Tibor Rutar - Rational Choice and Democratic Government: A Sociological Approach

Life in a stable, cushy liberal democracy is taken more or less for granted by many people in the West. Not only that, we tend to assume without questioning the moral superiority of democracy over other political regimes.

Our obliviousness to how weird and uncommon democracy in general, and liberal democracy in particular, has actually been in human civilization is in one sense not very surprising, as most Western countries have simply not experienced any other form of government in decades. Multiple generations have grown up in consolidated democracies. Likewise, the moral status we ascribe to this system is, on the face of it, quite deserved. Liberal democracies provide the most expansive and robust political and civil rights in the world. The former include such seemingly obvious amenities as free and fair elections, the right to assembly, and a realistic chance of opposition winning in electoral competitions. The latter encompass fundamental rights of free and independent media, of freely practising ones religion (or nonreligious beliefs), of free expression in general, the rule of law, and so on. However, when stepping back a bit and taking a more historical perspective, we immediately and quite painfully come to recognize that none of this is as obvious, self-evident, or secure as it might at first seem.

The first observation about the obviousness of democracy is, as I have already intimated, the quickest to collapse. Even though it is true that today many parts of the world (not relegated solely to the West) are filled almost to the brim with democracies, these regimes nevertheless represent less than 50% of all countries and less than 40% of the worlds population. Most people, even today, still live in non-liberal and simply non-democratic, i.e. autocratic, regimes. Furthermore, mass democracy appears as an even scarcer and more fragile phenomenon if we look back in time. Since the emergence of first pockets of human civilization around 5,000 years ago and right up until the late 19th century, illiberal autocracy was practically the only ubiquitous way in which states were governed. So, both spatially and temporally liberal democracy is the opposite of being obvious or given. It is a great, massive exception.

Of course, the fact that until very recently almost all states were authoritarian does not mean that all societies for the past few thousand years had also suffered the same fate. There existed quite a few early democracies, as David Stasavage has called them. These were almost without exception relegated to small-scale tribal societies, such as the Iroquois and Huron Indians, or the Germanic tribes in Europe. Moreover, they were very different from the more familiar mass representative, rights-protected democratic regimes of the modern era. To take just one important difference, there were no formal elections of leaders and universal adult suffrage was absent. What usually happened is that the leaders had to consult with, and thus yield some decision-making power to, local councils or assemblies. Even the most well-known case of early democracy, that of Ancient Athens, which was truly exceptional in the extent to which power was shared with, and ordinary people participated in, the assemblies, nevertheless remained small-scale compared to neighbouring regions. We should also not forget that it was not even a question whether women and slaves could enjoy the same civil and political right that men did.