Bermeo, Nancy (2003) Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times: The Citizenry and the Breakdown of Democracy Introduction, Chp1 pp1 -20 and Chp 7 pp.221-256.
Notes.
Much of what elites attempt to do is conditioned by their judgement of how ordinary people will behave.
People -> individuality of the group's membership. Ordinary -> no extraordinary powers vis a vis the states in which they live.
Do they defend democracy or embrace dictatorship? And why/when etc.?
First challenge - "finding" ordinary people - disentangling them from civil society
Second challenge - two competing visions - ordinary people as "heroic", or as members of groups with destabilising influences
Study of Electoral Behaviour, Strikes, Demonstrations and Acts of Violence
Mass defections to extremist parties are rare
Extremist support usually a result of expansion of the franchise or mobilisation of non-voters (so non-voters are not ordinary people?). Changes in the composition of the electorate rather than changes in heart and mind caused extremist support to grow.
Blame lies with political elites
either wholly - their own democratic convictions were so weak they used public polarisation as a rationale for creating an authoritarian regime
Other times they "allowed" public polarisation to grow violent and threaten public order and the military as an institution - when the military was threatened, democracy was doomed
Chapter 1
What is civil society - why is it important?
"The network of formal and informal associations that mediate between individual actors and the state"
The offer the fellowship, resources and refinement that make acts of defiance seem feasible
Civil society as salvation
de Tocqueville regards it as the only way of preserving freedom
Lots of other positive adjectives about civil society
Civil society as a spoiler
in the 1970s it was cast in an ambiguous role
Huntingdon (1968) drew a distinction between institutionalised societies where the expansion of civil society reduces tensions, and praetorian societies in which participation of new groups exacerbates tensions.
Highly activist society can lead to democratic instability. Linz for example believes civil society should have no direct connections with those in power if democracy is to be preserved.
E.g. O'Donnell (1979) pre-coup Argentinian and Brazilian governments wre victimised by praetorian coalitions (and also collaborated in it)
When a certain level of development of society allows even the base to get organised, the trouble begins.
Elected officials can face a barely manageable schedule of political demands (can lead to unsolvable problems and crises?)
Tying in civil society with Linz theory - it leads to government incapacity by increasing the demands on government.
Hirschman (1970) - need a balance between alert and inert citizens
If civic organisations can work against democracy - it is logical that the individual actors that compose them be blamed
Bermeo's point - we can blame civil society but not individuals?
Strand of the literature claiming ordinary people are not ready for the freedom democracy allows (see P15) e.g. Working class authoritarianism (Lipset, 1960) had its roots in low education, low participation, little reading, isolated occupations, economic insecurity and authoritarian family patterns.
Theory - in times of crisis ordinary people cannot be trusted to resist the lure of authoritarianism
For a regime to endure it has to continually prove its legitimacy, and can rely on loyalty to some extent but needs to prove to each generation
Institutions to control the populace
Sartori (1976) - party systems and party elites must restrain the forces of polarity inherent in political democracies. Party systems need to contain the ideological range and number of parties in the national legislature.
Conclusion - Ordinary people often play a PERIPHERAL role in the breakdown of democracy. In the cases where their role is more central, it's only partially captured by polarisation metaphor.
Mistaken the polarisation in "select and small groups" in civil society for polarisation in society as a whole. Voters generally did not polarise nor did public opinion shift to the edges of the left-right scale.
Chapter 7 - Polarisation and the ignorance of elites
In reality many people failed to polarise and Bermeo places the blame for democracy's demise overwhelmingly with political elites
Ordinary people rarely threw democracies off balance with their votes
Each of the many democracies studied (except Poland) fell to forces on the right but the democracies they replaced were of varied "hues".
The right do not necessarily unify against the left - e.g. if a right wing dictatorship takes over a right wing government - so the polarisation metaphor is not always accurate.
[Why would we need to assume polarisation? It's just one form of instability]
At the polls: even in Italy where the centre collapsed among political elites it still held its own at the polls.
Reason - loyalty and inertia - party identification is not easily changed - remarkably resistant to passing political events
If the party collapses by itself - or - if the composition of the electorate changes
Opportunity costs of political participation - collecting information is costly and party switching seems to be correlated with high levels of information (see p.224; Converse, in Campbell et al)
Weakness of using the unilinear, bipolar schema
Many parties don't particularly fit onto it
Often electoral alliances between parties with seemingly inconsistent ideologies made representation of particular votes difficult in countries such as Italy, Poland, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay.
Prefers to think of the policy landscape as a sphere
Polarisation in multiple arenas
It's a process as well as a condition. Growth of mutually antagonistic self identified groups. They are extremist (G Bingham Powell) if they offer the chance of radical change in the social, economic and political fabric of the existing system. (Is extremist the right word to use here?)
Different processes of polarisation:
- in public spaces
- at the polls
- in public opinion
- among political elites
Important to trace the trajectories of polarisation in different arenas because a democratic regime is itself composed of partial-regimes (Schmitter 1992)
Linz and Stepan (1996) "democracy is more than a regime" - it is an interacting system composed of 5 interrelated arenas - political society, civil society, economic society, rule of law, state apparatus.
[regimes need to maintain legitimacy in all of those areas in order to endure]
Role of elites - acting on the (generally) mistaken impression that polarisation in the streets was representative of high levels of polarisation in society generally - they reacted to it by exacerbating polarisation in political society
[so wouldn't those elites have been involved in the polarisation "on the streets"?]
They demanded increased concessions for the mobilised and extended toleration of disruption
Political polarisation let to military elites considering intervention
Polarisation can be contagious from one arena to another
Timing
None of the 17 cases studied here suffered a regime change during an economic boom. But bad economic performance was not unambiguously associated with regime breakdown
-Social movement literature - social movements emerge and lead to public polarisation when there are changes in political opportunity structures
Tarrow - the opening up of access to power / shifts in ruling alignments / availability of influential allies
Intensity - related to the density of social movements
Saliency - elites misjudged the size of social movements because they did not have good information on them [but how can you tell the real size of the social movements retrospectively.. just by using voting behaviour? is this a good measure? why did elites always get it wrong? would elites have had the capacity to put down these movements anyway?]
[Election results wouldn't be a good measure if a large part of the electorate felt disenfranchised or if party competition was limited/sham-like, or voting inertia hid true support for other groups]
pg.234
