarnost.55 For similar reasons, Sibneft’s owner, Roman Abramovich, placed the Omsk governor’s son in a comfortable position in Abramovich’s Swiss company Runicom.56 Relatives of Volgograd Governor Nikolai Maksiuta were promoted to managerial positions in Lukoil.57 For the same reason, federal oil companies often arranged for governors and members of local administrations to get on their board of directors. For instance, TNK reserved almost half the seats on its board of directors for the governors of the provinces where the company operated.58 By 1999 federal vertically integrated oil companies, often with the help of the Federal Ministry of Interior, had obtained full control over their refineries and forced criminal gangs from the market. Subsequently, federal companies (like Lukoil and Yukos) used their control over refineries to swiftly acquire small- and medium-sized independent regional petroleum traders.59 The preexisting Soviet infrastructure of oil production and the supply of refined products also eased the consolidation of local petroleum markets in the hands of one or two federal oil companies whose predecessors traditionally occupied monopolistic positions in their host and neighboring regions. During Putin’s presidency federal oil companies began to rely on their own corporate power to reach their strategic goals. This signified a departure from the 1992– 98 period, when such companies were still dependent on the administrative resources of regional elites.

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Corporate Expansion under Putin: The Political Dimension

After Putin’s ascension to the presidency in 2000, federal oil companies, in their quest for regional resources, also pursued political expansion in the provinces. This corporate involvement in regional politics varied from political-administrative pressure tactics to complete regional re gime changes. The choice of political strategies employed by federal oil companies varied across the regions and depended on the regional elite’s unity, its relationship with the Kremlin, and its level of influence in regional economy and politics (including its popularity with the voters). It is therefore unsurprising that federal companies were more successful in nonethnic regions, where local elites had less administrative control than their counterparts in resource-rich ethnic republics. Federal oil conglomerates often opted to safeguard and expand their interests in specific regions by backing their own candidates during local elections. These corporate candidates who successfully challenged the ruling regional elites included, for instance, Roman Abramovich, owner of the Siberian Oil Company (Sibneft), who was elected governor of the Chukotka region in December 2000, and Boris Zolotarev, business development director of Yukos, who was elected governor of the Evenk autonomous territory in April 2001.60 The two elections also illustrate the growing ability of federal oil companies to use the power of the federal executive and its agencies to facilitate the regional elites’ withdrawal from local political competition against corporate candidates. In the case of Chukotka, prior to the elections the federal tax police opened an investigation against the governor, Aleksandr Nazarov, which was swiftly closed after his decision not to seek another term in office.61 The threat of criminal prosecution was also used against Evenk incumbent Aleksandr Bokovikov, who also refrained from taking part in the race.62 The heavy reliance of federal companies on federal law enforcement agencies in their attack on provincial regimes also indicated that the Kremlin unofficially encouraged such actions, until local elites were “bled into submission.”63 At the same time, although the federal corporate actors initiated a regional regime change, they would subsequently avoid further confrontation by reaching a pact (or compromise) with

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the outgoing governors. As a result, the former governor of Chukotka, Nazarov, became a member of the upper chamber of the Russian parliament (the Federation Council), whereas the former Evenk governor, Bokovikov, was elected to the local legislature.64 In addition to expanding their political power through regional regime changes, federal oil companies built political alliances with provincial governors. To achieve this, companies usually provided financial backing to the electoral campaigns of regional incumbents. For example, in 2000– 2004, Lukoil helped the Volgograd governor Nikolai Maksiuta and his Astrakhan counterpart, Alexander Efremov, retain power. Similarly, TNK and Yukos backed the Razyan governor Vladimir Lyubimov and the governor of Samara, Konstantin Titov, respectively. In some regions governors could only survive so long as they ensured the intercorporate status quo within their domains. For example, Russia’s oil richest region, Tyumen oblast, hosted a number of oil companies and thus any preferential treatment of one in particular was discouraged. When the incumbent Leonid Roketsky showed preferential treatment to TNK, other oil and gas companies, such as Gazprom and Lukoil, simply backed another candidate, Sergei Sobyanin, who defeated Roketsky in the March 2001 gubernatorial elections and reinstated the preexisting balance of corporate powers.

Changing the Rules: The Oil Lobby and the Regions

In addition to their growing political influence at the regional level, federal oil companies attempted to lobby beneficial oil legislation through the federal parliament. In the State Duma of 1996– 99, oil conglomerates maintained close ties with a number of interfaction parliamentary groups, namely, the Regions of Russia and the Energy of Russia.65 The latter was the traditional political partner of the Russian oil companies Rosneft, Lukoil, and Yukos and had a number of the oil industry’s backers among its members, including the prominent deputy speaker of the parliament, Artur Chilingarov. In 1997 Rosneft and Yukos also facilitated the election of Oleg Morozov as head of the Regions of Russia in place of Gazprom’s lobbyist Vladimir Medvedev.66

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Overall, the main aim of the oil lobby was to create a more stable legal framework clearly defining the rights and responsibilities of federal and regional authorities in relation to the oil industry. Companies were not particularly happy with the ambiguous delineation of authority over the subsoil between Moscow and the regions, nontransparent licensing procedures, and the widespread abuse of authority by provincial elites. However, despite numerous attempts by Russia’s federal oil companies to push relevant laws through parliament, these legal acts never surfaced. One such example is the draft federal law “On Oil and Gas,” which Lukoil, Yukos, and Surgutneftegas tried to lobby for in the mid-1990s. President Yeltsin, however, viewed even minor alterations to his bilateral arrangements with the provinces as a threat to the existing political stability. For this reason, Yeltsin asserted that the federal law “On Subsoil” was sufficient to regulate relations within the oil industry and therefore there was no need for another legal act in this respect. However, the ambiguity of federal subsoil legislation meant that resource-rich regions became the driving force behind the development of relevant laws and administrative procedures. For example, in the mid-1990s Russia’s largest oil-rich regions, the Republic of Tatarstan and the Khanti-Mansi AO, adopted their own legislation on oil and gas.67 The problem for oil companies, however, did not derive from these regional legislative efforts but from large transaction costs associated with diverse rules and regulations across regional borders. After the December 1999 Russian parliamentary elections, federal oil companies occupied an even more prominent role in the State Duma. During the elections, Lukoil and Yukos funded the Fatherland– All Russia party, controlled by regional governors.68 The party platform enabled Yukos’s top manager and shareholder, Vladimir Dubov, to secure a parliamentary seat and even to become chairman of an important subcommittee for taxation. Apart from Fatherland– All Russia, federal oil companies provided funding to virtually all political parties represented in the parliament (see table 11.2). Yukos financed the Communists, Yabloko, and the Union of Rightist Forces.69 The Tyumen Oil Company (TNK), controlled by Alfa Group, backed Zhirinovsky’s Liberal-Democratic Party of Russia, the Communist Party (KPRF), and Gennadii Raikov’s “People’s Deputy” faction; the latter was also affiliated with Lukoil.

Oil and the Corporate Reintegration of Russia | 321 Table 11.2 Oil Lobby in the State Duma, 1999– 2003

Faction

Seats

KPRF Unity People’s Deputy Fatherland– All Russia Regions of Russia Agrarians Union of Rightist Forces Yabloko LDPR

85 80 60 46 45 42 37 19 12

Oil Lobby Total Total Number of Deputies

426 450

Linked to Yukos, TNK, Lukoil Sibneft, TNK TNK, Sibneft Lukoil, Yukos, Sibneft, TNK Lukoil, Rosneft Yukos, Lukoil TNK, Yukos TNK, Yukos TNK

Sources: “Organicheskoe soedinenie: Neft’ i Vlast’ v preddverii izbiratel’noi kompanii,” Neft’ i kapital, no. 6 (2003), www.oilcapital.ru/main.asp?IDR=3070; Sergei Pravosudov, “Lobbisty v Gosdume,” Russkii fokus, 15 September 2003, 14–19; Vitalii Ivanov, “Khodorkovsky soznalsia. Aktsionery “Yukosa” pomogut SPS, “Yabloku” i KPRF,” Vedomosti, 8 April 2003, A1; “Deputaty ot ‘neftianki,’” Neft’ i kapital, no. 10 (2004), www.oilcapital.ru/main.asp?IDR=3916; State Duma’s official website, www.duma.gov.ru.

In the Duma of 1999 – 2003, Yukos became the main coordinator of the lobbying activities of Russian oil companies. The influence of the Yukos-led oil lobby extended to such a degree that it was capable of securing a two-thirds parliamentary majority in support of its legislation.70 The Oil Quality Bank

The first major institutional change initiated by the oil lobby was the draft federal law “On the Trunk Pipeline Transport.”71 The law was originally developed by Russia’s largest oil companies, Yukos and Lukoil, with the stated aim of improving the quality of oil supplied by companies to the federal pipeline network Transneft.72 The law introduced the concept of an oil quality bank that would introduce a financial mechanism enabling suppliers of lower-quality (sour and heavy) crude oil to compensate producers of high-quality (light and sweet) crude oil for lost profit. Compensation fees would be based on the difference between the value of oil at its entry into the Transneft trunk oil pipeline system

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and its reduced value on exit from the pipeline as determined by third party examiners. The idea to introduce the Oil Quality Bank originated in the early 1990s, when Russia’s light oil producers entered the international market and found that their capacity to generate larger revenues was undermined by the continued practice of mixing light and heavy oil for export as the Urals blend. Thus, depending on world oil prices, such producers incurred losses of $1.5 to $2.5 billion per year. The majority of high-quality light, sweet crude producers were federal oil companies such as Lukoil, Rosneft, Sibneft, Slavneft, Yukos, and TNK, whereas the largest low-quality oil producers were Tatarstan’s and Bashkortostan’s regional companies, Tatneft and Bashneft. When oil prices plummeted in the second half of the 1990s, Lukoil offered funding to the Russian Fuel and Energy Ministry to implement the introduction of the Oil Quality Bank through special quality control measures within the Transneft pipeline network.73 At the same time, Russia’s federal oil companies, Lukoil and Yukos, pursued an active lobbying campaign in the State Duma as well as within Yeltsin’s administration for a new law on trunk pipeline transport. The two companies asserted that the state would gain higher tax returns due to increased sales of better-quality oil abroad. However, Russia’s largest lower-quality oil producers opposed Lukoil’s and Yukos’s oil quality proposals.74 In December 2001 the presidents of Bashkortostan and Tatarstan even appealed to President Putin, describing the draft law as a strategy of federal companies to eliminate regional competition. It was also claimed that if the new law came into force the regional companies, Bashneft and Tatneft, would have to cease their operations and face imminent collapse due to a fall in demand of lower-quality crude and high compensation fees payable to higher oil quality producers.75 Since both companies contributed significantly to regional budgets, their collapse was bound to lead to economic, and potentially social, destabilization in Bashkortostan and Tatarstan. Despite this failure of federal oil companies to lobby for successful introduction of the Oil Quality Bank, the federal center used this opportunity to exert pressure on the Bashkir and Tatar regional authorities to give up tax privileges granted under their bilateral treaties with

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Boris Yeltsin. A prominent member of the Bashkir legislature, Zufar Enikeev, explained that the Kremlin did not leave Tatarstan and Bashkortostan any space for maneuver over the tax issue: “They hinted that if we did not yield 60% of all our taxes back to the federal budget, the Oil Quality Bank would be swiftly introduced.”76 Tax Changes

The oil lobby also used its power in the State Duma to facilitate a more favorable tax regime as well as to block government initiatives imposing higher taxes on the oil producers.77 Since the subcommittee for taxation was chaired by Yukos’s representative, Vladimir Dubov, it became the oil lobby’s key platform for initiating changes to oil sector taxation. This also resulted in the federal oil companies being able to undermine the tax authority of regional elites in resource-rich provinces. The lobby was successful in having the State Duma introduce a uniform federal mineral tax that canceled any tax concessions to oil companies operating in older depleted fields, most of which were located in Bashkortostan and Tatarstan. In turn, the Tatar and Bashkir presidents tried to fight back and demanded a flexible taxation system from the federal executive, including lower rent and royalty payments for regional oil companies. However, federal oil companies successfully persuaded President Putin that it would not be profitable for the state to grant tax concessions and special privileges to regional oil producers. Another important change introduced by the oil lobby was the transfer of the petrol tax from refineries to fuel traders. This legislative move targeted smalland medium-sized fuel traders and was intended to assist federal oil companies in their quest to monopolize regional markets by driving out the local competition. Although the Kremlin criticized federal oil companies’ attempts to maximize their profits at the expense of the federal and regional budgets, it never vetoed the legislation passed by the Duma. For President Putin, the fact that the federal oil companies held considerable control over the parliament offered a unique opportunity to undermine the fi nancial base of regional elites. Most important, this enabled Moscow to consolidate control over regional budgetary revenues. The evidence is

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compelling: if in the mid-1990s Bashkortostan retained 100 percent of its oil excises, by January 2005 this figure went down to a mere 5 percent.78

Changing Federal Relations: From Yeltsin to Putin

After their emergence in the mid-1990s, federal oil companies made a considerable impact on the authority of regional elites and their relationship with the federal center. However, it is important to note that Moscow-based companies had to rely on federal legislative and executive bodies in their attempts to change preexisting center-periphery institutional arrangements. System stability is an appropriate term to describe the role of federal oil companies in the center-periphery bargaining game under Boris Yeltsin (see table 11.3). During this period, strong regional elites had remained relatively autonomous from federal actors. Federal oil companies held either very limited influence on the regional politics and decision-making process or none at all. In paternalistic systems, such as in Bashkortostan and Tatarstan, federal companies had played a purely brokering role between the federal center and a given region in return for a small fee. For example, in the case of Bashkortostan, even though Lukoil managed to enter the local petroleum market, the company’s presence was insignificant, and it never became a serious player in either local politics or the economy. In contrast to their limited involvement in paternalistic regional regimes, federal corporations swiftly took over provinces with weak local elites, such as Kirov oblast. Similarly, local elites in resource-rich regions, such as Tyumen oblast with its KhantyMansi and Yamalo-Nenets AOs, were heavily reliant politically and economically on several federal oil companies operating in their territories. Elites in such regions could secure their political survival only by ensuring the status quo between the often competing interests of federal oil companies. Under President Yeltsin, federal oil companies found it difficult to change center-periphery arrangements institutionally. The federal executive resisted corporate attempts to push new oil legislation through the parliament that would infringe on regional authority over the oil

Oil and the Corporate Reintegration of Russia | 325 Table 11.3 Oil Sector’s Role in the Russian Federal System

Oil prices Consolidation within the oil sector Federal executive’s dependence on regional elites Regional dependence on external economic resources Corporate dependence on regional elites Hypotheses

Yeltsin, 1991–1999

Putin, 2000– 2004 (first term in office)

Low-medium ($17–$25 per barrel) Low

Medium-high ($33–$44 per barrel) High

High

Moderate-low

Low

High

High

Moderate-low

System erosion– System stagnation

System change

Source: BP Statistical Review of World Energy, 2011. Note: Oil prices are based on average annual prices for Brent Crude, 1991– 2004.

sector. Yeltsin’s dependency on provincial elites meant that he could not afford a situation in which federal oil companies alienated regional leaders in one form or another. Instead, Yeltsin’s administration encouraged federal companies to build their relations with provincial bosses on the same principle of bilateral treaties and agreements that the Kremlin had adopted in its policy toward the periphery. The institutional weakness of federal oil conglomerates also accounts for their limited involvement in the center-periphery bargaining game under Yeltsin. During this period, federal oil companies were only emerging or undergoing gradual vertical integration. They often needed the assistance of regional elites to consolidate their corporate assets throughout the federation and to gain access to new oil fields and support services. This explains why federal oil companies were so heavily involved in barter politics with regional administrations, especially in regions with strong and united local elites.

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Despite their inability to undermine regional authority in the oil sector, by the end of the 1990s, federal oil conglomerates had established additional economic links between individual regions. Through consolidation of assets in oil production and refining, petroleum trading, and support services, federal oil companies emerged as a new force that helped to prevent further system erosion and to preserve Russia’s territorial unity (system stability). As soon as the new Russian president, Vladimir Putin, unveiled his plans to strengthen Moscow’s hold on the provinces, federal oil companies saw this as a new opportunity to transform the semiconfederal nature of center-periphery relations in Russia (system change). The oil lobby introduced tax changes in the federal legislature that intended to undermine tax privileges of regional administrations and their local companies. The oil lobby’s threat to introduce the Oil Quality Bank, though never implemented, made it easier for the Kremlin to force Bashkortostan and Tatarstan into giving up their hold on oil excises and other taxes. Furthermore, in August 2004 the State Duma amended the federal law “On Subsoil” by transferring the authority to allocate oil licenses exclusively to the federal center.79 Thus Moscow no longer required “the second provincial key” (formal regional approval) for the oil licensing process as it did under Yeltsin’s “two-key” system. As a result, regional elites in the oil-rich provinces lost their important administrative powers vis-à-vis federal oil companies. In another drastic change from Yeltsin’s period, the federal executive provided political and administrative backing to oil companies in their quest for regional resources. Thus federal corporate penetration into the provinces considerably undermined the bargaining power of regional elites in their relations with Moscow. For the Kremlin this often was an easy way of “bleeding” strong provincial elites into submission. On 13 September 2004, President Vladimir Putin unveiled changes to the federal legislation, seeking to end the autonomous powers of Russia’s regional governors and presidents.80 The federation’s formerly most powerful and rebellious provincial bosses could no longer rely on the popular support of local voters in their bargaining with Moscow over political authority and economic resources. According to these legislative changes, approved by the federal parliament in December 2004, all

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regional heads were now to be nominated by the federal president and then approved by provincial legislatures. In the case of a rejection of Moscow’s governor candidate by provincial legislators, an amendment was added to the legislation allowing the Russian president to dissolve noncompliant regional parliaments.81 On their part, provincial elites offered no resistance to Putin’s reforms. Unlike the early 1990s, no nationalist demonstrations took place in the ethnic republics demanding greater local “sovereignty” from the “imperial Moscow.” In a gesture showing this new compliance, one of the pioneers of regional separatism during Yeltsin’s time, President Murtaza Rakhimov of Bashkortostan, became the first leader of an ethnic republic to back the Russian president’s legislative amendments in full. Having already lost most of the authority they had gained under President Boris Yeltsin, the governors quietly accepted Putin’s “revolution from above.”

Final Thoughts

In the 1990s, Russian federalism, in addition to experiencing constitutionally embedded asymmetry, was driven by iterative bargaining games between the center and the regions taking place outside of the constitutional sphere.82 Regions redrafted their own constitutions, refused to implement certain federal laws on their territories, and reached bi lateral deals with the center that contradicted the federal constitution as well as their own laws. This was the time when the federal executive built its power not by rallying behind a polity-wide political party that secured a parliamentary majority but by granting its power to the regional elites through bilateral deals. However, as soon as federal oil companies were institutionalized, new center-periphery channels emerged. These companies became the vehicles for reintegration of the loose federation. Once the new federal president emerged—with a 70 percent popular mandate—he relied on the power of federal oil companies to reintegrate the loose federation. This study has argued for a significant elaboration on the meaning and dynamic of asymmetric federalism, which Stepan did so much to

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highlight through his work. It also hopes to draw attention to the need for further comparative work that takes the role of corporate power seriously into account when discussing the power dynamics between the center and regions in federal systems. The point is to expand the way we think about federalism.

Notes This chapter is based on material in the author’s forthcoming book, The Battle for Russian Oil: Corporations, Regions, and the State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), by permission of Oxford University Press. 1. This study uses the terms corporate, corporations, and conglomerates interchangeably, all referring to Russian oil companies, both private and stateowned. At the same time, the terms provinces, periphery, and regions are applied to the constituent parts of the Russian Federation. 2. Alfred Stepan, “Toward a New Comparative Politics of Federalism, Multinationalism, and Democracy: Beyond Rikerian Federalism,” in Federalism and Democracy in Latin America, ed. Edward L. Gibson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 39, 41– 42. 3. Linz and Stepan highlight that “the essence of the empirical findings and historical studies of Western democracies has always been that political systems of democracy legitimate market economies, not the reverse.” Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 438. 4. The division of Russian oil companies into federal and regional, used in this chapter, is based on two factors: the authority that institutionalized them and their major shareholders. A company institutionalized by the federal executive can be regarded as a federal oil company, whereas the formation of a regional company is based on a decision of a regional administration. In a federal oil company a major shareholder is the federal executive or a politywide private entity that obtained control over federal shares during privatization. An oil company may be considered regional if its major shareholder is a regional administration or a private local actor. 5. See Douglas Blum, ed., Russia’s Future: Consolidation or Disintegration? (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1994); Ann Sheehy, “Russia’s Republics: A Threat to Its Territorial Integrity?,” RFE/RL Research Report 20, no. 2 (14 May 1993); Fiona Hill, “Russia’s Tinder Box”: Conflict in the North Caucasus and Its Implications for the Future of the Russian Federation, Report of the Strengthening

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Democratic Institutions Project, Harvard University, 1995; Christine Wallich, “Making—or Breaking—Russia,” in Russia and the Challenge of Fiscal Separatism, ed. Christine Wallich (Aldershot: Avebury, 1996), 241– 51; Daniel Triesman, “Fiscal Redistribution in a Fragile Federation: Moscow and the Regions in 1994,” British Journal of Political Science 28, no. 1 (January 1998): 185– 222; Matthew Evangelista, The Chechen Wars: Will Russia Go the Way of the Soviet Union? (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2002). For a further assessment of the topic, see Shamil Valiullin (Yenikeyeff), “Will the Russian Federation Disintegrate? Politics of Nationalism and Separatism in Bashkortostan and Tatarstan” (unpublished M. Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 1998). 6. Gail Lapidus, “Gorbachev’s Nationalities Problems,” Foreign Affairs 68, no. 4 (Fall 1989): 96. 7. See Ronald Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993); Valery Tishkov, Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Conflict in and after the Soviet Union: The Mind Aflame (London: Sage, 1997). 8. Jeffrey Hahn, “Conclusions: Common Features in Post-Soviet Local Politics,” in Local Power and Post-Soviet Politics, ed. Theodore Freidgut and Jeffrey Hahn (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1994), 274; James Hughes, “Sub-National Elites and Post-communist Transformation of Russia: A Reply to Kryshtanovskaya and White,” Europe-Asia Studies 49, no. 6 (September 1997): 1023. 9. Alfred Stepan, “Toward a New Comparative Politics,” 70. 10. See Linz and Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation, 7– 9; Vladimir Gel’man, Sergei Ryzhenkov, and Michael Bri et al., Making and Breaking Democratic Transitions: The Comparative Politics of Russia’s Regions (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 14. 11. Stepan, “Toward a New Comparative Politics,” 71. 12. Gel’man, Ryzhenkov, and Bri et al., Making and Breaking Democratic Transitions, 389. 13. A similar opinion is expressed by David Lane in David Lane, ed., The Political Economy of Russian Oil (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999). In the 1990s the oil sector occupied a leading position among other sectors of the national economy despite the decline in overall oil production. Naturally, the oil industry’s economic dominance affects inflation rates, price levels, and, subsequently, production costs in manufacturing and other sectors. In 2002 the energy sector was responsible for 33.5% of tax revenues, 54.4% of exports, and 25.5% of Russia’s GDP (the oil sector was responsible for 14.1% of GDP, whereas the gas industry made up 6.9%, electric energy industry 3.7% and coal industry 0.7%). See Inessa Gerasimchuk, “Neftyanye slivki—2002,” in Toplivno-Energeticheskii Kompleks, 2001– 2002: Federal’ny spravochnik, http://www.rusoil.ru/reviewtext/ review/id/713473.html; Aleksandra Vertliugina, “Osnovnye pokazateli deiatel’nosti predpriiatii neftianoi otrasli,” Gruppa kompanii AVK, 7– 25 May 2001.

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14. The Russian Federation is second (after Saudi Arabia) among countries with an abundance of oil resources and contains 12% to 13% of proved global oil reserves. This mineral resource base spreads throughout the federation and covers territories of thirty-eight out of Russia’s eighty-nine regions. See: Andrei Konoplyanik, “Is Oil Production Crisis Imminent in Russia?” Mineral Resources of Russia: Economics and Management—Mineral’nye resursy Rossii: ekonomika i upravlenie, no. 1 (bilingual Russian-English journal) (2001), www .geoinform.ru/?an=mrr1; State Committee of the Russian Federation on Statistics, Fuel and Energy Complex of Russia: Statistical Handbook (Russian-English bilingual edition) (Moscow: Goskomstat, 2002), 23– 24. 15. The Russian fuel-energy complex contains six main components: oil, gas, coal, nuclear energy, electric energy, and renewable energy. See Ministerstvo Energetiki Rossiiskoi Federatsii, Energeticheskaia Strategiia Rossii na period do 2020 goda, Moskva, 2003, 51– 93, www.mte.gov.ru/docs/32/103.html. 16. The Soviet federal structure contained several subsystems of territorial units with varying legal status and rights. The first layer of the federation contained fifteen Union republics, which were territorial-administrative homelands of major ethnic groups. These Union republics (such as the Russian Federal Republic, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Georgia) formally had the greatest degree of autonomy and self-rule and even had the formal right to secede. The Union republics contained over 20 autonomous ethnic republics and 120 territorial units such as krais and oblasts. Autonomous republics were established as administrative self-ruling units of “smaller” ethnic groups. These ethnic republics had a lesser degree of autonomy than their Union hosts, and such autonomy was usually limited to cultural development. In addition, there were eighteen autonomous oblasts and okrugs, which were also products of the Bolshevik policy of territorialization of ethnicity. These ethnic units were mostly cultural autonomies subordinate to a krai, oblast, or autonomous republic. 17. Stepan, “Toward a New Comparative Politics,” 42. 18. In the mid-1990s, Khanty-Mansi AO was responsible for 54 percent of Russia’s oil extraction: Goskomstat Rossii, Regiony Rossii: statisticheskii sbornik (Moscow: Goskomstat, 1998), 278. 19. This argument refers to Khanty-Mansi and Yamalo-Nenets AOs in Tymen oblast, the Netensky AO in Arkhangelsk oblast, the Komi-Permian AO in Perm oblast, and the Taimyr and Evenk AOs in Kransnoyarsk krai. 20. Unlike Yamalo-Nenets and Khanty-Mansi autonomous okrugs, some AOs such as Adygeia, Karachai-Cherskessia, and Gornyi-Altai managed to raise their status to that of an ethnic republic due to activism by local indigenous elites. 21. For an in-depth assessment of this issue, see Jeffrey Kahn, Federalism, Democratization and the Rule of Law in Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

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22. Aleksandr Arinin, Sergei Baburin, and Mikhail Guboglo et al., Federalizm vlasi i vlast’ federalizma (Moskva: IntelTekh, 1997), 34. 23. Factors such as two devastating wars, loss of human life, and virtually complete destruction of industrial infrastructure make Chechnya an outlier, and it will therefore not be considered in this study. 24. Stepan summarizes the key problems that these agreements presented to the Russian democratic transition: “Russia has forty-six aconstitutional, bilateral treaties that were negotiated and signed by the chief executive of Russia and the chief executive of one of the eighty-nine constituent members of the Russian Federation, without being signed, or even shown, to the Russian parliament. This is procedurally exceptional in a democratic federation. A further unconformity (indeed, gross incompatibility) with democracy is that many of the bilateral treaties were also substantively exceptional for a democratic federation because they contained passages or agreements that were in violation of the federal constitution.” Stepan, “Toward a New Comparative Politics,” 41. 25. Marat Kulsharipov, “Obshchestvenno-politicheskaia i sotsial’noekonomicheskaia situatsiia v Bashkortostane,” in Etnopoliticheskaia Mozaika Bashkortostana, vol. 1, ed. Mikhail Guboglo (Moskva: Rossiiskaia Akademiia Nauk, 1992), 40– 49; Damir Iskhakov, “Neformal’nye ob’edineniia v sovremennom tatarskom obshchestve,” in Sovremennye natsional’nye protsessy v republike Tatarstan, ed. D. I. Iskhakov (Kazan: Rossiiskaya Akademiya Nauk–Kazanskii Nauchnyi Tsentr, 1992), 5– 52. 26. In his new institutionalist approach to this issue, Rogers Brubaker asserts that “the Soviet and post-Soviet ‘national struggles’ were and are not the struggle of nations, but the struggles of institutionally constituted national elites — that is elites institutionally defined as national — and the aspiring counter-elites.” Rogers Brubaker, “Nationhood and the National Question in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Eurasia,” Theory and Society 23, no. 1 (1994), 48; See Valiullin (Yenikeyeff), “Will the Russian Federation Disintegrate?” 27. Rafael Khakimov, a political advisor to the president of Tatarstan and a former leader of the nationalist organization Tatar Public Center, admits the role of elites in artificially generating nationalist sentiment in their relations with the Kremlin: “We had learnt the technology of how to call up national forces, how to organise and to direct them.” See Statement by Rafael Khakimov at the annual Seminar of the Network of Ethnological Monitoring and Early Warning, 16 October 1995, Limmassol, Cyprus. Quoted in Tishkov, Ethnicity, Nationalism and Conflict in and after the Soviet Union, 45. 28. See, e.g., Sergei Shakrai, “Uroki ‘tatarskoi modeli’ otnoshenii s Tsentrom,” Nezavisimaia gazeta, 27 February 2001, www.ng.ru/specfile/2001-02-27/ 9_kazan.html. 29. Soglashenie mezhdu Pravitel’stvom Rossiiskoi Federatsii i Pravitel’stvom Respubliki Tatarstan o realizatsii i transportirovke nefti i produktov

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neftekhimpererabotki” (Moskva, 05 iiunia 1993 goda); “Soglashenie mezhdu Pravitel’stvom Rossiiskoi Federatsii i Pravitel’stvom Respubliki Bashkortostan o sotrudnichestve v otrasliakh toplivno-energeticheskogo kompleksa” (Moskva, 25 maia 1994 goda), available at http://npa-gov.garweb.ru:8080/default.asp. 30. See Transneft’s 2003 fourth quarterly report at www.transneft.ru/ Finance/Reports/report2003_6.asp. 31. Ibid. 32. See “Soglashenie mezhdu Pravitel’stvom Rossiiskoi Federatsii i Pravitel’stvom Respubliki Bashkortostan o biudzhetnykh vzaimootnosheniiakh v 1994–1995 godakh” (Moskva, 03 avgusta 1994 goda), “Soglashenie mezhdu Pravitel’stvami Rossiiskoi Federatsii i Respubliki Tatarstan o biudzhetnykh vzaimootnosheniiakh mezhdu Rossiiskoi Federatsiei i Respublikoi Tatarstan” (Moskva, 15 fevralia 1994 goda), www.businesspravo.ru/Docum/DocumList_ DocumFolderID_287_CPage_1.htm. 33. See Russian Audit (Accounts) Chamber Report on Legality and Economic Effectiveness of Tax Exemptions, Tax Privileges, and Tax Credits in the Fuel-Energy Complex of the Republic of Bashkortostan, “O rezul’tatakh proverki pravomernosti, ekonomicheskoi obosnovannosti i effektivnosti predostavleniia nalogovykh l’got, otsrochek, rassrochek, nalogovykh kreditov v nalogovykh inspektsiiakh, na predpriiatiiakh i organizatsiiakh toplivno-energeticheskogo kompleksa Respubliki Bashkortostan za 1997 god i pervoe polugodie 1998 goda,” Biulleten’ Schetnoi palaty Rossiiskoi Federatsii, no. 2 (1999): 63– 67. 34. On the weakness and disunity of Udmurtian elites, see Kimitaka Matsuzato, “Vvedenie: Nekotorye kriterii dlia sravneniia politicheskikh rezhimov Tatarstana, Udmurtii i Mordovii,” in Regiony Rossii. Khronika i rukovoditeli, vol. 7, ed. Kimitaka Matsuzato (Sapporo: Slavic Research Center, Hokkaido University, 2000), 12; and on Komi elites, see V. Il’in, N. Kolesnik, Sotsial’nopoliticheskie protsessy v respublike Komi, December 1992, Mezhdunaronyi institut gumanitarno-politicheskikh issledovanii, www.igpi.ru/monitoring/ 1047645476/1992/1292/11.html. 35. Ibid.; and Igor Egorov, “Udmurtskaia respublika,” in Matsuzato, Regiony Rossii, vol. 7, 273– 312. 36. In the mid-1990s the relevant federal agencies included the Environment Ministry, the Geology Ministry, and the Ministry for Fuel and Energy, see “Ukaz Prezidenta Rossiiskoi Federatsii No. 327, 01 April 1995,” and “Postanovlenie Soveta Ministrov – Pravitel’stva Rossiiskoi Federatsii, No. 775, 31 iulia 1995 g.,” in Sobranie aktov Prezidenta i Pravitel’stva Rossiiskoi Federatsii. In 2000 the authority over oil licensing of resources of federal significance was transferred to the joint jurisdiction of the Federal Ministry of Natural Resources (and its regional branches) and regional authorities. See Irina Reznik, “Poslednii Ministr,” Kommersant Neft’, special supplement to Kommersant Daily, no. 121 (6 July 2000): 13, available at www.kommersant.ru/archive/ archive-material.html?docId=255371; Olga Romanova and Elizaveta Osetin-

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skaia, “Zadacha-ukrepit’ rol’ gosudarstava,” Vedomosti, 22 August 2001, available at www.vedomosti.ru/stories/2001/08/22-37-01.html. 37. The Russian two-key system or joint jurisdiction was unique since no other federal constitutions contain such provisions. The federal constitutions of other countries make a clear distinction between federal and regional jurisdictions and ownership rights over natural resources. For example, the constitution of Brazil declared sole jurisdiction of the federation over national natural resources. In Canada provinces have supreme control over natural resources. In the United States natural resources are clearly divided into three categories: those under federal government’s control, those under states’ control, and those in private ownership. 38. For further detail on the described oil licensing procedure, see “Regulations on Natural Resources’ Licensing,” adopted by the Russian Supreme Soviet’s Decision on 15 July 1992 (four months prior to Yeltsin’s decree on the oil sector’s privatization): Polozhenie o poriadke litsenzirovaniia pol’zovaniia nedrami”, utverzhdeno Postanovleniem Verkhoivnogo Soveta Rossiiskoi Federatsii No. 3314-1 ot 15 iiulia 1992 g. 39. A. Yu. Perepelkin and N. K. Nikitina, “O sovershenstvovanii sistemy litsenzirovaniia i kontrolia v nedropol’zovanii,” Mineral’nye resursy Rossii. Ekonomika i upravlenie, no. 4 (2002): 41. 40. “Bud’ kak vse”; A. N. Kurskii, “Zakonodatel’stvo o nedrakh: kontsepsii reformirovaniia,” Mineral’nye resursy Rossii, no. 2 (2002): 55. 41. “Dva kliucha,” Neft’ i kapital, no. 10 (2004), www.oilcapital.ru/ main.asp?IDR=4028; A.Y. Perepelkin and N.V. Lvov (Ministry of Natural Resources of Russia), “Main Problems of Reforming the System of Licensing of the Right to Use Resources,” Mineral’nye resursy Rossii. Ekonomika i upravlenie— Mineral Resources of Russia. Economics and Management (Russian-English bilingual edition), no. 6 (2001): 31; “Iz khroniki piati desiatiletii “Tatnefti,” Neft’ i kapital, no. 4 (2000), www.oilcapital.ru/main.asp?IDR=442; “Uzhe bez l’got, no s zapasom prochnosti,” Neft’ i kapital (special edition on Tatarstan), no. 6 (June 2001): 129, www.oilcapital.ru/main.asp?IDR=1095. 42. Filippov V. U nenetskogo guberantora otbiraut “vtoroi kluch,” Izvestiia, July 17, 2002. 43. See “Rabota s regionami,” Gazprom.Ru, www.gazprom.ru/articles/ article2674.shtml. 44. For a thorough assessment of center-periphery bilateral treaties, see Kahn, Federalism, Democratization and the Rule of Law in Russia. 45. Ibid. 46. Svetlana Azarova, “Starikam vezde u nas doroga,” Neft’ i kapital, June 1997. 47. For further discussion of these issues, see Ol’ga Proskurnina and Ol’ga Deriagina, “Lukoil ulichili,” Vedomosti 1210, no. 170 (20 September 2004), www.vedomosti.ru/newspaper/article.shtml?2004/09/20/81007.

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48. Svetlana Azarova, “Prakticheski podelili,” Neft’ i kapital, no. 6 (2000). 49. Stepan, “Toward a New Comparative Politics,” 71. 50. Aleksandr Tutushkin, “Maluiu neft pustiat v truby krupnykh neftianykh kompanii,” Vedomosti 325, no. 2 (11 January 2001), www.vedomosti .ru/newspaper/article.shtml?2001/01/11/24196. 51. Ibid.; and “Ot redaktsii: Plod lobbizma,” Vedomosti 991, no. 191 (20 October 2003), www.vedomosti.ru/newspaper/article.shtml?2003/10/20/67861. 52. Dmitry Simakov, “V trubu – cherez RSPP,” Vedomosti 917, no. 117 (8 July 2003), www.vedomosti.ru/newspaper/article.shtml?2003/07/08/63636. 53. “O prelestiakh vertikal’noi integratsii,”Neft’ i kapital, no. 11 (2002): 15; “Rossiiskii rynok nefteproduktov,” Neft’ i kapital, no. 10 (2004), www.oilcapital .ru/main.asp?IDR=4003. 54. Ibid. 55. Rostoslav Turovskii, “Gubernatory i oligarkhi: Istoriia otnoshenii,” in Politika v regionakh: Gubernatory i gruppy vliianiia (Moskva: Tsentr Politicheskikh tekhnologii, 2002), 76–107. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid. 59. “Sibirskii sbyt ne izbezhit obshchei sud’by,” Neft’ i kapital, no. 5 (2003), www.oilcapital.ru/main.asp?IDR=3015. 60. See K. Viktorov, “Oligarkhi zavoevyvaiut okrainy,” SPB Vedomosti (30 January 2001), 4; A. Nikolsky et al., “Bog troitsu liubit. Eshche odin gubernator-biznesmen,” Vedomosti (10 April 2001); Anna Frik, “Who Is Mr. Khloponin?” Novaia Gazeta, no. 65 (4 September 2003), http://2003.novayagazeta .ru/nomer/2003/65n/n65n-s25.shtml. 61. See “Prishli ot Abramovicha,” Kommersant 2085, no. 200 (25 October 2000): 1. 62. Igor Sas’kov, “Delo BONY: evenkiiskii sled,” FreeLance Bureau (FLB) (4 May 2000), www.flb.ru/material.phtml?id=4651. 63. In a similar manner, during the 2003 elections of Bashkortostan’s president, Russian President Vladimir Putin ignored the incumbent’s direct appeals to him to stop the corporate attack by Mezhprombank on local political establishment until the Bashkir president was on the point of losing his post. 64. Sergei Sergievskii, “‘Byvshie’ ne khodiat na birzhu truda,” Nezavisimaia gazeta 3144, no. 31 (16 February 2004), www.ng.ru/regions/2004-02-16/ 9_gubernators.html. 65. “Deputaty ot ‘neftianki,’” Neft’ i kapital, no. 10 (2004), www.oilcapital .ru/main.asp?IDR=3916; “Zhizn’ prodolzhaetsia,” Neft’ i kapital, no. 6 (1996): 12. 66. Ibid. 67. See Zakon o Nefti i Gaze Republiki Tatarstan ot 12 iiunia 1997 goda (Kazan, 1997).

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68. “Organicheskoe soedinenie: Neft’ i Vlast’ v preddverii izbiratel’noi kompanii,” Neft’ i kapital, no. 6 (2003), www.oilcapital.ru/main.asp?IDR=3070. 69. See Sergei Pravosudov, “Lobbisty v Gosdume,” Russkii focus (15 September 2003), 14–19; Vitalii Ivanov, “Khodorkovsky soznalsia. Aktsionery ‘Yukosa’ pomogut SPS, ‘Yabloku’ i KPRF,” Vedomosti (8 April 2003), A1. 70. Ibid. 71. “Kogda v neftianikakh soglasiia net,” Neft’ i kapital, no. 10 (2001), www.oilcapital.ru/main.asp?IDR=484. 72. Ibid. 73. Grogor’ev, “‘Chernoe’ zoloto proby ne imeet.” 74. “‘Bank kachestva’ dlia ustranenia konkurentov,” Respublika Bashkortostan (16 March 2002), 2. 75. “Realizatsiia proekta ‘Banka kachestva’ mozhet privesti k ekonomicheskoi i sotsial’noi netsabilnosti v Bashkortostane i Tatarstane,” Rosbalt (14 March 2002). 76. Interview with Zufar Enikeev, Ufa, February 2002. 77. Ibid. 78. Alik Shakirov, “Defitsit biudzheta Bashkirii v 2005 godu sostavit 2,5 milliarda rublei,” RIA-Novosti (27 September 2004), www.volga.rian.ru/news .html?nws_id=297221. 79. “Kliuchevoi vorpos,” Neft’ i kapital, no. 9 (2004), www.oilcapital.ru/ main.asp?IDR=3871. 80. “Putin Announces Broad Reorganization of Political System In Russia,” RFE/RL Newsline 8, no. 174 (13 September 2003), www.rferl.org/newsline/ 2004/09/1-RUS/rus-130904.asp; Peter Baker, “Putin Moves to Centralize Authority,” Washington Post Foreign Service (14 September 2004), A1, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17838-2004Sep13.html. 81. According to the amendments in the federal laws “On Basic Principles of the Organization of Legislative and Executive Branches of State Authority in the Subjects of the Russian Federation” and “On Basic Guarantees of Russian Citizens’ Electoral Rights and Their Right to Participate in the Referendum,” the Russian president can dissolve provincial legislative bodies which have twice rejected his nominees for the top regional executive positions. At the same time, a rejected nominee can be appointed acting governor until a newly elected legislature approves him. 82. Stepan, “Toward a New Comparative Politics,” 67.

Part V Religion, Tolerance, and Democracy

12 Religion, Politics, and the State in a Stepanesque Perspective Inseparable but Craftable Brian H. Smith

Of the many contributions to the study of comparative politics, one of the most insightful and agenda-setting for future research is Al Stepan’s perspective on religion, politics, and the state in the consolidation of democracies. In Arguing Comparative Politics, he challenges some commonly held positions by previous scholars that religion and politics and religion and the state must be kept separate for democratic debate and policy making to occur. He also refuses to accept the proposition that some religions by nature are antithetical to democracy. Rather, he believes that “multivocality” exists in all major religious traditions, giving them what he terms “usable” elements that that can be marshaled to support democratic values and processes.1 He finds that full-blown separation of religion and state is not found in some of the most robust democratic societies (contemporary Western Europe) and concludes that disestablishment of religion is not necessary for crafting the core elements of democracy. His concept of the “twin tolerations,” whereby governments remain autonomous of religious dictates in policy making and religious freedom is guaranteed to all, including the freedom for religious organizations to pursue their values and interests in politics within the rule of law, allows for a variety 339

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of linkages among religion, politics, and the state while still preserving the core of democratic processes.2 Finally, in the work that both he and Juan J. Linz have done on problems involved in transitions and consolidation of democracies, they remind us that a strong civil society is essential to keep governments accountable. Religious institutions can play a vital role as articulators of values necessary for democratic debate and sometimes can serve as important mobilizing agents of resistance to authoritarianism in the first stages of democratic transition. In fact, they argue that “massive secularization may weaken an active society.”3 In this chapter I build on Stepan’s work and further develop thinking about religion, politics, and the state in a democratic polity in two ways: (1) Religion and politics not only can be compatible, as Stepan argues, but I argue that they are inherently inseparable. The two systems inevitably interact due to overlapping mutual concerns, and crafting their relationship is far more fruitful than trying to keep them separate, even in democratic polities. I also demonstrate that there is a rational core element in major religious ethical systems that is open to discourse and debate by all citizens (believers and nonbelievers), and therefore religious ethics need not be subversive to democracy but a healthy contribution to it. (2) Governments deal with religious institutions in negotiated relationships that change over time, as Stepan has demonstrated on the basis of European church-state relationships. I would argue that all four of the classic religion-state models—theocracy (religious control of the state), caesaropapism (state control of religion),4 establishment (official recognition and support for one religion by the state), and disestablishment (complete separation of religion and the state)— continue to exist in various parts of the modern world and also change over time. Moreover, regimes based on all these models need not, nor rarely can, opt for the complete disestablishment model. Partial forms of theocracy, caesaropapism, and establishment all can be crafted in ways that are compatible with the twin tolerations that Stepan defines as the minimum for religionstate relations in democratic polities.

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Classic Theories of Religion and Politics

The two theories that shaped thinking about the relationship between religion and politics during the late nineteenth century and for most of the twentieth century have been Marxism and modernization. Both of these traditions, for different reasons, argued that religion should be removed from politics for politics to achieve its purpose and that, in fact, religion would either disappear once the state achieved its ideal form (Marx) or be reduced to a force in the private lives of citizens once important public issues were decided on the basis of reason and science (modernization). Both theories were based on two assumptions: (1) religion was harmful for modern political discourse and processes, and (2) religion was not an independent variable but a reflection of the dynamics of other forces in society (class relationships, ownership of the means of production, economic development, education), which, once reconfigured, would make the need for religion in public life unnecessary. Proponents of both theories did not expect religious traditions to act as significant public moral forces in either expanding capitalist or socialist societies.5 The last half of the twentieth century proved both of these theories inadequate. In every geographic region of the world, regardless of level of social and economic development, religion has continued to play a public role in political debate and has exhibited resilience in adapting to new political contexts.6 Every major religious tradition has also re flected what Stepan terms “multivocality” in that religious norms are being marshaled in new formulations to provide critical moral support for democratic processes, acting not as dependent variables but as relatively independent sources of influence. Stepan’s work has especially forced us to be open to different relationships between religion and state that are not only more accurate in describing modern reality but also are compatible with basic requirements for democracy.

Interrelated Concerns of Religion and Politics

A major reason why it is impossible to structure political systems without allowing for considerable interplay of religion and politics is that

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politics is inherently a moral enterprise. No matter how one defines politics, it includes either explicit or implicit ethical assumptions about right and wrong behavior in relation to the pursuit and organization of power in society. Both traditions in the West about the meaning of politics—the Aristotelian and the Machiavellian—acknowledge a moral dimension of politics, if not in the means used at least in the goals to be achieved. For Aristotle, who had an optimistic view of human nature, politics was the promotion of the “good life” among citizens. Citizens (adult males) shared in the responsibility of discussing publicly what the “good life” meant in society and of using persuasive rational arguments to reach a consensus with others about the common good.7 Politics in this tradition is a noble vocation of service by creating conditions of social harmony and thus allowing the full flourishing of human life, which could not be achieved by individuals alone. In the Aristotelian tradition, politics is thus an inherently ethical enterprise. For Machiavelli, who was more pessimistic about human motivations than Aristotle, politics in a republic was the pursuit of selfinterest by individuals and groups in competition with one another. He did not believe citizens could reach a consensus by reasonable discourse on a common definition of the “good life” in society. The ambition of each was so deeply entrenched that citizens individually or in groups could only see their own good or interest. Elected officials in a republic, therefore, should not assume that there was a common good they could realize through dialogue with citizens but rather they should allow the maximum pursuit of ambitions among citizens (politics) to achieve their self-interests. Ambition must be given free rein if social stability is to be achieved. Otherwise, citizens will become frustrated if ambition is stifled, and they will resort to violence against government or other citizens.8 Government should, however, regulate this egotistical competition in society among individuals and groups to protect property and prevent serious physical harm to citizens. Even for Machiavelli there is a minimal moral goal of order and stability that the shrewd prince (in a monarchy) or elected representatives (in a republic) must safeguard if they are to remain in power and also avoid chronic social chaos due to

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the unbridled pursuit of ambition by citizens. Machiavelli advises even the prince, who sometimes must resort to ruthless methods, to do good whenever possible and always preserve the appearance of being moral since moral credibility is an important ingredient in successfully maintaining order.9 Rulers must rely on more than brute force and fear to maintain respect for law in society. In fact, Machiavelli complained in The Discourses that the corruption that had infected the Catholic clergy of his day had caused a loss in their moral credibility among the people and thus the church could no longer play the role of teachers of obedience to law, an important ingredient in maintaining political stability.10 Modern political scientists in the West often draw upon both of these two traditions in defining contemporary politics, allowing for the possibility of achieving some consensus on what are the ingredients of a “good life” for society and also maximizing the public pursuit of various private “goods” defined by individuals or groups on their own. Drawing on the Aristotelian tradition, David Easton defines politics as “those interactions through which values are authoritatively allocated for a society.” Vernon Van Dyke tilts more toward Machiavelli in describing politics as the struggle among actors pursuing conflicting desires on public issues. Herbert Winter and Thomas Bellows also leaning toward Machiavelli depict politics as “a struggle between actors pursuing conflicting desires on issues that may result in an authoritative allocation of values which are binding.”11 Stepan, drawing on both traditions, defines democratic politics as “a system of conflict regulation that allows open competition over values and goals the citizens want to advance.”12 Politics, therefore, regardless of which of these two major traditions on which one relies for definition, involves value decisions. These are choices that the religion scholars Michael and Julia Corbett describe as pertaining to what one believes is “good, bad, right or wrong, desirable or undesirable” for oneself, one’s group, or society at large. People have many different things they consider right and desirable in society (e.g., justice, equality, love, peace, security, health, wealth, power, success, freedom, tolerance) and many things they consider wrong or undesirable (e.g., murder, exploitation, abuse, violence, poverty, discrimination, oppression, bigotry). Moreover, persons may define or prioritize these values or nonvalues differently. Some people may have a shorter list of

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desirables (and undesirables) than others, but to achieve positive social values, or avoid negative ones, some interaction with other people in society is necessary, either in cooperation, in competition, or in conflict. How one, or one’s group, chooses to define what is desirable and undesirable for himself or herself and how to relate to others in pursuit of these goals are value decisions about good and bad ideals and right and wrong social behavior.13 On both counts — choosing and acting publicly to define what is good/bad and desirable/undesirable for social life, and interacting with others to achieve (or avoid) these goals — morality comes into play. These choices and actions are by their very nature moral, since morality deals with standards of what people believe to be right and wrong conduct both for themselves and with others as essential for achieving human meaning. Politics, then, by definition cannot function without underlying moral assumptions guiding its operation. Here it steps onto the terrain of religion because all religious traditions include the definition and promulgation of morality — what is of value for human life and how properly to attain it—as part of their mission. The sociologist William James, writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, claimed that religion “consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.”14 A mid-twentieth-century Lutheran theologian, Paul Tillich, defined it as that which is of “ultimate concern” in one’s life—that which is more important than anything else.15 The sociologists Charles Glock and Rodney Stark have described religion as “what societies hold to be sacred” and which “comprises an institutionalized system of symbols, beliefs, values, and practices focused on questions of ultimate meaning.”16 Julia Corbett combines several elements in these other definitions. She describes religion as “an integrated system of beliefs, lifestyle, ritual activities, and institutions by which people give meaning to (or find meaning in) their lives by orienting themselves to what they take to be holy, sacred, or of ultimate value.”17 Despite some differences of wording or emphases in these various definitions, it is clear that one essential part of being religious is to act

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in a proper value-affirming way in this world—to live the “good life”— in accordance with a transcendent force that wills, or makes, it to be so. This moral concern makes religion a potentially political force. All religions set down standards of right and wrong behavior to be followed not only in one’s personal life but also in social life. They all claim that how one defines and prioritizes values in this life and how one treats oneself and others in the pursuit of those values affects one’s spirit, or consciousness, and thus one’s relationship with a supreme sacred spiritual power in the universe. Regardless of how much emphasis a religious tradition places on faith as opposed to good works, all religions affirm that the ways one behaves in relationships with other human beings, both in face-to-face encounters and in collective relationships in society, is an integral part of maintaining a proper relationship with the transcendent power and achieving unity with it in an afterlife. For Jews, Christians, and Muslims, the image of a personal God is in every human being, and therefore encounters with other people in society are by nature an experience in some way of God himself/ herself. Part of the mission for religious members of these “religions of the book” is to fashion the social order in a way that protects and enhances the sacredness of every individual and to speak truth to political power when governments fail to accomplish justice. This has political implications and is the reason why throughout Western history and in societies significantly influenced by these religions of the book, the intertwining of religion and politics has been unavoidable. For Hindus a piece of the ultimate spiritual force of the universe, Brahman, is in every human being, and, therefore, similar to the JudeoChristian-Muslim tradition, action toward others is one important way a Hindu experiences Brahman. The German sociologist Max Weber a century ago, however, described the central focus of Hinduism (and that of other Eastern religions) as having primarily a “world-rejecting asceticism.” Hindus have traditionally emphasized private rituals such as meditation and fasting as being far more important for developing a relationship with Brahman than action in the world to make it more orderly or just. Weber found this very different from the “inner-worldly asceticism” in Western religions that emphasize social action in the world to order it in a more rational way as part of one’s religious obligation.18

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The tacit political impact of Hinduism even as a “world-rejecting asceticism” has always been present, however, due to its long-standing justification of the caste system and allowance for political privileges for the upper caste because of their presumed superior spiritual character. For Buddhists, there is no god or transcendent force, but all sentient beings are intimately joined in one seamless reality with both material and spiritual dimensions. Like Hinduism, Buddhism has traditionally emphasized a “world-rejecting asceticism” by upholding the life of the monk and personal discipline and meditation as religious ideals rather than the transformation of political arrangements in society. However, the same latent political potency is present in Buddhism as in Hinduism with its emphasis on the sacredness of all life. How one treats other beings is in fact how one treats oneself and directly affects one’s spiritual awareness and growth—in this life, and in one’s journey toward ultimate enlightenment (spiritual unity with the universe). For many centuries in South and Southeast Asia, Buddhist teaching about respecting others entailed encouraging obedience to rulers who provided a stable social order. Thus, no religion, explicitly or implicitly, neglects the importance of making ethical choices in politics. Religion by nature is inherently political since politics deals with the effort to structure how humans relate to one another socially in the articulation and pursuit of their social values and interests, and religion teaches, implicitly or explicitly, how to do this as part of one’s relationship with a transcendent power. Moreover, all religious traditions are malleable in the interpretation and articulation of their social values, and this allows new “voices” from time to time in these traditions that create politically influential impacts different from the past. This is a major reason why religion has remained a continuing force in political life in contemporary global society, even with the seemingly ineluctable growth of modernization. Education, science, technology, and the multiplication of economic resources have certainly expedited the availability of material goods to make life more comfortable and orderly. Despite more efficient strategies for making the material world better serve the needs of humans, however, there still remain underlying questions of meaning and value at the core of one’s life.

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Questions unavoidably arise for humans as to the rightness and wrongness in pursuing the goods of this world among people with unequal access to the means of production and over how to share them fairly both within and across national borders so that all humans can have the basics of a dignified life. There are also questions about human responsibility for the environment in producing these goods in a way that respects nature and allows humans to survive on this planet. Politics, national and transnational, deals with all of these challenges today. It continually involves ethical judgments and assumptions, not merely technical expertise, in answering these questions, even when citizens, groups, or policy makers engaging in politics do not explicitly recognize the underlying values guiding their choices. Wisely, unlike theorists relying primarily on a Marxist or modernization perspective, Stepan recognizes an important role for religious traditions in shaping these debates since they have inherently moral dimensions. One can surely disagree with the way these various traditions define or prioritize public values or identify public evils, and one can criticize the strategies they use in pursuing their public agenda given the sometimes negative impact these have on the rights of others not of their own moral outlook. One can also legitimately ask when and how a diversity of moral judgments about contemporary public issues across religions occurs, and even inside the same religion. One may also ask how and why religious traditions have changed their official teachings about social issues over time, and under what conditions religious teachings and behavior have a significant impact on politics depending on how many faithful in a particular tradition actually comply with the ethical guidelines for politics articulated by their religious leaders. The fact, however, that many religious people of various traditions around the world continue to engage in politics is rooted in deep moral commitments that are inseparably tied up with what they believe to be the meaning of the “good life” in this world as influenced by their faith. Over four-fifths of the world population identifies with some religious tradition, and the vast majority claim that their moral values are shaped primarily by their religion. One cannot, then, reduce politics to techniques apart from value judgments that very often are influenced by religious affiliation. One also cannot reduce religion to the affairs of

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the spirit separated from the public realm where debates occur over social values and on how individuals and groups are to be treated by the structures of power. The two realms are bound together intimately with one another through an ethical umbilical cord.19

The Democratic Minimum for Religion in Public Advocacy

Scholars who have thought about the relationship between religion and politics would not deny their mutually overlapping concerns in the area of morality that I have laid out, but some would argue that in democratic polities, or in the transition and consolidation thereof, the two must remain separate in order for the debate about the articulation of values to occur in the fairest possible way that is accessible to all citizens. John Rawls believes that one must “take the truths of religion off the political agenda” in debate about public policies in a democratic society since arguments supported on the basis of religion are not “public”; that is, they are based on privately held beliefs not available to all and are not principles “expressed by society’s conception of political justice.” For Rawls, only normative principles based on reason available to all— “forms of reasoning found in common sense,” he terms them — are worthy to be considered in public debate about the allocation of values, since everyone, not just religious believers, can comprehend them and discuss them equally. Rawls sees a place for religious argument in debate in “nonpublic” forums (private associations in civil society) but not in public argument as to what justice and fairness entails in a pluralistic society.20 Kent Greenawalt makes a similar claim on the basis of what he considers fairness. When legislators (and by extension, citizens) in a democracy make moral arguments on the basis of religion some “are likely to feel imposed upon in the sense of being excluded.” This, he believes, breeds “inequality and disrespect” for those in society (or in government) who do not base their morals on faith and who have no access to the fundamental basis of such religious positions. He believes that a religious person who argues ethics places himself in “a kind of privileged position, as the holder of a basic truth that many others lack.” This

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assertion of privileged knowledge may appear to imply, he says, “inequality of status that is in serious tension with the fundamental idea of equality of citizens within liberal democracies.”21 Stepan does not deny the intellectual importance of establishing the theoretical underpinnings of an ideal liberal society. He is more interested, however, in crafting minimum conditions that both respect the freedom of religious believers and protect the integrity of fair and open debate in political society and policy making in government. It is here where his “first toleration” is helpful— namely, the respect that religious believers in a democracy must show to other forms of argument (including those stemming from different religion or no religion) without using illegality or violence to further their own values. Stepan states that religious communities “as individuals and groups . . . should . . . be able to publicly advance their values in civil society and to sponsor organization and movements in political society, as long as the advancement of these beliefs does not impinge negatively on the liberties of other citizens, or violate democracy and the law, by violence.”22 This “first toleration” is not only more realistic than the principles laid down by Rawls and Greenawalt since, as mentioned earlier, many in the modern world continue to draw their moral principles from religious traditions, but it also leaves the door open to constructive inputs into political debate that otherwise would not be allowed in Rawls’s and Greenawalt’s ideal liberal democracy. Stepan’s “first toleration” makes sense for theoretical reasons as well. By allowing a public place for religion in “open competition over values and goals that citizens want to advance” (a key component in Stepan’s definition of democracy), he not only grants religious believers full equality with other citizens in the debate but also recognizes that it is possible to craft the terms of dialogue and competition that religious believers can observe in advancing their arguments without undermining a minimum of fairness that Rawls and Greenawalt underscore. Stepan’s position of not insisting that religion be taken “off the political agenda” (Rawls) implicitly recognizes a valuable role for the moral argument religious believers can contribute to political debate in a pluralistic society.

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Fundamental Respect for All Is Present in Religious Ethics

Religiously grounded ethics need not create “a kind of privileged position” that is in serious tension with the fundamental idea of equality of citizens within liberal democracies (Greenawalt). Nor are such ethics necessarily based only on “nonpublic” reasons inaccessible to rational debate and criticism by nonbelievers and thus not allowable in debates over what justice and fairness entails in a pluralistic society (Rawls). Significant elements in the ethics articulated by major religious traditions of the world are understandable by nonbelievers and open to rational discussion in a pluralistic society. As stated earlier in the chapter, all religious traditions deal with issues of morality since they believe there is a sacred element present in all human beings, regardless of how that is defined. Undoubtedly religious leaders and groups in all traditions have at times downplayed or distorted the sacred element in all human beings that their respective scriptures teach, leading to religious justification for bigotry, discrimination, and even arbitrary killing of human beings who disagree with them. There is also ample evidence that conflicts that involve religious issues continue to exist in the modern world. However, it is also true that all religious traditions have within them core values that can be marshaled in support of universal human dignity and rights. It is precisely these elements in all religious traditions that I will focus on in this section, showing their compatibility — when articulated with authority by religious leaders and scholars—with democratic society. Moral principles that affirm human dignity although grounded in religious beliefs are not incompatible with ethical underpinnings of modern democratic polities. The constitutional lawyer Michael Perry underscores this compatibility and mutually overlapping concern of religious and secular ethics: Because the proposition that every human being is sacred is shared not only among many different religious traditions but also between many religious believers and many who have no religious beliefs, laws and public policies that are rooted in the view that every human being is sacred— indeed, that are political representations, legal embodiments, of the view that every human being is sacred—do

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not in and of themselves privilege either one religion (as such) over another or even religion over nonreligion.23 Perry further observes that all the major international declarations and covenants on human rights since World War II begin with premises about belief in the fundamental dignity of the human being that requires respect and protection by governments. Though not grounded in religious belief, but rather based on a consensus of reason, these are very similar to the principles embedded in all major religions.24 Although religious believers hold that fundamental respect for all is grounded in a transcendent power, the expression of the specifics of what this respect entails can be, and often is, made in language that is accessible to nonbelievers and which can serve as common ground (“public reasons,” according to Rawls) for discussion and debate over the allocation of values in a democratic polity. The basic ethical principles of religions can thus be shown to be “reasonable” since they are ingredients in what public justice requires in a democratic polity.25 A fundamental belief of Judaism is that the conscience of each individual is an expression of the voice of God and that all humans regardless of faith can discover in this inner voice principles that are universal and basic to enhancing individual dignity and constructing a just society. In addition to the Ten Commandments rabbis refer to the “Noahide Laws,” which preceded the Laws of Moses and which remain embedded in the hearts of all humans, including the avoidance of murder, incest, theft, and the obligation to construct a social order that protects the dignity of all people.26 Such beliefs do not “privilege” Jews in the area of ethics, and the concept of “chosen people” is about the Jews’ religious relationship and obligation to God, not about their ethical superiority to other people. Tolerance for the religious freedom of others and a willingness to work with all persons of goodwill to construct a more humane society is at the heart of the Jewish ethic, which overlaps with, and is understandable to, those who construct an ethic based primarily on reason. Added to the Jewish belief in core ethical principles that are both reasonable and universal is the obligation of compassion to those who suffer. One of the basic laws of Judaism in the Torah is the requirement for Jews to work to reduce human suffering of all people, not just their

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own kind. The rabbis in the Talmud have taught: “We are obligated to feed non-Jews residing among us even as we feed Jews; we are obligated to visit their sick even as we visit the Jewish sick; we are obligated to attend to the burial of their dead even as we attend to the burial of the Jewish dead.”27 The two key virtues at the basis of Jewish ethics — justice and compassion—although grounded in a religious belief that God’s image is in everyone, are compatible with a nonreligious conception of moral obligation based on reason alone, and they do not necessarily need to be taken “off the political agenda” in public debate in a pluralistic society about the allocation of values, a key ingredient in democratic politics. Christianity builds on these basic ethical beliefs of Judaism that all persons can discover basic principles of morality embedded in their reason and conscience. Early Christians, in fact, felt comfortable borrowing much of the ethical reasoning of Greek and Roman philosophy to provide a framework for living out in a pluralistic culture the values of justice and compassion also taught by Rabbi Jesus. The natural law tradition articulated by Aristotle and Cicero based on the assumption that human reason could discover universal ethical principles regardless of religious belief became the framework for Christian ethics for centuries. It continues to be used in the Roman Catholic tradition as guiding its thinking on issues of the morality of warfare, economic justice, religious freedom, and human rights.28 Since the late nineteenth century a whole series of papal social encyclicals have dealt with challenges to modern society in the area of economics, human rights, modern forms of warfare, and democracy. In all these documents religious values are clearly the inspiration, but the articulation of natural law principles and their application to a modern context are the mediums through which gospel values are expressed. Official Catholic social morality endorses moral dimensions of a just economy as including a living wage for workers, collective bargaining among employees and employers, subsidiarity of decision making in both economic and political systems (to prevent accumulation of power in the hands of a few), and a whole range of civil, political, and economic rights compatible with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations.29

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In the articulation of Catholic social morality there never has been a papal statement that has been made ex cathedra—that is, invoking infallibility based on divine revelation. All the social encyclicals are based primarily in a natural law framework that makes its appeals to the human reason and goodwill of all people (not just Catholics) and which remains open to discussion, debate, and ongoing development. The hierarchy applies natural law principles to economic, social, and political issues, and these applications are to be taken seriously by all Catholics, but there is room for interpretation according to social context, with the final application left up to the prudent consciences of laity. This framework for social morality is clearly compatible with democratic values since it establishes a common ground with nonbelievers for discussion, negotiation, and bargaining in the effort to construct just economies and systems of government in pluralistic societies.30 The implementation of these encyclicals in the mission of the church (especially after the Second Vatican Council, 1962– 65) placed its institutional weight behind opposition to authoritarian regimes, protection of human rights, and support for processes of redemocratization in several countries of Latin America, Africa, and Eastern Europe. In all these cases Episcopal statements on behalf of human rights and a return to democracy were articulated on the basis of natural law principles (not Catholic dogma) and received significant support of both religious and nonreligious citizens opposing authoritarian rule. In these contexts church-sponsored programs (including the cooperation of other Christians and non-Christians) blunted some of the worst violations of human rights (Brazil, Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala) and helped orchestrate nonviolent opposition to authoritarian governments (Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia). Catholic clergy and lay leaders also served as mediators between government and opposition in transitions back to democracy (Kenya, Malawi, Benin, Congo, Gabon, Zaire, Togo, Madagascar, and Mozambique).31 In the United States, Catholic moral teachings on the issue of abortion have caused concern among some that the church is violating separation of church and state by trying to force its religious views— “nonpublic” reasoning—on the body politic. However, in this controversy the church’s strong pro-life position is articulated on the basis of

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natural law principles about the need to respect all human life equally. The primary moral argument that the U.S. Catholic bishops have put forth is that all human life deserves equal treatment under the law and that since the fetus is biologically human life, it deserves respect.32 Others might disagree with drawing the boundaries of the human community so widely as to include the unborn, but the debate is based on reason and prudential judgment, not on theology that “privileges” believers over nonbelievers or on “nonpublic” arguments not subject to open debate in a pluralistic society.33 Moreover, bitter as has been the argument over this issue in American politics, there is no substantial evidence that the overwhelming majority of religious opponents of abortion (even those who do so for primarily religious reasons) have not met the basic core of the “first toleration”: respect for the opinion of others and observance of law. The American political scientist Kenneth Wald has underscored this point by recognizing the compromises many pro-life advocates have made in advancing their goals and by highlighting their contribution to democratic debate: It is noteworthy that despite its bitterly divisive nature, the abortion issue has engendered willingness to compromise. The advocates of restriction by constitutional amendment have seemingly withdrawn from a position of favoring only an absolute prohibition on abortion to one that would permit abortion under certain conditions. Supporters of liberalized policies might not appreciate the magnitude of these compromises nor their divisive impact on prolife activists, but they do in fact constitute a significant revision of earlier positions, indicating the willingness of antiabortion forces to adapt to political realities. . . . [I]ssues like abortion enhance democracy by forcing ordinary men and women to take a stand on issues of public significance and by encouraging them to act on their beliefs in the public realm. The rise of the abortion issue challenges not democracy per se, but rather a particular conception of democracy that keeps important issues off the agenda or limits their focus, or leaves decision making to political elites. . . . When religious convictions propel groups

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to enter the political process, they add a new voice to the public debate on issues like abortion. . . . That may not be orderly— but perhaps orderliness is not an appropriate standard for democratic politics.34 Wald also believes that to be convincing in a pluralistic society “religious claims need to be ‘translated’ into a secular language accessible to people outside any single faith denomination” (my argument that religious morality can and does find overlapping roots in natural reason). He recognizes, however, that insisting that religious groups always do this “amounts to forcing religious people to deny who they are, to ‘bracket’ their religious convictions from their public language and argument.”35 He agrees with Stepan’s first toleration (respect and lawfulness) as a fairer demand to make of religious people in public moral advocacy than insisting, as do Rawls and Greenawalt, that the moral arguments by religious people be taken “off the political agenda.” Not only does such strict prohibition impinge on the freedom of religious people to express their views, but, as Ward observes, it narrows the agenda for debate over the public allocation of values — even when nonreligious persons cannot access all of the arguments made by religious proponents. The Islamic tradition, which is grounded in both Judaism and Christianity, believes in the same doctrine of the image of God in all people, and articulates in the Qur’an similar virtues of respect for all individuals, the obligation to work for a just society in which the dignity of all people is respected and enhanced (including freedom of worship), and the need to take care of the poor. The same importance of the role of reason found in Jewish and Christian ethics is present in the articulation of Muslim ethics as well. The concept of ijtihad (independent reasoning) has a place in the interpretation of Muslim law, and the need for consultation (shura) by leaders and citizens (including non-Muslims) is essential in elaborating laws and policies for just government.36 While rigidity has characterized some historical and contemporary manifestations of Islamic law, the values of justice and compassion for all and flexibility and consensus building in interpreting and applying Islamic law over time in new contexts are fundamental to Islamic

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morality. These traditional characteristics present from the start in Islam have opened up the possibility and legitimacy of the kind of “multivocality” Stepan discerns in many religions and in establishing grounds for rational debate and discussion of Muslim ethics in pluralistic societies. There is a growing body of Islamic scholars today (trained both in Islamic tradition and in Western schools) who are laying the foundations for an “Islamic Reformation.” They distinguish between Islamic faith and doctrine and the historical expressions and forms in which these have been encased over time and which are always subject to change and adaptation. They have shown in their research and publications over the past two decades that Islamic extremists who resort to violence to obtain their ends, or who link Islam with authoritarianism, do not do justice to core Islamic values of respect for all people, consultation of leaders with the Islamic community, and flexible interpretation of Islamic law. The argument of such scholars (Abdullah Ahmed An-Naim and Mohamed Mahmoud of Sudan, Abdolkarim Soroush of Iran, Rachid al-Ghannouchi and Mohamed Talbi of Tunisia, and Mohamed Arkoun of Algeria) is that considerable internal pluralism exists within the Islamic tradition, giving it the capacities to accept modern democratic values of equality, representative government, and respect for the basic human rights of all peoples.37 As Stepan has shown in Arguing Comparative Politics, this multivocality in Islam regarding respect for democratic processes and an inclusiveness for the rights on non-Muslims has led to an acceptance in several contemporary culturally Muslim societies of secular and Islamic political parties competing in open free elections. Elections in Indonesia, Turkey, and Pakistan over the past decade have all produced outcomes in which Muslim citizens have rejected rigid positions espoused by fundamentalist Islamic parties in favor of more moderate policies espoused by other parties arguing the compatibility of Islam with respect for human rights and religious freedom for all in a Muslim society.38 One also finds this kind of openness to the role of reason and to dialogue and compromise in ethical systems of the East. In both Hinduism and Buddhism, the appeal to reason is a central element in developing religious ethics that not only makes these systems susceptible

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to change over time but also able to rearticulate traditional principles and values in new contexts in terms understandable to persons outside of those traditions. S. Crawford Cromwell, a contemporary scholar of Hindu ethics, describes the essence of morality in Hinduism as follows: Through reason and intuition, Hinduism finds the source of ethics in the nature of the human being. It agrees with the Relativists that the claims . . . to finding absolute values is illusory and pretentious because social morality is inevitably the construct of subjective, historical forces that reflect the accidents of time and place; but this admission of subjectivity is not tantamount to saying that all of our choices . . . are merely the products of subjective preferences. To the contrary, we can arrive at objectively valid norms based on our knowledge of positive human capacities for life, for love, for freedom, for integrity. Our cultural formulations of these objective values will always be relative, constantly to be refined over the long haul of human experience— which is to acknowledge that objectivity is not absolute or unconditional. The notion of absolutism is alien to Hindu ethics because it is a concept of transcendental revelation that is removed from an appreciative understanding of human nature and human history.39 It is precisely this “appreciative understanding of human nature and human history” and the necessity for Hindu ethics “to be refined over the long haul of human experience” through a reliance on “human reason and intuition” that made it possible for Mahatma Gandhi to reformulate and apply Hindu values in a modern political context. In the face of mounting opposition to British colonial rule and demand for independence in the early twentieth century, Gandhi molded Hinduism into a powerful and tolerant force to redress social grievances non violently. He not only reformulated traditional Hindu beliefs (about the presence of the divine, Brahman, in all beings) in a way that would support equality among all castes in India, and among Hindus, Christians, and Muslims, but mobilized millions in nonviolent campaigns for political independence. He also linked the ultimate religious goal of

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Hinduism—spiritual liberation, or moksha —with the social and economic uplifting of all (sarvodaya), especially the vast majority of Indians in the lower castes. His campaigns all included small-scale self-help programs among the lower castes so as to improve their social and economic situation, some of which have continued today to influence those involved at the local level throughout India engaged in cottage industries, environmental protection, the empowerment of women, and anti–nuclear weapons campaigns.40 Gandhi’s appeal, although religiously based, was understandable and applicable to non-Hindus and to nonbelievers. His influence on Martin Luther King Jr. in the United States was profound. His strategy of nonviolent resistance to unjust laws and authoritarian governments has been replicated in other contexts (most recently in Eastern Europe leading up to the fall of Communism) and continues to be appealing to those seeking redress of public grievances without resort to violence. This ethical approach—tolerance and respect for the conscience of others, while appealing to their best moral sense, and a refusal to invoke violence to advance one’s cause— is clearly part of the first toleration that Stepan has argued is a minimum core expected of religious activists in a democracy. One also finds these universal elements in major components of Buddhist ethics that help it meet the test of Stepan’s first toleration. Like Hinduism, Buddhism believes in the sacredness of all beings, not because of a divine presence in the world, but because all reality is one and damage to any living being is harm to oneself. Traditionally, as in Hinduism, this has led to a focus on cultivating individual consciousness through meditation and withdrawal from the world so as to liberate oneself from harmful attitudes of greed, hatred, and self-deception—in Weber’s terms, a “world-rejecting asceticism.” However, the ethical system of Buddhism, like Hinduism, has within it elements that are reformulatable and capable of motivating significant political involvement that is tolerant of others’ beliefs, explainable in terms understandable to non-Buddhists, and which is respectful of constitutional government and human rights. For Buddhists, human experience, conscience, and the use of reason are all essential in ethical decision making, and truth is not seen as something available to Buddhists alone but to all humans who seek it honestly and in cooperation with others.41

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The Buddhist scholar Peter Harvey has pointed to where Buddhist ethics can at its core be compatible with modern democratic emphasis on human rights: It is true that Buddhism does not usually talk in terms of ‘rights’ which is a term that arose from Western philosophical tradition. That does not mean, however, that Buddhists cannot agree with the substance of what is expressed in ‘human rights’ language. Buddhists are sometimes unhappy using the language of ‘rights’ as they may associate it with people ‘demanding their rights’ in an aggressive, self-centered way. . . . Nevertheless, as rights imply duties, Buddhists are happier talking directly about the duties themselves: about ‘universal duties’, or, to use a phrase much used by the Dalai Lama, ‘universal responsibilities’. . . . Moreover, while aggressively demanding rights is not in tune with the spirit of Buddhism, being calmly firm and determined in upholding rights, particularly of other people, is so.42 As in Hinduism under British rule, Buddhism in Southeast Asia under colonialism underwent significant transformation from a “worldrejecting” to an “inner-worldly” asceticism and became a significant force for social change. The potential present in Buddhist ethics to support peaceful change leading to greater equity, self-determination, and human rights emerged in several Buddhist reform movements that have had impact on economic and political policies in several countries of South and Southeast Asia over the past few decades. Scholars such as Angarika Dharmapala (1864–1933), a Sri Lankan Buddhist monk, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956), an Indian Hindu layman who converted to Buddhism, and Ajarn Buddhadasa (1915– 93), a Thai Buddhist monk, provided the foundations for a socially engaged Buddhism through their writings, lectures, and travels throughout Southeast Asia. As did Gandhi, they articulated a reform Buddhism that emphasized the core values of compassion, selflessness, and interdependence of all beings but interpreted these as being realizable in social structures and political and economic relationships in society.43 Rather than concentrate only on the elimination of spiritual suffering in personal life, these reformers emphasized the importance of

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alleviating all forms of human suffering, including material pain felt by millions as a result of unrestricted greed, rampant poverty, exploitation, and political oppression. They linked spiritual enlightenment (the supreme Buddhist religious objective) with social liberation, and articulated a vision of nirvana (total peace and unity with the universe) that could be experienced in this life through reduction of class differences, satisfaction of the basic material and spiritual needs of all people, and the creation of governments committed to the common good of all citizens. The thought of these Buddhist reformers, along with the example of Gandhi, has stimulated the formation of new institutions throughout South and Southeast Asia in recent decades to assist the poor, to work for peace amidst conflict, and to engage in resistance to authoritarian governments.44 Buddhist monks and laity influenced by the theoretical work to update and apply Buddhist values to modern political and economic challenges have created a series of grassroots development projects in Sri Lanka (reaching over three million people by the late 1980s). These projects have also included the cooperation of Hindus and Christians, have attracted support from international funding agencies such as the World Bank, and have helped orchestrate interfaith “peace walks” across the country to help reconcile differences between Hindus and Buddhists during mounting tensions and violence between the majority Sinhalese Buddhists and Tamil Hindus.45 “Engaged Buddhist” monks in Thailand have created similar smallscale development projects that have included Buddhists, Christians, and those with no religion. They also mounted nonviolent demonstrations opposing military coups in 1976 and 1991 and have been active in monitoring and publicizing human rights by the military when in power.46 In Cambodia in 1993, after eighteen years of civil war that followed upon a genocidal three-year reign of terror (1975– 78) carried out by the Khmer Rouge (in which one-fifth of Cambodia’s eight million people were killed), the Buddhist primate, Somdech Ghosananda, organized a monthlong peace march of ten thousand monks, nuns, and laity. The purpose was to support the implementation of the UN-sponsored elections that year, as well as more vigorous efforts by the government to rid the country of land mines.47

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In Burma (Myanmar) in the late 1980s, after twenty-six years of military rule in the context of chronic poverty, political oppression, and failing economy, young Buddhist monks began to join students in peaceful public protests for a return to democratic rule. A new organization was created, Yanhapyo (Union of Young Monks), that helped orchestrate this opposition in 1988 and the demonstrations that finally led to the May 1990 elections (the first since 1962) in which a united opposition, the National League for Democracy led by Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi (a subsequent Nobel Prize Peace winner in 1991), won a landslide victory.48 When the military and their civilian allies refused to accept the outcome of the elections, the Union of Young Monks became the leading force of resistance and mounted nonviolent protests involving thousands of monks throughout the country.49 Nonviolent protests by thousands of monks occurred again in mid-August 2007 after the military announced a dramatic increase in fuel prices (over 500 percent). These lasted for several weeks and resulted in the arrest of several hundred clergy.50 Perhaps the most powerful symbol of “engaged Buddhism” today is Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet. Over forty years in exile he has traveled extensively in support of self-rule and respect for Tibetan culture within the political sphere of China. Buddhist values have significantly shaped his five-point peace plan for Tibet and China, since these endorse negotiation, love and forgiveness of one’s enemies, nonconfrontation, and respect for both Chinese interests and Tibetan culture.51 He has also helped write the Charter of Tibetans in Exile rejecting traditional Tibetan forms of monarchical rule in favor of constitutional government. He argues, in fact, that democracy is compatible with Buddhist values: As a Buddhist monk, I do not find alien the concept and practice of democracy. . . . The Buddha proclaimed that each individual is a master of his or her own destiny, highlighting the capacity that each person has to attain enlightenment. . . . Like Buddhism, modern democracy is based on the principle that all human beings are essentially equal, and that each of us has an equal right to life, liberty, and happiness. . . . Thus not only are Buddhism and democracy

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compatible, they are rooted in a common understanding of the equality and potential of every individual.52

The Democratic Minimum in Religion- State Relationships

The “second toleration” that Stepan offers as necessary to guarantee the core of democracy regarding religion and politics is that “religious institutions should not have constitutionally privileged prerogatives which allow them authoritatively to mandate public policy to democratically elected governments.” In addition, all religious communities “must have complete freedom to worship privately.”53 Traditionally, these concepts of state autonomy from religion and universal religious freedom have been commonly associated with the structural arrangement called “separation of church and state,” a complete differentiation of religious and governmental institutions protecting the autonomy of each that originated as an ideal for liberal democracy in eighteenthcentury Enlightenment thinking. Samuel Huntington argues that Western civilization’s key contribution to democratic theory and practice regarding religion and politics has been this norm of complete separation of church and state. He states: “God and Caesar, church and state, spiritual and temporal authority, have been a prevailing dualism in Western culture.”54 Stepan’s second toleration, however, calls into question the validity of this “prevailing dualism” by forcing us to rethink the meaning and measure of separation of church and state as a prerequisite core element in a democracy. In examining constitutional and legal evidence in contemporary Western European democracies he finds a variety of patterns of religion-state relationships among the fifteen member countries of the European Union, few of which have a complete separation of religious and governmental institutions. He finds one European country with a formerly hostile separation of church and state (France in 1905) subsidizing religious schools for the past half century. He describes the practice in Germany whereby the government collects voluntary designated contributions to churches as part of the national annual income tax (the Kirchensteuer). In the United Kingdom and in the three Scan-

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dinavian countries (until 1995), established churches have been the norm and an official church has privileged mention in the constitution. In the Netherlands, consociational arrangements permit local communities that are predominantly of a specific church to choose which version of Christianity is to be taught in the publicly financed public schools in their respective districts. Some publicly owned radio and television stations are also given to Catholics and Calvinists (the two largest Christian denominations) to operate. Stepan also finds, however, that all these countries with close church-state involvements score consistently high on respect for political and civil rights, including religious freedom.55 By focusing on the second toleration instead of the concept of separation of church and state, Stepan is closer to the mark than Huntington in describing the actual reality of religion-state relationships in Western Europe. He is also forcing us to rethink the theoretical issue of what kind of religion-state relationships are necessary to protect political and civil liberties. Stepan’s empirical findings of close religion-state involvements in Western Europe are also found in varying degrees in many other democratic societies in the modern world. Moreover, in many of these cases, changes have occurred over time indicating the kind of “political crafting” that Stepan underscores as possible in reshaping religion-state relationships. His work encourages us to think about other theoretical models for religion-state relationships than complete separation of church and state (disestablishment) that are also compatible with the core elements of democracy The United States, for example, does not have, nor has it ever had, a complete separation of church and state, nor does it measure up to the “prevailing dualism” Huntington believes is the norm in Western democracies. The U.S. Constitution, written in 1787 at the height of the Enlightenment, was politically crafted in such a way as to guarantee complete freedom of worship but to allow various interactions and involvements between religious institutions of government so as to gain sufficient political support for ratification.56 The First Amendment in the Constitution states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the

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free exercise thereof.” The Constitution did not forbid any state from establishing an official religion or providing public money for the support of religious institutions, only the national government. Until 1833 several states had established religions privileged in their respective constitutions. Until the late 1940s the Supreme Court did not interpret the restrictions of the establishment clause in the First Amendment as applicable to state governments in addition to the federal government.57 Since the 1960s the Supreme Court has engaged in an ongoing process of defining what is permissible and what is not for federal, state, and local governments to do in relation to religion without violating the establishment clause. The Court has upheld as constitutional publicly financed chaplains for the U.S. Congress and military, “In God We Trust” on U.S. currency, tax exemptions for church property used for religious purposes, publicly funded textbooks on nonreligious subjects in parochial schools, and religious symbols displayed on public lands and buildings that are part of our cultural heritage. It has also struck down as violating the establishment of religion clause Bible reading and formal prayer in public schools, public funding for “nonreligious” activities of teachers in parochial schools, public funds to reimburse tuition costs to parents who send their children to religiously affiliated schools, a mandated daily “moment of silence” in public schools, and the teaching of “creationist” views of human origins in public schools.58 Clearly such ongoing interpretations of the meaning of the First Amendment indicate a continuous “political crafting” over time in the United States as part of our effort to keep religion and state sufficiently differentiated so as to preserve a minimum of autonomy of both but also to allow for ongoing cooperative interactions that are in continuity with long-standing American cultural traditions. In no sense does the United States have a complete separation of church and state, nor does it exhibit the “prevailing dualism” of spiritual and temporal power that Huntington speaks of as the hallmark of Western Christian civilization. Freedom of worship for religious communities and independence of government from religious mandates in its policy making are observed in the United States, which complies with Stepan’s second toleration. When one looks beyond the United States and Europe it is clear that other Western democracies also have not accepted the “prevailing

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dualism” concept as an ideal. In Latin America, Catholicism is still given privileged mention in several national constitutions (Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, and Venezuela). In all Latin American countries except Cuba and Mexico, the Catholic Church receives public subsidies for its schools and universities, and in some (Colombia, Chile, and Nicaragua) the law mandates that representatives of the church teach Catholic doctrine in public schools when qualified instructors are available.59 In all these cases throughout the Americas what we find is not a complete separation of church and state but what I would call the “partial establishment” of religion. Some forms of recognition and support are given to religion and religious organizations by democratic governments that allow for close cooperation between religion and state. Nevertheless, freedom of worship is guaranteed and government policy making is not subject to review or veto by religious leaders. In some of these countries (Colombia, Nicaragua, and Venezuela), political and civil liberties beyond religious freedom are not thoroughly protected.60 There are cases of what I would term “partial theocracy,” which satisfies Stepan’s “second toleration.” The government of Israel, for example, imposes Jewish religious restrictions on Jews in selected areas of life. The Ministry of Religious Affairs (staffed by Orthodox rabbis) existed in government until 2004 to apply Torah obligations to Jews in areas of medicine, conscription, sale of food, and transportation on the Sabbath. However, these state-imposed religious regulations apply only to Jews and in residential areas where observant Jews are predominant. They do not apply for non-Jews, and each major religious community—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—is allowed to apply in its own religious courts its respective traditions in marriage, divorce, and burial. The law does not allow civil marriage, however, and up until recently only Orthodox Jewish definitions were used to determine if Jewish immigrants were eligible for citizenship. State monies are allocated to religious schools of all three faiths, and there is complete freedom of worship for all religions. Israel continues to score relatively well on Freedom House’s scale of political and civil liberties (2 and 3 in 2006) for official policies within its traditional boundaries (but not for its restrictive political practices in the disputed occupied territories, or in its

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supervision of Palestinian Authority– administered territories, where its scores are three 5’s and one 6).61 One can find cases of more complete official separation of religious and state institutions in the world (the disestablishment model), but ironically several of these cases on closer analysis have involved more restrictions on religious freedom than in the above-mentioned cases of “partial establishment” and “partial theocracy.” In Mexico, Cuba, and China after their respective revolutions in the early and mid-twentieth century, there was an official separation of religious and governmental institutions. New laws no longer allowed official support—constitutional, legal, or financial— to any religion or religious organization by agencies of the state. However, in all three cases, religious institutions did not operate freely of government supervision or restriction, nor was there complete freedom to practice religion. The reason is that, historically, separation of church and state occurred in mutually antagonistic circumstances (what Stepan has termed “hostile” separation, as occurred in France in 1905 and Spain in 1931).62 In all of them, Christian clergy opposed either revolutions that brought new governments to power or the policies of new governments created after the revolutions. Governments in all three cases, therefore, had as part of their agenda in disestablishing religion the objective of ensuring that church opposition to regime ideology or policy would cease. In Mexico, the Constitution of 1917 officially separated church and state, but subsequent enabling laws forbade churches from owning any property (even church buildings were to be government owned), abrogated religious educational institutions, forbade foreign clergy to work in the country, required national clergy to wear secular dress, denied them the right to vote in elections for public officials, and outlawed any political group with ties to any religious beliefs. In Cuba after the 1959 revolution, in engineering a separation of church and state the government outlawed religious schools for being staging grounds for opposition to the government, and the Constitution of 1975 made a “scientific materialist concept of the universe” the official basis of the socialist government (Stepan’s “atheistic secularism imposed by the state”).63 Moreover, persons who practiced religion could not become members of the Communist Party or hold government positions. In China after the

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1949 revolution, the government forbade all foreign sources of support for religious institutions in the country, evicted foreign religious representatives, confiscated the lands of Tibetan Buddhist monasteries, and during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s arrested clergy and closed churches and temples.64 While none of these cases meet the test of either of the twin tolerations due to their severe restrictions on religious freedom and legal public advocacy by religious groups, some significant changes in religionstate relations have occurred in all of them since the most severe controls were created in the respective postrevolutionary periods. In 1992 constitutional reforms in Mexico allowed churches to own property (including houses of worship), granted foreign clergy the right to do religious work in Mexico, and allowed all clergy who are citizens the right to vote. Churches, however, are still not permitted to operate religious educational institutions, nor are clergy allowed to run for public office or associate themselves with any political goals, party, or candidate. Mexico now scores a 2, however, on Freedom House’s latest country ranking on respect for both political and civil liberties.65 In Cuba in 1991, “scientific materialism” was no longer officially proclaimed as official ideology in the constitution, and persons who practice religion are no longer forbidden to be members of the Communist Party or serve in government positions. Over the past two decades (since the fall of the Soviet Union and the need for Cuba to gain other international sources of support) greater freedom for Cuban churches to have contacts and financial support from international church organizations has been permitted, and Pope John Paul II was warmly received by Fidel Castro on an official visit to Cuba in 1998. Churches, however, still cannot operate religious schools, nor may they have access to the media unless given special permission by the government on a case-bycase basis.66 With the beginning of an opening to the West and the desire to attract Western investments after Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, the Chinese government relaxed some of its restrictions on religion. The amended Chinese Constitution of 1982 proclaimed “freedom of religious belief ” and gave formal recognition to five religions considered legitimate by the state: Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Catholicism, and Protestantism.

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The Religious Affairs Bureau (RAB) in the government was created to oversee the functioning of religious cults but forbids religious allegiances to any foreign power, thus still making the Roman Catholic Church illegal due to its ties with the Vatican. All legitimate Catholic churches need to be connected to the Catholic Patriotic Association (CPA), which is regulated by the government, and all ties to the Vatican, including papal appointment of Chinese Catholic bishops, are forbidden. Moreover, only Protestant churches linked to the Three-Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM) are recognized by the RAB as official, and between 20 million and 80 million members of small evangelical “house churches” not part of TSPM are forbidden to practice their faith even in private homes and are punished when caught doing so. Members of other unauthorized religious groups, such as Falungong, continue to be harassed or detained.67 Turkey is another example of a state that experienced a “hostile” separation of religion and state and underwent decades of strong “caesaropapist” controls on religion, but over the past decade the state has been relaxing some of these restrictions. When Mustafa Kemal Atatürk came to power in 1924, he wanted to modernize Turkey by making it resemble more secular patterns in Western European culture. He substituted civil law for the previously established Islamic Shari’a law, separated Islam from the state, and recognized the freedom to practice for all religions. He also imposed secularism as official state policy by abolishing all public Islamic schools, forbidding the wearing of the fez by men and the veil by women in public, outlawing a number of Muslim Sufi organizations for being superstitious and mystical, and making illegal the creation of political parties with ties to religion. Four times between the 1960s and 1990s, in fact, the military intervened to overthrow elected parties, often arguing these were not safeguarding the strict secular legacy of Atatürk.68 In recent years, however, with the economic ascendancy into the middle class by many devout Muslims who in the past were poor and politically silent, and a growing desire among Turkish political leaders to gain entrance into the European Union, some of these restrictions have been relaxed. The Directorate of Religious Affairs in the government now funds and oversees the teaching of Islam in public schools, and pro-

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vides funds for the construction of new mosques and pilgrimages to Mecca by Turkish Muslims. Moreover, political parties with unofficial ties to Islam have been competing electorally for several years and one (the Welfare Party) shared executive power with a secular party in the late 1990s. Its successor, the Justice and Development Party (AK), won a plurality of the vote in 2002, ruled successfully for five years, and was reelected in July 2007 with 46.6 percent of the vote, far outdistancing its secular party competitors. The current prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdog˘ an, is a practicing Muslim, and the new parliament in August 2007 chose Abdullah Gül as president, the first openly Muslim chief executive since Atatürk’s 1924 revolution. The AK ran on a platform of continued economic prosperity and promises not to impose Islamic law in public policy making. Laws are still in force, however, against the wearing of the veil by women who are students, civil servants, lawyers, judges, or public office holders, but Turkey’s rating on the Freedom House scale is now 3 for both political and civil liberties.69 Although all these governments officially engineered a “hostile” separation of church and state in their postrevolutionary periods in the early and mid-twentieth century, and still do not meet all the conditions for Stepan’s second toleration test, the fact that changes have occurred over time in the direction of greater religious freedom is an indication that “political crafting” is occurring. The second toleration is not necessarily created all at once but can be constructed in piecemeal fashion over time, even in societies where previously there have been hostile religion-state relations. I would argue that just as there are cases of partial establishment of religion and even partial theocracy that can meet the second toleration test (some undergoing changes over time) there are cases of “partial caesaropapism” that are moving in that direction. Forms of caesaropapism can be adjusted to permit more religious freedom and autonomy for religious institutions because of changing domestic and/or international political conditions. Stepan’s analytical framework, therefore, sensitizes us to many nuances of religion-state interactions that are involved in crafting the process of democratization and provides a spectrum along which different country cases can be measured as they move toward meeting the second toleration.

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Conclusion

The evidence, both theoretical and empirical, from many religious traditions helps underscore the validity of several of Stepan’s (and Linz’s) insights about the legitimate role religion can play in both the transition to and consolidation of democracy. All major religions are “multivocal” with moral elements “usable” to legitimize democratic values and processes. This is because the ethical traditions embedded in religions rely significantly on reason for interpretation and ongoing rearticulation. This not only gives them flexibility and adaptability to new contexts but also a “window of dialogue” for conversation with nonreligious people in debating the allocation of values in modern pluralistic democracies. Values of respect and compassion for persons based on ancient religious beliefs can be, and are being, articulated in new forms by scholars and practitioners in various religious traditions today that give support for democratic ideals of equality, toleration, and compromise. As such, the articulation of traditional religious values in terms compatible and understandable to those basing their morality on reason alone makes them, in Rawls’s terms, “public” rather than “private” and enables them to contribute significantly to public moral debate without arguing from “privileged positions” (which Greenawalt fears undermines fairness). Even in cases where religious advocates have not translated their moral concerns into publicly accessible arguments, they need not be silenced for the core elements of democracy to be met. Provided they stay within the law in advancing their positions and exhibit a toleration of the viewpoints of others—exhibited either by compromise or acceptance of decisions of elected officials with whom they continue to disagree—they are no threat to the required fundamentals of democratic polities. Reformulated religious moral values that are supportive of equality, human rights, and constitutional government have led in several areas of the world over the past several decades to a strengthening of civil societies against authoritarian governments (in Latin America, Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and Eastern Europe). What gives religion in -

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fluence in support of democratic values is not only voice but also institutional clout. The dramatic actions of clergy and the social networks maintained by various religious traditions have led to new strategies to defend human rights, carry out nonviolent protests, create new private social organizations, and mediate actions between governments and opposition leaders to negotiate peaceful transitions back to democratic governments. Hence, Stepan’s argument for the “first toleration” needed from religious advocates in competing for the allocation of public values has good theoretical justification due to the many overlapping moral values shared by believers and nonbelievers alike. Moreover, in practical terms not only does this core demand not fall into the “reverse discrimination trap” that some secular proponents can be guilty of in insisting that religion be taken off the political agenda in public argument, but it frees up a whole series of usable moral and institutional contributions religious groups can make in strengthening civil societies and opposing oppressive political regimes. As with the first toleration, Stepan’s “second toleration” is also a more useful category empirically in describing the actual state of religionstate relations in democracies in different parts of the world than Huntington’s prevailing dualism concept commonly believed to be the norm for democratic polities. Stepan’s test provides a minimum set of conditions that have to be met, rather than an ideal maximum, and he clearly shows that many societies that meet this minimum core in the second toleration (freedom of religious practice and autonomy of the state from religious veto in policy making) can and do meet high standards in respecting civil and political liberties of all their citizens. Moreover, as in the first toleration, the theoretical implications of his analysis of various kinds of close relationships between religion and state in democracies are significant. Building on Stepan’s work, I have shown that there are different models other than disestablishment (complete separation of church and state) that are compatible with democratic government, including partial establishment of religion and partial theocracy, both of which are capable under the right conditions of meeting the second toleration test. Even models that do not completely meet the test—for example, partial caesaropapist arrangements that

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place some restrictions on religious freedoms— are capable of being politically crafted over time in a direction toward meeting core elements of the second toleration. It is also important to underscore the fact that Stepan never argues that crafting the twin tolerations guarantees the consolidation of democracy. Autonomy in decision making in both religious and governmental organizations, political advocacy within the limits of the law by religious individuals and groups, and the right to practice one’s faith freely and openly are necessary, but not sufficient, conditions to establish a robust democracy. Many other political conditions must be met in addition to the twin tolerations, and it is possible to craft the twin tolerations without having full observance of all political and civil liberties (as witnessed today, for example, in countries such as Colombia, Nicaragua, and Venezuela that do not receive the highest ratings on the Freedom House scale). Finally, Stepan never argues that crafting the twin tolerations will remove religion as a source of political conflict in democratic societies. This would be naive. In his own words, “democracy is a system of conflict regulation,” not conflict elimination. Provided the management of conflicts (including political conflicts over religion) takes place within legally constituted boundaries accountable to public input, and without jeopardizing basic civil or political rights of all citizens or the autonomy of the state, then the core elements of democracy are protected. In fact, attempts to remove all religious conflict from politics is not only unrealistic given the continuing influence of religion in many cultures, but it would also reduce the positive moral contributions religion can make to debates over the articulation of values in public life and to the strengthening of civil society over the state that all healthy democracies require.

Notes 1. Alfred Stepan, Arguing Comparative Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 214–15, 223– 29. 2. Ibid., 216–17, 218– 23. 3. Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 245.

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4. For the classic definitions of theocracy and caesaropapism, see Max Weber, Economy and Society, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, 3 vols. (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968), 3:1158– 63. 5. For the classical Marxist position on religion’s role in society and eventual disappearance, see Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” in Karl Marx: Early Writings, ed. T. B. Bottomore (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), 43– 59; “The Communism of the Paper, ‘Rheinischer Beobachter,’” in On Religion, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (New York: Schocken Books, 1964), 84. For a summary of the assumptions and method of modernization theory, see Cyril E. Black, The Dynamics of Modernization: A Study in Comparative History (New York: Harper and Row, 1966). For a summary of what modernization theory posited about the inevitability of secularization as societies developed, see Roy Wallis and Steve Bruce, “Secularization: The Orthodox Model,” in Religion and Modernization, ed. Bruce (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 8– 30. Literature on religion in society influenced by the modernization paradigm includes Richard Fenn, “A New Sociology of Religion,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 11, no. 1 (March 1972): 16– 32; Donald E. Smith, Religion and Political Development (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970); Bryan Wilson, Religion in Sociological Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). 6. Eric O. Hanson, Religion and Politics in the International System Today (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Mark Juergensmeyer, ed., Religion and Global Civil Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); N. J. Demerath III, Crossing the Gods: World Religion and Worldly Politics (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001); Ted Jelen and Clyde Wilcox, eds., Religion and Politics in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); R. Scott Appleby, The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000); Brian H. Smith, Religion and Politics in Comparative Global Perspective (book manuscript in progress). 7. Aristotle, The Politics, bk. 1, chap. 2, rev. ed., trans. T. A. Sinclair (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), 59. 8. Niccolo Machiavelli, The Discourses, bk. 1, chaps. 3, 4, in The Portable Machiavelli, ed. Peter Bondanella and Mark Musa (New York: Penguin Books, 1979), 181– 85. 9. Machiavelli, “The Prince,” chap. 18, in Bondanella and Musa, Portable Machiavelli, 133– 36. 10. Machiavelli, The Discourses, bk. 1, chap. 12, in Bondanella and Musa, Portable Machiavelli, 210–13. 11. David Easton, A Systems Analysis of Political Life (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1965), 21; Vernon Van Dyke, Political Science: A Philosophical Analysis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1960), 134; Herbert R. Winter

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and Thomas J. Bellows, People and Politics: An Introduction to Political Science, 3rd ed. (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1985), 11. Robert Dahl also encompasses both Aristotle and Machiavelli but defines politics in the widest possible scope to include any activity that attempts to influence others. For him it includes those human relationships (even in one’s private life) that “involve to a significant extent, control, influence, power or authority” (Modern Political Analysis, 5th ed. [Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1991], 3). 12. Stepan, Arguing Comparative Politics, 216. 13. Michael Corbett and Julia Mitchell Corbett, Politics and Religion in the United States (New York: Garland, 1999), 8. 14. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Longmans, 1902), 53. 15. Paul Tillich, The Protestant Era, trans. James Luther Adams (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), xv, 273. 16. Charles Y. Glock and Rodney Stark, Religion and Society in Tension (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1965), 4. 17. Julia M. Corbett, Religion in America, 3rd ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997), 7. 18. For Weber’s classic definitions of “inner-worldly asceticism” vs. “worldrejecting asceticism,” see Max Weber, Sociology of Religion, trans. Ephraim Fischoff (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), 166– 83. 19. This is not to imply that one needs to be religious in order to make value judgments in politics and conduct oneself morally. There is a venerable tradition in all societies of the world where religions flourish that moral judgments can be made on other grounds— e.g., reason, experience, human traditions. Atheists, agnostics, and those who define themselves as irreligious constitute 15 percent of the world’s population (900 million out of 6 billion) and do not draw on any religious definition of what constitutes the “good life” for themselves or others. However, over 5 billion of the 6 billion people living in the world today do identify themselves with a religious tradition. For them the moral teachings of those traditions, at least potentially, carry some weight in their choices as to what constitutes the “good life” in society and how to achieve it ethically. See David B. Barrett and Todd M. Johnson, “Annual Statistical Table on Global Mission: 2000,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 24, no. 1 (January 2000): 25. 20. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 151, 214–16, 220– 22. 21. Kent Greenawalt, Private Consciences and Public Reasons (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 157; original emphasis. 22. Stepan, Arguing Comparative Politics, 217. 23. Michael J. Perry, Religion in Politics: Constitutional and Moral Perspectives (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 69. 24. Ibid., 67– 68.

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25. The philosopher Brendan Sweetman makes the distinction in religious traditions between “higher-order” doctrinal beliefs requiring an acceptance on faith and “lower-order” moral teachings, which include the use of reason in their articulation and which are open to public scrutiny and debate in democratic societies. Sweetman, Why Politics Need Religion: The Place of Religious Arguments in the Public Square (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2006), 51– 53, 98–104. The philosopher Robert V. Hannaford makes a similar point in observing that the “golden rule” in various formulations is found in all major religious traditions independent from theological doctrines. Respecting others as oneself, fairness, and upholding human dignity under law are common elements in the moral teaching of religions and are understandable to all humans as autonomous moral agents whether or not they have any religious faith. Hannaford, Moral Autonomy and Moral Reasoning (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993), 104– 6. 26. Peggy Morgan and Clive A. Lawton, Ethical Issues in Six Religious Traditions (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), 158. 27. Ben Zion Bokser and Baruch M. Bokser, “Introduction: The Spirituality of the Talmud,” in The Talmud: Selected Writings, ed. Ben Zion Bokser and Baruch M. Bokser (New York: Paulist Press, 1989), 30– 31. 28. John Mahoney, S.J., The Making of Moral Theology: A Study of the Roman Catholic Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 224– 58. See also David Hollenbach, S.J., Claims in Conflict: Retrieving and Renewing the Catholic Human Rights Tradition (New York: Paulist Press, 1979), 41–106. 29. Perry, Religion in Politics, 67– 68. 30. Dutch Catholic moral theologian, Edward Schillebeeckx, O.P., has underscored the importance of reason in the development of religiously based moral teachings: “Even when their fundamental inspiration comes from religion, belief in God, ethical norms . . . must be rationally grounded. None of the participants in [religiously based moral discourse] can hide behind an ‘I can see what you don’t see’ and then require others to accept this norm straight out.” Edward Schillebeeckx and Robert Schreiter, eds., The Schillebeeckx Reader (New York: Crossroad, 1984), 263. Rev. Bryan Hehir, principal drafter of the 1983 U.S. Catholic bishops’ letter on nuclear deterrence, has made a similar point: “Religiously based insights, values and arguments at some point must be rendered persuasive to the wider civil public. . . . When a religious moral claim will affect the wider public, it should be proposed in a fashion which the public can evaluate, accept or reject on its own terms. The [point] . . . is not to banish religious insight and argument from public life, [but only to] establish a test for the religious communities to meet: to probe our commitments deeply and broadly enough that we can translate their best insights to others.” Hehir, “Responsibilities and Temptations of Power: A Catholic View” (unpublished manuscript, 1988), cited in Perry, Religion in Politics, 78.

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31. Brian Smith, “Churches and Human Rights in Latin America: Recent Trends in the Subcontinent,” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 21, no. 1 (February 1979): 89–128; Paul Gifford, ed., The Christian Churches and the Democratization of Africa (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995); Niels Nielsen, Revo lutions in Eastern Europe: The Religious Roots (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991); Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 72– 85. 32. For examples of natural law, as opposed to strictly theological arguments for defending the life of the fetus by U.S. Catholic bishops, see U.S. Catholic Bishops Conference, “Resolution on Abortion,” Origins 19 (1989): 395; Catholic Bishops of Wisconsin, “A Consistent Ethic of Life,” Origins 19 (1989): 461– 62; Archbishop John May, “Faith and Moral Teaching in a Democratic Nation,” Origins 19 (1989): 385, 388. 33. Perry, Religion in Politics, 70– 72. 34. Kenneth D. Wald, Religion and Politics in the United States, 4th ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 306– 8. 35. Ibid., 317. 36. Radwan A. Masmoudi, “The Silenced Majority,” in World Religions and Democracy, ed. Larry Diamond, Marc F. Plattner, and Philip J. Costopoulos (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 218– 22; Subhi Mahmasani, “Adaptation of Islamic Jurisprudence to Modern Social Needs,” and Asaf A. A. Fyzee, “The Reinterpretation of Islam,” in Islam in Transition: Muslim Perspectives, ed. John J. Donohue and John L. Esposito, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 145– 56; Dale F. Eickelman, “Islam and Ethical Pluralism,” and Muhammad Khalid Masud, “The Scope of Pluralism in Islamic Moral Traditions,” in The Many and the One: Religious and Secular Perspectives on Ethical Pluralism in the Modern World, ed. Richard Madsen and Tracy B. Strong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 161– 91. 37. Robin Wright, “Islam and Liberal Democracy: Two Visions of Reformation,” Journal of Democracy 7, no. 2 (April 1996): 64– 75; Abdullahi Ahmed An Na’im, Toward an Islamic Reformation: Civil Liberties, Human Rights, and International Law (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990); An Na’im, “Toward an Islamic Hermeneutics for Human Rights,” in Human Rights and Religious Values: An Uneasy Relationship?, ed. An Na’im et al. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995), 229– 42; Valla Vakili, Debating Religion and Politics in Iran: The Political Thought of Abdolkarim Soroush, Occasional Papers/Studies Department, no. 2 (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1996); John Cooper, Ronald L. Nettler, and Mohamed Mahmoud, eds., Islam and Modernity: Muslim Intellectuals (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998); Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Heart of Islam: Enduring Values for Humanity (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 80– 84, 155– 56, 309–16; Appleby, Ambivalence of the Sacred, 255– 63; Charles Kurzman, ed., Liberal Islam: A Sourcebook (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 59– 98, 145– 84; John J. Donohue and John L. Esposito, eds., Islam in Transition: Muslim Perspectives,

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2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 143– 202, 261– 330; John L. Esposito and John O. Voll, Islam and Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 11– 51; Abdou Filali-Ansary, “Muslims and Democracy” and “The Sources of Enlightened Muslim Thought,” in Diamond, Plattner, and Costopoulos, World Religions and Democracy, 153– 67 and 197– 211. 38. Stepan, Arguing Comparative Politics, 238– 46. Moreover, despite the more restrictive religious policies espoused by religious parties in these elections they themselves have abided by the outcome and not resorted to violence or other subversive activity undermining constitutionalism. They are observant of the first toleration of respecting the law and on this basis are not in violation of the core elements of democracy. In such cases, religiously based political movements should not be “taken off the political agenda” in competition about the allocation of values in democratic societies. 39. S. Crawford Cromwell, Dilemmas of Life and Death: Hindu Ethics in a North American Context (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 9; original emphasis. 40. Judith M. Brown, Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); Ignatius Jesudasan, S.J., A Gandhian Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1984), 1–137; Gene Sharp, Gandhi as a Political Strategist (Boston: Porter Sargeant, 1977), 273– 309; Edward Gargan, “As Hand Looms of India Fall Silent, the Country’s Social Fabric Frays,” New York Times, October 7, 1992, A4. For other examples of reform movements in Hinduism during the rise of nationalism that led to new interpretations compatible with human rights and social equality, see Pratap Bhanu Mehta, “Hinduism and Self Rule,” in Diamond, Plattner, and Costopoulos, World Religions and Democracy, 56– 69. 41. Morgan and Lawton, Ethical Issues in Six Religious Traditions, 58– 59. 42. Peter Harvey, An Introduction to Buddhist Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 119; original emphasis. 43. Christopher S. Queen, Introduction to Engaged Buddhism: Buddhist Liberation Movements in Asia, ed. Christopher S. Queen and Sallie B. King (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 20– 28. 44. Ananda Guruge, ed., Return to Righteousness: A Collection of Speeches, Essays, and Letters of Angarika Dharmapala (Colombo, Sri Lanka: Government Press, 1965); Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, The Buddha and His Dhamma, 3rd ed. (Bombay: Siddhartha Publications, 1984); Queen, “Dr. Ambedkar and the Hermeneutics of Buddhist Liberation,” in Queen and King, Engaged Buddhism, 45– 71; Donald Swearer, ed., Me and Mine: Selected Essays of Bikkhu Buddhadasa (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989); Santikaro Bikkhu, “Buddhadasa Bhikku: Life and Society through the Natural Eyes of Voidness,” in Queen and King, Engaged Buddhism, 147– 93. See also Sallie B. King, Being Benevolence: The Social Ethics of Engaged Buddhism (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005).

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45. A. T. Ariyaratne, In Search of Development: The Sarvodaya Movement’s Effort to Harmonize Tradition with Change (Moratuwa, Sri Lanka: Sarvodaya Press, 1982); A. T. Ariyaratne, The Power Pyramid and the Dharmic Cycle (Ratmalana, Sri Lanka: Sarvodaya Vishva Lekha, 1988); Dennis Goulet, Survival with Integrity: Sarvodaya at the Crossroads (Colombo: Marga Institute, 1981); Joanna Macy, Dharma and Development, rev. ed. (West Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press, 1985); United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Human Development Report 1993 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 95; George D. Bond, “A. T. Ariyaratne and the Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement in Sri Lanka,” in Queen and King, Engaged Buddhism, 121– 46. 46. Asian Cultural Forum on Development (ACFOD), Coordinating Group for Religion and Society (CGRS), Thai Inter-Religious Commission for Development (TIDC), Thai Development Support Committee (TDSC), and Peace, Democratic Participation, Justice or Righteousness Institute (SPDI), Seeds of Peace (Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1992); Sulak Sivaraksa, A Buddhist Vision for Renewing Society (Bangkok: Thai Inter Commission for Development [TICD], 1994); Donald Swearer, “Sulak Sivaraksa’s Buddhist Vision for Renewing Society,” in Queen and King, Engaged Buddhism, 201– 8; Swearer, “Sulak Sivaraksa’s Buddhist Vision,” 196– 99, 208–11; Appleby, Ambivalence of the Sacred, 138– 40. 47. Appleby, Ambivalence of the Sacred, 123– 28. 48. Charles F. Keyes, “Buddhist Economics and Buddhist Fundamentalism in Burma and Thailand,” in Marty and Appleby, Fundamentalisms and the State, 383– 84; Bertil Lintner, Outrage: Burma’s Struggle for Democracy (Hong Kong: Review Publishing Company, 1989), 122– 23, 132, 141, 151, 178, 217. 49. Keyes, “Buddhist Economics,” 384; Bertil Lintner, “Saffron Sanctions,” Far Eastern Economic Review 150, no. 45 (November 8, 1990): 35. 50. Marwaan Macan-Markar, “Monks vs. Military Hike Myanmar Tensions,” Asia Times, September 8, 2007, www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/ II08Ae04.html (accessed June 4, 2009). 51. His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Freedom in Exile: The Autobiography of the Dalai Lama (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), 247– 54; José Ignacio Cabe zón, “Buddhist Principles in the Tibetan Liberation Movement,” in Queen and King, Engaged Buddhism, 297– 308. 52. His Holiness the Dalai Lama, “Buddhism, Asian Values, and Democracy,” in Diamond, Plattner, and Costopoulos, World Religions and Democracy, 70– 74. 53. Stepan, Arguing Comparative Politics, 217. Stepan’s use of the words “freedom to worship privately” as part of the second toleration is somewhat puzzling. On face value, it seems to imply that as long as a government does not forbid religious people from holding beliefs privately (which they do not express publicly) and permits them to conduct rituals personally or in their homes, then religious freedom is guaranteed. However, in the first toleration

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Stepan insists that democratic governments must allow religious people and communities to “publicly advance their values in civil society and to sponsor organizations and movements in political society,” provided they do so lawfully and do “not impinge negatively on the liberties of other citizens.” These are clearly public, not private, activities in the first toleration. It would seem more logical, then, that in the second toleration public, not just private, worship be respected in law—e.g., rituals done collectively in houses of worship that do not harm public order. It is this public sense of “freedom of worship” that I will consider normative in discussing the relevance of Stepan’s second toleration. 54. Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the Modern World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 70. 55. Stepan, Arguing Comparative Politics, 219– 22. In the 2006 annual report from Freedom House, which employs a 7-point scale in ranking countries according to their respect for political and civil liberties, each of these seven European countries received the highest rating of 1 for the observance of both sets of liberties. See Aili Piano, Arch Puddington, and Mark Y. Rosenberg, eds., Freedom in the World 2006: The Annual Survey of Political Rights and Civil Liberties (New York: Freedom House, 2006), 890– 91. 56. A. J. Reichley, Religion in American Public Life (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1985), 106–14; Corbett and Corbett, Politics and Religion in the United States, 53– 58. 57. Reichley, Religion in American Public Life, 135. 58. Wald, Religion and Politics in the United States, 83– 96. 59. J. Lloyd Mecham, Church and State in Latin America: A History of Politico-ecclesiastical Relations, 2nd ed. rev. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966); Brian Smith, Religious Politics in Latin America: Pentecostal vs. Catholic (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), 60– 62. 60. In Argentina, Brazil, and Chile the 2006 Freedom House score on political and civil liberties was either 1 (Chile) or 2 (Argentina and Brazil). Colombia and Nicaragua ranked lower (3 on both) and Venezuela scored 4 on both. It is clear, however, in the country descriptions in the report that these lower scores are due more to incomplete protection of freedom of the press, some mistreatment of prisoners, and significant government corruption than to significant restrictions on religious freedoms. See Piano, Puddington, and Rosenberg, Freedom in the World 2006, 41– 46, 109–14, 165– 70, 517– 21, 785– 90, 890– 91. 61. Charles S. Liebman and Eliezer Don-Yehiya, Religion and Politics in Israel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 15–18, 135; Kenneth D. Wald, “The Religious Dimension of Israeli Political Life,” in Jelen and Wilcox, Religion and Politics in Comparative Perspective, 102 – 3; Demerath, Crossing the Gods, 103. In recent years there has been an erosion of the Orthodox Jewish monopoly on Jewish affairs. The Ministry of Religious Affairs was disbanded in 2004, putting rabbinic courts under the control of the Justice Ministry. In 2005 the Supreme Court ruled that the state must recognize as Jews

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people who undergo non-Orthodox conversions begun in Israel and formalized abroad. Piano, Puddington, and Rosenberg, Freedom in the World 2006, 355– 56, 890, 892. 62. Stepan, Arguing Comparative Politics, 221. 63. Stepan articulates a variety of religion-state relationships, some of which meet the criterion of his twin tolerations and some of which do not. One that does not he calls “atheistic secularism imposed by the state.” See Stepan, Arguing Comparative Politics, tables 11.1 and 11.2, 224– 25. 64. Roderic Ai Camp, Crossing Swords: Politics and Religion in Mexico (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 26– 28, 36; Margaret Crahan, “Fidel Castro, the Catholic Church, and Revolution in Cuba,” in Church and Politics in Latin America, ed. Dermot Keogh (London: Macmillan, 1990), 257– 62; Demarath, Crossing the Gods, 151. 65. Camp, Crossing Swords, 36– 39; Piano, Puddington, and Rosenberg, Freedom in the World 2006, 891. 66. Lucien O. Chauvin, “Thaw in Church-State Relations,” Latin America Press 28, no. 44 (November 28, 1996): 1, 8; John M. Kirk, Between God and the Party: Religion and Politics in Revolutionary Cuba (Tampa: University of South Florida Press, 1989), 169– 78; Jorge I. Domínguez, “International and National Aspects of the Catholic Church in Cuba,” Cuban Studies 19 (1989): 43– 60. According to the 2006 Freedom House report on Cuba, “security agents frequently spy on worshippers, the government continues to block construction of new churches, the number of foreign priests is limited, and most new denominations are refused recognition.” Piano, Puddington, and Rosenberg, Freedom in the World 2006, 197. 67. Demerath, Crossing the Gods, 151– 52; Richard Madsen, China’s Catholics: Tragedy and Hope in an Emerging Civil Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Pitman B. Potter, “Belief in Control: Regulation of Religion in China,” China Quarterly 174 (June 2003): 317– 37; Hanson, Religion and Politics, 168– 70; Piano, Puddington, and Rosenberg, Freedom in the World 2006, 163. 68. Demerath, Crossing the Gods, 74– 75; Binnaz Toprak, Islam and Political Development in Turkey (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1981). 69. Demerath, Crossing the Gods, 75– 78; Sabrina Tavernise, “Governing Party Scores Big Victory in Turkish Vote,” New York Times, July 23, 2007, A3; Sabrina Tavernise and Sebnem Arsu, “Turkish Official with Islamic Ties Wins Presidency,” New York Times, August 29, 2007, A1, A8; Piano, Puddington, and Rosenberg, Freedom in the World 2006, 891. The European Court of Human Rights has ruled repeatedly in favor of Turkey’s barring of the headscarf as legal, and the current Muslim-based AK party in power in Turkey has not pushed for an easing of the ban in law. Piano, Puddington, and Rosenberg, Freedom in the World 2006, 731.

13 Twin Tolerations or Siamese Twins? Kemalist Laicism and Political Islam in Turkey Murat Akan

Political Islam in Turkey has come a long way, from the National Order Party (Milli Nizam Partisi, banned by the Constitutional Court in 1971 for violating laiklik,1 or laicity) to the National Salvation Party (Milli Selamet Partisi, banned by the military Junta in 1980 along with all political parties) to the Welfare Party (Refah Partisi, banned by the Constitutional Court in 1998 for violating laiklik following a military warning against the party in 1997) to the Virtue Party (Fazilet Partisi, banned by the Constitutional Court in 2001 for violating laiklik) to the split that took place within political Islam in 2001 with the formation of two political parties: the Felicity Party (Saadet Partisi), which represents the radical wing, and the Justice and Development Party (JDP; Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi), which represents the moderate wing of political Islam. The JDP won two consecutive parliamentary elections in 2002 and 2007. In 2002 it won 34.28 percent of the vote and 363 seats of 550 in parliament, and it captured 46.58 percent of the vote and 341 seats in 2007. To underline the magnitude of the party’s electoral success, let it suffice to say that in both parliaments the party had more seats than the 330 votes (three-fifths majority) required for approving a constitutional change, and in the 2002 parliament it was only two votes short of the 381

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367 votes (two-thirds majority) required to overturn a presidential veto on a proposal for constitutional change. In 2008 the head prosecutor of the republic indicted JDP for violating laiklik. The Constitutional Court decided not to close the party but cut half its public funding and issued a warning. This chapter offers an analysis of some concrete policies and public statements of the Justice and Development Party in the press and in parliamentary discussions and evaluates what they mean for the relation of religion and politics in Turkey. The European and Turkish press, academics, and public intellectuals have taken the electoral success of JDP without a subsequent intervention by the military, the pro-European union position the party has taken in contrast to the previous parties of political Islam, its participation in the Alliance of Civilizations Project,2 and the lack of references to Shari’a law in speeches by party members (in contrast to the speeches by members of the Welfare Party) as concrete evidence for the consolidation of democracy in Turkey. Furthermore, the JDP era has been taken as an example of how strict secularism and consolidation of democracy are not complementary projects. In the current world context where it is quite popular to associate Islam with violence, JDP has been taken as an example for the compatibility of Islam and democracy. This article reevaluates this celebrated moment in Turkish politics from two different angles present in Alfred Stepan’s work on democratic consolidation: the “twin tolerations” argument in his article “The World’s Religious Systems and Democracy: Crafting the ‘Twin Tolerations’”3 and the “nation-state policy” angle in his book coauthored with Juan J. Linz, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe.4 Empirical evidence presented here from these two angles portrays Turkish politics as being much more complicated than the celebrated “success” narrative reiterated above. The JDP religion policy and nation-state policy fit much better with what Stepan calls “organic statism” in his book The State and Society: Peru in Comparative Perspective 5 than with a democratic pattern. From these two angles, I offer an analysis of Turkish poli tics at critical moments in the past two decades with comparisons to the early times of the Turkish Republic. My main argument is that the more the Justice and Development Party has established a powerful place in

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Turkish politics, the more it has reproduced the “organic statist” politics of the Kemalist military-civilian establishment via religion policy and nation-state policy. This co-optation is most visible from the vantage point of minorities—Armenians, Alevis,6 Kurds, and women—in Turkey. I focus mainly on political events and state policies concerning Alevis and Armenians, and only briefly on those related to Kurds and women. As a conclusion, I discuss the relevance of this empirical thesis for Stepan’s twin tolerations.

Theoretical Frameworks of Evaluation Angle 1: State-Religion Relations and Democratic Consolidation

In “The World’s Religious Systems and Democracy,” Stepan took a step beyond Eurocentrism by recapitulating the lessons to be drawn from the European experience of secularization. To gather all the diverse institutional arrangements regulating the relation between states and religions in Europe under the concept of separation of church and state is empirically incorrect, and it hides more than it reveals. “The ‘lesson’ from Western Europe,” Stepan writes, “lies not in church-state separation but in the constant political construction and reconstruction of the ‘twin tolerations,’ ”7 namely, the boundary of the freedom of the state from religion and the freedom of religion from the state. Stepan lists ten institutional requirements of democracy8 and then articulates the boundary between state and religion as follows: The key area of autonomy that must be established for democratic institutions is that the institutions that emanate from democratic procedures should be able, within the bounds of the constitution and human rights, to generate policies. Religious institutions should not have constitutionally privileged prerogatives which allow them authoritatively to mandate public policy to democratically elected governments. The key area of autonomy—from the government or even from other religions—that must be established for religious freedom is that individuals and religious communities, consistent

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with our core institutional definition of democracy, must have complete freedom to worship privately. More: as individuals and groups, they should also be able to publically advance their values in civil society, and to sponsor organizations and movements in political society, as long as their public advancement of these beliefs does not impinge negatively on the liberties of other citizens, or violate democracy and the law, by violence.9 By underscoring the multivocality of all religious traditions, Stepan shifted the focus from Huntington’s trend of reducing the problems of democracy in the world to a “Muslim” problem to a focus on institutional problems and solutions beyond religious essentialism via the “twin tolerations” articulated in the above quotation. Stepan’s emphasis on multivocality opposes the idea of a unique “essence” for each religion on which Huntington’s religious-civilizational approach is grounded. In explicating multivocality, based on his interviews with some Islamic leaders, Stepan contrasts the mobilization of Koranic concepts for a nondemocratic vision of politics with concepts such as shura (consultation), ijtihad (independent reasoning), and ijma (consensus), which, he argues, can be mobilized for a democratic vision of politics. Stepan concludes as follows: What should we conclude from this brief discussion? It seems valid to conclude that contemporary Islamic leaders have “usable” elements to draw from in their doctrine, culture, and experience with which to construct a nondemocratic vision of a desired future polis. But, there are also other contemporary leaders who have “usable” elements of Islamic doctrine, culture, and experience with which to attempt to support, or construct, a democratic vision of their desired future polis. The tradition is multivocal.10 Here, Stepan turns away from Huntington’s cultural essentialism. But he goes further than just showing variations within a culture. He shares José Casanova’s emphasis on “the practical advantages that accrue when actors are able to offer traditional religious legitimation for modern developments.”11

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Stepan’s research agenda on religion and democracy assigns a crucial role to the reexamination of the place Turkish politics has held in the literature on democratization and secularization. In a 2003 article with Graeme C. Robertson, “An ‘Arab’ More than a ‘Muslim’ Democracy Gap,” Stepan and Robertson argue that relative to their GDP per capita, non-Arab-Muslim-majority countries are “democratic overachievers” in contested elections.12 The authors set an empirical framework that takes Turkey from its celebrated position as the unique example of democratization through contested elections in a Muslim-majority country and requalify it, not as a unique case, but as the longest-lasting one. In the 2001 article cited above, Stepan sees Turkey falling under “nondemocratic patterns of religious-state relations.”13 He suggests that state measures taken in Turkey in the name of secularization far exceed those taken even by France, which historically has had the most radical separation of religious and state institutions in Europe. In these two articles, Stepan argued for an analytical and empirical separation of the processes of secularization and democratization as a challenge to the “no secularism, no democracy”14 thesis that is the prevailing understanding of the relationship between secularization and democratization in the social sciences. Angle 2: Nation-State Policy and Democratic Consolidation

In Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation, Linz and Stepan “mean by a consolidated democracy a political situation in which, in a phrase, democracy has become the ‘the only game in town.’”15 They take a modern state as a prerequisite for democracy, because “democracy is a form of governance of a modern state. Thus, without a state, no modern democracy is possible. . . . [A]n intense lack of identification with the state . . . raises fundamental and often unsolvable problems.”16 While Linz and Stepan highlight “an intense lack of identification” with the state as a hindrance to democratic consolidation, they argue that an excessive identification with the state can be a hindrance to democratic consolidation as well. They emphasize that too much identification with the state by a certain group in society, a majority or a minority, or a demand from the citizens by the state for identification for

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the purpose of homogenization, which they call “nation-state policy,”17 is at odds with democratic policy in a society composed of diverse interests, identities, and political goals—for example, as I understand them, ethnic, religious, national, economic, gender, or intellectual diversity.

The Overarching Angle: Religion Policy and Nation- State Policy as Makers of Organic Statism

In his chapter, “Liberal-Pluralist, Classic Marxist, and ‘Organic-Statist’ Approaches to the State,” in The State and Society, Stepan positions “organicstatism” as an antiliberal and anti-Marxist, in other words, a third way, approach to the state. He argues that this approach offered a more accurate conceptualization of the states in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s than the liberal and the Marxist approaches. The particular form that organic statism took at the time in Latin America was corporatism: My working hypothesis is that many of the political elites in Latin America have in fact responded to their perceptions of impending crises of modernization and control by invoking, in a variety of modern forms, many of the central ideas of the organic-statist, non-liberal, non-Marxist model of state-society relations described here, and have attempted to use the power of the state to forge regimes with marked corporatist characteristics.18 Stepan offered a fivefold definition of “organic statism”: (1) “the starting point is normative—the preferred form of political life of man as a member of a community”; (2) it “emphasize[s] the ends of government and . . . [is] less concerned with procedural guarantees”; (3) “since the common good can be known by ‘right reason,’ there is no need for a process whereby interest groups express their opinion and preferences in order for the leaders of the state to ‘know’ what the common good is”; (4) “rejection of the legitimacy of ‘private interests’”; and (5) “rejection of class conflict in favor of a harmonious community.”19 He articulated the relation between “organic statism” and “corporatism” as follows:

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Organic statism is a normative approach to politics that can also be formulated as an abstract model of governance. . . . Corporatism refers to a particular set of policies and institutional arrangements for structuring interest representation. . . . While organic statism and corporatism refer to different things, organic statism is sometimes connected as a guide to corporatist policies, more often as a rationale, and frequently as a combination of a guide and rationale.20 I will not engage in a discussion on the links between corporatism and fascism here. There is plenty of well-researched scholarly work, including Stepan’s, that sets certain types of corporatism as conceptual and analytical frameworks for research separate from fascism.21 I will not engage with this literature except to underscore that Taha Parla and Andrew Davison have written extensively on Kemalism’s original content as an ideology,22 of which Kemalist laicism is a subset, and particularly on how Kemalism “strongly emphasize[s] solidaristic corporatism . . . [and] also incorporate[s] partially fascistic characteristics here and there.”23 I will stick with the wider analytical framework of organic statism, which utilizes not only corporatism but also nationstate policy and religion policy, and helps capture a wider range of antiliberal and antisocialist tendencies of various degrees. It also helps to underscore how both Kemalist ideology and political Islam in Turkey are third way organic-statist ideologies. The offshoot of corporatism in the sphere of Kemalist laicism is the state mobilization of religion as a cement of society in order to bring to life at least elements (1), (4), and (5) and partially (2) and (3) in Stepan’s above definition of organic statism. In the following pages, I first show, through analyses of parliamentary debates from the past two decades, that radical Islam (Welfare Party), Moderate Islam (Justice and Development Party), and Republican Left (Democratic Left Party) all put religion at the service of the state, thus contributing to organic statism. Second, through an analysis of Turkish politics from the assassination of Hrant Dink, editor in chief of Agos, the only Armenian weekly in Turkish, on January 19, 2007, until the parliamentary elections of July 2007, I show how nationalism at the state and society levels contribute to organic statism. My analysis provides further support through

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contemporary evidence for the thesis that Parla and Davison defend in “Secularism and Laicism in Turkey.” They argue, with evidence predating the rise of the JDP, “The issue in Turkey is not secularist Kemalist generals and intellectuals versus religious fundamentalists and reactionaries. It is, rather, limited laicist Kemalists Muslims versus other Islamo-political groups.”24 Before I delve into the original contemporary evidence to be evaluated in this chapter, I would like to offer a brief historical analytical overview of laicism in the Turkish context for readers who are not familiar with Turkish politics.

A Historical-Analytical Overview of Laicism in the Turkish Context: The Roots and Branches of Kemalist Laicism The Roots

Kemalist laicism at its roots and in its contemporary forms is anticlerical but not antireligious. The statement that “Kemalism is not being without a religion” is present in all the constitutive documents of the Turkish Republic and is a commonly uttered defense of Kemalist republicans against political Islamists in public discussions today and in the past. This is a polemical defense, a manifestation of Kemalist pragmatism in a country where religion has always been constitutive of the social fabric and where religious populism has worked as a source of vote for right and center-right political parties. In this context, an explicit public position against religion has been politically costly. It is also an articulation that accurately defines the institutional arrangement regulating the relationship of the state and religion in Turkey. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s most explicit and repeated statement on religion in the 1920s and 1930s was on preventing religion from becoming “a tool for politics.” To reach this goal, the management of religious affairs was put under a state institution, the Directorate of Religious Affairs (DRA). The directorate has privileged Sunni Islam, leaving out non-Muslims and non-Sunni forms of Islam, and it put Sunni Islam at the service of building a homogenous nation-state. Through the directorate, the Turk-

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ish state has always made a claim on what the “right” religion in Turkey is, and this claim has taken mild as well as violent forms. This particular institutionalization of state and religion relations in the early years of the republic was subservient to the higher and main goal that Mustafa Kemal Atatürk set for himself and his Republican Peoples Party, namely, to “raise Turkey to the level of contemporary civilization.” The path to “contemporary civilization” passed through dismantling the institutions of the Ottoman Empire and building the nation-state. In the 1920s, the abolition of the Sultanate, the Caliphate, and the Shari’a were the major moves that disestablished the political and religious wings of the empire. Popular sovereignty, a civil code, the advocacy of positive science, and the union of education were the main constitutive of elements of the republican regime. Viewed through this lens of a regime change, the source of political legitimacy had changed; there was a laicist practice at the regime level. Yet the place and role of religion in the new nation-state displayed quite a bit of continuity with its place and role in the empire. In both the empire and then the republic, Sunni Islam was the social cement of the political body. By paying the salaries of the clerics through the DRA, the state created religious personnel faithful to the republic. This was precisely how some Republicans perceived the paying of the salaries of the clerics in the Third French Republic before the separation of church and state in 1905—as a way of controlling them, for any cleric who spoke against the republican regime could be fired. These developments in Turkey did not follow a democratic path, nor was democracy one of the six arrows of Kemalism. The six arrows were nationalism, populism, statism, laicism, republicanism, and transformationism. Kemalism in its content, defined by these six arrows, was a third way ideology, neither liberal nor socialist, but best described by Parla and Davison in Corporatist Ideology in Kemalist Turkey: Progress or Order? as a form of corporatism. The roots of corporatism in Kemalism came from Ziya Gökalp, the most systematic nationalist thinker. He was the first chair of sociology at Istanbul University and a member of parliament in the first parliament of the republic who was influenced by Émile Durkheim. Within the organicism of corporatism that prioritized the cohesiveness of the whole over the individual and economic

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classes, religion found its place as a contributor to the “cohesiveness” of society, where “cohesiveness” did not have any democratic connotations. Yet in all fairness to Gökalp, Parla and Davison underline the elements of universalism in Gökalp “who, even as a corporatist, envisioned ‘civilization’ as a shared sphere in which all nations participate in a common whole,”25 while Kemalism as an ideology promoted the superiority of the Turkish nation over all other nations. In sum, the roots of Kemalist laicism were embedded in the pursuit of the level of contemporary civilization via a regime change from empire to the nation-state with a corporatist strategy. The Branches

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk died in 1938, and the Republican Peoples Party stayed in power until 1950, when it lost in the first competitive elections ever held in Turkey to the Democrat Party. In 1937 the six arrows of Kemalism were constitutionalized, and the constitution explicitly declared Turkey as laic. The antiminority policies of the Republican state in building a homogeneous nation-state culminated in the Dersim massacre of citizens of Kurdish origin in 1938,26 and the Directorate of Religious Affairs stayed intact. The emergence of the multiparty system in 1945 was a big turning point in the religious policy of the Republican Peoples Party. The rising opposition based part of its platform on a criticism of the Republican Peoples Party for having kept the infrastructure for religion in the country underdeveloped. Although the DRA was intact, it remained small in size. Faced with this opposition platform and fearing a loss of power, the Republican Peoples Party turned toward increasing the budget of the directorate, reintroducing optional Sunni-centered courses on religion in public education, and reopening the schools for the education of imams. The party justified the change in policy by maintaining that the republican regime was consolidated; that is, there was no risk of a counterrevolution. Therefore, investing in the infrastructure of religion was not against republican principles but, to the contrary, was crucial for bringing up youth faithful to the republic. It supported this position with examples from European countries where, some members of the party argued, religion

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was still a vibrant force in the social fabric. In the face of competition for a religious electorate, the Republican Peoples Party’s pragmatism precluded a full commitment to laicism as a state policy in daily politics and limited laicism to the question of the regime. This circumstantial move to strengthen infrastructure in religion was not the last instance of its kind in Turkey; later sections of this chapter present concrete examples from the past two decades. The most significant push for religious infrastructure came from the military itself, which is the self-declared heir of Kemalism. The military’s actions in this respect underscored one more time that Kemalist laicism in Turkey embraces state mobilization of religion as a cement of society. In the 1980 military takeover, the military, exactly like its counterparts in Latin America, repressed left movements and organizations. The military-written 1982 constitution explicitly offered religion as a bulwark against leftwing politics by reemphasizing the role of the directorate in maintaining national solidarity and in introducing required religion courses in public education. During the writing of the constitution, some statements explicitly denied the existence of minorities in Turkey and emphasized that religion would undercut left politics. The center of the political spectrum moved even further to the right in the aftermath of military rule from 1980 to 1983. The president of the republic was a military officer until 1989, though the first competitive elections were held in 1983. Religious conservative political parties gained momentum in this context. The military’s next major appearance on the scene was in 1997, when the National Security Council issued a warning against the coalition government of which the Welfare Party (Refah Partisi) was a partner and Necmettin Erbakan was the prime minister. On the surface of the intervention against Refah Partisi were the speeches of Necmettin Erbakan, which included elements of violence and explicit suggestions for a “multi-juridical system.”27 In the background was the rise of Muslim capital via investments from religious citizens in the form of profit sharing.28 One of the major outcomes of this episode that started with a military warning and ended with a Constitutional Court decision closing down Refah Partisi on grounds of being the focal point of anti-laic activities was the military’s imposition on the subsequent government of an increase in the length of

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compulsory primary education from five to eight years as a way to fight political Islam. Yet the state’s educational infrastructure was not sufficient to deal with an expansion from five to eight years. Whatever the intentions were, the result was the fracturing of the main—historically speaking— constitutive institution of laicism, free and compulsory public education. By this hurried imposition, the National Security Council, the self-appointed defender of Kemalist laicism, contributed to a state policy that surpassed existing state capacity in education and prepared the grounds for the privatization of primary education, hence contributing to the cutting off of the major root of laicism. The number of private primary schools in Turkey doubled, from 335 schools in the 1996– 97 school year, just before the military warning in 1997 and the hurried impositions on the subsequent government in 1998, to 669 schools in the 1998– 99 school year.29 One of the founding texts of political Islam in Turkey is a book by Necmettin Erbakan, leader of the Welfare Party, titled Milli Görüs¸ (National Perspective). Published in 1975, this book explicitly defines political Islam as a third way ideology in opposition to liberalism and socialism, exactly the same ideological place that, according to Parla and Davison, Kemalism claims in its official documents.30 The current prime minister, Tayyip Erdog˘an of the Justice and Development Party government, has stated on multiple public occasions that religion is the cement of society, a statement which also has Kemalist versions. Since the party came to power in 2002, it has steadily increased the budget of the Directorate of Religious Affairs. The 2009 budget of the directorate was 2.4 billion New Turkish Liras, more than the amount allocated for institutions of social policy and even more than some ministries. The privatization of education has benefited among others the Fethullah Gülen religious community, whose schools are flourishing in Turkey as well as in Iraq, Africa, Europe, North America, Central America, South America, Central Asia, and some post-Soviet Repub lics (some have denied permission to these schools on grounds of secularism). Kemalist laicist scholars and politicians, including the leftwing republican Bülent Ecevit, leader of the Democratic Left Party, who passed away in 2006, have expressed in writing their appreciation of Gülen schools.31

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Is Turkey Democratizing? Justice and Development Party Politics from the Angle of the “Twin Tolerations”

Stepan’s “twin tolerations” framework analytically differentiates processes of secularization and democratization and explicitly problematizes their relationship rather than reducing one to the other. This framework can help produce a critical analysis of Turkish politics because the modernist accounts of Turkish politics are precisely built on an analytical conflation of these two processes.32 In the nonmodernist accounts—namely, accounts that do not assume a directly proportional relationship between modernization, secularization, and democracy— the decoupled nature of Turkish modernization and secularization (modernization and secularization from above) from local agents is the key and oldest problem. For instance, S¸erif Mardin, in his classic 1973 article, “Center-Periphery Relations: A Key to Turkish Politics?,”33 and Çag˘lar Keyder, in a 1997 article, “Whither the Project of Modernity? Turkey in the 1990s,”34 both address this decoupled nature of modernization and secularization in Turkey from local agents. At the same time, because Turkish politics is a quintessential example in which the relationship between the processes of modernization, secularization, and democracy is the key problem, it offers a context to evaluate the twin tolerations framework. In the twin tolerations article, Stepan regarded Turkey as a case of “nondemocratic patterns of religious-state relations.” He analyzed the existence of Turkey’s Directorate of Religious Affairs, which pays the salaries of clerics, defends a particular version of Islam, and currently employs close to 85,000 clerics. One often reads or hears allusions to Atatürk’s secularism being influenced by, and modeled on, French secularism. However, from the evidence I have given, it should be clear that France in 1905 never assumed this degree of state management of religion. For Western observers to defend Atatürk’s version of military controlled religious education as “French type secular democracy” is a

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complete misreading of secularism in the West, even in France in 1905, much less in 1959, and certainly a misreading of a democratically normal separation of religion and state.35 The question I would like to pose is whether the Justice and Development Party has presented a substantial democratic challenge to the militaristic state management of religion in Turkey and moved toward, or has potential to move toward, a democratic pattern of religion-state relations, toward “twin tolerations.” I will answer this question through public statements, statements in parliamentary debates, and the party’s actual and proposed policies. J DP Politics of the Directorate of Religious Affairs in Historical Perspective

Prime Minister Tayyip Erdog˘an summarized the JDP’s position on laiklik on December 12, 2005, six days before the parliamentary discussion of the 2006 budget of the DRA: “Religion is the cement of society.”36 During the discussion in parliament on December 18, 2005, the JDP’s position on two issues suggest the particular nature of that cement: the proposal to give Alevis as well as Sunnis representation in the DRA and the proposal to strengthen the existing structure of DRA particularly against Christian missionaries. First, the Republican Peoples Party (RPP) spokesperson argued during the parliamentary session of December 18, 2005, that the DRA should also recognize Alevis and have Alevi representatives as part of its institutional structure, and that a state budget should be provided for the group: The Directorate of Religious Affairs is an important institution. . . . We [RPP] value it more than you [JDP] do, but this institution has to contribute to the happiness of people. . . . You are pushing a significant portion of society into spiritual/psychological depression. . . . There is depression in all parts of society. . . . The [Alevis] have to be represented within the Directorate of Religious Affairs, and cemevis [Alevi places of worship] have to be given a legal status. You are not giving them a dime. These people are paying taxes to the state, but with these taxes we are supporting a single sect [Sunni].37

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In his response, the Justice and Development Party spokesperson dismissed the RPP spokesperson’s demand for representation for Alevis within DRA by reiterating, perhaps ironically, the exact Kemalist laicist argument in defense of the DRA: Mr. President and esteemed parliamentarians, the fundamental goals of the Directorate of Religious Affairs are to enlighten society on matters of religion, to provide people with solid [religious] knowledge based on the fundamental sources of religion by a method that does not disregard modern life, . . . and to maintain fidelity to religion and to the state, love and unity of the nation, positive values of the contemporary world, and societal agreement. . . . The Directorate of Religious Affairs is an institution that represents all Muslims by being equidistant on the basis of citizenship and not discriminating on the basis of sect, understanding, or religious practice. . . . Islam is a universal religion. . . . Therefore, not only does it represent all Muslims by being indifferent to ethnicity, its fundamental principle serves as an umbrella for all those who feel Muslim and believe in the religion of Islam, regardless of religious sect, character, or religious order, be it Alevi or Sunni. . . . Dear Friends, because I know our Alevi brothers, . . . in all their aspects, I see them as Muslim brothers of mine. Because we have accepted Hz. Ali as most respectable, we do not have the slightest doubt that . . . those who follow on the path of Hz. Ali . . . are Muslims. . . . Our Republican Peoples Party spokesperson mentioned here that Alevis are not represented in the Directorate of Religious Affairs and that cemevleri [Alevi places of worship] are not recognized as mosques, as places of worship. . . . Dear Friends, in fact, because the Directorate of Religious Affairs represents all Muslims, our mosques are not the places of worship . . . of any one particular sect. They are the common places of worship of all Muslims.38 I would like to emphasize two points from this discussion in parliament. First, the above references to the content of the religion of Islam as universal and compatible with modernity by the JDP are very much reminiscent of the statement in the early days of the republic by Mustafa Kemal and his supporters. On many occasions, Mustafa Kemal

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praised Islam as being the most rational religion. For instance, in January 1923 he stated, “Our religion is the most reasonable and most natural religion, and it is precisely for this reason that it has been the last religion. In order for a religion to be natural, it should conform to reason, technology, science, and logic. Our religion is totally compatible with these.”39 Or, as Mustafa Kemal’s minister of exterior articulated in a speech during the discussions on the abolishment of the Caliphate in parliament on March 3, 1924: In Islam, as opposed to Christianity, there is no clergy; in other words there is no clerical government. . . . All the civilized world has been advancing on the path to progress. Are we going to be left behind? . . . How odd! It would be very odd if we were left behind when the Religion of Islam is so noble and so progressive. . . . The nation cannot be represented. . . . The nation says that it will manage its own affairs. . . . This is what Kuran-ı Kerim insists on. It says that Muslims manage their own affairs among themselves with consultation [shura].40 The parallel between contemporary statements by JDP members and statements by Republicans in the 1920s is precisely the compatibility of Islam and modernity, or, in the words of Casanova, the offering of “religious legitimation for modern developments.” This similarity between strictly antipluralist early republican ideology and the JDP position casts doubt on the commonly made dichotomy between Kemalist laicism and political Islam that dominates the studies of Turkish politics. It also disqualifes the current politics of Islam in Turkey as a new moment. Second, while it is widely acknowledged that the institution privileges a Sunni version of Islam, the defense of the DRA by the JDP in qualifying it as an institution above sects is reminiscent of the early and late Republican strategy of putting Islam through the DRA to the assimilationist task of building a homogeneous society. Furthermore, the JDP spokesperson quoted above explains the purpose of the DRA with exactly the same vocabulary—“maintain fidelity to religion and to the state, love and unity of the nation”—as the Kemalist military officers who wrote the 1982 constitution. This similarity in the commitment to

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the DRA casts yet another doubt on the Kemalist laicism/political Islam dichotomy that dominates the studies of Turkish politics. During the December 18, 2005, parliamentary session on the budget for the Directorate of Religious Affairs, the JDP spokesperson further pointed out that Christian missionary activities in the world were an imminent danger. He said the main problem concerning the DRA was its weakness due to the vacancies among the institution’s cadres. He noted that some mosques did not even have a cadre: Dear Friends, you all know that in recent years in Turkey, as in all over the world, Christian missionaries have worked very intensely. At a time when the world promotes basic rights and freedoms, we need to provide the conditions for those from any belief to freely communicate their beliefs. Yet the . . . competition is working to the disadvantage of Muslims, as evidenced by intense propaganda of missionaries in Muslim countries and the financial support of the Union of Churches. Dialogue between religions and the elimination of conflict among them is applaudable, yet the competition among religions will last as long as the world exists. Competition can develop only under equal conditions and opportunities. Muslims must undertake more innovative activities. I believe that it is much more beneficial in the long run that these activities be within the standards of science and justice. Therefore, the number of expert cadres of the High Council of Religious Affairs of the Directorate of Religious Affairs must be increased. We need to conduct research on Abrahamic religions under the directorship of the Directorate of Religious Affairs with the cooperation of a few wellstaffed Faculties of Theology.41 This statement opens yet another angle on the contemporary dialogue and alliance of civilizations visions that dominate world politics. Visions of tolerance and mutual understanding may be the facade of competition among religious missionaries. The analogy between capitalism and religion has continued relevance: all capitalists, despite their explicit commitments to free competition, deep inside strive for monopoly, and likewise, all religions, despite their explicit commitments to toleration, deep inside would like all to convert to their side.

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Figure 13.1 The Actual Budget of the Directorate of Religious Affairs as a

Percentage of the Actual State Budget Spent Source: Calculated from Turkish Statistical Yearbook.

The above discussions in parliament during the December 18, 2005, session on the budget of the DRA was one snapshot of JDP politics regarding the DRA, the general trajectory of which is summarized in figures 13.1 and 13.2 below. The JDP has continuously increased the share of the DRA in the state budget (fig. 13.1), finally to a level that has surpassed the peak share that the Welfare Party (WP)—the party of radical Islam—had allocated to the institution in 1997.42 The 2007 budget of the DRA under the JDP has surpassed the share of thirty-seven other state institutions.43 In 2007 the DRA received more state funds than the Social Services and Child Protection Institution, the Ministry of Interior, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Transportation, the Ministry of Industry and Commerce, the Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the Ministry of Forest and the Environment, and the Ministry of Public Works and Settlement. With the 15,000 new cadres the JDP secured for the institution in March 2007, the DRA enjoys the largest staff it has ever

Twin Tolerations or Siamese Twins? | 399 86,000 84 000 84,000 82,000

Employees

80,000 78,000 76,000 74,000 72,000 70,000 68,000 66,000

20008

20007

20006

20005

20004

20003

20002

20001

20000

19999

19998

19997

19996

64,000

Figure 13.2 Number of Employees at the Directorate of Religious Affairs Source: Directorate of Religious Affairs.

had since the founding of the Republic, even larger than it was when the Welfare Party was in government, in 1997 (fig. 13.2). The JDP has embraced the DRA, a republican institution in its origins, yet to qualify this embrace as political Islamist would be historically wrong. For although the DRA was kept dormant with a low budget after its establishment in 1924 until the late 1940s, the coming of the multiparty system in 1946 facilitated a shift in the Republican vision of its tasks. Fearing a loss of power through political competition in the new multiparty system, the Republicans moved to arm the DRA by increasing its budget in 1949 in order to substitute moral ties for political ties. The Republican rationale for this investment in the DRA was discussed widely at the Seventh Congregation of the Republican Peoples Party in 1947. At this meeting, a member of the Republican Peoples Party issued a statement that captures the Republican spirit for investing in the DRA at the time: Friends, by keeping religious affairs separate from state affairs and politics and by granting complete freedom of conscience to the citizens, the article that is the object of debate does not satisfy our needs today. Today, the Turkish Nation and Turkish youth need spiritual nutrition. In nations deprived of spiritual nutrition and

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that worship only material things, preventing immorality has never been possible. In these cases humanity and society have fallen into mischief. History proves this and provides the most powerful evidence. Friends, people who worship only material things, and a human being deprived of spiritual existence, . . . do not think of anything except spending their days with pleasure. But if you look at their conscience, their masks fall and their inner state of terror is revealed. Humanity has to embrace the spiritual ties of religion at all levels; as an individual, as a community, as a nation. How will individuals embrace these spiritual ties and from where will they provide for these needs? Friends, let me speak frankly; we will find the means of satisfying this need only in the laws of morality approved by the religion of Islam [Applause]. These laws of morality will take this nation to the right path; today, those immoralities complained of everywhere and all the time will be prevented. Most respected friends, inspiring spiritual nutrition to human beings is possible only through religion. Training the spirit is not possible outside religion because religion curbs cruel and tyrannical feelings and bad inclinations in human beings, society and individual need religion. Friends, after having accepted that embracing spiritual ties is necessary, I would like to say one thing briefly. As we can see, after the end of the war, radio stations in the United States and in Europe are incessantly broadcasting religious conferences, churches are filled over capacity.44 This long quotation from the speech of a Republican Peoples Party member in 1947 is an excellent example of the antimaterialism (and the consequent antisocialism) of Kemalism. At the time the speech was given, this spirit was heightened by fear of communism during the Cold War, but according to Parla and Davison, the party also embraced this antimaterialism in its official documents in the 1920s and 1930s.45 The above republican speech advocates moral ties instead of political ties, foreshadowing the public statement of Prime Minister Erdog˘an on December 12, 2005, six days before the above discussions in parliament: “Religion is the cement of society.”

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Moreover, a close comparative analysis of the parliamentary debates at the other two crucial moments of figure 13.1—the discussions on the budget of the DRA during the coalition government led by the Welfare Party in 1997 and during the coalition government of the Democratic Left Party (DLP in the figure) in 2001—shows some similarities between political parties on the rationale of the politics of the DRA. During the December 13, 2000, discussion of the 2001 budget of the DRA in parliament, the spokesperson for the Democratic Left Party introduced the position of the party on the DRA as follows: For the religion of Islam . . . the world is a means while the love of God and the concomitant eternal happiness is an end. Religion is at the heart of the people and not in the monopoly of politics. Islam is the common belief of our society. Islam is a religion grounded on love. If today our mosques are open and we can easily hear the call to prayer and can pray freely, we should not forget that it is thanks to the Great Leader Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and the laik and democratic republican state that he established. Therefore, in all the regions [of Turkey], particularly in the Eastern and South Eastern regions, it is crucial to organize conferences, in cooperation with universities, in religious and national institutions. We cannot save on the defense of the nation and on fulfilling the requirements of the Koran and religion. Especially in the East and the South East, we should not leave mosques empty [without an imam], and appoint religious personnel with a high education. Recent history shows us how these vacant mosques are put to use by enemies of [our] religion and nation. Great duties fall upon the Directorate of Religious Affairs to straighten these unfavorable conditions.46 The spokesperson continued with an argument that the Turkish translation of the Koran has to be distributed more widely in Turkey so that people can learn the true religion and be protected against abuses of religion. Only in this way is it possible “to save in a truthful and scientific way our society and particularly our youth [from ignorance]. . . . For this program to be successful important duties fall upon the Directorate of Religious Affairs and the National Ministry of Education.”47

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This position was similar to the concerns and comments put forth by the spokesperson of the Virtue Party, the party of radical political Islam founded by the members of the Welfare Party after the latter was banned by the Constitutional Court in 1999. After underlining that the DRA was understaffed and that some mosques in Turkey did not have religious personnel, he stressed that religion is the cement of society: Some values are common to all society. . . . Religion is the first of these common values, most probably the most important one, and the common element of all the people in this country. In other words, it is the common element of each one of us in this parliament. No one can claim exclusive property over religion. If she or he does, harmony will be disrupted in the management and the ruling of society and depression/crisis will result. . . . It [religion] is the common property of all parties right to left. . . . The Directorate of Religious Affairs has to view society from this perspective.48 The Virtue Party spokesperson concluded by stating that if the Directorate of Religious Affairs is weak, then “illegal religious activities will flourish.” The spokesperson for the National Action Party—the party of the radical nationalist right—also repeated the same theme by stating that “all nations have religion as the core of their culture.” He continued: “The budget allocated for the Directorate of Religious Affairs is not sufficient to deliver its sevices in an effective and productive way. . . . It [the DRA] has to be restructured according to current ser vice needs by issuing a law for its reorganization.” The December 12, 1996, parliamentary discussions on the 1997 budget of the Directorate during the coalition government led by the Welfare Party was not any different with regard to the role attributed to the directorate. The Welfare Party spokesperson made the following speech: Dear friends, faith is an important resource for the tranquility of society. Imagine that the 70 million are a faithless crowd. I guess all of you would agree that there would be no tranquility and order left. Therefore, instead of opposing religion, the most rational path

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is to make peace with religion, to love it and to purify it from falsehoods. . . . Therefore, it is self-evident that the Directorate of Religious Affairs has to be a part of the state administration and a state budget be allocated for it. . . . A law for its organization has to be issued right away. With this law, the Directorate of Religious Affairs has to be removed from the slippery influence of politics. . . . In short, the Directorate has to be made autonomous. . . . Cemevi is not an alternative to mosques, it is a place of gathering and conversation. . . . The Directorate of Religious Affairs serves all Muslims equally in Turkey; it is not under the rule of any religious sect or order; it embraces and guides all of them. . . . One of the fundamental duties of the state is to make the necessary arrangements for individuals to learn, live, and spread their basic rights. Therefore, it is a pedagogical, psychological, and sociological necessity that religious education and instruction in our schools start at a very early age. . . . Today, if we look at Europe and the United States and observe the bad habits we all reject such as alcohol, gambling, prostitution, and their consequences such as murder, divorce, and deadly disease such as AIDS, we realize how much of a blessing our Holy religion Islam and the family structure built upon it is. . . . The Directorate of Religious Affairs has an important role. The Directorate is also effective for fighting terrorism, divisive political currents and all kinds of harmful currents of ideas. . . . The budget of the Directorate we are discussing has been increased 25% compared to last year. . . . This is marvelous. . . . Due to the very important duties we expect from the Directorate we need to increase it [its budget] more.49 All three political parties see the DRA as a tool for substituting the “right” religio-moral ties for political ties and mobilizing the “right” religion as a solution to structural problems, all falling within a tradition of organic statism, particularly elements (1), (4), and (5) in Stepan’s definition. Returning to the December 18, 2005, session of the parliament, we can see the rich comparative remarks made on European countries and Turkey. For instance, a JDP member made the following comparison with Europe:

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This organization [DRA] which is providing religious services on five continents of the world through its international representatives does not only serve the Turks in those countries but also serves all people who would like to learn about Islam. On October 3, 2005, we entered the starting period of the negotiations with the European Union. The strongest and most organized institutions of Europe are still churches and religious endowments. The financial and spiritual power of these institutions is nearly stronger than the states’ budgets, and their spiritual authority and influence are stronger than those of heads of states. Although they are laic, according to the constitutions of strong European Union countries Germany, France, Italy, and England, laws contrary to Christian dogma cannot be proposed. . . . In order for our country to endure against Christian institutions with strong and rooted organizations, we have to evaluate and strengthen these three basic institutions to the best of our ability: . . . Ministry of Culture[,] . . . Ministry of Education[,] [and] . . . Directorate of Religious Affairs.50 These references to the persisting role of religion in Europe, despite the fact that some are inaccurate, have to be taken seriously. On the one hand, they are simple political rhetoric. References from within political Islam in Turkey to the diversity of relations between the state and religion in European countries started with the Welfare Party of Necmettin Erbakan in a more systematic and grounded way than the JDP statement above.51 In a pamphlet in 1994, the Welfare Party demanded a constitutional amendment, specifically calling for the elimination of the term laik from Article 2 of the Turkish Constitution. The party had often called Europe a “Christian Club” but then diverged from its anti-Western stance in the 1970s52 and engaged in a comparative analysis of European constitutions. In order to argue for the constitutional amendment in Turkey, the Welfare Party pamphlet used French exceptionalism— that it is the only European country with the term laïque in its constitution. It also cited the fact that Norway, Greece, Denmark, and England have constitutionally established churches, and emphasized that every individual has a right to religious instruction in Germany. In other

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words, a party of “radical political Islam” that had been banned by the Turkish Constitutional Court, and whose closure was sanctioned by the European Court of Human Rights, once used and bequeathed a strategy of “turning to the West” or “westernism.” Such comparisons with European countries look more like pragmatic political attempts and do not necessarily signal or constitute moves toward democratization in Turkey. On the other hand, such references have a different significance in light of the persisting role of religion in Europe and the current stateled restructuring in state-religion relations under way in many European countries.53 Such examples include the Shari’a courts established in the United Kingdom in 2008, the corporatist French Muslim Council forged by Nicolas Sarkozy, and the plan articulated in Sarkozy’s book Republic, Religions, and Hope for advocating religious morality as the cement of society to demobilize impoverished masses in the French ghettos.54 They attain additional significance and give birth to interesting hypotheses. This additional significance was put forward best at the first Alliance of Civilizations meeting. The press release issued after the fourth meeting of the Alliance of Civilizations in Istanbul, held November 12–13, 2006, was titled “Politics, not Religion, at the Heart of the Growing Muslim-West Divide, New Report Argues.” The title led one to believe that a shift from a religiously based understanding of the problems of the world order to a political understanding was taking place.55 But the report cites religion among its guiding principles for a solution: “Religion is an increasingly important dimension of many societies and a significant source of values for individuals. It can play a critical role in promoting an appreciation of other cultures, religions, and ways of life to help build harmony among them.”56 Read from the perspective of “religion as a solution,” which is a part of politics in Europe, the similarities JDP members find between the place religious organizations have in European societies and the place they envision in Turkey are the constitutive vocabulary of a future religiously segregatedintegrated Europe.57 A statement by Mehmet Aydın, minister responsible for Religious Affairs, ended the December 18, 2005, session of the parliament on the budget of the DRA as follows:

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One more time in both speeches there is the subject of Alevis. Every year it [this subject] comes on the agenda, and out of respect for the subject . . . issue . . . problem . . . I would like to say a few words. I always say the same thing; here a thing [duty] that does not fall upon the Directorate of Religious Affairs is demanded from it. This institution cannot solve this problem. . . . It is quite weak, and therefore, we are issuing a new law for its organization. The minister dismissed the question of the representation of Alevis and shifted the topic to a potential new law for the restructuring of the DRA; this law passed after a heated debate in parliament in June 2010. The new law maintained the exact Kemalist relation of the DRA vis-à-vis the state, introduced a more hierarchical structure to the institution by differentiation in pay among the urban and countryside imams, and left the Sunnite bias of the institution intact by once again excluding all demands from Alevi organizations and members of parliament from Kurdish regions.58 The new law even fell short of propositions of the conservative right political theoretician Ali Fuat Bas¸gil (1893–1967), the first thinker to offer a systematic defense for an autonomous DRA in the 1950s. The new law did not take any steps toward autonomy but rather mobilized the state further to strengthen Sunnite infrastructure throughout the country, a goal that Bas¸gil had proposed to reach through an autonomous DRA. Bas¸gil’s argument was again full of European references, and the goal was to strengthen the power of religion in society. His model was the Catholic Church. Bas¸gil, in his memoirs, summarizes the central social role he attributes to religion in his writings: In western countries, organizations and institutions which control unruly youth are in place. First among them is the church. This is an organization that, without being tired or daunted, is always at work. In Switzerland, kids are taken to church almost every day until they become of school age. And, after they start school, they are taken to church twice a week under the supervision of their teacher to pray and listen to the preacher. When these kids, who grow up in such an environment, meet temptations later on, the sentiment of God he [or she] has received always constitutes a rein for him [or her].59

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The role attributed to religion for the taming of youth goes along with admiration of the efficacy of the structure of the Catholic Church for such a purpose. Therefore, Bas¸gil defends an autonomous DRA in order to strengthen the hold of religion on the youth in particular and spreading religion as a social bond in general. This we can find best articulated in his 1954 book, Religion and Laiklik. After reviewing the structure of the Catholic Church, Bas¸gil comments as follows: Here dear reader, the Catholic castle [referring to the church], which communism could not demolish in Europe, has been established in this way. This is the Catholic front . . . which Fascism and the armies of Hitler could not penetrate and therefore had to reconcile with. Today, among the big religions, in terms of its worship place organization and its personnel, the most impoverished one is, regrettably, the religion of Islam. We are not going to delve into the historical and sociological causes of this impoverishment here. Let it suffice to underline two fundamental causes [of this impoverishment]. The most important one of them is that religion in the world of Islam has not parted with state control and declared its freedom against politics. According to us, the worship organization of Islam will continue to be impoverished as long as it is under the control of politics and serving politicians. Today, the only way for the worship organization of Islam to be set free from this condition and servitude is to achieve autonomy, even freedom, and in this way to part with politics and politicians. Today, the second fundamental reason for the impoverished state of the worship organization and personnel of Islam has to be sought in the constitution of the religion of Islam itself. The constitution of the religion of Islam is different from that of Christianity in an important respect: while Christianity is built upon the organization of religious personnel and offices, in Islam there is no religious personnel and offices. In Islam, a sufficiently knowledgeable and experienced Muslim can lead the religious service. . . . Without doubt, this lack [of structure of religion personnel and offices] is a superior characteristic. In this way, Islam has attained the status of the most liberal among religions, and its followers have not been subject to the rule of clerics as it has been the case in Christianity at different degrees during

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history. But, on the other hand, the experience of the past two centuries has shown that the lack of worship organization and religious offices has created a lack of direction and proved to be a shortcoming.60 The JDP has not introduced autonomy—in other words, a move from institutional control to institutional separation—on the 2010 law for the DRA, but even if it does one day, Bas¸gil’s old proposal for a centralized, hierarchical, and autonomous DRA in order to strengthen the social role of religion suggests that the relation between democratization and such a move toward autonomy will have to be studied in empirical detail. Bas¸gil’s proposal raises many questions about the relationship between the institutional separation of religion and state and the institutional control of religion by the state with democratization. Here, it is crucial to remember Talal Asad’s critique of José Casanova’s tripartite division of the secularization thesis into three subtheses—(1) Differentiation of spheres; (2) Privatization of religion; and (3) Decline of the social significance of religion—and Casanova’s argument that deprivatization of religion (religion becoming public) can be compatible with democracy. Asad summarizes and criticizes Casanova as follows: It [Public Religions in the Modern World, by Casanova] argues that the deprivatization of religion is not a refutation of the [secularization] thesis if it occurs in ways that are consistent with the basic requirements of modern society, including democratic government. . . . The argument is that whether religious deprivatization threatens modernity or not depends on how religion becomes public. If it furthers the construction of civil society (as in Poland) or promotes public debate around liberal values (as in the United States), then political religion is entirely consistent with modernity. If, on the other hand, it seeks to undermine civil society (as in Egypt) or individual liberties (as in Iran) then political religion is indeed against modernity and the universal values of the enlightenment. This is certainly an original position, but not, I would submit, an entirely coherent one. For if the legitimate role of deprivatized religion is carried out effectively, what happens to the allegedly

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viable part of the secularization thesis as stated by Casanova? Elements (1) and (3) are, I suggest, both undermined.61 Bas¸gil’s defense of separation complicates the Asad-Casanova debate even further. It points out that institutional separation, as well as the Kemalist laicist line of institutional control, can be a means both for increasing the social role of religion, where religio-moral ties become a substitute for political ties and religion policy a substitute for social and education policy, and for undermining the differentiation of spheres that neither the Casanova deprivatization perspective nor the Stepan twin toleration perspective would want to underwrite. Here we reach the limits of the institutionalist analysis. The mobilization of both institutional control and institutional separation— understood as separation from a centralized and hierarchical religious institution—for increasing the social role of religion, we learn from the Turkish context, suggests at least two paths of research for the future of democratization. First, a sociology and an anthropology of institutions regulating the relation between state and religion could show whether institutional control and institutional separation pose differentiable alternatives as far as the social role of religion is concerned. Second, instead of just focusing on religion, an evaluation of religion infrastructure in comparison with other spheres such as education and social policy can be much more fruitful. If we shift to a relational independent variable— for example, investment in religion infrastructure in relation to investment in education infrastructure—we will better see the priorities of political actors and opportunity costs involved, and we will have gained a better analytical framework for the evaluation of democracy and secularism. The shared political will—left to right— to invest in religion infrastructure looks all the more contrary to priorities of democracy given the weak state of primary education infrastructure in Turkey and the current privatization of primary education under way.62 Focusing on required and free public primary education is not only significant from the angle of democratic theory, but also from the angle of secularization theory, for free and compulsory education is, historically speaking, one of the institutional founding stones of secularization in Europe and in Turkey.

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Justice and Development Party Politics from the Angle of “Nation-State Policies”

Hrant Dink, editor in chief of Hürriyet, had already been convicted for “denigration of Turkishness” under Article 301 (the Turkish penal code article limiting freedom of speech for reasons of national order) at the end of a court case initiated by a state prosecutor when he was murdered on January 19, 2007. The main response of politicians to the assassination was that this was an attack not only on a public intellectual, a member of the new left Freedom and Democracy Party, a member of the Armenian community, and the editor in chief of the only Turkish-language Armenian weekly but also an attack on the Turkish nation. Prime Minister Erdog˘an’s statement immediately after the assassination summarized this position: “This attack, on the person of Hrant Dink, has been on all of us, on our unity and togetherness, our repose and stability as a nation. A bullet has been fired at free thought and our democratic lives.” The circulation of nationalist and ultranationalist newspapers rose steadily following the assassination, and differences between Erdog˘an’s statement and the ultranationalist and nationalist right-wing newspapers were minimal. The ultranationalist Tercüman increased its circulation from 34,314 in the week preceding the assassination to 44,985 four weeks afterward, moving twenty-fourth to twenty-second in terms of national circulation. The nationalist Hürriyet jumped from a circulation of 575,541, ranked third in the country, in the week preceding the assassination to 665,956 the sixth week after the assassination, ranking first in the country in circulation (fig. 13.3). The Tercüman headline on January 20, 2007, read “Bu Kurs¸unlar Türkiye’ye” (These Bullets Are to Turkey). Hürriyet turned Dink into a “son of the nation,” providing one more instance of the significant place of family analogies in nationalist thought. The Hürriyet headline on January 22 read, “Türkiye Evladını böyle ug˘urlayacak” (Turkey’s Farewell to Its Son), and the newspaper praised the funeral arrangements for Dink, using different vocabulary from the prime minister but dissolving the issue in the same crucible of nationalism.

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Figure 13.3 Circulation of Hürriyet through the Assassination of Hrant Dink

At least 200,000 people walked in an eight-kilometer funeral procession with placards reading, “We are all Hrant Dink,” “We are all Armenians,” and “Murderer 301” in Turkish and in Armenian. This was twice the average attendance that a typical demonstration in defense of laiklik at Anıtkabir (the Tomb of Atatürk) would attract. For instance, the media reported that a demonstration in defense of laiklik in November 2006 at Anıtkabir was attended by approximately 127,000 people. The number of people in Dink’s funeral cortège was four times the offi cial Armenian population in Turkey, a clear sign that the support the Dink family received was not only from the Armenian community. In addition, the statements on the placards were radically antinationalist and antistatist for the nationalist Turkish context. They underscored how the state is not only insufficient but also contributes to the general lack of individual freedoms in Turkey through the Turkish penal code’s Article 301. Being convicted under this article had made Hrant Dink a target for nationalists. The responses of the Republican Peoples Party (the opposition) parliamentarians in the discussion ranged from explicit xenophobia—with statements like “Turks are becoming a minority in their homeland”63— to statements calling marchers in the procession strategically minded Turkish nationalists who were sending a message to the world by embracing Dink after his death. Statements at both ends of the spectrum

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alleged that the goal was to ensure that Dink’s assassination could not be used to push for the genocide laws under discussion in France and the United States.64 Justice and Development Party members were often silent, but when they spoke, their attempts to deal politically with the event produced contradictory statements, such as that the assassination should be condemned, but it is of value to the country that Trabzon, the assassin’s hometown, is nationalist.65 Regardless of party positions, all arguments and comments were headed in the direction of preserving a distinction between good and bad nationalism, qualifying the racist attack as an exceptional instance of bad nationalism and not the whole truth about nationalism.66 They were all in denial of the simple fact that approximately four times the official Armenian population in Turkey participated in the procession; hence, the question was not simply an Armenian one. Dink’s murder was clear evidence that one of the Dahlian institutional requirements of democracy, the right to freedom of speech, was not present in Turkey. The mourning for Dink in the ultranationalist and nationalist media lasted for about a week. Tercüman’s headline on January 24 read, “Hepimiz Türk’üz [We are all Turkish],” and the following news article presented the participants of the procession as usurpers and abusers of Dink’s funeral. Hürriyet headlines on January 25, 2007, announced a national survey asking the following two questions in an attempt to moralize social facts and displace public discussion from a factual to a moral register: (1) Is the slogan “We are all Armenians” right or wrong? and (2) Is it okay to recite the Al-Fatiha67 after Dink? Emerging evidence linking the assassin to the Turkish police, gendarme, and secret service, and the publicization of the welcoming treatment the assassin received at the police station where he was held, revealed that this nationalist reaction was deeply rooted. The police and gendarme had treated him like a hero and had photos taken with him under the Turkish flag all together. The most current evidence at the time of writing was a phone conversation between a friend of the assassin (known to be an informant for the police) and a police officer, where the officer expressed his contentment with the assassination. While the nationalist Turkish press was trying to dissolve the issue in nationalism, the European and American press was dissolving it in Ar-

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menian diaspora politics, all placing the Turkish state versus the Armenian community opposition at the heart of their analyses but defending different sides. It was completely forgotten that Dink’s public statements through his career were much more nuanced than a Turkish-Armenian binary opposition could capture. For instance, Dink joined other public intellectuals tried under Article 301 in October 2006 to oppose the French law in recognition of the Armenian genocide, because he preferred a solution by public discussion rather than by legal measures.68 In February 2007, eight months before the parliamentary elections, Prime Minister Erdog˘an started explicitly playing on a distinction between good and bad nationalism in order to differentiate his party’s position from that of the Nationalist Action Party (far right, not then in parliament). He stated, “They [the National Action Party] are not nationalist; they are racist, discriminationist headhunters. We do not say ‘love it or leave it.’ We say ‘let the sons and daughters of this country love each other.’ ”69 Yet Erdog˘an neither attended the funeral of Dink nor pushed for a change in Article 301 of the penal code under which Dink was convicted. And when, during the opening reception of the Grand Assembly on October 1, 2007, the president of the Association for the Support and Education of Women Candidates for Parliament (KADER) pointed out to Prime Minister Erdog˘an that in Rwanda there is a quota for women in parliament and asked him whether Turkey will ever have quotas for women in parliament, Prime Minister Erdog˘an told her to go and live in Rwanda,70 suggesting that the distinction he made between good and bad nationalism and his criticism of the slogan “love it or leave it” in February was simply election propaganda. The JDP’s silence on the question of freedom of speech was striking, and it raised serious doubts about how dedicated the party was to challenging the “nation-state policy”-oriented organic state tradition in Turkey. Was this silence on such a fundamental institutional requirement of democracy to be interpreted as a “tacit consent” to the status quo, or just political prudence concerning the timing of such a change? Simultaneously, the Republican Peoples Party, the historical founder of laik institutions, started its move to get closer to the Justice and Development Party. Respect for Atatürk and religion in schools was present among the declared election proposals of the party. This move was already visible when, during the visit of Pope Benedictus XVI in

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November 2006, the leader of the Republican Peoples Party, Deniz Bay kal, stated that as “social democrats” they should not dismiss religion. The RPP’s claim for social democracy has never been more than lip service, and on March 22, 2007, the only counterstatement that Baykal could come up with to oppose Erdog˘an’s “Religion is the cement of Turkish society” was “Nationalism is the cement of our society.” And the Turkish party spectrum was set before the elections from Islamistnationalist only as far as nationalist-Islamists, proving again that party politics in Turkey is still trapped within the Turkish-Islamist synthesis instituted and defended by the military. While party leaders were riding the rising tide of reactionary nationalism in the wake of Dink’s assassination and distinguishing themselves from each other on the nationalist-Islamist spectrum, ethnic and religious-nationalist fever was finding expression at all levels in the country both in the state and in civil society. Radical right-wing civil organizations led by retired high-ranking military officers—a perfect example of the militarization of society and how organic statism is encroaching upon the nascent space of civil society in Turkey—were conducting initiation ceremonies by a pledge on a gun and the Qur’an.71 The president of the Turkish History Association, Professor Yusuf Halaçog˘lu, criticized the participants of the funeral for being ideological and so well organized that they could only have acted in such a manner by having foreknowledge of the assassination, falling just short of accusing the participants of the movement as being a party to the assassination. With this nationalist fervor came the presidential elections of April 28, 2007. General Chief of Staff Yas¸ar Büyükanıt spoke on April 12 and signaled the preferences of the military to the government before the presidential elections—that the military preferred to enter northern Iraq, but the operation should be ordered by parliament.72 On the question of the presidency, he signaled that the military wanted a president loyal to the Republic not in appearance, but in essence,73 which in the context of the military’s desire to enter Northern Iraq simply meant a president loyal to the interests of the military institution. The first matter the Justice and Development Party had to deliberate over and decide in parliament each time it took office, both in 200274 and in 2007, was the question of a military operation across the Iraqi border. In both

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parliaments the party had more than a simple majority; therefore, the decision was in its hands. In 2002 the parliamentary decision was against the operation. The statements of the general chief of staff prior to the 2007 parliamentary elections were highly suspected of initiating a bargain between the JDP and the military on the question of an acrossborder operation. From April 14 to May 13, Republican demonstrations in five cities— Ankara, Istanbul, Manisa, Çanakkale, and I˙zmir— were organized by the Union of National Civil Society Organizations against the candidacy of Abdullah Gül for the presidency. On the night of the first round of presidential elections, April 27, at 23:10, General Chief of Staff Headquarters issued a warning against religious threats to laiklik on their website, popularized in the media as the e-coup (electronic coup).75 The military document referred to the presidential elections and stated that the military would take action if necessary.76 The tension between the JDP and the military was alleviated after a secret meeting between General Chief of Staff Büyükanıt and Prime Minister Erdog˘an. In the presidential elections, Abdullah Gül was the only candidate. In the first round of elections on April 27, the attendance in parliament was less than 367, and Gül could not receive the required two-thirds majority (a two-thirds majority required 367 votes; JDP seats numbered 365). The constitution stated that a simple majority in the third round would elect the president if no candidate received a two-thirds majority in the first two rounds. In other words, even if JDP was short of a two-thirds majority, in the third round it could elect its preferred candidate. Just after the first round, the opposition party in parliament, RPP, appealed to the Constitutional Court for the annulment of the first round of presidential elections on the grounds that the constitution not only specified a two-thirds majority in parliament for the election to presidency but also a two-thirds majority in parliament to be able to hold the presidential elections. For the first time in the history of Turkey, the Constitutional Court, having received the signal of the military—court decision or coup—interpreted the two-thirds majority mentioned in Article 102 as the requirement of convening and annulled the first round of elections on May 1, 2007. With this decision it became impossible for the parliament to hold an election, because

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now the JDP needed the participation of at least two parliamentarians from the opposition parties in order to be able to reach the 367 seats required with the new court decision for convening, and the opposition in parliament refused. If the parliament is unable to elect a president, the constitution required parliamentary elections. The election was rescheduled for July instead of its normal time in November, and in the meantime the Justice and Development Party took advantage of the lower requirement for constitutional change (while two-thirds is required for electing a president, three-fifths is required for a constitutional change in parliament unless there is a presidential veto, which can be overturned by a two-thirds majority) and started pushing for a change in the constitution. After a constitutional change, Abdullah Gül was elected president in the first popular presidential elections of Turkey in August 2007. When the vice general chief of staff accompanied Prime Minister Erdog˘an on his November 5, 2007, U.S. visit, the coalition that had been forming between the military and the Justice and Development Party since April 2007 became blatantly public concerning the Kurdish question. After the visit, President Abdullah Gül declared in the media: “From this point on not diplomats, but soldiers will speak.”77 From a position of opposing the military on the question of an across border operation in 2002, the JDP and the ex-JDP new president converged to the military position in favor of an operation in 2007. Concomitant with the military operation was the censorship of the media on the coverage of the South East, and the head prosecutor of the republic launched a constitutional court case against the Democratic Society Party (Kurdish political party) in parliament, charging them for having members who had not yet completely broken their ties with the PKK. During the military operation across the Iraqi border in December 2007, Prime Minister Erdog˘an stated, “single nation, single patri, single flag and single state,”78 an exact reiteration of the position of the military.79

Conclusion

I have argued that the current institutions of “laiklik” do not satisfy the “twin tolerations,” nor are the policies of the JDP, in great contradic-

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tion to their celebrated position, pushing Turkey toward “democratic patterns of religious-state relations.” They are reproducing, rather, the religion and nation-state policies bequeathed by the Kemalist militarycivilian establishment. The empirical evidence I have presented on the JDP fits much better under “organic statism” than under “twin tolerations.” With the victory of the JDP, Turkish democracy has proved “resilient” but only with the collaboration and co-optation of the JDP into the organic statist tradition in Turkey. I would like to suggest that at least for the case of Turkey, Stepan’s analytical concept “multivocality,” which asks the researcher to focus on concepts and arguments within religious traditions and texts with democratic potential, still shares one significant element with Huntington’s view. In The Clash of Civilizations, Huntington writes: While Australia’s leaders embarked on a quest for Asia, those of other torn countries—Turkey, Mexico, Russia—attempted to incorporate the West into their societies and to incorporate their societies into the West. Their experience strongly demonstrates, however, the strength, resilience, and viscosity of indigenous cultures and their ability to renew themselves and to resist, contain, and adapt Western imports. While the rejectionist response to the West is impossible, the Kemalist response has been unsuccessful. If non-Western societies are to modernize, they must do it their own way and, emulating Japan, build upon and employ their own traditions, institutions, and values.80 In his work on religion and politics, Stepan criticizes Huntington’s understanding of culture as a totality,81 which denies the possibility of democracy traveling across certain contexts. Instead, Stepan follows a Weberian “worldview” understanding of culture conveyed by Weber’s switchman metaphor. In other words, although for Stepan democracy can travel to any context, sometimes he still works with the assumption that there is a distinct “own way” to democracy that at the least partly passes via the religious tradition in question. And he operationalizes the analysis of religious tradition as a worldview by focusing on its multivocal texts and the local agents who mobilize these texts. My analysis of Turkish politics first shows that Kemalists and Islamists have no significant difference in their respective conceptual and institutional

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mobilizations of religion. If Kemalism is the “imposed way,” then what is new and “own” about the Islamist way? Second, my analysis also shows that the conceptual and institutional mobilizations of religion and nationalism are better described as “organic-statist”—a concept from Stepan’s earlier work—than democratization.

Notes I would like to thank Sandrine Bertaux, Douglas A. Chalmers, Toros Korkmaz, Scott Mainwaring, Jörg Nowak, and Taha Parla for their comments and suggestions and the Bog˘aziçi University Research Fund (BAP 6054) for providing financial support during my research. 1. Laiklik is the concept used to refer to the relation of religion and state in Turkey. It denotes a condition rather than an “ism.” Its parallel would be secularity and not secularism. Secularism would correspond to laikçilik, but this concept is not common, except for a few usages during the writing of constitutions. Whether laicism and secularism are different concepts referring to different phenomena, or simply French and English versions of the same phenomenon, is an issue of debate. See Taha Parla and Andrew Davison, “Secularism and Laicism in Turkey,” in Secularisms, ed. Janet R. Jacobsen and Ann Pellegrini (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 61; and see Jean Baubérot, “Laïcité, Laïcisation, Secularisation,” in Pluralisme religieux et laïcité dans l’Union Européenne, ed. A. Dierkens (Bruxelles: Editions de l’Universite de Bruxelles, 1994), 9– 20. 2. An international project led by Spain and Turkey to produce alternatives to the Clash of Civilizations perceptions of world politics. 3. Alfred Stepan, “The World’s Religious Systems and Democracy: Crafting the ‘Twin Tolerations,’” in Arguing Comparative Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 216–17. 4. Juan J. Linz and Alfred C. Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 25. 5. Alfred Stepan, “Liberal-Pluralist, Classic Marxist, and ‘Organic Statist’ Approaches to the State,” in State and Society: Peru in Comparative Perspective (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 26. 6. Alevis are a minority Islamic group in Turkey. The majority of Muslims in Turkey are Sunnites. The population statistics for the Alevis are highly politicized and run between 12 million and 20 million. The total population in Turkey is more than 70 million.

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7. Stepan, “The World’s Religious Systems and Democracy,” 222. 8. Robert A. Dahl’s eight requirements are (1) freedom to form and join organizations, (2) freedom of expression, (3) the right to vote, (4) eligibility for public office, (5) the right of political leaders to compete for support and votes, (6) alternative sources of information, (7) free and fair elections, and (8) institutions for making government policies depend on votes and other expressions of preference. The two additional Linz-Stepan criteria: (9) the opportunity for the development of a robust and critical civil society and (10) a democratically written democratic constitution. 9. Stepan, “The World’s Religious Systems and Democracy,” 216–17. 10. Ibid., 236. 11. José Casanova, “Civil Society and Religion: Retrospective Reflections on Catholicism and Prospective Reflections on Islam,” Social Research 68, no. 4 (2001): 1075. 12. Alfred Stepan and Graeme B. Robertson, “An ‘Arab’ More than a ‘Muslim’ Democracy Gap,” Journal of Democracy 14, no. 3 (2003): 33. 13. Stepan, “The World’s Religious Systems and Democracy,” 225. 14. Fred Halliday, Islam and the Myth of Confrontation: Religion and Politics in the Middle East (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003), 117. 15. Linz and Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation, 5. 16. Ibid., 7. 17. Ibid., 25. 18. Stepan, “Liberal-Pluralist, Classic Marxist, and ‘Organic Statist’ Approaches to the State,” 67. 19. Ibid., 59– 61. 20. Alfred Stepan, “Corporatism and the State,” in State and Society, 46– 47. 21. Douglas A. Chalmers, “Corporatism and Comparative Politics,” in New Directions in Comparative Politics, ed. H. J. Wiarda (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1985), 59– 81; Taha Parla and Andrew Davison, Corporatist Ideology in Kemalist Turkey: Progress or Order? (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2004), 25– 34; Philippe Schmitter, “Still the Century of Corporatism?,” Review of Politics 36, no. 1 (1974): 85–131; Stepan, The State and Society; Ruth B. Collier and David Collier, “Inducements versus Constraints: Disaggregating: Corporatism,” American Political Science Review 73, no. 4 (1979): 967– 86. 22. For the distinction between corporatism as a regime and as an ideology, see Chalmers, “Corporatism and Comparative Politics,” 63– 67. 23. Parla and Davison, Corporatist Ideology in Kemalist Turkey, viii. See also Taha Parla, The Social and Political Thought of Ziya Gökalp, 1876–1924 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1985), 49. 24. Parla and Davison, “Secularism and Laicism in Turkey,” 74. 25. Parla and Davison, Corporatist Ideology in Kemalist Turkey, 279.

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26. Air raids and state troops took the lives of civilians in Dersim in order to reinforce the nation-state. 27. This was the exact phrase used in the European Court of Human Rights decision against Refah Partisi in July 2001. It referred to the violation of the rule of one law for all citizens and the advocacy of discrimination according to religious beliefs. 28. Most of the companies that generated capital in this format have recently gone bankrupt and left their shareholders in economic deprivation. 29. Turkish Statistical Yearbook. 30. Necmettin Erbakan, Milli Görüs¸ (National Perspective) (Istanbul: Dergah Yayınları, 1975), 25. 31. See the collection of essays: Toktamıs¸ Ates¸, Eser Karakas¸ and I˙lber Ortaylı, eds., Barıs¸ Köprüleri: Dünyaya Açılan Türk Okulları (Bridges of Peace: Turkish Schools Opening to the World) (Istanbul: Da Yayıncılık, 2005). 32. For instance, see Niyazi Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1964). In his conclusion on the nature of secularization in Turkey, Berkes writes, “The struggle was not over the question of separating the spiritual and the temporal, but over the difference between democracy and theocracy” (479). 33. S¸erif Mardin, “Center-Periphery Relations: A Key to Turkish Politics?,” Daedalus (1973): 169– 90. 34. Çag˘lar Keyder, “Whither the Project of Modernity? Turkey in the 1990s,” in Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey, ed. Sibel Bozdog˘an and Res¸at Kasaba (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), 37– 51. 35. Stepan, “The World’s Religious Systems and Democracy,” 245. The comparison with France has become much more complicated since the 2004 law in France banning religious symbols in public schools. The commission report in favor of a ban preceding the law has implicitly offered Kemalist laicism as a justification. In other words, recent evidence suggests that France is currently modeling itself on Turkey. For recent developments in France in historical context, see Murat Akan, “Laïcité and Multiculturalism: The Stasi Report in Context,” British Journal of Sociology 60, no. 2 (2009): 237– 56. Recent developments aside, the above comparative remark is accurate, and I take it as a starting point for the current section. 36. “Din Çimentomuz,” Radikal, December 12, 2005. 37. Records of the Turkish Grand National Assembly, 22nd term, 4th year, 35th meeting, December 18, 2005. 38. Ibid. 39. Parla and Davison, Corporatist Ideology in Kemalist Turkey, 110. 40. Records of the Turkish Grand National Assembly, 2nd term (vol. 7) (1924), 50, 55, 60. The term consultation is currently in popular usage by both

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scholars and moderate Muslim politicians alongside many Qur’anic terms with democratic implications in a hermeneutical attempt to democratize Islam from within. This is in no way an original moment in the history of Turkish laicization, as this quotation from 1924 suggests. 41. Records of the Turkish Grand National Assembly, 22nd term, 4th year, 35th meeting, December 18, 2005. 42. This comparative point calls for a reevaluation of the question of continuity and discontinuity between JDP and previous parties of political Islam. The empirical evidence in this article challenges the common narrative of the JDP break from the previous parties of political Islam toward a more moderate position. See Binnaz Toprak, “Islam and Democracy in Turkey,” Turkish Studies 6, no. 2 (2005): 167– 86, for an example of such an analysis. 43. “Diyanet bütçesi 37 kurumu solladı,” Hürriyet, October 24, 2006. 44. Records of the 7th Republican Peoples Party Congregation (Ankara, 1948), 448– 70. 45. Parla and Davison. Corporatist Ideology in Kemalist Turkey, 68–140. 46. Records of the Turkish Grand National Assembly, 21st term, 3rd year, 30th meeting, December 13, 2000. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid. 49. Records of the Turkish Grand National Assembly, 20th term, 2nd year, 31st meeting, December 12, 1996. 50. Records of the Turkish Grand National Assembly, 22nd term, 4th year, 35th meeting, December 18, 2005. 51. Proposal for Compromise on Constitutional Change by the Welfare Party (Ankara: Semih Ofset, 1994), 25– 37. 52. Erbakan, Milli Görüs¸ (National Perspective), 9–10. 53. See Akan, “Laïcité and Multiculturalism”; and Murat Akan, “Governing Religious Difference or Differentiating Governance Religiously?,” paper presented at the ECPR Joint Sessions, Lisbon, 2009. 54. Nicolas Sarkozy, La République, les religions, l’espérance (Paris: Cerf, 2004), 19. 55. “Politics, not religion, at the heart of growing Muslim-West divide, new report argues,” Alliance of Civilizations Press Release, Fourth High Level Group Meeting, November 12–13, 2006. 56. Alliance of Civilizations Report of the High-Level Group, November 13, 2006, 3. 57. Étienne Balibar, “Droit de cité or Apartheid?,” in We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, trans. James Swenson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 31– 50. 58. For a detailed critical analysis of the law, see Murat Akan, “‘Religious’ and ‘Laik’ Actors and the Question of Democracy in Turkey” (forthcoming).

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59. Ali Fuad Bas¸gil, Yakın Maziden Hatıra Kırıntıları (Crumbs of Memory from a Recent Past) (Istanbul: Yag˘mur Yayınevi, 2007), 25– 26. 60. Ali Fuat Bas¸gil, Din ve Laiklik (Religion and Laiklik) (Istanbul: Sönmez Nes¸riyat ve Matbaacılık, 1954), 95– 96. 61. Talal Asad, “Secularism, Nation-State, Religion,” in Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 182. 62. See Murat Akan, “Politics of the Veil: Towards an Infrastructural Theory of Secularism” (unpublished manuscript); Murat Akan, “Infrastructural Politics of Laiklik in the Writing of the 1961 Turkish Constitution,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 13, no. 2 (2011): 190– 211. 63. Records of the Turkish Grand National Assembly, 22nd term, 5th year, 55th meeting, January 25, 2007. 64. Ibid. 65. Records of the Turkish Grand National Assembly, 22nd term, 5th year, 56th meeting, January 30, 2007. 66. The distinction, Partha Chatterjee explains in his book Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 2– 3, is made to cope with the “liberal-rationalist dilemma in talking about nationalist thought.” Liberals could not deny that the history of nation-states, which Charles Tilly in his “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” in Bringing the State Back In, ed. D. Rueschemeyer, P. B. Evans, and T. Skocpol (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 169, described as a history of “organized crime” rather than the history of liberty and progress, but instead liberals could create some new distinctions, such as the good versus evil nationalisms, save the former and protect a liberalismnationalism synthesis, by trying to gather all the baggage of crime under the latter. As nationalism and racism in Turkey have been reduced to psychological, lumpen, and regional (the teenage assassin comes from a city infamous for its radical nationalism) issues after the assassination of Dink, the problems of nationalism and racism in the world have been reduced to German and/or Oriental problems under the pen of liberalism. These are particularizations of the problems of nationalism and racism, which all function, according to Étienne Balibar, “Racism and Nationalism,” in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, ed. Immanuel Wallerstein Étienne Balibar (New York: Verso, 1991), “as an alibi” (45). These distinctions are displacements, tinkering with typologies and making use of these “alibis” in order to, in the final analysis, protect nationalism as an idée force. 67. The first shura of the Qur’an. 68. “301 Mag˘durları: Fransa Düs¸ünceye Darbe Vuruyor,” Radikal, October 9, 2006. 69. “Erdog˘an: “Bunlar Irkçı ve Kafatasçı,” Radikal, February 4, 2007.

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70. “Gülbahar: Erdog˘an Kotayı Kabul Etmis¸ti,” Bianet, October 2, 2007. 71. “Mersin’e dikkat!,” Radikal, February 14, 2007; “‘Vatanseverlik’ Yarıs¸ında Örgütler Emekli Asker Dolu Al Sana ‘sivil’ toplum!,” Radikal, February 17, 2007. 72. “Orgeneral Büyükkanıt ‘Kuzey Irak’a girmeliyiz’ deyip topu Hükümete attı,” Radikal, April 13, 2007. 73. “Büyükanıt cumhurbas¸kanı adayını tariff etti,” Radikal, April 13, 2007. 74. Koray Çalıs¸kan and Yüksel Tas¸kın, “Litmus Test: Turkey’s Neo-Islamists Weigh War and Peace,” Middle East Report Online, January 30, 2003. 75. I will not go into detail here, but this term misrepresents the military warning in 2007 as completely discontinuous with the past tradition of military takeovers and warnings in Turkey. 76. www.tsk.mil.tr/10_ARSIV/10_1_Basin_Yayin_Faaliyetleri/10_1_ Basin_Aciklamalari/2007/BA_08.html. 77. “Gül: Artık Diplomatlar Deg˘il, Asker Konus¸acak,” Radikal, November 7, 2007. See also ”Devletin Tepesinde Sag˘ırlar Diyalog˘u,” Radikal, June 1, 2007. 78. “Erdog˘an Fena Patladı,” Internet Haber, December 27, 2007. 79. The secretary of the National Security Council — the institution through which the military dictates its preferences to the government — on June 1, 1997, during the peak of the events, referred to the operation as the “postmodern coup,” and in his speech on the anniversary of the founding of the Council had listed as the main features of the laik state: “Everyone should know that the fundamental features of the modern and laik state founded by Atatürk will not change and will not be changed. These features are single patri, single nation, single state, single language and single flag. Let this be known.” See Demokrasi Kararlılıg˘ı,” Milliyet, June 1, 1997. 80. Samuel P. Huntington, Clash of Civilizations: Remaking of the World Order (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 154; emphasis added. 81. For culture as totality, see Murat Akan, “Contextualizing Multiculturalism,” Studies in Comparative International Development 38, no. 2 (2003): 58.

14 Consociationalism versus Twin Tolerations Religion and State in Israel Hanna Lerner

In his well-known article “The World’s Religious Systems and Democracy: Crafting the ‘Twin Tolerations,’ ” Alfred Stepan provides a theoretical framework for evaluating the democratic relationship between religion and state.1 Based on broad comparative analysis, Stepan defines minimal boundaries of freedom of action for political institutions visà-vis religious authorities and for religious individuals and groups vis-àvis political institutions. His requirement of “twin tolerations” between religious individuals and groups on the one hand and state institutions on the other is a useful conceptual framework for evaluating the appropriate relationship between religion and democracy, and particularly in the context of an ongoing conflict over the role religions should play in the public sphere. Israel represents a country in which religious politics play a central role and where issues of religion-state relations stirred intense public, political, and legal disputes for over sixty decades since its indepen dence in 1948 and are far from being over. Officially, the state is defined as “Jewish and democratic,” yet whether these two components in the state’s identity are compatible is one of the most divisive questions in Israeli politics. Stepan’s framework, thus, may be of great importance to enhancing our understanding of democracy and religion in Israel. 424

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Does Israel fulfill the basic conditions of democratic religion-state relations defined by Stepan’s concept of twin tolerations? To what extent do the Israeli institutional arrangements in the religious sphere violate democratic principles? These are the central questions addressed in this chapter. The analysis proposed here leads to the conclusion that Israel does not fulfill the necessary condition of democratic religionstate relations as defined by Stepan and which characterizes the religionstate relations in Western democracies. Moreover, I argue that the recent failures to reform the controversial religious arrangements—particularly in the area of marriage and divorce—reflect the rigidity of the religious status quo and its resilience to change. Following a brief background regarding the nature of the religioussecular debate in Israel and the semiformal consociational arrangements adopted during the first years of statehood, the three areas in which Israeli religious status quo deviates from Stepan’s twin tolerations are delineated: personal law, preservation of Shabbat, and the question, Who is a Jew? Although existing arrangements in these three areas have been harshly criticized as infringing on the citizens’ individual rights, by and large their reform was limited. The reluctance of the political system to propose radical changes in religious arrangements in Israel was demonstrated most clearly in the 2006 Knesset proposal for a draft constitution. While many Israeli citizens hoped that the writing of a new constitution would advance a radical transformation of existing inegalitarian arrangements, the proposed solutions to disputed religious issues mirrored extant “systematic constraints” on consociational arrangements in the religious sphere, to use Alfred Stepan’s terminology from a different article.2 Similarly, the failure to enact a comprehensive civil marriage bill in 2010 reflects the rigidity of the existing religious arrangements. Why have Israeli religious-secular arrangements been so resistant to change? A comprehensive answer to this intriguing question requires a separate discussion, one beyond the limited scope of this chapter. Nevertheless, I argue briefly in the concluding section that continuous ideological, political, and judicial debate over religion-state relations in Israel supports the major argument that Stepan sought to promote in his twin tolerations article: The civilizational approach limits our understanding of the possible relationship between democracy and religion. The multivocality within Jewish religious society is evidence that

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there is no inherent cultural conflict between Judaism and democracy. Rather, particular institutional religious arrangements in Israel are the result of a political struggle over the meaning of Jewishness. It is a struggle between conflicting conceptions of Jewish identity—religious, national, cultural, or historical. Before continuing, one point of clarification is important: The conflict between religious and secular-cultural-national conceptions of Jewish identity is only one of the continuous tensions in Israeli politics between the polity’s Jewish and democratic elements. Two additional sources of tension are, first, relations between the Jewish majority and the nearly 20 percent non-Jewish minority population within Israel’s pre-1967 borders. Second, there is a deep, ongoing political debate within Israel concerning the country’s borders—whether those should be determined by the 1967 lines or include the whole region of Israel/ Palestine, and the nature of the state given issues associated with border determinations, such as matters of military control, civil occupation, settlement issues, and so forth.3 While the three sources of tension are interrelated, and while questions of religious identity are difficult to decouple from those of national and ethnic identity, this chapter does not address manifestations of the Jewish-Palestinian conflict within Israeli borders or the one outside the state borders. Rather, it focuses only on the religious-secular dispute within Israel’s Jewish society.4

Israel’s Religious- Secular Conflict

The conflict over Israel’s religion-state relations differs in its intensity from religious conflicts in other Western democracies. Christian Democratic parties in Europe, for example, are concerned primarily with preserving the interests of their religious institutions and education systems.5 However, rather than focus on issues of allocation of power and resources among various groups, religious parties in Israel are also interested in leaving the imprint of religious Judaism on all state’s institutions, by means of the legislature, executive, and judicial systems. What is at stake is “a struggle over the ultimate values rather than distributive justice, over the whole rather than the parts.”6

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The internal debate over Jewish identity in the modern world dates back to late-eighteenth-century Europe. Religious orthodoxy and the Zionist national movement represented opposite reactions to modernism. The emergence of Jewish nationalism in the form of the Zionist movement posed new and powerful challenges to Orthodox Jews by providing a secular, modern, and nationalist alternative to traditional Judaism. The return to Zion was intended to create a new Jewish identity defined in political-territorial rather than in religious-communal terms.7 Most ultra-Orthodox Jews rejected Zionism for its generally atheistic approach and also because the Zionist principle of self-emancipation violated religious doctrine, according to which only God could redeem the Jewish people and return them to the land of Israel. Standing between the secular Zionists and the ultra-Orthodox, Religious Zionists viewed the foundation of the state as the beginning of redemption. For them, the political-territorial aspect of Jewish identity was a supplemental component to the traditional national-religious definition of Jewish identity.8 As the possibility of the emergence of an independent Jewish state became increasingly more realistic after World War II, the religioussecular struggle over the prospective legal system of the new state intensified. The leaders of the Orthodox Agudat Israel party demanded that the legal system be based on the halacha (Jewish religious law). As Y. M. Levin, leader of Agudat Israel, stated in a meeting with the heads of the Jewish Agency, the de facto pre-state government: “A Jewish state that is not governed by the halacha after two thousand years of Exile is a desecration of God, a shunting aside of the Torah, a rebellion against the Kingdom of God in its own land, and is untenable.”9 The halacha is a comprehensive, self-contained legal system. As such, it could theoretically have been an alternative to the civil legal system of the state. From the perspective of an Orthodox Jew, halachic law takes precedence over the law of the state.10 Consequently, the fundamental issue in terms of the relationship between religion and state was not simply whether to grant the Jewish religion and its institutions official recognition and legal status (as is often the issue in other countries where church-state questions are debated), but the thornier issue of legal precedence between the laws of the state and halachic law. This

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problem was clearly expressed during the Knesset deliberations over the constitution by Member of Knesset (MK) Meir Levonstein of Agudat Israel, who declared: “There is no place in Israel for any constitution created by men. If it contradicts the Torah— it is inadmissible, and if it is concurrent with the Torah—it is redundant.”11 Thus, this was not solely a question of symbolism or of granting cultural and educational autonomy to particular communities, but, in the most fundamental way, a debate over the norms and values of the state. And, in 1949, when the issue of the constitution first appeared on the agenda of the Knesset, it was clear to all that the central problem that divided them with regard to the content of the future constitution was, in the words of one MK, “one cardinal question: what is the State of Israel?”12

Semiformal Consociationalism: The Religious Status Quo

The disagreement between those who defined Israel identity in nationalcultural terms and those who defined it in religious terms was one of the main reasons for the Knesset’s decision in 1950, a year and a half after independence, to refrain from drafting a formal constitution.13 Thus, instead of writing a constitution, which would require a clear choice between the competing religious and secular visions of the state, the Knesset decided to adopt a constitution in a gradual manner through a series of Basic Laws that would be enacted over the years.14 In the absence of a written constitution, competing religious and secular claims have been dealt with through a series of semiformal con sociational arrangements that over time became entrenched in the political landscape. The most notable of these consociational arrangements was the concept of the religious status quo, never clearly or formally de fined, that was first introduced in the coalition agreement of 1950. Since then, it has been included in coalition agreements of most Israeli governments15 as a manifestation of the delicate balance between religious and secular demands, based on what is known in the consociational literature as a mutual-veto principle.16 The status quo arrangements shaped during the formative years of the state effectively determined nonseparation between religion and

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state in certain areas. Their origin is commonly attributed to a letter, dated June 1947, sent by David Ben-Gurion and other leaders of the Jewish Agency to the non-Zionist Orthodox Agudat Israel group. Designed to gain support of the religious leadership for the Jewish state, the letter reassured them that establishment of a decidedly secular state would not harm the status of the Jewish religion or threaten the values and way of life of religious Jews.17 The letter stipulated key principles that would guide governmental policy and action in four main areas: observance of the Sabbath, observance of kashruth (dietary laws) in governmental institutions, exclusive jurisdiction of rabbinic courts over Jews in matters of personal status (in particular marriage and divorce), and the autonomy of religious educational institutions.18 However, the language of the letter is broad, and consequently its operative implications soon became highly contentious themselves. Status quo arrangements were formulated during the first years of the state through Knesset regulations and informal practice. Following the state’s declaration of independence, the Provisional Council decided to incorporate the existing legal framework of the British Mandate into the Israeli legal system, which in turn incorporated numerous Ottoman laws. One result of this decision was preservation of the authority held by the institutions of various religious denominations in areas pertaining to religious status. These authorities were based on the Ottoman Millet system that recognized the legal autonomy of all religious traditions in the area of personal law. Later, various aspects of the status quo were formally defined through legislation. These included, for example, the recognition of the Sabbath as the day of rest,19 observance of kashruth laws in military installations,20 restrictions on production of pork,21 exclusive Orthodox jurisdiction over Jewish marriage and divorce,22 and retaining an independent Orthodox educational system.23 Later in the chapter I discuss some of these regulations in more detail. Other aspects of the status quo, in particular exemption of Orthodox yeshiva (higher education) students and religious women from mili tary service, resulted from the harsh political and military reality faced by the government during the War of Independence. “The declaration of the establishment of the State of Israel in the midst of a bloody war created a political reality which required maximal consensus,” writes the historian Menachem Friedman, “that is, the complete participation

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of the religious parties, including the Orthodox Agudat Israel, in the government. This reality determined almost by itself . . . the application of the status quo principle in religious issues.”24 In addition to the mutual veto principle, religious-secular tension was dealt with through three other types of arrangements, considered essential to the theory of consociational democracy, as defined by Arend Lijphart.25 The first such arrangement—coalition partnership—has existed since the first days of the state, as various religious parties have been almost always included in the ruling coalition. Representatives of the National Religious Party (NRP) were members of a coalition with Mapai (and later the Labor Party) even when the latter’s majority in the Knesset enabled it to form a coalition government without the support of this religious party. The second standard consociational principle used was the rule of proportionality. In Israel this entailed per capita allocation of financial resources and is reflected in coalition agreements concerning the allocation of resources to religious institutions and services, and particularly to the religious educational system. The third arrangement ensured that disagreements regarding the school curriculum would be resolved according to the consociational model in application of the principle of autonomy. Religious educational institutions in Israel, just like those in the Netherlands, enjoy autonomy and per capita governmental funding.26 Israel is not, however, a consociational democracy in the full sense of the term. According to Lijphart, “Consociational democracy means government by elite cartel designed to turn a democracy with a fragmented political culture into a stable democracy.”27 But, as Don-Yehiya points out, not all segments of Israeli society are included in consociational arrangements. In particular, political parties representing the Arab population in Israel are consistently excluded from participation in government coalitions. Also, not all groups within the Jewish community have participated fully in consociational arrangements. For example, non-Orthodox religious groups, such as the Reform and Conservative, did not have representatives in official religious institutions of the state until very recently.28 In his famous article “Path towards Redemocratization: Theoretical and Comparative Considerations,” Alfred Stepan pointed to an inherent difficulty of consociational democracy: the tendency to build

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“systemic constraints” to rapid societal change.29 According to Stepan, consociational arrangements risk entrenchment of identity divisions within the institutional framework of the state and ultimately perpetuate polarization, instead of moderating it. Indeed, in the Israeli case, Stepan’s criticism of consociationalism has proven to be accurate. Over the years, as inter-Jewish debate about the meaning of the Jewishness of the state intensified, little change occurred in actual institutional and legal arrangements that determine the relationship between religion and the Israeli state.30 The question of whether the religious status quo should be reformed or maintained has involved heated ideological, political, and judicial debate in Israel for decades. More than sixty years after independence, the disagreement between religious and secular visions of the Jewish state is still the main obstacle to adoption of a written constitution, including a comprehensive bill of rights.31 At its core, the religious-secular debate revolves around the question of the extent to which the existing religious institutions and regulations are compatible with the definition of the state of Israel as “Jewish and Democratic.” This definition was introduced, for the first time, in two Basic Laws passed by the Knesset in 1992.32 While the definition of Israel as “Jewish and democratic” aimed at finding common ground for the competing religious and secular visions of the state, it stirred an intense debate among political activists, academics, and judges regarding its interpretation.33 Does Israel fulfill the basic conditions of democratic religion-state relations? To what extent does the Israeli status quo arrangement vi olate the basic principles of democracy? Here, Stepan’s concept of twin tolerations is useful in evaluating the appropriate relationship between religion and democracy.

Twin (In)Tolerations

In one of the first articles that addressed the issue of religion-state relations through comparative politics lenses, Stepan demonstrated how, in fact, no Western democracy has institutionalized or regulated a complete separation between religion and state. Indeed, in these countries, the relationship between religion and state is characterized by their

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compatibility rather than by their strict separation. Nevertheless, Stepan argued, a democratic polity should include some necessary limitations on state interference in religious affairs as well as some constraints on religious influence on decision making within state institutions. These “twin tolerations” delineate the “necessary boundaries of freedom for elected governments from religious groups, and for religious individuals and groups from government.”34 Stepan defined two key areas of autonomy that together delineate “minimal freedom for the democratic state and minimal religious freedom of citizens.” The first key area of autonomy is for democratic institutions: Institutions that emanate from democratic procedures should be able, within the bounds of constitutions and human rights, to generate policies. Religious institutions should not have constitutionally privileged prerogatives which allow them authoritatively to mandate public policy to democratically elected governments.35 The second key area of autonomy refers to religious freedom and distinguishes between autonomy from government and from other religions. According to the first type of religious freedom, “individuals and even religious communities, consistent with our core institutional defi nition of democracy, must have complete freedom to worship privately.” According to the second type of religious freedom, individuals and groups “should also be able publicly to advance their values in civil society, and to sponsor organizations and movements in political society, as long as their public advancement of these beliefs does not impinge negatively on the liberties of other citizens or violate democracy and the law, by violence.”36 In other words “no group in civil society—including religious groups— can a priori be prohibited from forming a political party. Constraints on political parties may only be imposed after that party, by its actions, violates democracy and should be decided not by parties in the government but by the court.”37 In most general terms, the two key areas of autonomy defined by Stepan’s twin tolerations are implemented in Israel. The 2011 Freedom House report rated Israel at 1.5 (on a scale of 1 to 7), qualifying the state for inclusion among “free” states. While the report cites Israel’s social

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discrimination against Arab citizens, who comprise nearly 20 percent of its population, Israel is recognized as an electoral democracy, with regular and free elections, an independent judiciary, equal political rights to all its citizens, and impressive respect of civil liberties such as freedom of speech and freedom of association.38 Similarly, religious freedom is respected in Israel, and all religious groups—including Christian, Muslim, Druze, and Baha’i communities—have full jurisdiction over their own members in matters of marriage, divorce, and burial. Nevertheless, some of the religious arrangements that evolved in Israel during its formative stage, in the 1950s and 1960s, fail to fulfill the minimal liberal precondition for Stepan’s twin tolerations. This minimal precondition is included in both “key areas of autonomy” he defined, albeit in different formulations: the autonomy of democratic institutions rests on the precondition of “protection of human rights.” Accordingly, the autonomy of religious groups includes the demand that “public advancement of [individuals’ and groups’] beliefs does not impinge negatively on the liberties of other citizens.” The following discussion demonstrates how in three areas of religious concern — personal law, preservation of Shabbat, and the question of who is a Jew—the existing status quo arrangements infringe on citizens’ individual liberties.39 These three issues stand at the center of the intense conflict between the Jewish population’s religious and secular camps. Personal Law

The issue of personal law, particularly the regulation of marriage and divorce, is considered among the most divisive issues in the religioussecular schism. The Orthodox parties’ monopoly on personal law—one of the cornerstones of the religious status quo—is based on the Provisional Council’s decision, four days after the establishment of the state, to preserve all authorities of the religious institutions in the area of personal law as they existed prior to the foundation of the state.40 In 1953 this policy was reinforced by the Rabbinical Courts Jurisdiction (Marriage and Divorce) Law when it established that “matters of marriage and divorce of Jews in Israel, being nationals or residents of the state, shall be under the exclusive jurisdiction of rabbinical courts” and “marriage and

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divorce of Jews shall be performed in Israel in accordance with Jewish religious law.” Consequently, the institution of civil marriage does not exist in Israel. Anyone who wishes to marry or divorce must do so in a religious ceremony, even if they are proclaimed atheists.41 Women in particular are discriminated against by the patriarchal religious legal system, since Jewish law enables men to deny their wives’ request for a divorce.42 Israel’s Women Equal Rights Law (1951) explicitly specifies that the law does not apply to matters of marriage and divorce. And, consistent with this arrangement, Israel included two reservations related to such matters when signing the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women in 1991.43 In addition, the status quo regarding personal law does not allow formal state recognition of marriage conducted by non-Orthodox religious Jews (such as Reform and Conservative Jews), and does not allow marriage of interfaith couples or marriage between people defined by the rabbinical authorities as “barred from marriage” (psuley chitun) for various reasons.44 In 2008, 319,000 citizens in Israel (4.3 percent of the population) were defined by the Ministry of Internal Affairs as “others” under the category “religion.” The definition of “others” included “immigrants who are not registered as Jews by the Ministry of Internal Affairs (non-Arab Christians and residents whose religion is not defined).”45 Persons defined as “others” were not permitted to be married in Israel as they are not recognized as members of any religious community. Over the years, the Israeli legal system developed several legal alternatives to circumvent limitations set by formal religious marriage, such as the institution of “common-law relationships” (yeduim betzibur). In addition, many Israelis who travel abroad to marry in a civil ceremony are registered as married by the state upon their return. Nevertheless, while mitigating some of the effects of basic rights violations caused by religious law, these alternative arrangements have not resolved all difficulties that result from the Orthodox monopoly over formal marriage in Israel.46 Moreover, the separation between religious and secular courts entails an inherent clash of authorities within the judicial system. This is especially the case when the Rabbinical Court refuses to accept an authoritative ruling of the Supreme Court.47

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The inability of the aforementioned 300,000-plus citizens, defined as “others” or “lacking religion,” to marry in Israel was the main problem targeted by the proposed Civil Marriage Bill, which was initiated in 2009 by the right-wing party Israel Beiteinu. However, after long negotiations, a diluted version of the bill was passed by the Knesset in March 2010 as the Spousal Covenant for Persons Having No Religious Affiliation Act. The new legislation did not address the infringement of basic rights of women, who are still subject to a traditional religious patriarchal legal system. For example, according to recent estimates, around 100,000 women in Israel have either been denied a divorce or have had to comply with conditions set by the husband in order to be awarded a divorce.48 Moreover, critics of the bill argued that it still leaves the authority to define the couple’s religious identity in the hands of religious authorities.49 And, finally, the bill allows couples who are both considered as not members of any religion to formally register as couples, and to have equal legal rights and obligations as a married couple. The parallel institution of family relations it created, termed “registration of couples,” is not contiguous in all respects with the legal marriage recognized by the religious establishment. For example, the legislation proposes that the state recognize the rights and duties of a registered couple (similar to those of a married couple) only eighteen months after they have formally registered as a couple.50 The Couplehood Union legislation represented the existing difficulties involved with the religious status quo arrangements rather than propose a genuine resolution of them. Yet personal status law is not the only area in which, contrary to Stepan’s twin tolerations policy, existing institutions advance beliefs that “impinge negatively on the liberties of other citizens.”51 Two additional areas of intense conflict between religious and secular views are those of the preservation of Sabbath and the issue of conversion. Sabbath

When Israel was founded, Saturdays and Jewish holidays were declared the official days of rest.52 However, the character of the Sabbath in the public sphere was among the most heated issues in the religious-secular

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conflict. The Orthodox demanded closing down all workday activity, including public transportation and places of public entertainment, such as movie theaters and restaurants. The secular population claimed, vehemently, that applying these halachic prohibitions and rites was intrusive and anachronistic.53 The accommodational status quo concerning Sabbath observance has evolved and altered over the years. The Knesset passed the Working Hours and Rest Law prohibiting working on Sabbath in 1951.54 However, this legislation includes permission to work on Sabbath in cases of vital services to the public or when the security or economy of the state would be endangered (section 12).55 Conflict continued over the interpretation of the law, particularly in regard to recreational facilities. The Knesset transferred the decision from the national to the local level and to auxiliary municipal regulation in 1991. Accordingly, each municipality was authorized to regulate the functioning of recreational facilities on Sabbath in accordance with the character of its local population.56 During the 1990s, a new status quo has emerged regarding commercial activity on Sabbath in malls and shopping centers located outside municipal territory or within the territory of Kibutzim, enabling Saturday commerce at these locales.57 So far, all legislative attempts on the part of orthodox parties to change this state of affairs have been rejected by a majority of the Knesset.58 Constitutional debates over Sabbath observance involved not only cultural considerations but also touched on social issues such as the right of workers to enjoy a weekly day of rest. A strong argument was made for preservation of Sabbath employment restrictions based on religious halacha as well as the desire to create a common Israeli lifestyle that distinguishes between everyday work and a restful pause at the end of the week. This view was expressed by the Supreme Court in the case of Design 22 (2004), in which the court upheld the legality of the law and declared that it fulfills two worthy causes: social and religiousnational.59 Nevertheless, many view existing practices that preserve the status quo of Saturday as a day of rest as “religious coercion,” particularly the prohibition on public transportation and the fines imposed on businesses open on Saturday.60

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Conversion and Definition of Who Is a Jew

When the Law of Return was enacted in 1950, it did not define clearly who is considered to be Jewish and hence entitled to automatic citizenship upon arrival to Israel. Nevertheless, soon the question, Who is a Jew?—whether Judaism should be defined in national-cultural or religious-Orthodox terms — became a matter of public debate in Israeli society, and continues to enflame debate in Israeli political and judicial systems today. In practical terms, for the sake of population registry, the Israeli government adopted a religious-Orthodox definition of Jewishness. Thus, in 1970, following two decades of intense debate, the Knesset amended the Law of Return, formally defining a Jew as “one who was born to a Jewish mother or was converted and is not a member of another religion.”61 Nevertheless, this definition left much ambiguity concerning the nature of proper conversion. The controversy over conversion lies at the heart of the conflict between Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jewish movements, the Conservative and Reform movements, both of which were excluded from the consociational arrangements that regulated religion-state relations during the first decades of the state.62 While there is no law granting Orthodox exclusiveness in conversion (as opposed to matters of marriage and divorce), de facto status quo policy has evolved so that the state recognizes any type of conversion undertaken abroad, even Reform and Conservative, while only Orthodox conversions are recognized in Israel. Since the 1990s the Reform and Conservative movements have turned continuously to the courts to seek recourse to have their conversions recognized. Here, the Supreme Court deviated from the status quo in a series of rulings in determining that for the purpose of population registration, the state should recognize a non-Orthodox conversion whether undergone in Israel or abroad.63 The issue of conversion is particularly acute in regard to the estimated 300,000 immigrants from the former Soviet Union who are not recognized as Jews by the rabbinical establishment and hence deprived of various basic rights; for example, they cannot marry or divorce in Israel. The controversy over proper conversion is far from being resolved, as is evident by a recent crisis regarding a Great Rabbinical Court

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decision to invalidate retroactively conversions made by a National Zionist Rabbi in the past fifteen years.64

Resistance to Change in Constitutional Proposals

Although status quo arrangements—particularly in the areas of personal law and the “Who is a Jew?” issue—have been criticized harshly for infringing on citizens’ individual rights, by and large their reform has been limited over the years. During the 1980s and 1990s the consensus regarding the consociational arrangements of the religious status quo eroded, yet the political system was reluctant to reform existing regulations. The Knesset refrained not only from passing new legislation in the religious sphere but also from even discussing new bill proposals.65 Religious parties vehemently resisted any legislation that threatened to alter the religious status quo.66 Consequently, the liberal-secular camp turned to the judiciary branch in the hope of achieving greater liberalization and secularization. Nevertheless, studies have shown that although the court “took a side” by and large in the religious-secular dispute and in most rulings favored the secular worldview, its effect on religious status quo arrangements was limited in scope.67 The intensification of the rift in recent years between secular and religious camps was also reflected in the continuous dispute over the future of the Israeli constitution. While Basic Laws relating to political institutions were passed in relative ease by the Knesset during the first decades after Independence, there was consistently strong opposition to enacting a comprehensive bill of rights. The religious parties vigorously objected to the draft of the Basic Law on Human and Civil Rights proposed by Minister of Justice Dan Meridor in 1989. Their main concern was that it would undermine the religious status quo, even though the bill explicitly stated that the new Basic Law would not infringe upon religious regulations regarding marriage and divorce.68 In 1992 liberal Knesset members eventually managed to pass in the Knesset two Basic Laws, Human Liberty and Dignity and Freedom of Occupation. However, these new Basic Laws included various provisions that limited their impact on the status quo. A special “validity of laws” clause was added to Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty, which

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provided that it “shall not affect the validity of any law in force prior to the commencement of the Basic Law” (sec. 10). A similar clause was included in Basic Law: Freedom of Occupation, although in this case the perpetuity of the validity clause is limited to a number of years (sec. 10). And, since religious parties feared potential limitations on future religious legislation, the term Jewish was added stating that the purpose of Basic Law: Freedom of Occupation is “to establish in a Basic Law the values of the state of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state” (sec. 2). In addition, in 1994, any hope (in the liberal-secular camp) that the new Basic Laws would allow greater influence of judicial review was halted by a highly convoluted amendment to Basic Law: Freedom of Occupation. Titled the Effect of Nonconforming Law (sec. 8), the amendment determined that “a law that infringes upon the freedom of occupation shall be valid even though it is not consistent with provision 4 [the restrictive clause], if included in the law passed by a majority of the Knesset members is an explicit provision stating that it is valid despite what is said in the Basic Law.”69 A new hope for liberal reform of the existing religious status quo arrangements was introduced in 2003 when the Knesset’s Constitution, Law, and Justice Committee attempted to draft a constitutional proposal for the state of Israel. This was the most comprehensive endeavor since 1950 to write a constitution and to address the most controversial issues that divided Israeli society.70 The committee held more than eighty meetings over the course of the next two years and heard the testimonies of hundreds of experts, legal advisors, public figures, and politicians. Hundreds of documents were submitted to the committee as background material. The prospect of writing a new constitution was viewed by many secular Israelis as an opportunity to reform inegalitarian religious regulations that have evolved— partly formally, partly informally—since the beginning of the state. However, similarly to the Civil Marriage Bill of 2009, the Knesset’s proposed solutions to disputed religious issues mirrored the “systematic constraints” on the consociational arrangements in the religious sphere. The final report presented to the Knesset by the committee in February 2006 contained more than ten thousand pages of detailed protocols and a draft constitution.71 However, despite conducting intensive

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discussions, the committee did not succeed in finding acceptable compromise formulations to the most controversial issues. Rather, the constitutional draft, titled “Constitution in Broad Consent,” incorporated several alternative formulations for controversial topics on which committee members had not reached agreement. Thus, instead of making choices among the conflicting proposals, the committee chose to consolidate a single constitutional document that sought to “enjoy wide support among Israelis and Jews worldwide.”72 It was left to the Knesset to transform this multiversion document into a comprehensive coherent constitution. Knesset members from both the Orthodox and the liberal-secular pole acknowledged the substantial distance between their positions and admitted that agreement had yet to be been achieved on issues such as personal law, particularly marriage and divorce, conversion to Judaism, the “Who is a Jew” question, Kosher food, and public observation of Sabbath.73 As deputy minister of welfare and member of the Orthodox Yahadut Hatorah party, Abraham Ravitz, stressed during the Constitutional Committee discussions: The main reason that for fifty years we could not make any progress towards a constitution is that . . . first, the Jewish people already has a constitution, and we should implement it in our daily life, . . . and second, the fact that we cannot compromise on the most fundamental issues which, from our perspective, are essential to our existence as a people.74 The political reluctance to make clear choices that would reform the existing inegalitarian religious status quo arrangements was mirrored in the Knesset’s constitutional proposals regarding the three contentious issues of personal law, Shabbat and the definition of a Jew. All the Constitutional Committee’s proposals refrained from suggesting a comprehensive reform. All alternatives put forward compromise solutions that sustained most of the existing inegalitarian arrangements. In addition, all proposals limited the Court’s power to decide in controversial issues that touch upon the fundamental values and basic norms underpinning the state.75

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Conclusion

This chapter demonstrates how Israeli religious status quo arrangements fail to fulfill Alfred Stepan’s minimal condition of democratic twin tolerations between religious groups and state institutions. Why are the religious status quo arrangements, which evolved during the first years of the state, so resistant to change? A comprehensive account of all causes of Israeli political stagnation with regard to religious legislation requires a much broader discussion than can be provided in this brief concluding section. Hence, only three key factors of religious politics in Israel are discussed. First, many view the electoral system in Israel as among the central factors for the consistently elevated influence of religious parties on Israeli politics. The transformation of the Israeli political system from a one-dominant-party (Mapai) to a two-camp system (Left and Right) in 1977 created the dependence of coalitional governments on the support of the religious parties.76 Second, the overlapping nature of the religious-secular divide and institutional tension between Israeli judicial and legislative branches has resulted in ongoing political reluctance to introduce constitutional reform of the religious arrangements. Due to the growing power of the religious parties in the Knesset, the Supreme Court has become the central arena for promotion of the liberal-secular Jewish agenda since the 1980s, and this has led to the emergence of a significant arena of tension between legislators and the Supreme Court.77 In 1992, after legislation of the two Basic Laws on human rights, the Court-Knesset conflict intensified due to the Supreme Court’s referral to these laws as a “constitutional revolution.” Chief Justice Aaron Barak argued that the two new Basic Laws were constitutionally entrenched and consequentially “the Israeli courts are authorized to overrule any statute which infringes upon an entrenched Basic Law.”78 This doctrine of selfclaimed power of judicial review was affirmed by a Supreme Court ruling in the case of Ha’mizrachi Bank v. Migdal in 1995. However, since then, the Supreme Court has used its power of judicial review of legislative actions in only a few marginal cases. Nevertheless, this ostensible constitutional revolution has paralyzed any further legislation of new Basic Laws. The religious parties, which oppose the Supreme Court’s

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liberal and secular worldview, fear any future activist judicial interpretation of the Basic Laws and have blocked their enactment.79 Third, one may argue that the persistence of religious arrangements represents a perpetual schism in Israeli society regarding the public role of religion. Six decades after independence, Israeli society lacks the common consensus required for radical transformation of existing religious institutions. Indeed, recent polls found that Israeli Jewish society remains deeply divided along religious-secular lines. In 2004, a minority 44 percent of Israeli Jews defined themselves as “secular,” compared to the religious-traditionalist majority composed of 8 percent who defined themselves as “Orthodox,” 9 percent as “religious,” 12 percent as “religious-traditional,” and 27 percent as “traditional.”80 In a 2007 poll, 59 percent of the Jewish respondents agreed that the “Israeli government should make sure that life be managed according to Jewish religious tradition.”81 Yet 54 percent agreed that couples should “marry any way they like.”82 And in 2008, 61 percent of the respondents claimed that relations between religious and nonreligious are “not good” or “not good at all,”83 compared to the 80 percent who held this view in 2000.84 These numbers illustrate that there is no clear support for a secular revolutionary movement in Israel. While these explanations may not exhaust all the possible reasons for the political lack of will to alter the inegalitarian religious arrangements in Israel, they are sufficient to support the major claim for which Alfred Stepan argued in his article on the world’s religious systems and democracy: The civilizational approach, offered by political scientists such as Samuel Huntington, limits our understanding of the relationship between religion and democracy. Rather, an institutional approach is much more helpful to understanding the impediments of and incentives for the promotion of a particular type of relationship between religion and state institutions. The ability to arrive at a “politically possibilistic view” was the main reason for Stepan’s preference for the institutionalist perspective on democracy over the civilizational approach that focuses on the cultural boundaries of democracy.85 An institutionalist analysis of Israeli religion-state relations indeed suggests that no necessary cultural characteristics of Jewish tradition prevented Israel from adopting a liberal-

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secular constitution at independence, nor did they impede future reforms in the religious status quo arrangements. The struggle over the actual realization of Israel’s identity as a “Jewish and democratic state” is a political one that is taking place within the Jewish community. This debate is characterized by internal rich multivocality, to use another of Stepan’s key concepts, not only within Israeli Jewish society but also within Israeli religious Jewish society. One of the salient evidences for such multivocality may be found in the variety of religious-secular public covenants, drafted and signed by public leaders, rabbis, legal academics, and Knesset members. These covenants proposed various resolutions to the religious-secular divide and represented different views from both secular and religious camps.86 What is missing are not proposals for possible solutions. Rather, in the words of the Israeli philosopher Menachem Lorberbaum, “the real problem in Israel is . . . the lack of political will to implement what is already possible.”87 How to generate such political will is a question to be answered in future articles.

Notes 1. In Alfred C. Stepan, Arguing Comparative Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 213– 53. 2. Alfred Stepan, “Paths toward Redemocratization: Theoretical and Comparative Considerations,” in Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Comparative Perspectives, ed. Guillermo O’Donnell, Philippe C. Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988). 3. Ruth Gavison, “Jewish and Democratic? A Rejoinder to the ‘Ethnic Democracy’ Debate,” Israel Studies 4, no. 1 (1999): 44. 4. For an excellent discussion of Israeli interrelated tensions, see Gershon Shafir and Yoav Peled, Being Israeli: The Dynamics of Multiple Citizenship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). See also Ruth Gavison, Can Israel Be Both Jewish and Democratic: Tensions and Prospects (Jerusalem: Van Leer Institute and Hakibutz Hameuchad, 1999). 5. Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Rise of Christian Democracy in Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). 6. Asher Cohen and Bernard Susser, Israel and the Politics of Jewish Identity: The Secular-Religious Impasse (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 20– 21.

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7. Dan Horowitz and Moshe Lissak, Trouble in Utopia: The Overburdened Polity of Israel (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 139. 8. Ibid. 9. Cited in Menachem Friedman, “These Are the Chronicles of the Status Quo: Religion and State in Israel,” in Brethren Dwelling Together: Orthodoxy and Non-Orthodoxy in Israel: Positions, Propositions, and Accords, ed. Uri Dromi (Jerusalem: Israel Democracy Institute, 2005), 72 (Hebrew). 10. Horowitz and Lissak, Trouble in Utopia, 59– 60, 138. 11. Knesset Records, 4 (1950): 744. 12. Avraham Goldrat, United Religious Front, Knesset Records, 5 (1950): 1315. 13. Historians debate the question of what was the major cause for the deferral of the drafting of the constitution. In addition to the disagreement over the appropriate religion-state relations, other explanations point, for example, to Ben-Gurion’s admiration of the British system of parliamentary sovereignty; his pragmatic perspective and desire to refrain from long-lasting philosophical dispute at a time of urgent economic, military, and social needs; or the desire to refrain from adopting a Bill of Rights that would require equal rights for the Palestinian minority. See Hanna Lerner, Making Constitutions in Deeply Divided Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), chap. 3. 14. This decision is known as the “Harari Compromise,” named after its initiator. Knesset Records, 5 (1950): 1743. 15. Eliezer Don-Yehiya, Religion and Political Accommodation in Israel (Jerusalem: Floersheimer Institute for Policy Studies, 1999), 44– 45. 16. Arend Lijphart, “Majority Rule versus Democracy in Deeply Divided Societies,” Politikon 4, no. 2 (1977): 118. 17. Shulamit Aloni, The Arrangement: From Rule of Law to Rule of Religion (Tel-Aviv: Otpaz, 1970), 90– 91 (in Hebrew). 18. Ibid., 82– 83. Some aspects of the status quo are not included in the letter, such as the exemption of Orthodox students and religious women from military service. 19. P’kudat Sidrei Ha’shilton ve’hamishpat (Law and Administration Ordinance) (1948) and Working Hours and Rest Law (1951). 20. Kosher Food for Soldiers Ordinance (1948). 21. Pig Raising Prohibition (1962). 22. Rabbinical Courts Jurisdiction (Marriage and Divorce) Law (1953). 23. Compulsory Education Law (1949) and National Education Law (1953). For a comprehensive overview of religious legislation, see Amnon Rubinstein and Baruch Medina, The State of Israel’s Constitutional Law, vol. 1 (Jerusalem: Schocken, 2005), chap. 6. 24. Friedman, “These Are the Chronicles of the Status Quo,” 80. 25. Lijphart, “Majority Rule versus Democracy in Deeply Divided Societies,” 118–19.

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26. Don-Yehiya, Religion and Political Accommodation in Israel. 27. Arend Lijphart, The Politics of Accommodation: Pluralism and Democracy in the Netherlands, 2d ed., Campus 142 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 216. 28. Don-Yehiya, Religion and Political Accommodation in Israel. 29. Stepan, “Paths toward Redemocratization: Theoretical and Comparative Considerations,” 80. For an extensive criticism of the consociational model, see Brian Barry, “Political Accommodation and Consociational Democracy,” British Journal of Political Science 5, no. 4 (1975): 477– 505. 30. Michael Corinaldi, “Freedom of Religion in Israel: What Changed in the ‘Status Quo’?,” Sha’arey Mishpat 3, no. 2 (2003); Patricia J. Wood, Judicial Power and National Politics: Courts and Gender in the Religious-Secular Conflict in Israel (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008). 31. Hanna Lerner, “Entrenching the Status Quo: Religion and State in Israel’s Constitutional Proposals,” Constellations 16, no. 3 (2009): 443– 61. 32. Basic Law on Human Dignity and Liberty and Basic Law on Freedom of Occupation. 33. The literature on this debate is immense. For a glimpse of some of the readings, see, for example, Yossi David, ed., The State of Israel: Between Judaism and Democracy (Jerusalem: Israel Democracy Institute, 2000); Menachem Elon, “The Way of Law in the Constitution: The Values of Jewish and Democratic State in the Light of Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty,” in The Landau Book, ed. Aaron Barak and E Mazuz (Tel-Aviv: Borsei, 1996), 641– 76; Gavison, Can Israel Be Both Jewish and Democratic; Menachem Mautner, Avi Sagi, and Ronen Shamir, eds., Multiculturalism in a Democratic and Jewish State (Tel Aviv: Ramot, 1998). 34. Alfred Stepan, “The World’s Religious Systems and Democracy: Crafting The ‘Twin Tolerations,’” in Arguing Comparative Politics, 216. 35. Ibid., 216–17; my emphasis. 36. Ibid., 216; my emphasis. 37. Ibid. 38. This is far from an exhaustive and nuanced account of Israeli democracy, which is a topic for much ideological and theoretical contention. For various positions in the debate over Israeli democracy, see Alan Dowty, “Is Israel Democratic? Substance and Semantics in the ‘Ethnic Democracy’ Debate,” Israel Studies 4, no. 2 (1999): 1–15; Gavison, “Jewish and Democratic?”; As’ad Ghanem, Nadim Rouhana, and Oren Yiftachel, “Questioning ‘Ethnic Democracy’: A Response to Sammy Smooha,” Israel Studies 3, no. 2 (1998): 253– 67, Sammy Smooha, “Ethnic Democracy: Israel as an Archetype,” Israel Studies 2, no. 2 (1997): 198– 241. 39. Due to limitation of space, and since the Israeli religious-secular debate is mainly an inter-Jewish debate, I focus in the following sections on the arguments made within the inter-Jewish debate.

446 | Hanna Lerner

40. Based on the Palestine Order in Council 1922, Paragraph 83, in Robert Harry Drayton, Laws of Palestine: In Force on the 31st Day of December 1933, rev. ed., vol. 3 (London, Jerusalem, and Palestine: Printed by Waterlow and Sons, 1934), 2587. 41. Since 1963, the state recognizes civil marriages that are conducted outside of Israel. See HJC 143/62 Schlezinger v. Minister of Internal Affairs. 42. Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, Women in Israel: A State of Their Own (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), chap. 11; Frances Raday, C. Shalev, and Michal Liban-Kooby, eds., Women’s Status in Israeli Society and Law (Jerusalem: Schocken, 1995) (Hebrew); Barbara Swirski and M. P. Safir, Calling the Equality Bluff: Women in Israel (New York: Pergamon Press, 1991). 43. See www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/ratification/8.htm. 44. For example, the Rabbinical Court does not recognize marriage of children who were born to unmarried women or a marriage between a Cohen (member of the priestly clan) and a divorced women. 45. Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics Report, 2008. 46. For a comprehensive discussion of the various alterative solutions, see Shachar Lifschitz, “Spousal Registration—Preliminary Design,” in Book in Memory of Prof. Shava, ed. Aaron Barak and Daniel Friedman (Tel Aviv: RamotTel Aviv University Press, 2006). 47. Anat Scolnicov, “Religious Law, Religious Courts and Human Rights within Israeli Constitutional Structure,” International Journal of Constitutional Law 4, no. 4 (2006): 732– 40. 48. Orit Lotan, ‘Mesoravot Get’ (Denied Divorce) in Israel, Report presented to the Knesset Committee on the Status of Women, November 29, 2005, www .knesset.gov.il/MMM/data/docs/m01242.doc (last accessed May 13, 2009). 49. Avirama Golan, “Marriage for the Shunned,” Haaretz, July 22, 2009. 50. Section 13c. Another example of the difference between “registration as a couple” and state-recognized marriage is that in the case of the death of one of the partners, such registration will be obliterated (sec. 10). This means that the status of the surviving spouse will be “single” rather than “widower/ widow.” 51. Stepan, “The World’s Religious Systems and Democracy,” 216. 52. P’kudat Sidrei Ha’shilton ve’hamispat (1948). 53. Cohen and Susser, Israel and the Politics of Jewish Identity. 54. Non-Jews are allowed to rest either on their holidays or during the Jewish holidays. 55. According to section 12 of the Working Hours and Rest Law (1951), the minister of labor is authorized to permit employment on Sabbath if “ceasing work . . . is liable to inflict major damage on the economy, on an ongoing work project or on the provision of vital services to the public or to a part of it.” 56. Pekudat Ha’Iriot (amendment), (1990).

Consociationalism versus Twin Tolerations | 447

57. In 1998 the opening of stores in these areas was approved by the Jerusalem Regional Labor Court in the case of State of Israel v. Kibbutz Tsoraa, aguda shitufit (cooperative society). 58. Corinaldi, “Freedom of Religion in Israel: What Changed in the ‘Status Quo’?,” 314. 59. The court ruled that the prohibition against work on the Sabbath according to the Working Hours and Rest Law does not conflict with Basic Law: Freedom of Occupation (due to its restriction provision). HJC 5026/04 Design 22 v. Rozentzvaig Zvi (not published). 60. Haim Cohen, “Religious Coercion in Israel,” in Bernson Book, ed. Aaron Barak and Haim Berenson (Jerusalem: Nevo, 2000), 315–17. 61. The 1970 amendment to the Law of Return also expanded the number of family members entitled to immigrate to Israel to include grandchildren of Jews and their spouses, along with their grandchildren and their spouses. 62. Don-Yehiya, Religion and Political Accommodation in Israel, 45. 63. HCJ 1031\93 case of Pasero (Goldstein) 49 (4) PD 661; HCJ 5070\95 case of Naamat 56 (2) PD 721; and HCJ 2597\99 case of Toshbeim (not published). See also Rubinstein and Medina, The State of Israel’s Constitutional Law, vol. 1. 64. Yair Etinger, “Internal Conflict in the Rabbinical Court,” Haaretz, May 4, 2008; R. Gavison, “Conversion and Membership,” Haaretz, June 13, 2008. 65. Wood, Judicial Power and National Politics, 53. 66. Ibid., 48– 53. 67. Ofrit Liviatan, “Judicial Activism and Religion-Based Tensions: The Case of India and Israel,” Arizona Journal of International and Comparative Law 26, no. 3 (2009): 583– 621. 68. Joshua Segev, “Who Needs a Constitution? In Defense of the NonDecision Constitution-Making Tactic in Israel,” Albany Law Journal 70 (2007): 409– 89. 69. Known publicly as “the High Court of Justice bypass law,” this amendment was enacted following a controversial Supreme Court ruling. Simultaneously, the amendment to Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty included the addition of Section 1(a), namely, the adjustment of the Purpose clause to conform to the one in the Basic Law: Freedom of Occupation. For a detailed analysis of these amendments, see Hanna Lerner, “Democracy, Constitutionalism, and Identity: The Anomaly of the Israeli Case,” Constellations 11, no. 2 (2004): 237– 57. 70. Simultaneously with the Knesset’s Constitution Committee’s discussions, numerous think tanks and advocacy groups and organizations have produced constitutional drafts, covenants, and future vision documents aimed at contributing their point of view to public deliberations of the emerging constitution. See, for example, Israel Democracy Institute’s Proposal for a Constitution

448 | Hanna Lerner

by Consensus (2005), www.idi.org.il/PublicationsCatalog/Pages/Const/index .htm; Constitution of the State of Israel Proposed by the Institute of Zionist Strategies (2006), www.izs.org.il/page. For Jewish covenants focusing on the religioussecular divide, see T. Ilan and B. Kahana-Dror, Covenants in Israel (Jerusalem: Moetzet Yahad, 2004) (Hebrew). On the Palestinian future vision documents, see Amal Jamal, “The Political Ethos of Palestinian Citizens in Israel: Critical Reading in the Future Visions Documents,” Israel Studies Forum 23, no. 2 (2008): 3– 28. 71. Constitution in Broad Consent: Report of the Constitution, Law and Justice Committee regarding Proposals for the Constitution of the State of Israel, 2006 (Hebrew), http://huka.gov.il/wiki/index.php. 72. Ibid. 73. Protocol no. 658, in Constitution in Broad Consent. 74. Ibid, 12. 75. For a detailed discussion of the proposed constitutional drafts, see Hanna Lerner, “Entrenching the Status Quo: Religion and State in Israeli Constitutional Proposals,” Constellations 16, no. 3 (2009): 445– 61. 76. Cohen and Susser, Israel and the Politics of Jewish Identity. 77. Menachem Mautner, The Decline of Formalism and the Rise of Values in Israeli Law (Tel Aviv: Ma’agaley Da’at, 1991). 78. Aaron Barak, “The Constitutional Revolution: Protected Human Rights,” Mishpat Umimshal: Law and Government in Israel 1, no. 1 (1992): 9– 35 (Hebrew). 79. The liberal-secular philosophy manifested in the court rulings was prominent in Chief Justice Barak’s public expressions and publications. For example, his interpretation of the formulation “Jewish and democratic state” attempted to bring the conflicting concepts into line according to a “universal abstraction level,” and equated Jewish values with Western democratic principles. Barak stated that “the meaning of the Jewish nature of the state is not in the religious-Halachic sense, and hence the values of the State of Israel as a Jewish state should not be identified with the Jewish Law.” Barak, “The Constitutional Revolution: Protected Human Rights,” 30– 31. This comment drew intense criticism from the religious camp, including from retired Supreme Court Justice Menachem Elon. Elon, “The Way of Law in Constitution.” 80. “Religions in Israel, 2002– 2004,” Central Bureau of Statistics (Jeru salem, 2006). 81. Asher Arian, Nir Atmor, and Yael Hadar, Auditing Israeli Democracy 2007: Cohesion in a Divided Society (Jerusalem: Israel Democracy Institute, 2007), 66. 82. Ibid. 83. Asher Arian and Tamar Hermann, Auditing Israeli Democracy 2008: Between the State and Civil Society (Jerusalem: Israel Democracy Institute,

Consociationalism versus Twin Tolerations | 449

2008), 51. All respondents were Jewish, but the poll did not include those who define themselves as “traditional” or “Orthodox.” Interestingly, while 68 percent of the secular respondents stated that secular-religious relations are “not good/not good at all,” only 45 percent of religious respondents agreed with this statement. 84. Arian, Atmor, and Hadar, Auditing Israeli Democracy 2007, 67. 85. Stepan, “The World’s Religious System and Democracy,” 215. 86. Among the most famous public covenants one may mention the Meimad-Lubotzky-Beilin Covenant (1998), the Kineret Covenant (2003), and the Gavison-Madan Compact (2003; see www.gavison-medan.org.il/english/). See also Asher Cohen, “Covenants for Accommodating Religious-Secular Relations: Public Attempts for Accommodation in Light of Political Failure,” in Dromi, Brethren Dwelling Together, 365– 83. 87. Menachem Lorberbaum, “Religion and State in Israel,” in Judaism and the Challenges of Modern Life, ed. Moshe Halbertal and Donniel Hartman (London: Continuum, 2008), 163. By “what is already possible,” Lorberbaum refers to, for example, “changing the electoral system, ceasing the funding of [religious] anti-civic educational systems, ending the exemption of haredi and Arab citizens from civil service,” and altering marriage and divorce regulations in Israel.

Contributors

Murat Akan is Assistant Professor of Political Science and International

Relations at Bog˘aziçi University. His research is on secularism, laicism, religion, and democracy in Turkey and France. His articles have appeared in the British Journal of Sociology, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, and Studies in Comparative International Development. He is currently completing a book on politics, religion, and diversity in Turkey and France. László Bruszt is Professor of Sociology at the European University

in Florence. His recent studies have focused on the interplay between transnationalization, institutional development, and economic change. His collaborative research with Balazs Vedres studies the impact of EU regional development programs. His research with Gerald McDermott on transnational integration regimes compares the effects of the EU and NAFTA on institutional development in evolving market democracies. His recent articles have appeared in Voluntas, Theory and Society, Journal of Public Policy, West European Politics, and Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Fernando Henrique Cardoso served as president of Brazil for two terms

(1995– 2003). Before becoming president, he was senator from São Paulo, minister of foreign relations, and minister of finance. Cardoso’s pathbreaking scholarship on political and economic development shaped a generation of thought in Latin America. He established the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Research (CEBRAP), which became an influential think tank both in Brazil and internationally. Currently, he is president of the Fernando Henrique Cardoso Institute in Brazil. 450

Contributors | 451

Ryan E. Carlin is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Georgia

State University. He received his B. A. from the University of Notre Dame in 1999 and his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2008. Carlin’s research interests include political culture and political institutions and the interplay between them. His most recent work has appeared in Party Politics, Political Behavior, Comparative Political Studies, Political Research Quarterly, and Public Choice. Douglas Chalmers , Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Colum-

bia University, has been department chair, dean of the School of International Affairs, and director of the Institute for Latin American Studies. Currently he is executive director of the Society of Senior Scholars at Columbia. He is the author and coeditor of The New Politics of Inequality in Latin America (1997) and coeditor of The Right and Democracy in Latin America (1992). He has written articles about the organization and institutions that link civil society to government in Europe and Latin America. His current project is building an argument for rethinking the institutions of political representation, based on the Schoff Lectures given at Columbia University. Ashley Esarey , Visiting Assistant Professor of Politics at the University

of Alberta, received his Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University, where Alfred Stepan was a dissertation adviser. He held the An Wang Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. He teaches Chinese politics at Whitman College, serves as Associate in Research at Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, and is a visiting scholar at the University of Washington’s Jackson School of International Studies, China Program. His publications concern political communication and democratization in the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan. Robert M. Fishman , Kellogg Institute Fellow and Professor of Sociology

at the University of Notre Dame, is currently writing a book that shows how Portugal’s and Spain’s virtually polar opposite pathways to democ racy in the 1970s generated enduring differences in democratic practice and, as a result, in various other societal outcomes. Fishman’s most recent books are Democracy’s Voices (2004) and (with Anthony Messina) The Year of the Euro (2006). His articles have appeared in World Politics,

452 | Contributors

Politics & Society, Studies in Comparative International Development, Comparative Politics, and other journals. He did his undergraduate and graduate work at Yale, where he worked with both Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan. J. Samuel Fitch is Professor of Political Science at the University of

Colorado in Boulder. His research focuses on the interrelations among the armed forces, society, and the state in Latin America. He is the author of The Coup d’Etat as a Political Process (1977) and The Armed Forces and Democracy in Latin America (1998), as well as numerous articles and chapters on comparative civil-military relations, U.S. military assistance programs, and public policy. Edward L. Gibson is Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. His most recent publications include Boundary Control: Subnational Authoritarianism in Federal Democracies (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and, with Julieta Suarez-Cao, “Federalized Party Systems: Theory and an Empirical Application to Argentina,” Comparative Politics (2010). He is also the editor of Federalism and Democracy in Latin America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). Jonathan Hartlyn is Senior Associate Dean for Social Sciences and

Global Programs and Kenneth J. Reckford Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is coauthor of Latin America in the Twenty-First Century: Toward a New Socio-Political Matrix (2003; Spanish ed. 2004, Portuguese ed. 2007) and author of The Struggle for Democratic Politics in the Dominican Republic (1998; Spanish ed. 2008) and The Politics of Coalition Rule in Colombia (1988; Spanish ed. 1993). His articles have appeared in numerous journals and edited books, including Comparative Political Studies, Latin American Politics and Society, Politics & Gender, Latin American Research Review, Journal of Democracy, Studies in Comparative International Development, and América Latina Hoy. He received his B. A. from Clark University and his M. Phil. and Ph.D. in political science from Yale University. Mirjam Künkler is Assistant Professor in the Department for Near

Eastern Studies at Princeton University. She received her Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University with a dissertation on the role

Contributors | 453

of Islamic thought and social movements in processes of regime transformation in Indonesia (1981– 98) and Iran (1997– 2005), supervised by Alfred Stepan and Charles Tilly. From July 2006 to July 2007, she served as deputy director of the Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration, and Religion (CDTR) at Columbia University, under the directorship of Alfred Stepan. She is coeditor, with Alfred Stepan, of Indonesia, Islam, and Democracy (Columbia University Press, 2012). Hanna Lerner is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Tel Aviv Uni-

versity. She is the author of Making Constitutions in Deeply Divided Societies (Cambridge University Press, 2011). Her research focuses on comparative constitution making, religion and democracy, Israeli constitutional politics, and global justice and international labor. She received her Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University, where she wrote her dissertation under the supervision of Jean Cohen and Alfred Stepan. Juan J. Linz is Sterling Professor Emeritus of Political and Social Science at Yale University. He has been one of the world’s leading contributors to the study of authoritarian and democratic regimes. In 1987 he was awarded the Príncipe de Asturias Prize for outstanding contributions to the social sciences, and in 1996 he won the Johan Skyte Prize, granted to the scholar “who has made the most valuable contribution to political science.” Linz’s collaboration with Alfred Stepan dates to their 1978 volume, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes. Linz and Stepan also wrote Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe (1996), and, along with Yogendra Yadav, Crafting State Nations: India and Other Multinational Democracies (2011). Scott Mainwaring is Eugene Conley Professor of Political Science and

Director of the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame. His most recent book, coedited with Timothy R. Scully, is Democratic Governance in Latin America (Stanford University Press, 2010). He is working on a book with Aníbal Pérez-Liñán titled The Rise and Fall of Democracies and Dictatorships: Latin America since 1900 (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). Mainwaring was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010.

454 | Contributors

Cecilia Martínez- Gallardo is Assistant Professor of Political Science at

the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She previously taught at CIDE in Mexico. Her teaching and research interests are Latin American political institutions, especially government formation and change. Her work focuses on the political and institutional factors that affect coalition politics in these countries. She has also worked on government formation and stability in Western Europe and policy reform in Latin America. She has published articles in the American Journal of Political Science and the American Political Science Review. Martínez-Gallardo received a B. A. from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM) in Mexico City (1995) and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University. Thomas Jeffrey Miley is Lecturer of Political Sociology at the University of Cambridge. He has been a Garcia-Pelayo Research Fellow at the Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales (CEPC). His research interests include nationalism, language policy, and democratic theory. Miley is the author of Nacionalismo y política lingüística: El caso de Cataluña (2006) and coeditor, with José Ramón Montero, of Las obras escogidas de Juan J. Linz, 7 vols. (2008–10). In addition, he has published articles in Nations and Nationalisms, the European Journal of Political Research, and Nationalism and Ethnic Politics. He received his Ph.D. in political science from Yale University. Brian H. Smith holds the Charles and Joan Van Zoeren Chair in Reli-

gion, Ethics, and Values and is Professor of Religion at Ripon College in Ripon, Wisconsin. His advanced degrees are in political science (Ph.D., 1979), religion (Master of Divinity, 1970), and ethics (Master in Sacred Theology, 1971). He has done research in Latin America, including Chile and Colombia, on religion and politics and the role of nongovernmental organizations in socioeconomic development. He has previously taught at Fordham University, Georgetown University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His books include The Church and Politics in Chile: Challenges to Modern Catholicism (1982), More than Altruism: The Politics of Private Foreign Aid (1990), (with Michael Fleet) The Catholic Church and Democracy in Chile and Peru (1997), and Religious Politics in Latin America, Pentecostal vs. Catholic (1998). He is currently work-

Contributors | 455

ing on a book manuscript titled Religion and Politics in Comparative Global Perspective. Mark Ungar is Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College and

of Political Science and Criminal Justice at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His published works include Elusive Reform: Democracy and the Rule of Law in Latin America (2001), Violence and Politics: Globalization’s Paradox (2001), and Policing Democracy: Overcoming Obstacles to Citizen Security Reform in Latin America (2011). Ungar is also an adviser on police reform for several international organizations and Latin American governments. Shamil Midkhatovich Yenikeyeff is Research Fellow at the Oxford In-

stitute for Energy Studies and Senior Associate Member at the Russian and Eurasian Studies Centre, St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford. Yenikeyeff holds a first class degree with honors in law from the Bashkir State University, Russia, and an M. Phil. and D. Phil. in politics from the University of Oxford. In the 1990s he worked in the Russian parliament as an adviser to the chairman of the Subcommittee for the Organi zation of the State Authority System in Russia. His current research focuses on the political economy of the oil and gas sectors of Russia and Central Asia, with emphasis on economic policies, state-business relations, corporate strategies, and political and economic risks. Yenikeyeff is the author of The Battle for Russian Oil: Corporations, Regions, and the State (2012), on the politics of the Russian oil sector under Yeltsin, Putin, and Medvedev.

Index

Abramovich, Roman, 317, 318 Abtahi, Mohammad Ali, 177, 194n7 academies, military. See military academies, Latin American accountability, 96–100 as citizen’s capacity to reward or sanction elected officials, 204 Linz and Stepan on, 5, 96 and representative democracy, 231– 32 actors political —and crafting of federal institutions, 291 —as major cause in regime change or stability, 148 in Portuguese process of political change, 152 Aftab-e Emruz (newspaper), 197n39 Agence France-Presse, 181 Agenda 2000 (European Commission), 113, 123 Aghajari, Hashem, 188– 89 Agudat Israel party, 427 Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud, 191 Alfonsin, Raúl, 75 Alliance of Civilizations, 382, 405

456

Amazon, deforestation, 78– 79 Ambedkar, Bhimrao Ramji, 359 Amnesty International on demonstration in Iran, 181 on Xinjiang, 264 An-Naim, Abdullah Ahmed, 356 Ansar-e Hezbollah, 199n47 investigation of, 182 raid on student dormitory, 180– 81 Ansar-e Velayat, 201n74 anticlericalism as root of Kemalist laicism, 388 “‘Arab’ More than a ‘Muslim’ Democracy Gap, An” (Stepan and Robertson), 385 Argentina 1854 Constitution, 295n15 applications to military academy, 33– 34, 34f disequilibrium in military-society relations, 42 federalism in, 95 military —budget, 41– 44 —personnel, 42t —political identification of officers, 48 —possible kinds of, 44

Index | 457

—relations with Brazilian military, 74 —social origins, 26, 29– 31, 29f, 30f, 31f, 59 —societal confidence in, 43, 45f National Crime Prevention Plan (2004), 95 police force —demand for change, 101 —reform of, 99 Stepan on, 4 teachers’ salary in, 66n47 Arguing Comparative Politics (Stepan) arguing against essentialist nature of religion, 13 on multinationalism and federalism, 11 on multivocality in Islam, 356 on religion, politics, and the state, 339 Aristotle on natural law, 352 on politics, 342 Arkoun, Mohamed, 356 armed forces. See military Arya (newspaper), 174 Asad, Talal, 408– 9 asceticism of Buddhism, 346, 359 of Hinduism, 345 Assembly of Combatant Clerics (MRM, Iran) in 2004 parliamentary elections, 190 and reform, 176– 77, 190 support of Khatami, 195n12, 197n35 Assembly of Experts (Iran), 169, 171f Association for the Defense of Free Press (Iran), 176

Association for the Support and Education of Women Candidates for Parliament (Turkey), 413 Association of Generals and Admirals (Ecuador), 66n48 Asunción Treaty, 75 Austria, path to democracy in, 142 authoritarian regimes in Iran, 192– 93, 195n15 military dictatorship of Brazil, 69 opposition to — Catholic Church and, 353 — Stepan on tasks of democratic opposition, 8, 167, 193n3 —strengthened by religious ethics, 370 Stepan on military as backbone of, 67 Aydin, Mehmet, 405– 6 Azad (newspaper), 174 Azar (newspaper), 175 Barak, Aaron, 441, 448n79 Bar Association, 188 Bashkortostan bargaining power, 306– 7, 306t as ethnic republic, 304 nationalism in, 307 oil sector in —oil licensing, 309–10 —oil taxation, 308 —opposition to Oil Quality Bank, 322 —producers of low-quality oil, 313, 322 —role of federal oil companies in, 324 —shares in open joint stock oil company, 307– 8 separatism in, 305

458 | Index

Bashneft licensing of, 310 low-quality oil, 322 vertical integration of, 308 Basic Law on Freedom of Occupation (Israel, 1992) Effect of Nonconforming Law amendment, 439, 447n69 limited impact on status quo, 438 Basic Law on Human and Civil Rights draft (Israel), 438 Basic Law on Human Liberty and Dignity (Israel, 1992), 438 amendment, 447n70 Basij (Iran voluntary force), 168 Bas¸gil, Ali Fuat, 406– 8, 409 Bayat, Asef on NGOs in Iran, 176 on press in Iran, 173, 196n25 on reform movement in Iran, 189 Baykal, Deniz, 414 Bazargan, Mehdi, 186 Bellows, Thomas, 343 Ben-Gurion, David, 429, 444n13 Bernstein, Thomas, 257 Bill of Rights (U.S.) nationalization of, 297n36 non-applicability to state governments, 278 Bokovikov, Aleksandr, 318, 319 Bolivia federalism in, 95 societal confidence in armed forces, 44, 45f Brazil. See also military, Brazilian 1974 elections, 69 civil society —opposition to military regime, 68– 69 —tension with political society, 70 corruption as concern in, 79

as dangerous country, 82 demand for change in police force, 101 jurisdiction over natural resources, 333n37 Ministry of Defense, 76– 77 preservation of environment, 78, 79 Stepan on, 2, 4, 68 symmetrical federation, 262 transitional justice in, 73– 74 Brazilian Space Agency, 75 Breakdown of Democratic Regimes, The (Linz and Stepan, 1978), 6, 16 Bredow, Ferdinand von, 243 Brubaker, Rogers, 331n26 Buddhadasa, Ajarn, 359 Buddhism action toward others in, 346 asymmetrical federalism and Tibetan, 263– 64 ethics in, 358– 62 socially engaged, 359– 61 budgetary power (Iran), 172 budgets, security sectors lack of transparency, 99 military, 40– 41 —in Argentina, 41– 44 —resentment among junior officers, 65n40 police forces, 89 Bujnourdi, Ayatollah, 177 Bundestreue (federal loyalty), 234, 251n7 bureaucracy democracy and, 239– 41 federal civil service in asymmetrical federalism, 263 Burke, Edmund, 229– 30 Burqani, Ahmad, 196n23, 197n39 Büyükanit, Yas¸ar, 414, 415

Index | 459

caesaropapism, 14, 340 partial, 369 Caetano, Marcelo, 151, 152 Calderón, Felipe, 95 Cambodia, socially engaged Buddhism in, 360 Campos, Nauro F., 124 Canada jurisdiction over natural resources, 333n37 multiethnic population in, 261 Canes-Wrone, Brandice, 206 Capitaes de Abril (film), 164n36 capital controls, indicators for, 133n10 Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (Schumpeter), 240 capture theory of regulation, 119 Carnation Revolution (Portugal), 151, 152, 164n36 Casanova, José Asad’s critique of tripartite division of secularization thesis, 408– 9 on traditional religious legitimation for modern developments, 384, 396 Catholic Church. See Roman Catholic Church Center for Strategic Studies (Iran), 176 arrests of core members of, 185– 86 “Center-Periphery Relations: A Key to Turkish Politics?” (Mardin), 393 Charter of Tibetans in Exile, 361 Chatterjee, Partha, 422n66 Chávez, Hugo, 45 Chechnya, 305 Chen Shui-bian, 266

Chile decentralization in, 95 military —officers recruitment campaign, 39f —social origins, 26 —societal confidence in, 44, 45f military academy, 37, 38 —scholarship, 63n20 Stepan on, 4 Chilingarov, Artur, 319 China 1911 Revolution, 257 elections, 257– 58 May Fourth Movement (1915– 21), 257 China, People’s Republic of, 255– 72 Brazil and, 75 leaders —change in background of, 258 —as technocrats, 259 possibility of democratization of, 258, 259– 60 religion-state relationship, 366– 67 — Constitution of 1982, 367– 68 —Religious Affairs Bureau (RAB), 368 social revolution and antidemocratic rule, 150 stability of regime, 259 as a state-nation, 267– 68 China Democracy Party, 258 Chinese Communist Party, 257, 259 Christianity. See also Roman Catholic Church ethics in, 352– 55 and social order, 345 Chukotka, 318 Cicero, 352 citizen, idealized concept of average, 233 citizen security, 5, 82–107

460 | Index

citizenship American concept of dual, 279 —reaffirmation by Supreme Court, 287 —redefined, 283 —as understudied subject, 292 federalism and, 278– 79 civil-military relations, 25, 54– 55 Civil Rights Bill (U.S., 1866), 283 Foner on, 286 civil society, 100–103 Brazilian —opposition to military regime, 68– 69 —tension with political society, 70 and consolidated democracy, 114 definition, 100, 105n16 impact on police reforms, 5 necessary to keep governments accountable, 340 public opinions shaping, 101 during Reconstruction, 285 religious institutions as part of, 13, 340 Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the Modern World, The (Huntington), 13, 417 Clausewitz, Carl von, 242– 43 Clean Development Mechanism (Brazil), 78 coalitions. See government coalitions Colegio Militar de la Nación (Argentina), 59 Coles, Catherine, 90 Collins, Kathleen, 249 Collor, Fernando, 75 Colombia armed forces —role in war against drugs, 79 —societal confidence in, 44, 45f as dangerous country, 82

Communist Party (KPRF), 320, 321t community justice and policing associations, 102 community policing, 84 comparative federalism, field of, 273 compassion as basis of Jewish ethics, 352 as support for democratic ideals of equality, toleration, and compromise, 370 Computer Statistics, 90 Condor program (Argentina), 75 Conservative Judaism in Israel, 430, 437 consociational democracy, 424– 49 definition by Lijphart, 430 and systemic constraints to societal change, 430– 31 consolidated democracy. See also democratic consolidation definition, 385 impossibility of completely free market in, 115 interrelated arenas forming, 114 consultation (shura) by leaders and citizens, 355, 384 Corbett, Julia, 343 on religion, 344 Corbett, Michael, 343 corporatism as form of organic statism, 386– 87 in Kemalism, 387, 389 Corporatist Ideology in Kemalist Turkey: Progress or Order? (Parla and Davison), 389 corruption dealing with police corruption, 99 as main concern in Brazil, 79 Costa Rica misdemeanor reports in, 92 path to democracy, 142

Index | 461

public security structure, 95– 96 shortcomings in education of police force, 88 Couplehood Union legislation (Israel), 435, 446n50 Court of the Clergy (Iran), 198n45 crime, organized police collaboration with, 99 and Russian oil trading companies, 317 crime in Latin America, 104n2 destabilizing to democratic regimes, 83 incomplete information on causes and patterns, 89 introduction of problem-oriented policing, 84 iron fist anticrime policies, 97 —popular support for, 101 mapping, 91 Cromwell, S. Crawford, 357 Cruikshank (U.S. Supreme Court), 287 Cuba, religion-state relationship in, 366, 367 culture, Huntington versus Stepan on, 417 Dahl, Robert A. on decentralization, 94 definition of democracy, 229 definition of federalism, 19n5 definition of politics, 374n11 minimum conditions for democracy, 169, 419n8 Dali Yang, 259 Davison, Andrew on antimaterialism of Kemalism, 400 on Kemalism’s original content as ideology, 387

decentralization, 105n12 impact in Latin America, 93– 96 political clientalism and, 94 problem in hurrying, 95 pros and cons, 94 deconcentration, 105n12 delegation, 105n12 democracy. See also transition to democracy area of autonomy of institutions, 432 Brazilian, 77 Chinese, 256– 60 conditions of successful regimes, 18 consolidation of, 83 definitions of, 229– 30 —by Chinese Communist Party, 257 depth/deepening of, 140 minimum conditions for —Dahl on, 169, 419n8 — Stepan on, 383 political equality versus social inequality, 159 and regulatory state capacities, 128 representative, 243– 45 —accountability, 231– 32 —danger of democratization of all societal institutions, 244– 45 —focus of theory on responsiveness, 228– 29 —responsibility and, 230– 31, 234– 38 Stepan’s pathways to, 141– 42 survival rates in parliamentarism versus presidentialism, 203– 4 as system of conflict regulation, 372 Democracy Wall Movement (1978–1979), 257

462 | Index

democratic consolidation. See also consolidated democracy nation-state policy and, 385– 86 parliamentarism versus presidentialism, 203 state-religion relations and, 383– 85 Democratic Left Party (Turkey) and budget of Directorate of Religious Affairs, 401 religion at service of state, 387 Democratic Party (U.S.), in Southern states after Reconstruction, 288 democratic practice impact of social revolution on, 140 in Portugal, 152, 156 —role of news media, 157 shaped by social characteristics of transition scenario, 149 in Spain, 158 democratization. See also transition to democracy centrality of police to, 84 as challenge to military, 3 comparison of Portugal and Spain, 7 fragmentation of collective action, 101 nationalism as danger to, 269n2 and regulatory state capacity, 129f Stepan on concept of, 70 subnational, 274 substantive versus territorial, 275– 76 third wave, 151, 213 demos asymmetrical federalism as demos enabling, 262 versus kratos in contemporary democratic theory, 229 symmetrical federation as demos constraining, 261, 293– 94

dependency theory, 17 as explanation of long-term social and economic processes, 67 Dersim massacre (Turkey, 1938), 390 Design 22 (Supreme Court, Israel), 436 de Villiers, Bertus, 251n7 devolution, 105n12 Dharmapala, Angarika, 359 “Dialogue among Civilizations,” concept of, 177 diarchy, Iran as, 169 Dink, Hrant, 387, 413 assassination, 410 —link to the Turkish police, 412 funeral procession, 411, 412 Discourses, The (Machiavelli), 343 disenfranchisement, 289 disestablishment, 340 not a necessary condition of democracy, 339 and restrictions on religious freedom, 366 Dismantling Democratic States (Suleiman), 239– 40 dispensability, problem of, 237 di Tella, Guido, 75 Don-Yehiya, Eliezer, 430 drug trafficking as major source of crime in Latin America, 91– 92 role of military in fighting, 79 Dubov, Vladimir, 320, 323 Durkheim, Émile, 389 Eastern Europe, market economies in, 111– 36 Easton, David, 343 East Turkestan, 264 Ebadi, Shirin, 198n43 EBRD. See European Bank for Reconstruction and Development

Index | 463

Ecevit, Bülent, 392 Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (China and Taiwan), 266 economic society building a, 112 and consolidated democracy, 114 defined by Linz and Stepan, 114 economy armed forces and development, 56 liberalization linked to state capacity to maintain rule of law, 125– 26, 126f negative factors and executive approval, 206 public rules for private economy —as necessary to constitute market order, 122 —precondition of democratic consolidation, 115 and social class of military, 49 Ecuador coup overthrowing Mahuad, 45 Escuela Politécnica del Ejército, 53 military —applications to air force, 62n18 —conscription, 39, 66n44 —contracting to provide security services, 66n49 —development mission of, 55– 56 —new salary system, 63n19 —social origins, 27, 28t —societal confidence in, 44, 45f military academy —applications to, 37 —fees for attending, 63n20 —identification of cadets, 46, 47t, 48 military industries in, 55 police forces —discredited by human rights organizations, 103 —lack of equipment, 89

political identifications, 48 problems created by Penal Process Code, 105n11 tribunals system, 99 urban homicide rate, 105n13 education, 53 autonomy of religious institutions in Israel, 429, 430 democratization of institutions in Portugal, 153 of police force in Latin America, 87, 88 privatization in Turkey, 392 Efremov, Alexander, 319 elections 2004 parliamentary in Iran, 190 after Reconstruction in the U.S., 297n30 in Brazil, 69 calendar and rate of approval, 208 in China, 257– 58 of democratic minded-opposition in Iran, 166 endogenous electoral timing, 211 in Iran, 170t, 196n31 —1997 presidential, 167 —2000 parliamentary, 184, 186 —2001 presidential, 169, 187 —2004 boycott by political parties, 190 —as arena of contestation, 195n15 —disqualification of candidates, 170t, 190, 201n86 —municipal, 168– 69, 173, 174– 75 —raising of voting age, 186 in Islamic countries, 356, 377n38 media-driven campaigns, 208 money as decisive criterion for winning, 237– 38 and process of democratization in Portugal, 154

464 | Index

elections (cont.) in Russia —of heads of ethnic republics, 305 —victory of old political and industrial elites, 300– 301 —violations in regional elections, 301 in Turkey, 356, 377n38, 414 —in 2002 and 2007, 381– 82, 414–15 electoral systems impact on executive approval dynamics, 218, 219 influence of religious parties in Israeli politics, 441–42 and rates of executive approval, 208, 211 —impact on initial level, 216–17 —number of political parties and initial approval, 208– 9 —second-round runoff system, 209–10 elites, political, 237 elites, research on, 236– 37 elites, Russian regional authority over oil sector, 303 challenge of Russian leadership, 300 co-opted by oil companies, 317 dependency of federal oil companies on, 312–14 direct elections of heads of ethnic republics, 305 generating nationalist sentiment, 331n27 initial bargaining power dependent on administrative status of region, 304 as only powerful force in Russia, 301 power of, 304–10

El Salvador, 82, 150 Emami, Said, 180 Energy of Russia, 319 Enforcement Act of 1870 (U.S.), 283– 84 Enikeev, Zufar, 323 environment, preservation of, 78, 79 Environment Conference (1992, Rio de Janeiro), 78 equilibrium in military-society relations, 40– 45 Erbakan, Necmettin, 391, 392, 404 Erdog˘an, Tayyip, 369, 415 on distinction between good and bad nationalism, 413 on JDP’s position on laiklik, 394 on religion as cement of society, 392, 400 statement after assassination of Dink, 410 Erickson, Robert S., 206 Escuela Militar (Uruguay), 59 Escuela Militar Libertador Bernardo O’Higgins (Chile), 38 Escuela Politécnica del Ejército (Ecuador), 53 Escuela Superior Militar (Ecuador) fees for attending, 63n20 interview questionnaire, 46 Eshkevari, Hasan Yousefi, 185, 191 establishment, 14, 340, 362– 63 partial, 365, 369 ethics, religious in Buddhism, 358– 62 in Christianity, 352– 55 as contribution to democracy, 340, 341 in Hinduism, 356– 58 in Islam, 355– 56 overlapping with secular ethics, 350– 51, 371

Index | 465

and strengthening of civil societies against authoritarian governments, 370 understandable by nonbelievers, 350, 375 Europe persisting role of religion in, 405 —Turkish references to, 404 professional bureaucracy as element of modern state, 241 European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) data on regulatory state building, 127, 128 on need to build regulatory capacities, 120 on uneven capacity of states, 120 European Union assistance programs to build economic society, 123 connection of political and economic conditionality, 113 on necessity of building state capacities, 122– 23 state of the market, 124– 31 variety of patterns of religionstate relationships, 362 executive approval in democratic regimes, 203– 26. See also presidents, rates of approval of; prime ministers, rates of approval of data on survey marginals, 213 electoral systems and, 208, 211 —impact on initial level, 216–17 —number of political parties and initial approval, 208– 9 —second-round runoff system, 209–10 factors determining, 206

mean executive approval in parliamentary and presidential systems, 214t methodology used for study of, 213–15 in parliamentary and presidential systems, 205–12 surveys used for study of, 212 Executives of Construction Party (Iran), 175, 195n12 Expediency Council (Iran), 171f, 172 parliamentary speaker on, 194n11 rewriting laws on appointment to Guardian Council, 187 and standoff between legislature and judiciary, 187 externally monitored installation of democracy, 141 difficulty of internal legitimacy, 144 Fath (newspaper), 174 Fatherland– All Russia party, 320, 321t federacies defined, 265 Hong Kong and, 265– 66 Taiwan and, 266– 67 federalism asymmetrical, 11, 19n6, 262 —constitutional court in, 263 —in Russia, 299, 304 in China —in the 1980s, 271n28 —debate on, 256– 57 citizenship and, 292– 93 definition by Dahl, 19n5 different national identities within a sovereign state, 11 impact in Latin America, 93– 96 multinationalism and, 246

466 | Index

federalism (cont.) relationship with democracy —impediment to democratization, 12 —institutions as objects of contestation in struggles about democracy, 274, 292 — Stepan on, 10 Riker on, 271n25 in Russia —asymmetrical, 299, 304 —reintegration through federal oil companies, 327 —role of federal oil companies in, 299– 335 Stepan —on concerns about, 94– 95 —research on, 260– 61 subnational political regimes in, 293– 94 federalism, U.S. altering —courts and, 279– 80 —strategies, 280– 81 centralization —democratic transition in the Southern states, 284– 86 —statutory battle, 283– 84 struggle over, 281– 90 Federalism: Origin, Operation, Significance (Riker), 10 federations difficulty of holding together nondemocratic, 261 symmetrical, 261– 62 Felicity Party (Turkey), 381 Fethullah Gülen religious community, 392 fieldwork by Stepan, 16 Figueiredo, Argelina Cheibub, 18 Figueiredo, João, 70– 71 Fitch, J. Samuel, 87

Foner, Eric on 1866 Civil Rights Bill, 283, 286 on early phase of Reconstruction, 284, 285 on Radical Republicans, 282 Forouhar, Dariush, 179 Fort Leavenworth debates, 241 Fraga, Rosendo, 29, 30, 64n29 France Fourth Republic and restoration of democracy, 141 Muslim Council, 405 religion-state relationship, 362 Turkey compared to, 389, 420n35 Franco, Itamar, 72, 75 Freedmen’s Bureau (U.S.), 285 Freedom House 2006 report —European countries in, 379n55 —Latin American countries in, 379n60 2011 report on Israel, 432– 33 indexes for Political Rights and Civil Liberties, 128 —on Israel, 365 freedoms restricted in democracy, 239 Friedman, Menachem, 429– 30 Frota, Sílvio, 70 “Future of Reform in Iran, The” (Berlin, 2000), 180, 185 Gandhi, Mahatma, 357– 58 Ganji, Akbar, 180, 185 Garcia, Alán, 210 Gavison-Madan Compact (Israel, 2003), 449n86 Gazprom bilateral cooperation agreements with regional administrations, 311 in Tyumen oblast, 319 Geisel, Ernesto, 69, 70

Index | 467

Gellner, Ernest, 249 gender relations in Portugal, 153 Germany ordo-liberalism in postwar, 113, 121– 22, 132n2 postwar restoration of democracy, 141, 145 Protestant Church and Glaubensbewegung Deutscher Christen, 243– 44 religion-state relationship, 362 Ghannouchi, Rachid al-, 356 Ghosananda, Somdech, 360 Gilley, Bruce, 258 Glock, Charles, 344 Gökalp, Ziya, 389 Goldman, Merle, 258, 270n21 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 301 government coalitions coalition partnership in Israel, 430 executive approval and, 210 regime survival of, 204 Greenawalt, Kent, 348– 49 Guardian Council (Iran) composition, 171– 72 in Iran’s political system, 171f standoff between legislature and judiciary on appointments to, 187 veto of legislative proposals, 189, 195n18 vetting of electoral candidates, 172 Guatemala arrests for misdemeanors, 91 lack of education and training of police force, 87 Guerrero, Rodrigo, 89 Gül, Abdullah, 369, 415, 416 Hajjarian, Said, 176, 185– 86 halacha (Jewish religious law), 427– 28

Halaçog˘lu, Yusuf, 414 Hall, Peter, 151 Ha’mizrachi Bank v. Migdal (Israel, 1995), 441 Hamshahri (Fellow-Citizen) (newspaper), 175 Hannaford, Robert V., 375n25 Hansen, Roy, 26 Harvey, Peter, 359 Hehir, Bryan, 375n30 Hellwig, Timothy, 221n5 hierarchies, partial inversion of, in Portugal, 152, 157– 58 Hinduism action toward others in, 345– 46 ethics in, 356– 58 reformulation by Gandhi, 357– 58 Hobbes, Thomas, 6 Hoffman, Kelly, 65n39 homicides in Latin America, 82, 104n2 urban rate in Ecuador, 105n13 Honduras, 82 honeymoon period of elected officials, 206 Hong Kong, 265– 66 Horvath, Roman, 124 Hu Jintao, 257 human rights in Brazil, 69, 73– 74 Buddhist ethics and, 359 in Ecuador, 103 in mission of Catholic Church, 352, 353 reparation for the victims, 73 Hundred Flowers Movement (China, 1956– 57), 257 Hunt, Lynn, 153 Huntington, Samuel P. cultural essentialism, 13, 384 religious-civilizational approach, 384, 442

468 | Index

Huntington, Samuel P. (cont.) on separation of church and state, 362 Stepan and, 417 and system institutionalization, 148 Third Wave of democratization, 151 Hürriyet (newspaper), 410, 412 circulation through the assassination of Dink, 411f Hu Yaobang, 258 Ibn Khaldun, 249 ideas, impact on political outcomes, 17–18 identifications excessive state identification and democracy, 385– 86 of Latin American military, 46, 47t, 48 research on relative intensity of, 52 identity, Jewish, 425, 427, 437– 38, 440 ijtihad (independent reasoning), 355, 384 Imaz, José Luis de, 26 impeachment, decline in executive approval and, 207 India. See also Hinduism asymmetrical federalism, 262 Indonesia decentralization in, 95 elections, 356, 377n38 institutions democratization of all, 243 as location of actors of democratization, 143– 44 Stepan on importance of, 16–17 International Commission of Jurists, 198n44, 200n60 international crisis and executive approval, 206– 7

international financial institutions, 133n9 state capacities requested by, 118–19, 120 Iran, Islamic Republic of, 8 arrests of reformist intellectuals and politicians, 185 Artesh, 194n6 authoritarian consolidation, 192– 93 Constitution of 1979, 169, 171 —Khatami and implementation of, 193n4 elections, 170t, 196n31 —1997 presidential, 167 —2000 parliamentary, 184, 186 —2001 presidential, 169, 187 —2004 boycott by political parties, 190 —as arena of contestation, 195n15 —disqualifying candidates, 170t —municipal, 168– 69, 173, 174– 75 —raising of voting age, 186 —voter turnout, 169, 170t failed democratic transition, 166– 202 freedom under Khatami, 193n2 Khatami’s strengthening of directly elected institutions, 169 legislature as arena of contestation, 195n15 murders of dissidents, 179 normalization of relations with the UK, 178 opening of gas and oil industry to foreign investors, 178 political system, 171f religions tolerated in, 195n17 student demonstrations, 180– 81, 190 Iran Freedom Movement, 186

Index | 469

Iranian Islamic Participation Front (IIPF), 175, 190 Iraq overly optimistic expectations for, 233 political parties in, 249 as a state, 247 Stepan and Linz on invasion of, 146 Turkey and military operation in, 414–15 Islam compatibility with democracy, 382, 384 compatibility with modernity, 395 ethics in, 355– 56 internal pluralism in, 356 political in Turkey, 381 —definition by Erbakan, 392 Reformation, 356 and social order, 345 in Turkey, 369 —Alevis minority, 418n1 —as social cement of the political body, 389 — Sunni privileged, 388 Islamic Coalition (Iran), 197n34 Islamic Republic Party (Iran), 174 Israel, 424– 49 adoption of religious-Orthodox definition of Jewishness, 437 Arab political parties excluded from government coalitions, 430 Basic Laws, 428, 438 “common-law relationships,” 434 constitution —2003 Knesset proposal, 439– 40 —2006 Knesset proposal, 425 —absence of formal, 428 —deferral of drafting, 444n13

—deliberation of emerging, 447n70 —resistance to change in constitutional proposals, 438– 41 erosion of Orthodox Jewish monopoly on Jewish affairs, 379n61 implementation of twin tolerations in, 432– 33 as Jewish and Democratic, 431 overlapping religious-secular divide, 441– 42 religion-state relationship, 14–15, 365– 66 religious political parties in, 426, 441–42 religious-secular conflict, 426– 28 religious status quo, 428– 31 —not impacted by Basic Laws, 438– 39 tension between legislators and Supreme Court, 441–42 Israel Beiteinu (party, Israel), 435 Jalaeipour, Hamidreza, 173 Jame‘eh (Society) (newspaper), 173– 74, 196n26 James, William, 344 Japan postwar restoration of democracy, 141, 145 Jaskoski, Maiah, 66n49 Javadi-Amoli, Ayatollah, 194n9 Jennings, Ivor, 248 ijma (consensus), 384 JRM. See Society of Combatant Clergy Judaism controversy about conversion to, 437– 38 definition of, 437 ethics in, 351– 52

470 | Index

Judaism (cont.) no inherent conflict with democracy, 426 and social order, 345 judicial review in Israel, 441 in the United States, 279 judiciary in Iran, 171f —commitment of parliament to reforming justice system, 187 —family courts, 201n80 —use to repress dissent, 186 in Israel, 438 in Latin America, 98 Justice and Development Party (Turkey), 14, 369, 381 on assassination of Dink, 412 and constitutional changes, 416 and Directorate of Religious Affairs, 394– 409, 398, 398f, 403– 4 indicted for violating laiklik, 382 politics and nation-state policies, 410–16 religion at service of state, 387 reproducing “organic-statist” politics of the Kemalist establishment, 382– 83, 417 justice as basis of Jewish ethics, 352 Kadeer, Rebiya, 272n38 Kadivar, Mohsen, 185, 191 Kang Youwei, 256 Karbaschi, Gholam-Hossein, 175, 179 Karrubi, Mehdi, 177, 197n36 kashruth (dietary laws), 429 Kayhan (newspaper), 191, 198n39 Kelling, George L., 90 Kelsen, Hans, 239

Kemal Atatürk, Mustafa laicism, 388 modernization of Turkey, 368, 389 on rationality of Islam, 395– 96 Kemalism antimaterialism, 400 arrows of, 389 —constitutionalization of, 390 original content as ideology, 387 Kemalist laicism, 381, 418n1 as arrow of Kemalism, 389 branches of, 390– 92 corporatism in, 387, 389 JDP indicted for violating, 382 on religion as cement of society, 391 roots of, 388– 92 Keyder, Çag˘lar, 393 Khakimov, Rafael, 331n27 Khamenei, Ayatollah Sayyed Ali Hosseini attack on the press, 184– 85 on criminal behavior of the Ansar-e Hezbollah, 182–83 on political parties, 174 and security policy, 194n6 Khamenei, Hadi, 177 Khanty-Mansi AO as ethnic autonomous territory, 304 legislation on oil and gas, 320 Lukoil in, 312 role of federal oil companies in, 324 Khatami, Mohammad, 8 in 1997 presidential elections, 167 agenda of, 169 on criminal behavior of the Ansar-e Hezbollah, 182–83 electoral support in 1997, 167– 68 foreign policy successes, 177– 78 freedom under, 193n2 implementation of Constitution of 1979, 193n4

Index | 471

interview on CNN, 178 member of MRM, 177 Nouri and, 178– 79 strengthening of directly elected institutions, 169 on student unrest, 183 Khatami, Reza, 175 Khordad (newspaper), 174, 179, 198n39 Khordad Front, 190 Khordad Front, Second, 195n12 Kian (magazine), 185 Kineret Covenant (Israel, 2003), 449n86 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 358 Kirchner, Néstor, 210 Kirov oblast, 324 Komi bargaining power, 306t as ethnic republic, 304 weakness of local elites, 308– 9 Kousser, J. Morgan, 289 kratos, meaning of, 231 Labor Party (Israel), 430 labor unions in Iran, 176 laicism. See Kemalist laicism laiklik (laicity). See Kemalist laicism laissez-faire capitalism rejection by ordo-liberals, 132n2 revival of, 119 Lamarca, Carlos, 74 Lamont, Michele, 151 language, as common “link” in asymmetrical federalism, 263 Latin America. See also middle class, Latin American; military, Latin American; military academies, Latin American; police forces, Latin American federalism and citizenship in, 293 law enforcement, 88

legislation originating in executive, 98 religion-state relationship, 365 surveys on confidence in armed forces, 43– 44 “Usos y Costumbres” arrangements, 293 law political versus professional, 188 traditional versus political, 201n82 Law of Return (Israel, 1950), 437, 447n61 leaders, difficulty in finding pool of competent and responsible, 237– 38 Levin, Y. M., 427 Levitsky, Steve, 195n15 Levonstein, Meir, 428 Liang Qichao, 256 Liberal-Democratic Party of Russia, 320 liberalism distinguished from democracy, 238– 39 Li Cheng, 258 Lijphart, Arend, 262 on consociational democracy, 430 on U.S. Constitution, 279, 283 Linz, Juan J., 6, 142 on danger of overreaching, 147 on relationship between national identities and state building in Spain, 163n30 lobbies, oil-industrial, 306, 319– 24 López, Ernesto, 42 Lorberbaum, Menachem, 443 Los que mandan (Imaz), 26 Lotfian, Hedayat, 183, 200n67 Lukoil bilateral cooperation agreements with regional administrations, 311–12

472 | Index

Lukoil (cont.) financial backing to regional electoral campaigns, 319 founder of Fatherland– All Russia Party, 320 high-quality oil, 322 lobbying by, 319 Nenetsk and, 310 Nobel Oil and, 316 oil quality proposal, 322 and “On Oil and Gas” (Russian draft law), 320 and “On the Trunk Pipeline Transport” (Russian draft federal law), 321 and regional elites, 317 Lyubimov, Vladimir, 319 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 342– 43 MacKuen, Michael B., 206 Mahmoud, Mohamed, 356 Mahuad, Jamil, 45, 50 Mainwaring, Scott, 98– 99 Majles (Parliament, Iran) elections, 169 investigation of vigilante attacks on students, 181– 82 in Iran’s political system, 171f standoff with judiciary, 187 Maksiuta, Nikolai, 317, 319 Manateq-e Azad (newspaper), 197n39 Mapai (Israel), 430, 441 Mardin, S¸erif, 393 market building democratization seen as liability in beginning of, 111–12 public rules and, 115 regulatory state under democratic conditions and, 112, 117– 24, 126– 27, 127f market-preserving state, 118– 20 market reforms, 111– 36, 114–17 measuring progress in, 124– 25

marriage and divorce in Israel, 425, 433– 35 absence of civil marriage, 434 Couplehood Union legislation (Israel), 435, 446n50 interfaith marriage, 434 registration as a couple different from, 446n50 Marxism on removal of religion from politics, 341 Marxist-led revolutionary war as path to democracy, 142 Mattei, Ugo, 188 typology of legal systems, 201n82 Ma Ying-jeou, 266 McCann, Frank, 27 McNamara, Robert, 230– 31 Medvedev, Vladimir, 319 Meimad-Lubotzky-Beilin Covenant (1998, Israel), 449n86 Menem, Carlos, 210 Mercosur (Common Market of the South), 75 Meridor, Dan, 438 Mexico Constitution of 1917, 366 federalism in, 95 religion-state relationship, 366 —1992 constitutional reforms and, 367 role of armed forces in war against drugs, 79 middle class, Latin American military and, 27, 30 political views spreading to military, 50– 51 military and religious infrastructure in Turkey, 391 supporting Khatami Iran, 167 military, Brazilian dismissal of top commanders by Geisel, 70

Index | 473

ideational change in, 17 prerogatives during beginning of democratic rule, 4, 71 reconciliation with democracy, 67– 81 relation with Argentina’s military, 74 role —defined in 1988 Constitution, 71– 72 —in fighting drug trafficking, 79 social origins, 26– 27, 28t, 28t2 societal confidence in, 44, 45f transitional justice and, 73– 74 military, Latin American. See also Argentina; Chile; Ecuador; military, Brazilian; Uruguay budgets, 40– 41 civilian images of, 53 declining salaries —declining interest in military careers, 33 —resentment among junior officers, 65n40 and democratization, 144 dependence on society, 40 difficulties of changes in, 76 families —study of, 54 military sociology, 51– 56 need for an independent and professional hierarchy, 243 new professionalism of, 84 recruitment —campaigns, 38 —of officers, 27– 33, 37– 38 —patterns, 3 —of soldiers, 38– 39 research on military career patterns, 52 social origins, 26– 27, 28t, 49 —parents’ education and household income, 65n43

societal confidence in, 43– 44, 45f as state institution versus government, 144– 45 subordination to civilian authorities, 4– 5, 241– 43 treatment of personnel, 39– 40 military academies, Latin American applicants to, 33– 37 —in Argentina, 33– 34, 34f —in Ecuador, 37 —female, 35, 36f —in Uruguay, 35f cadets from military families, 29, 30– 31 Chile, 37, 38 fees/scholarships, 63n20 reasons for applying to, 37, 38, 52 Military in Politics, The: Changing Patterns in Brazil (Stepan, 1971), 2 on breakdown of democratic regimes, 6 on ideational change in Brazilian military, 17 on military professionalism, 15–16 Milli Görüs¸ (National Perspective) (Erbakan), 392 Millward, James, 272n38 Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance (Iran), 173, 201n74 Ministry of Religious Affairs (Israel), 365 Minxin Pei, 259 minzhu (democracy/popular sovereignty), 257 compared to Western understanding of democracy, 269n7 mirror-image-of-society model of democracy, 231 Missile Technology Control Regime (Brazil), 75

474 | Index

modernization on removal of religion from politics, 341 Mohajerani, Ataollah, 173, 175 Mohammadi, Manucher, 182 Mo’in, Mustafa, 181 Mokhtari, Mohammad, 179 Montazeri, Grand Ayatollah Hussein Ali, 179 Moore, Barrington, 148 morality bases for judgments, 374n19 in politics, 344 religion and, 344– 45, 375n25, 375n30 Roman Catholic Church and, 352– 55 Morozov, Oleg, 319 Mosharekat (newspaper), 174, 185 MRM. See Assembly of Combatant Clerics Mueller, John, 205, 206 multiethnic populations and democracies, 261 multinationalism democracy and, 10–11 federalism and, 246 multivocality in religious traditions, 339, 341, 370, 384 in Israel, 443 Musavi-Khoeiniha, Mohammad, 177, 199n46 mutual-veto principle, 428, 430 Myanmar, socially engaged Buddhism in, 361 Nateq-Nouri, Ali Akbar, 167, 168 Nathan, Andrew, 259 National Action Party (Turkey) and Directorate of Religious Affairs, 402 Erdog˘an on, 413 National Association of Students and Graduates (Iran), 182

National Control and Inspection Organization (Iran), 197n39 National Court of Police Justice (Ecuador), 99 National Force of Public Safety (Brazil), 72 nationalism as danger to democratizing countries, 269n2 Jewish, 427 in Russian ethnic regions, 307 in Turkey —as arrow of Kemalism, 389 —Erdog˘an distinguishing between good and bad, 413 Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World a Derivative Discourse? (Chatterjee), 422n66 nationalizations in Portugal, 152 National League for Democracy (Myanmar), 361 National Order Party (Turkey), 381 National Religious Party (Israel), 430 National Salvation Party (Turkey), 381 National Security Council (Iran) foreign and security policy, 172, 194n6 investigation of vigilante attacks on students, 182 National Security Council (Turkey), 391, 423n79 nation as creation of state, 246– 47 nation-state Kemal’s building of in Turkey, 389 versus state-nation, 252n22 natural law basis of Catholic moral teachings on abortion, 353– 54 framework for Catholic social encyclicals, 353 framework for Christian ethics, 352

Index | 475

Nazarov, Aleksandr, 318, 319 Needler, Martin, 46 neighborhood councils (Latin America), 84 Nenetsk Oil Company, 310 neoliberalism on market building, 112 —Linz and Stepan’s rejection of, 116 Neshat (newspaper), 183, 184, 198n39 Netherlands religion-state relationship, 363 study on zero tolerance in, 91 new institutionalism, 16–17 news media. See press New York Times, 241– 42 Nicaragua path to democracy, 142, 150 penal process code, 93 nongovernmental organizations in Iran, 176 nongovernmental violence observatories, 92 North-Western Trunk Oil Pipelines, 307 Nouri, Abdollah accusation, 197n39 impeachment by Majles, 178 nuclear control, joint program of Brazil and Argentina, 74, 75 Nun, José, 45 O’Donnell, Guillermo, 5, 6, 278– 79 Office for Fostering Unity among the Islamic Student Associations (DTV, Iran), 175 oil companies, Russian federal, 299– 335 control over regional petroleum markets, 316 corporate growth after financial crisis of August 1998, 314–15

emergence of within existing institutional framework, 311 funding of political parties, 320 involvement in regional politics, 318 —alliances with provincial governors, 319 —barter politics with regional administrations, 325 —cooperation agreements, 311–12 limited impact on regions from 1992 to 1998, 314 lobbying of federal parliament, 319– 24, 321t —for stable legal framework, 320 power from 1998 to 2004, 314–15 and system stability, 324, 326 vertical integration and influence in center-periphery bargaining relations, 310 oil industry in Russia, 302– 3 differing quality of oil, 322 diversity of regional control, 303 division of companies into federal and regional, 328n4 early 1990s arrangements concerning, 303 licensing, 332n36 —change in, 326 —two-key system, 309, 333n37 national oil pipelines, 307 oil resources, 330n14 regional authority over oil production, 308 taxation, 329n13 —oil lobby and, 323– 24, 326 —regions and, 308 Oil Quality Bank, 321– 23, 326 On War (Clausewitz), 242– 43 oppositions, democratic Catholic Church and, 353 strengthened by religious ethics, 370

476 | Index

oppositions, democratic (cont.) tasks of —Iranian reformists and, 191 — Stepan on, 8, 167, 193n3 ordo-liberalism in postwar Germany, 113, 121– 22 rejection of laissez-faire capitalism, 132n2 organic statism, 85 definition, 386 religion policy and nation-state policy as makers of, 382, 386– 88 Stepan on, 386 in Turkey, 387, 403, 414 Organization of the Islamic Conference (1997 meeting in Tehran), 177 Os Militares: Da abertura à Nova República (Stepan, 1986), 4 overreaching, danger of, 147 Oxhorn, Philip on decentralization, 94 Pakistan, elections in, 356, 377n38 pan-democratic ideology, 227– 28 Pan Wei, 257 Paraguay, 45f Parla, Taha, 387, 400 parliamentarism. See also prime ministers, rates of approval of asymmetrical federalism and, 262– 63 coalitions in, 210 compared to presidentialism, 9, 203, 219 definition by Stepan and Skach, 207 personalization of the office of prime minister, 208 Participation Front of Islamic Iran, 195n12 participation versus representation in democratic theory, 232

party pact path of redemocratization, 142 path dependence, 18 “Paths toward Redemocratization: Theoretical and Comparative Considerations” (Stepan), 7, 430– 31 penal process codes, 93 People’s Deputy faction (Russia), 320, 321t Perelli, Carina, 53 Pérez-Liñán, Aníbal, 207 performance, criteria for measuring political, 234– 35 Perm oblast, 312 Peronist party, 48 Perry, Elizabeth, 259 Perry, Michael, 350– 51 personal law in Israel, 425, 433– 35. See also marriage and divorce in Israel jurisdiction of rabbinic courts over Jews, 429 jurisdiction of religious groups over their members, 433 Peru reform of police, 99 salary of generals, 64n26 security services provided by army, 66n49 societal confidence in armed forces, 45f Pinto, Antonio Costa, 152 plebiscites, 248 pluralism destruction of social, 244– 45 in Islam, 356 moments in China, 257 police forces, Latin American academies, 87 accountability, 5 authority to enforce regulations, 98

Index | 477

budgets, 89 changes, 99 —inability to make, 86 —necessary to apply zero tolerance, 91 in Ecuador —discredited by human rights organizations, 103 —lack of equipment, 89 education, 87, 88 internal agencies to deal with corruption, 99 investigation, 88 judiciary and, 98 management and procedure, 87– 90 preventive policing, 88 professionalism of, 5, 84– 86 proliferation due to decentralization, 95– 96 promotion, 88– 89 recruitment, 87 societal reactions to abuses, 101 traditional practices versus problem-oriented practices, 85 police power judiciary and, 98 residing in legislature in democracies, 98 policing coordination with social services in democracy, 91– 92 legal base for, 104n9 repressive, 102 stages of modern, 85– 86 political Islam. See under Islam political law (Iran), 188– 89 political parties in Iran, 190 —boycott of 2004 elections, 190 —under Khatami, 172, 174– 76 —permits for, 196n28 selection of candidates by, 237

system impact on executive approval dynamics, 218, 219 tribal/clan loyalties and, 249 in Turkey, 369 —multiparty system, 390 Political Parties Law (Iran), 186 political society and consolidated democracy, 114 Stepan on role of in transition to democracy, 69 politics Aristotle on, 342 definitions —by Dahl, 374n11 —modern, 343 informal participation in Spain versus Portugal, 155– 56 Machiavelli on, 342– 43 moral assumptions in, 342, 344, 347 need for research on incentives and disincentives for being in, 234– 35 religion inseparable from, 340, 341– 48 value decisions in, 343– 44 “Politics, not Religion, at the Heart of the Growing Muslim-West Divide, New Report Argues” (Alliance of Civilizations meeting, 2006), 405 populism as arrow of Kemalism, 389 social origins and military, 45– 51 Portes, Alejandro, 65n39 Portugal, democratization of, 149, 150– 60 bottom-up purges, 152 captains’ coup of April 25, 1974, 151– 52 Carnation Revolution, 151, 152, 164n36 education institutions, 153

478 | Index

Portugal, democratization of (cont.) enterprise ownership, 153 families, 153 mass media, 153 partial inversion of hierarchies, 152, 157– 58 state crisis and, 151 post– New Deal constitutionalism, 113, 121– 22 Pouyandeh, Mohammad Jafar, 179 presidency (Iran), 169, 171f presidentialism coalitions in, 210 compared to parliamentarism, 9, 203, 219 definition by Stepan and Skach, 207 democracy and, 9 mean executive approval in, 214t presidential power index (PPI), 130, 133n11 presidents, rates of approval of constitutional terms and, 211, 212, 216 direct election and, 208, 209 electoral system and initial levels of approval, 217–18, 217t evolution of, 215 before leaving office, 216 mandates and initial levels of quarterly approval, 217t presidents, removal of, 221n3 press in Iran —as arena of contestation, 195n15 —crackdown on, 184– 85, 189 —imprisoned journalists, 190 —under Khatami, 172, 173– 74 —new law, 198n45 in Portugal, 153, 157– 58 and selection of political candidates, 237

in Spain —guarantees against partisan control, 164n38 —treatment of protests, 158 prime ministers, rates of approval of early elections and, 211 evolution of, 215 before leaving office, 216 mean executive approval in, 214t Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation (Linz and Stepan) on accountability, 5 on importance of democratic legitimacy, 299– 300 on links between market reforms, state making, and democratization, 6, 16, 111, 113, 121– 22 meaning of consolidated democracy, 385 nation-state policy angle, 382 Ungar on, 83 proportionality, rule of, 430 Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, The (Weber), 148 Protestantism in China, 368 protests and demonstrations in China, 259 interaction with institutional power holders —importance of type of, 159 —in Portugal, 154 —in Spain, 158 as opportunity for relatively powerless, 159 seeking to change public policy in Portugal, 157 in Spain versus Portugal, 155– 56, 158– 59 public opinion data and focus on responsiveness, 229

Index | 479

on public security, 5 surveys, 204– 5 Putin, Vladimir changes in federal legislation, 326– 27 corporate expansion under —economic dimension, 316–17 —political dimension, 318–19 oil sector’s role in federal system under, 323, 325t and regions, 315–16 Russian transition under, 299 Pye, Lucian, 255 Qalibaf, Mohammad Baqer, 200n67 Rabbinical Courts Jurisdiction (Marriage and Divorce) Law (Israel), 433 Radical Republicans (U.S.), 281, 282 Rafsanjani, Hashemi, 180, 195n12, 196n27 Raikov, Gennadii, 320 Rakhimov, Murtaza, 327 Ravitz, Abraham, 440 Rah-e No (New Way) (newspaper), 180 Rawls, John, 348 real-world relevance of issues studied by Stepan, 15 reason, role of. See also ijtihad (independent reasoning) in development of religiously based moral teachings, 375n30 in religions of the Book, 355 Reconstruction (U.S.), 277 active exercise of rights by blacks, 285 biracial electorates, 285– 86 black office holders, 285, 296n25 civil society during, 285 collapse of, 286– 87

constitutional basis for, 281– 82 elections in Southern states after, 297n30 protagonists in, 280– 81 registration of new voters, 284 state constitutions, 286 Reconstruction Constitutionalism, 282, 287, 291 redemocratization externally monitored installation, 141 initiated by “military-asgovernment,” 142, 144 initiated by the civilian or civilianized political leadership, 141– 42, 144 internal reformulation, 141, 144 internal restoration after external conquest, 141 led by “military-as-institution,” 142, 144 party pact, 142 society-led regime termination, 142 Reese (U.S. Supreme Court), 287 Reform Judaism in Israel, 430, 437 Regions of Russia, 319, 321t regulatory state, 120– 24 Agenda 2000 on, 113 capacities, 130 capacity to maintain rule of law —relation to neoliberal reforms, 125– 26, 126f comparative capitalism students on necessity of, 121 and democratization, 128, 129f link to market liberalization, 126– 27, 127f measuring capacity of, 127 religion Bas¸gil on social role of, 406– 8, 409 concerns interrelated with politics, 341– 48

480 | Index

religion (cont.) continued public role in political debate, 341, 346 core values of major religions and universal human dignity, 350 democratic minimum in public advocacy, 348– 49 democratic minimum in religionstate relationship, 362– 69 doctrinal beliefs versus moral teachings, 375n25 freedom —autonomy from government and from other religions, 432 —from the state, 383 —universal, 362 inseparable from politics, 340 in Israel —authority of institutions, 429 —freedom, 433 and morality, 344– 45, 352– 55, 375n30 public role in Israel, 442– 43 in Turkey —as cement of society, 391 —as contributor to the cohesiveness of society, 390 —at the service of the state, 387 Religion and Laiklik (Bas¸gil), 407– 8 religion-state relationship, 340. See also caesaropapism; disestablishment; establish ment; separation of church and state; theocracy in China, 366– 67 — Constitution of 1982, 367– 68 —Religious Affairs Bureau (RAB), 368 in Cuba, 366, 367 democratic minimum, 362– 69 in Israel, 425 religious-civilizational approach, 384, 442

religious-institutional approach, 442–43 representation versus participation in democratic theory, 232 Republic, Religions, and Hope (Sarkozy), 405 republicanism as arrow of Kemalism, 389 Republican Peoples Party (Turkey) on Directorate of Religious Affairs, 399– 400 —and Alevis, 394– 95 goal of modernization, 389 investing in infrastructure of religion, 390 and Justice and Development Party, 413 response to Dink’s funeral procession, 411 Resalat (newspaper), 198n39 Rethinking Military Politics: Brazil and the Southern Cone (Stepan, 1988), 4– 5 Revolutionary Court (Iran) closure of Iran Freedom Movement, 186 investigation of Ansar-e Hezbollah, 182 Revolutionary Guards (IRGC, Iran) favoring Khatami’s 1997 platform, 167– 68 and security, 194n6 Rial, Juan, 32, 53, 62n11 rights consciousness in China, 258 Riker, William H. on federalism, 271n25, 298n40 Stepan’s critique of, 10, 12, 16 Robertson, Graeme C., 385 Roketsky, Leonid, 319 Roman Catholic Church illegality in China, 368 in Latin America, 365

Index | 481

natural law framework of social encyclicals, 353 social morality of, 352– 55 support to Brazilian civil society, 69 Rosneft, 319, 322 rule of law consolidated democracy and, 114 Khatami’s strengthening of, 169 Rule of Law index (World Bank), 125 Runicom, 317 Russian Federal Treaty (1992), 305 Russian Federation. See also oil companies, Russian federal; oil industry in Russia bilateral treaties within, 331n24 Constitution of 1993, 304 elections —victory of old political and industrial elites, 300– 301 —violations in regional elections, 301 emergence, 300 federalism —changing federal relations, 324– 27, 335n81 —oil sector’s role, 325t —structure of, 330n16 inverted legitimacy pyramid in, 300 Kremlin pipeline politics, 307 legislation concerning oil —“On Oil and Gas” (Russian draft law), 320 —“On Subsoil” (Russian federal law), 326 —“On the Trunk Pipeline Transport” (Russian draft federal law), 321 regions —administrative status and initial bargaining power of elites, 304 —authority over oil industry, 309 —bargaining power of top oilrich republics, 306t

—ethnic autonomous republics, 304– 5, 330n16 —oil companies’ concessions to in exchange for licensing, 310 —separatism, 305 rent-seeking behavior of administrations, 311 social revolution and antidemocratic rule, 150 Yenikeyeff on, 12–13 Rwanda and danger of nationalism to democratizing countries, 269n2 Sabbath preservation in Israel, 425, 429, 435– 36 commercial activity, 436, 447n57 recreational facilities, 436 Safavi, Rahim, 196n26 Salam (newspaper), 177, 180, 198n39 Samuels, David, 221n5 Saratov oblast, 313 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 405 Sarney, José, 75 Scandinavia, religion-state relationship in, 362– 63 Schillebeeckx, Edward, 375n30 Schleicher, Kurt von, 243 Schmitter, Philippe, 6, 149, 278– 79 Schumpeter, Joseph on decentralization, 94 on necessity of bureaucracy for democracy, 240 on quality of leadership, 236 secularism laicism and, 418n1 not complementary to consolidation of democracy, 382 in Turkey, 368 “Secularism and Laicism in Turkey” (Parla and Davison), 388

482 | Index

security armies contracting to provide services, 66n49 as high priority in national polls, 82 right to, 103 self-determinism, 248 Selmeski, Brian, 39, 66n44 separation of church and state, 362. See also religion-state relationship antagonistic, 366 —in Turkey, 368– 69 incomplete —in the United States, 363– 64 —in Western democracies, 431 Stepan on, 13 Serviço Nacional de Informações (SNI, Brazil), 77 Shabestari, Mohammad Mojtahed, 185, 191 Shahidi, Shaaban, 197n39 Shamsolvaezin, Mashallah, 176, 185 Shariati, Ali, 188 Shonfield, A., 118 Shotts, Kenneth W., 206 Sibneft, 317, 322 Sidanko, 312 Sikkink, Kathryn, 18 Skach, Cindy, 9, 207, 219 Skocpol, Theda, 151, 162n19 Slaughterhouse Cases (U.S., 1873), 286– 87 Smith, Alastair, 211 Smith v. Allright (U.S., 1944), 297n36 Sobh-e Emruz (newspaper), 198n39 Sobyanin, Sergei, 319 social revolution and antidemocratic rule, 150 and democratization, 150 —and distinctive form of democratic politics, 159

—impact on democratic practice, 140 —in Portugal, 150– 60 Skocpol’s model of, 162n19 society, civil. See civil society society, political. See political society society-led regime termination, 142 Society of Combatant Clergy (JRM, Iran), 176, 197n34 Society of Instructors of the Qom Seminaries (Iran), 197n34 Society of Muslim Engineers (Iran), 197n34 Solidariedade Imigrante (Portugal), 156– 57 Solidarity Party of Islamic Iran, 195n12 Solidarnost, 317 Solid South (U.S.), 287– 88 Soroush, Abdolkarim, 185, 191, 356 Soviet Oil and Gas Ministry, 303 Sowing the Seeds of Democracy in China (Goldman), 258 Spain asymmetrical federalism, 262 bureaucracy during transition, 241 democratization compared to Portugal, 151, 154– 56 —in relation between protesters and institutional power holders, 154– 55 multiethnic population, 261 positive rating of military, 44 relationship between national identities and state building, 163n30 Special Court of the Clergy, 199n46 Spousal Covenant for Persons Having No Religious Affiliation Act (Israel, 2010), 435 Sri Lanka, socially engaged Buddhism in, 360

Index | 483

Stark, Rodney, 344 state. See also regulatory state; religion-state relationship autonomy from religion, 362 democracy and, 245– 46, 247, 385 developmental, 117–18 as distinguished from nation, 246– 47 as distinguished from regime, 144 excessive identification with as hindrance to democratic consolidation, 385– 86 freedom from religion, 383 measuring state capacities, 125 military’s relations with, 25 neo-Weberian scholars’ rediscovery of, 118 as precondition to markets, 114, 115 reconstruction in Russia aided by federal corporate actors, 300 State and Society, The: Peru in Comparative Perspective (Stepan, 1978), 3, 6, 16 on organic statism, 382, 386 state capacity, meaning of, 117–18 stateness problems, 10, 256 statism as arrow of Kemalism, 389 Stauffenberg, Claus von, 243, 251 Stepan, Alfred analysis of Brazilian military, 46 characteristic trademarks of, 15–19, 142 on civil society, 100 criticism of Huntington, 417 on danger of underreaching, 146 definition of politics, 343 on federalism, 12 —institutions crafted by political actors, 291 —and relationship with democracy, 273– 74

on military as backbone of authoritarian regimes, 67 requirements for democracy, 419n8 on tasks of democratic opposition, 8, 167, 193n3 use of opinion survey data, 218 Weberian view of culture, 417 Stigler, George, 119 Stimson, James A., 206 Successful Societies (Hall and Lamont), 151 Suleiman, Ezra, 239– 40 Sunday Times (London), 184 Sun Yat-sen, 256 Supreme Court (U.S.) on Bill of Rights, 278 interpretation of Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, 286– 87 on market regulation, 119– 20 nationalization of the Bill of Rights, 297n36 and separation of church and state, 364 Supreme Court (Israel) and liberalsecular Jewish agenda, 441–42 Supreme Leader (Iran), 171, 171f as commander in chief, 172, 194n6 Surgutneftegas, 320 surveys public opinion, 204– 5, 218 used in study of executive approval, 212, 213 Suu Kyi, Aung San, 361 Sverdlovsk oblast, 313 Sweetman, Brendan, 375n25 Switzerland and multiethnic population, 261 Taiwan, 266– 67 Talbi, Mohamed, 356

484 | Index

Tatarstan bargaining power, 306– 7, 306t as ethnic republic, 304 legislation on oil and gas, 320 nationalism in, 307 oil licensing in, 309–10 opposition to Oil Quality Bank, 322 producer of low-quality oil, 313, 322 role of federal oil companies in, 324 separatism in, 305 shares in open joint stock oil company, 307 Tatneft licensing of, 310 low-quality oil, 322 vertical integration of, 308 Tenzin Gyatso, Fourteenth Dalai Lama, 361 Tercüman (newspaper), 410, 412 territorial claims of China, 255 territorial democratization, 273– 98, 294n2 Thailand, socially engaged Buddhism in, 360 Thelen, Kathleen, 291– 92 theocracy, 14, 340 partial, 365, 369 theory of transition pathways, 143 third wave of democratization. See democratization: third wave Three-Self Patriotic Movement, 368 Tiananmen Square demonstrations (1989), 257 Tibet Chinese control over, 271n35 ethnic riots in, 256 federalism and, 263– 64 immigration of Chinese to, 264 Tillich, Paul, 344 Titov, Alexei, 317

Titov, Konstantin, 319 TNK corporate growth, 315 financial backing to regional electoral campaigns, 319 high-quality oil, 322 trade barriers, data on, 133n10 transformationism as arrow of Kemalism, 389 Transitions from Authoritarian Rule (O’Donnell and Schmitter), 278– 79 transition to democracy. See also democratization accountability during, 97 by external military imposition, 145 justice during, 73 political differences among paths, 149 reforma versus ruptura, 140 social characteristics of paths, 149 Stepan’s typology of, 139, 141– 42 theoretically conceivable routes —versus actually viable routes, 145 —and historical circumstances, 160 weakness of legislatures during, 97– 98 Transneft, 307, 321 Trinkunas, Harold on situation in Venezuela, 50 Turkey, 381– 423 antiminority policies, 390 Constitutional Court, 415 democratization, 393– 94 Directorate of Religious Affairs, 368– 69, 388 —budget, 397, 398 —budget as percentage of actual state budget spent, 398f —Democratic Left Party and, 401 —development of, 390 —employees at, 399f

Index | 485

—increased budget of, 392 —JDP politics and, 394– 409, 403– 4 —law for restructuring, 406 —National Action Party and, 402 — Stepan on, 393 —Virtue Party and, 402 —Welfare Party and, 401, 402– 3 elections, 356, 377n38, 414 —in 2002 and 2007, 381– 82, 414–15 Kemalist laicism and political Islam, 381– 423 and military operation in Iraq, 414–15 religion — Constitution of 1982 on, 391 —political will to invest in religion infrastructure, 409 —state relationship with, 14, 368– 69 Stepan on, 385, 393 “twin tolerations,” 13–14, 339– 40, 424, 431– 38 Israeli implementation of, 432– 33 second toleration, 362, 371 —compliance in the United States, 364 —freedom to worship privately, 378n53 Stepan on, 382 Tyumen oblast, 304, 319, 324 Tyumen Oil Company, 315 control over Yugraneft, 316 funding of political parties, 320 Udmurtia bargaining power, 306t as ethnic republic, 304 oil licensing in, 309–10 weakness of local elites, 308 underreaching, Stepan on danger of, 146, 149

Union Leagues, 285 Union of National Civil Society Organizations (Turkey), 415 Union of Rightist Forces (Russia), 320, 321t United Kingdom establishment of Shari’a courts, 405 religion-state relationship, 362 survey on executive approval, 213 United Nations Brazilian military in peacekeeping missions, 79 Year of the Dialogue among Civilizations, 177 United States. See also Reconstruction; Supreme Court (U.S.) Catholic moral teachings on abortion, 353– 54 Constitution —difficulty of changing, 279 —Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, 283 —guaranteeing each state a republican form of government, 282– 83 enfranchisement and disenfranchisement of southern blacks, 277, 278 federalism and territorial democratization in, 276– 98 investigation in police force, 88 judicial review, 279 jurisdiction over natural resources, 333n37 religion-state relationship, 363– 64 Southern states —constitutional reforms, 289 —construction of the Solid South, 287– 88 —elections after Reconstruction, 297n30 —voter turnout, 288, 289, 290t

486 | Index

United States (cont.) subnational governments and conflicts about democracy, 277 survey on executive approval, 213 Urals blend, 322 Ural-Siberian Trunk Oil Pipelines, 307– 8 Uruguay military —social origins, 32– 33, 32f, 59– 60 —societal confidence in, 45f Stepan on, 4 Valelly, Richard on change in U.S. federalism, 280 on enfranchisement and disenfranchisement of blacks, 277, 284 Reconstruction Constitutionalism, 282, 283 on Supreme Court and Reconstruction Constitutionalism, 287 Van Dyke, Vernon, 343 Venezuela as dangerous country, 82 federalism in, 95 Law of Vagabonds and Crooks (1939), 92 living standards of officers, 50 military populism in Bolivarian Revolutionary Movement, 45 penal process code in, 93 poor training of police force, 87– 88 societal confidence in armed forces, 44, 45f vigilantism, 102 Virtue Party (Turkey), 381, 402 Volgograd oblast, 312

Wald, Kenneth, 354– 55 Way, Lucan, 195n15 Weber, Max on Hinduism as world-rejecting asceticism, 345 influence of methodology on Stepan, 142– 43, 147 on problem of dispensability, 237 Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, The, 148 on public security, 6 Weingast, Barry, 271n28 Welfare Party (Turkey), 369, 381 attitude toward Europe, 404 and budget of Directorate of Religious Affairs, 401, 402– 3 calling for elimination of term laik from Turkish Constitution, 404 closing down, 391 decision of the European Court of Human Rights against, 420n27 National Security Council and, 391 religion at service of state, 387 Whitehead, Laurence, 6 “Whither the Project of Modernity? Turkey in the 1990s” (Keyder), 393 Wilson, James Q., 90 Winter, Herbert, 343 women applications to military academies, 35, 36f cadets, 62n13 discrimination in divorce law in Israel, 434 Women Equal Rights Law (Israel, 1951), 434 Wood, Elisabeth, 150 Working Hours and Rest Law (Israel), 436, 446n55

Index | 487

World Bank governance survey, 125 on need to build regulatory capacities, 120 “World’s Religious Systems and Democracy, The: ‘Crafting the Twin Tolerations’” (Stepan), 382 framework for evaluating democratic relationship between religion and state, 424 on multivocality, 13 World Uyghur Congress, 272n38 Xiaobo Lü, 257 Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, 256, 264– 65 Yabloko (Russian party), 320, 321t Yahadut Hatorah party (Israel), 440 Yakutia, oil licensing in, 309–10 Yamalo-Nenets AO as ethnic autonomous territory, 304 role of federal oil companies in, 324 Yanhapyo (Union of Young Monks), 361 Yeltsin, Boris dependence on regional elites, 301, 311, 315, 325 oil sector’s role in federal system under, 324, 325t

and political parties, 301 Russian transition under, 299 Yugoslavia and danger of nationalism to democratizing countries, 269n2 Yukos corporate growth, 315 founder of Fatherland– All Russia party, 320 funding of political parties, 319, 320 high-quality oil, 322 lobbying by, 319 oil quality proposal, 322 and “On Oil and Gas” (Russian draft law), 320 and “On the Trunk Pipeline Transport” (Russian draft federal law), 321 and regional elites, 317 regional strategy, 312 Zan (Woman) (newspaper), 174, 196n27 Zapatero, José Luís Rodríguez, 164n38 zero tolerance, 90– 91 Zhang Binglin, 256 Ziblatt, Daniel, 267 Zionism, 427 zizhi (self-government), 257 Zolotarev, Boris, 318