Abstract
Democracies that have adopted an authoritative tone to their politics have a lot in common. For example, their hate speech against minorities, the exacerbated nationalism, the economic factor, in particular, and a return to the economic liberalism orthodox politics all give power to the national conservative governments. These factors move the masses away from a position of influence to get power in the hands of conservative governments. Some of the countries that recently have adopted this radical conservative posture in their politics have been through periods of the opposite relative political liberalism position, like the USA with Barack Obama and Brazil with the Working Party (in Portuguese, PT). In both countries, the previous government attempted to include minorities.
So many other democracies, including Turkey, Chile, and South Africa are set by an institutional arrangement of people’s democracy and democracy to people, present only in the masses’ imagination, prevailing an authoritative posture that favour only the elite. ‘Why has the quality and breadth of democracy been so disappointing? Why have levels of inequality, poverty, and corruption become alarmingly high, even decades after transitions from authoritarianism? Why have many democracies failed, both today and in the past, to live up to the potential that so many attribute to them?’ (p. 3). Those are some of the question raised in Authoritarianism and the Elite Origins of Democracy. Its authors highlight the prominent role of outgoing authoritarian elites in the democracies’ development that emerge from an authoritative regime, particularly in the formation of countries’ democratic institutionality, the first democratic constitution.
The presence of authoritative elites (economic and political) is the main element to obtain answers for the previous questions. Michael Albertus and Victor Menaldo analyse the democracies that emerged from authoritarian governments, especially the ones that had their constitution made by the authority of an authoritative regime. The authors try to comprehend how the process of democratic transitions occurred and the impact on the political power distribution and economic resources in those societies.
The empirical results illustrate both elite-biased democracies and popular democracies. The first one is resulted from a constitutional structure elaborated by political elites and outgoing authoritarian regime economy, where self-benefit rules are established, such as demanding for an overall majority for future alterations to the constitution they have written, some include vote barriers, veto power to non-elected political figures, in which the authoritarian elites are overrepresented. In other words, an elite-biased democracy has opened the access to freedom of speech, religious freedom, for example, but it has limited the most important decisions for a smaller group, the political and economic elites outgoing authoritarian regime, and one of the examples shown by the authors is Chile (Chapter 7).
The second is a passage for popular democracies, and this occurs when external circumstances catch incumbent authoritarian elites off guard and, under duress, they concede institutional control and rulemaking to a coalition of outsider economic elites – shut out of power and influence under authoritarianism – and the masses; Switzerland is one of the examples shown by the authors (Chapter 6). The difference between these two types of democracy forged by the authors is crucial for delimiting a possibility or not to the masses’ satisfaction in their government performance.
One of the authors’ findings points out that in elite-biased democracies, the citizens may be free from some of the worst abuses of authoritarianism, such as blanket censorship and outright repression, but they are not important players in determining public policy. Which make the authors believe that authoritative elites do not have a preference for either a democracy or authoritarian regime, but for a regime where their interests are satisfied.
Albertus and Menaldo finish the book stating that a democracy as a people’s government and government for people is a false hope. Actually, what exist are models where the decisions pass through the authoritarian elites and where the democracies, even though incomplete, are better than dictatorial governments because ‘Democracy allows for greater popular representation, even if it is incomplete, and competition, even if constrained. It typically frees citizens from the threat of arbitrary or trumped-up detention and allows them to speak their minds’ (p. 283).
Authoritarianism and the Elite Origins of Democracy is a book that demonstrates the power of authoritarian elites, in particular, their preservation power of their own interests in democratic institutional arrangements as a constitution, thereby preventing the influences of the society’s groups on enforcing their participation prerogatives in decision-making for the masses, which very often create authoritarian democracies, explaining the recent authoritative turn to several democracies.