Abstract
If most of us can agree that the bottom line of modern democracy is sovereignty of the people in accordance with the principle of constitutionally guaranteed political equality among citizens or members who are independent enough to express their own will,1 then democratization may be defined as the process leading to democracy, and to its consolidation and deepening. It is true, of course, that many such processes have not come from below, but are outcomes of war and international pressure or of attempts by enlightened leaders to legitimize rapid modernization from above.2 And much of the recent democratization has been crafted through negotiations and pacts within the political, military and economic elites.3 Yet it is high time to study the processes from below. Not because there is a need to expand the limited definition of democracy as such, but because the dynamics of democratization is an altogether different matter. Not because enlightened and developmental elites, and their negotiations, are unimportant, but because there is also much to the results which indicate that popular demands and strength are often fundamental.4 And not in order to focus on grass-root movements as such (like most students of ‘new’ social movements), or ‘only’ on the structures and institutions that condition their actions (like most resource mobilization theorists), but on the process as a whole from below — primarily by way of critical empirical analysis of subordinated actors’ views of the process, and their strategies and actions to affect it. But then, how should one go about this?
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Notes
Cf., for example, Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule. Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1986.
Cf., for example, D. Rueschemeyer, E. Huber Stephens and J. Stephens, Capitalist Development and Democracy, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1992 and
Göran Therbom, ‘The rule of capital and the rise of democracy’, New Left Review, No. 103, 1977.
On civil society I have mainly relied on Jean L. Cohen and Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory, MIT Press, London, 1994
John Keane (ed.), Civil Society and the State, Verso, London, 1988; Mats Dahlkvist, “Det civila samhället” i samhällsteori och samhällsdebatt. En kritisk analys’, in
Lars Trägårdh (ed.), Civilt samhälle kontra offentlig sektor, SNS Förlag, Stockholm, 1995
Nicke Karlsson, The State of State. An Inquiry Concerning the Role of Invisible Hands in Politics and Civil Society, Uppsala, Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1993; Axel Hadenius and Fredrik Uggla, Making Civil Society Work Promoting Democratic Development: What Can States and Donors Do Uppsala Studies in Democracy No. 9, Uppsala, 1995.
Paul Hirst, Associative Democracy. New Forms of Economic and Social Governance, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1994.
Filippo Sabetti, ‘Path dependence and civic culture: some lessons from Italy about interpreting social experiments’, Politics and Society, vol. 24, no. 1, March 1996, p. 27.
Margaret Levi, ‘Social and unsocial capital: a review essay of Robert Putnam’s “Making Democracy Work”’, Politics and Society, vol. 24, no. 1, March 1996, p. 49.
Gordon White, ‘Civil society, democratization and development: clearing the analytical ground’, Democratisation, vol. 1, no. 3, 1994.
Cf. O. Törnquist, Dilemmas of Third World Communism. The Destruction of the PKI in Indonesia, Zed Books, London, 1984; What’s Wrong with Marxism? Vols I–II, (I: On Capitalists and State in India and Indonesia; II: On Peasants and Workers), Manohar, New Delhi, 1989; ‘Communists and democracy in the Philippines’, Economic and Political Weekly, 6–13 July and 20 July 1991. (Also in Kasarinlan, University of the Philippines, vol. 6, no. 1–2, 1990.)
Cf., for example, the writings of Törnquist (op. cit and below); Kewin Hewison and Gerry Rodan, ‘The decline of the left in South East Asia’, in Ralf Miliband and Leo Panitch (eds), Socialist Regrster, 1994, Merlin Press, London, 1994; Kewin Hewison, Richard Robison and Garry Rodan (eds), Southeast Asia in the 1990s. Authoritarianism, Democracy and Capitalism, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, 1993; Mamdani, op. cit., and Gibbon op. cit.
Amartya Sen and Jean Dréze, Indian Development: Selected Regional Perspectives, Oxford University Press, Oxford and Delhi, 1996.
Margaret Levi, ‘Review of Robert Putnam et al. “Making Democracy Work”’, Comparative Political Studies, vol. 26, no. 3, October 1993, p. 377.
See, for example, Mathew Zachariah and R. Sooryamoorthy, Science in Participatory Development. The Achievements and Dilemmas of a Development Movement: The case of Kerala, Zed Books, London and New Jersey, 1994.
For a normative-theoretical construct in the latter direction, see David Held, Democracy and the Global Order. From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1995. Cf. also Lars Rudebeck’s contribution to this anthology.
Nicos P. Mouzelis, Politics in the Semi-Periphery. Early Parliamentarism and Late Industrialization in the Balkans and Latin America, Macmillan, London, 1986.
Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement. Social Movements, Collective Action, and Politics, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1994, pp. 135f.
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© 1998 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Törnquist, O. (1998). Making Democratization Work: From Civil Society and Social Capital to Political Inclusion and Politicization — Theoretical Reflections on Concrete Cases in Indonesia, Kerala and the Philippines. In: Rudebeck, L., Törnquist, O., Rojas, V. (eds) Democratization in the Third World. International Political Economy Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26783-5_5
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