A passionate
debate comparing and contrasting the performance of
Advocates of democracy claim that it protects property
rights, promoting an environment of collective growth.
In political science and sociology literature,
dictatorship and democracy have been compared extensively in terms of their
effect on socioeconomic wellbeing and growth. In “Political Man”, Seymour
Martin Lipset’s primary argument is that economic development is the product of
democracy. Historical analyses such as his are, however, incapable of
establishing causality between the form of government and economic outcomes.
The reason is that it is not possible to isolate the effect of the form of
governance from that of various other factors such as the ruler's personality,
cultural practices, demographics of the country, availability of natural
resources, and many others.
A cursory look at post-World War II economic trajectories of various nations
confirms the precariousness of any connection between the form of government
and economic outcomes due to conflicting trends. While many western democratic
states have prospered, Latin American democracies with established
parliamentary structures, political parties, unions and competitive elections
suffered economic disasters during the 1980s. Similarly, many Far Eastern
nations have emerged from poverty under authoritarian rule, but the world is
replete with examples of dictatorships that are in deep economic turmoil. Some
empirical analyses have attempted to control for the effect of confounding
variables such as history or personality, but the results of these studies
remain largely inconclusive.
On the other hand, theoretical analyses also fall short of reaching consensus
on this question. To Amartya Sen, the foremost argument in favor of democracy
is its ability to hold the government accountable not only through elections,
but also through other participatory mechanisms such as free press and
independent judiciary.
Other advocates of democracy claim that it protects
property rights, promoting an environment of collective growth. The majority in
a democracy is empowered to enact taxation rules and other mechanisms to steer
the redistribution of wealth toward the middle stratum of society. This, the
critics of democracy contend, weakens the property rights of wealth generators,
thus undermining growth.
Another potential problem with democracy is that strategic voting, with partial
or asymmetric information, does not truly represent the preferences of all
citizens, thus negating the very purpose of democracy.
Meanwhile, the pro-dictatorship camp argues that an autocratic state is
autonomous and insulated from private pressures, eliminating resource wastage
due to political manipulation. However, the authoritarian regime, with its
absolute discretion, lacks accountability and therefore makes the ruler prone
to predation. In short, while there is agreement that political institutions
safeguarding economic rights are important for growth, framing the dichotomy in
terms of regimes does not seem to capture the relevant differences.
This assertion becomes more substantial when we recognise that dictatorships
are disparate in their institutional structure. They tend to differ, among
other factors, in the degree of absolutism, operational transparency, and
access to political rights – institutions that affect economic development.
Many dictatorships in history have governed with councils that sometimes enjoy
formal law-making powers. Many modern dictatorships allow multiple political
parties and legislatures to operate, although only after controlling the
pre-selection of political parties or their membership. Carles Boix and Milan
Svolik estimate that three-fourths of all post-WWII dictatorial regimes have
ruled with a legislature, and the majority has relied on a political party to
organise their political support. Similarly, Jennifer Gandhi finds that most
post-WWII dictators operated with multiple parties.
Interestingly, Machiavelli also recognised that some dictators – which he
called ‘limited princes’ as opposed to ‘absolute princes’ – are reined in by
institutions that empower other actors to oppose the despot. Gandhi’s recent
empirical analysis substantiates many historical readings suggesting that these
institutions are effective in constraining the dictator’s behavior.
We can therefore conclude that it is the presence of specific institutions, and
not the form of government, that affects economic development and access to
basic facilities. These institutions can be established in both democratic and
non-democratic regimes and there is no reason to believe that all the
democracies would establish these institutions.
Should the idea of democracy then be considered irrelevant and abandoned? To
answer that, we must note that democracy has an intrinsic value which
supersedes its potential instrumental role. The essential characteristic of
democracy is that it is a process of collective decision making in which,
according to James Buchanan, “each individual counts for one and that is that.”
Assigning men differential weights would amount to playing God, violating the
percepts of the individualists that form a democracy.
In the process of making a decision which falls in the public domain, the
private preferences of any individual are neither more nor less significant
than those of others. In other words, politics is not an attempt to achieve a
specific organisation of the society, but a process through which group
differences are reconciled. The only criterion to judge the state is its
ability to allow individuals to get what they want, whatsoever this might be,
limited only by the principle of mutual agreement guided by reciprocity. There
is no philosopher-king, nor is there an ultimate truth remaining to be
discovered that delineates a utopian society.
By accepting an individual as the unit of decision-making, we embrace the
principle that individual freedom is the overriding objective for social
policy, not as an instrumental element in attaining economic objectives, but
simply as a desirable characteristic of a society. The only purpose of any
social organisation is that it provides efficient means to achieve individual
objectives with minimal conflict, and not because it offers the means of
arriving at a transcendental common bliss.
The debate that compares democratic and dictatorial governance structures in
Is a society willing to give up economic development for the sake of each
individual’s right of participation in collective decision-making? Is
there consent on the absolute value of individual freedom? Do all members of
the society accept the normative political process that it entails? Is the
society willing and capable of absorbing the implications of such a conception
of democracy?
Only after answering these questions clearly and categorically can a society
move forward in instituting the appropriate system of governance and achieving
the goals that it sets for itself.
Ghazia Aslam is a doctoral candidate at George Mason
University, USA, and Wasim Q Malik is a postdoctoral researcher at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Monday, 01 March 2010 exclusively for Dawn.com