DRAFT: DATA NOT FOR CITATION
University of Pennsylvania
Prepared for the International Studies Association-Japan Association of International Relations Joint Convention, September 20-22, 1996, Makuhari, Japan
Was the cascade of democratic political developments in the past decade a rapid, enduring change, a massive adjustment, or a burst of an interlude in the transformation of governance in the world? Are recently installed democratic institutions merely a facade or manifestations of a deepening of democracy into all political cultures?
These are some basic questions addressed in the Democracy and Local Governance research program, launched in the summer of 1990 at the beginning of what was heralded as the Second Democratic Revolution. 1 The Revolution this time would take root throughout the world through the diffusion of ideas rather migrations of Western European populations or imposition by administrative and military imperatives.
This research is based on the intersect of three developments: globalization, localization, and democratization. The historical anchors are that the emergence of the nation-state in the late 19th century and until the 1970's enhanced central authority that weakened local barriers to "freedom" for both groups and individuals; the city became the engine for the expansion of individual opportunities; and scientific production yielded the surplus resources for the establishment of the strong welfare state. All these were conducive both the development of democracy and of national capacities to project power, both domestic and international.
The theoretical points of departure are that democracy today must be rooted locally; that the global system provides opportunities to by-pass national governmental compulsions to control; and that localism wedded to democracy is sufficiently legitimating for stability and liberating for growth and prosperity. The economic conditions for democracy, stability, and prosperity are theoretically repositioned as the democratic requisites for stability and economic growth.
The long-term projections are for a world system of cities and localities rather than an international system of states. The short-term ones a period of expressions, perhaps even violent, of the "old" localisms of group identities, long-suppressed. The longer-term is driven by positive-sum possibilities of choice as is the shorter ones by a zero-sum pathos with potential defaults in conflict and violence. The relative decline of the nation-state opens political space for the emergence of local political autonomy necessary for democratic development.
The perspective is macro-global. It is based on individuals and links them to local, regional, national, regional, and transnational entities. It seeks patterns of relationships among them, entertaining the most general ecological linkage of global changes to characteristics and behavior of individuals, localities, regions, and countries.
The main hypotheses of this research, based on thousands of observations of local political leaders in hundreds of localities, derive from the positive relationships among the local, global, and democratic proclivities of local political leaders in Asia, Europe, and North America. The new localisms of autonomy rather than the old ones of exclusion take place by participation in a global economy rather than resistance to the disruption of settled local order through economic penetration by global institutions or to suppression by ascendant nation-states.
The evidence is consistent with: significant differences between national aggregates of local leaders in their commitment to democratic values; the global politization of two fundamental issues of democratic development, participation/political equality and capitalism/economic inequality; and the stronger and more extensive commitments to democratic values of leaders who see their localities impacted by other countries and the world. One dimension of the evidence is that, although there are dramatic national differences in the democratic values of local political leaders, these are readily de-aggregated and described on an axes of political values and practices that can be theoretically interpreted as diffusion from the west of Europe to the east through Eurasia.
Although this research program is not yet finished, it now is approaching global standing as a study not of patches of humanity defined by discrete geographical, cultural, and political coordinates but of the world as a total system. What will be reported constitutes a data base sufficient for conclusions, while other sets of data are being added, some slightly modified, and additional analyses being conducted.
The Democracy and Local Governance Research Program
The design of the research rests on individual political leaders, their communities, regions within countries, countries, transnational regions, and the world as a whole. In addition observations are being analyzed on individuals (groups) and organizations (political party organizations) within local communities. The diagram below presents the over-all design for the observations and analysis.
The Structure of the Research Design
The starting points are countries, beginning with the "new democracies" that came to the fore from the political events of 1989-1990, symbolizing the final collapse of twentieth century territorial empires. Within each country, random samples of cities and communities ranging in size from 25,000 to 250,000 were taken, in some cases strictly random, in others modified to reflect particular national urban patterns. Because of the large concentration of the urban population in Hungary in one city, Budapest, and the dispersion of the rest in a large number of small localities, the lower end of the population range was 10,000. Adjustments upward were made for more densely concentrated urbanized populations. Japan would be at the upper end of this range. The vast majority of the world's population remains rural, mostly in India and China, and the 100 urbanized areas of about two million or more constitutes about eight percent of the world's population. Most of what can be considered urban today are in the strata of urban concentrations sampled. Urbanization today, especially in China, is changing the urban population structure.
About 30 localities were sampled in each country, ranging from a low of 18 in Lithuania to over 70 in Russia. More were taken for countries with a large number of local units. The Swiss sample of communes is 59. For each locality about 15 local political leaders in three general categories (elected officials, mayors and council people; administrative heads; and political party leaders) were targeted for interviews.
The countries and the year for which data are reported here are as follows: Armenia (95), Austria (92), Belarus (91), Czech Republic (95), Germany (East and West, 95), Hungary (92), Iceland (94), Kazakstan (96), Korea (94), Kyrgyzstan (95), Lithuania (95), Poland (95), Russia (95), Slovakia (95), Slovenia (91), Spain (96), Sweden (91), Switzerland (93), Turkey (93), Ukraine (95), United States (94), Uzbekistan ((93). Of these, nine have been or are now being studied for two points in time. The changes over these two points in time are not addressed here. In addition thirteen other countries are scheduled to join the research program, four of which should be completed in 1996.
The design is cross-level--individuals, communities, countries, regions, the world (across-time); cross-time (two points); and across systems (localities, countries, regions). It is thus fully "comparative". Rather than debating whether country, locality or region is the relevant unit of analysis, this question can be formulated theoretically and assessed empirically. The general question is what unit is relevant, explains variance, for what? In fact it does not matter whether an individual is a member of one country or another on certain questions; Central Asia is sufficient for predicting values.
The first step in the comparative analysis is pooled, all individuals without regard to locality, country or world region; all communities without regard to region or country. Countries, communities are treated as variables rather than theoretical parameters of relevance. 2 In the pooled analysis the number of leaders from each country is weighted according to the proportion of the total they contribute. Thus each country in the pooled analysis contributes equally to the total variance.
The local political leaders targeted for each country were interviewed face-to-face for about two hours with a standard questionnaire. In Austria, East and West Germany, Iceland, Korea, Sweden, and Switzerland mail questionnaires with telephone follow-up were used with better than 50% return; mail was also used in the United States with a low response rate.
Evidence I: Democratic Values: National Profiles
Definitions of democracy abound. The conceptual core of the Democracy and Local Governance project is that democracy is accountability to the people. The three pillars for achieving that are: democratic values of those in authority, institutions governed by laws, and processes, including elections with contested elections. They all rest on a social order of social and economic differences. There are more or less efficient culturally and historically mediated means for assuring accountability. Political parties are near-essential institutions in the new democracies; perhaps, becoming less relevant in established democracies. Democratic values and practices of local leaders, including perceptions of democratic institutions and processes must be assessed by traditions of "civic" and social order.
Democracy itself, however, is a political issue, including the question of limited government, rule of law, transparency of authorities, and political participation. In the latter part of this century both limited government as manifest in a free economy, civil and human rights as well as political participation as reflected in accepting political equality and obligating authorities to be responsive to political diversity are the issues of the great contest over the future of democracy. It also clear at this time that much of the legitimacy of democracy, its place in a shrine of virtue, is based on a lack of clear, better alternatives. The lack of alternative belief systems for legitimacy, of course, makes suspect professed commitment to democratic forms and values.
Several democratic values were assessed by standard value scale items that had been in general use for over three decades: pluralism (acceptance of conflict); minority rights over majority rule; political equality; political participation; and transparency or openness in the exercise of authority. 3 In addition, the right of people to accumulate wealth--capitalism and economic equality-- were also assessed. (Other values were localism, economic development, the obligation of authority, the rule of law, and the "values" of political parties.)
What was developed from the value items is a General Democratic Score (GDS). After a variety of scaling and scoring alternatives was exhausted, nine value items, three each taken from three value scales proved to be the "best", macro, crude cut. The value scales are pluralism, political equality, and minority (vs. majority) rights. (See Appendix 1) The most general underlying dimension of these items can be conceptualized as inclusion--differences should be accepted, everyone should count the same, and minorities should be tolerated. The idea of inclusion can be linked to that of accountability to the people, most or all the people, regardless of views and status.
What can be see from Table 1 is a more or less strict array of countries on where they "should be" on a democratic score, based on agreeing or disagreeing with each of nine statements. If these scores are dichotomized, then roughly 90% of the Swedish leaders are democratic; about 75% of the U.S. and Turkish leaders, down to less than 10% in the Central Asian countries.
The U.S. leader sample must be treated with circumspection because of the error in the mail sample in 1994. Comparisons with similar groups of leaders, samples with less error, from the same 30 cities in 1966 and 1984 show enormous stability in the leaders' values. The Turkish "fit" does not comport with general images and specific assertions that Islamic culture and democratic values and practices do not mix. Two reasons may account for this. First, at the time of the study (1993) a higher proportion of "secularists" identified by their political parties held public office than is the case today. Second, Turkish leaders generally are more accepting of certain "disliked" minorities, criminals, homosexuals, foreigners, etc. The pluralism items in the General Democratic Score are similar to accepting differences among people.
Conflict, whether reflected in value measures or other more direct measures are the most discriminating among countries and have been for a long time in the comparative study of local leaders and elites. In other words, if one had to know something theoretically that would be most informative of most other things found in these research instruments it would be pluralism, diversity, conflict. But the sensitivity of the conflict measures also means that they are not "equally valid" in every country; hence the reliance on several value items across three democratic value domains--conflict, political equality, and the rights of minorities in political expression and activity.
What the country aggregates disguise, as most comparative researchers know, are the vast regional differences within and across countries. If one had to know, excluding Iceland (a small community state) and the United States (a collection of states) one substantive bit of information that would predict differences among local political leaders, including their democratic values, it would be how far geographically the locality of the leader is from some line dividing Europe into east and west, somewhere in the middle of Germany. In addition, there is another east-west dividing line, somewhere in the eastern part of Poland, yielding from the spatial distribution of leaders and their democratic values in Eurasia, three distinct political cultures--West, Central and East. 4
One active "theoretical interpretations" of Europe" is that developed by Stein Rokkan.5 It is a strict ecological paradigm, where values and habits spread from a center to its peripheries. He also takes into account great historically imprinting events--the Schism of the Church, the Reformation, the rise of capitalism ending up in a political cultural configuration in Europe that stabilizes somewhere in the 1920's, and have been only modestly impacted since then. He did not extend his maps very far to the east. What this research can show, now that the history of Central Asia has opened, is that there is a mixing of Asian and West European political cultures in Central Europe, producing a special political culture. Rather than simple diffusion of west to east, there was also east to west diffusion, often on the backs of the horses of invaders.
The perspective being advanced here is that sometime in the 1970's democracy began to be diffused globally rather than in the classical manner of the ecological paradigm from neighbors. It can be expected that there will be democratic cultural mixes, as is found in the authoritarian patterns of even competitively elected leaders from President Yeslin to the Presidents of newly independent states to the south of Moscow and perhaps extending to other parts of Asia. Some of these mixes will become distinct.
The question of Islamic culture and democratic practice, of course, remains such in these data. Turkey, as noted, has democratic leaders in an Islamic context. Ukraine leaders are no more democratic than those in countries where Islam dominates political institutions. And in the more established democracies of Central Europe--Austria, parts of Germany, Switzerland--democratic leaders are willing to lead with authoritarian action.
Evidence II: Global Dimensions of the Politics of Democracy
The main political differences that discriminate among local political leaders in all 23 countries are those that directly deal with democratic values and the relationships between government and the economy. First in importance concerns political pluralism (conflict, diversity), political participation and political equality.
Thirty-nine value items were factor analyzed, four items on 10 value dimensions (the value of leader authority had three items). Two main factors come out of this analysis: a factor of inclusionary political participation and economic differences in a market economy. The first factor, accounting for 14.2% of the total variance, with the items, identified by the value scale domain, with factor loadings above .5 are given below.
Table 2
FACTOR I: INCLUSIONARY PARTICIPATION
Loading Public decisions made with unanimous consent. .7
Rely on trusted leaders and experts. .7
Only fully informed should vote. .6
Peoples participation unnecessary, if leaders competent. .6
Harmony more important than achieving community programs. .6
Leaders avoid proposals that divide community. .5
Leaders follow community wishes, even if mistaken. .5
Some better qualified politically from family background. .5
The one item that does not fit with one of the scales, is "A leader is obligated to follow the wishes of the community, even if he thinks the citizens are mistaken." This was entered into what is now considered the "authoritarian" leader, although it has been argued that following expressed public positions is a democratic obligation of political leaders.
This is the largest factor in the weighted pooled analysis. It was not anticipated that such a global dimension would be found. Having said that, national differences are substantial, although this issue is clearly political to some extent in every country sampled.
The second factor, accounting for 7.5% of the total variance, is a clear "for or against" a market economy dimension, made up of two scales, capitalism and economic inequality. This factor cuts across all countries. Looking country by country, the positions of leaders in the economically wealthy ones have clearer divisions among local leaders than those that just enter capitalism as an issue. The question of economic inequality, and the conflicts entailed, discriminate more sharply than the more general items about a free market.
Table 3
FACTOR II: MARKET ECONOMY Loading Upper limit on incomes, no one makes more than others. .7
Differences in salaries should be reduced. .7
Government responsible, nobody well-off, while others poor. .6
Competition often wasteful and destructive. .6
Poor people given more opportunities than rich. .5
People accumulating wealth at expense of others. .5
Government responsible, everyone has a job. .5
These are global political issues that identify local political leaders in all countries with vast differences among political cultures largely defined by recent histories of nation-states. The largest group of leaders in the most of the "new democracies", however, are what are called "floaters", people without a clear political identity. 5 The democratic issues of the late 20th century have a toe-hold everywhere, but are firmly rooted in those countries that have "established" democracies, whether they evolved, were imposed, or slowly nurtured by exposure to western democracies.
The leaders can also be differentiated globally on questions of openness of authorities to pubic scrutiny, local vs. national priorities, minority rights (vs. majority), and economic development. There is also a strong "non-democratic" value orientation among leaders, those who agree that "leaders must follow their convictions even if they are different from their constituency"; "on important issues, the leader should ignore majority opposition"; and "most decisions should be left to the judgment of experts".
Evidence III: Democratic Values and Global Linkages
Local political leaders who believe that they should promote understanding of opportunities and problems in the world are more democratic, the GDS measure. Those leaders who identify with their locality are also more democratic. Leaders who see that their communities are tied to the world, other countries, in terms of exports, tourists, and foreign workers are also more democratic. Those that perceive the strong impact of imports and foreign media are significantly less democratic. These correlations are given below. The data are presented both for leaders as individuals and for communities (mean scores) in pooled, without regard to countries, analysis.
Table 3: Democratic Values (GDS)and Global Involvement Correlations significant at .01 level
Leaders Communities (23 countries (19 countries n=9113-9662) n=510-540) responsible for understanding world opportunities & problems .14 .34
identify with locality .05 .13
perceived impact exports .12 .21
perceived impact, tourists .09 .23
perceived impact, foreign workers .14 .27
perceived impact investments .00* -.03*
perceived impact imports -.04 -.15
perceived impact, media -.15 -.23
perceived impact, pollution -.03* .03*
* not sig. at .01 level
NOTE: The leaders in the analysis are from the latest date of the interviews. Because not all countries for reasons of confidentiality have provided city and commune identifications, the number of communities is less than the number sampled in the research.
The pattern is consistent with what was theoretically expected. Locally oriented leaders are more democratically oriented; those assuming responsibility for leading the people to world problems and opportunities are also more democratic.
The perception of leaders of foreign impact on their communities was not expected to be divided into what has been called here passive--foreign investments, media, imports--and active--exports, foreign tourists and workers. But the difference is clear. Those leaders and those communities with leaders seeing their localities as more actively involved in foreign ties are clearly more democratic in orientation.
This analysis can be refined in terms of where the localities are located. From analyses of maps, communities with more democratic leaders are closer to the sea, international borders, and trade routes. Inspection of the distribution of democratic communities conform with the maps of Europe of the late Stein Rokkan. Some inflation of community level correlations can be expected from the aggregation biases, but the higher correlations are also consistent with the homogenizing effects of international involvement of the localities.
Concluding Comments
The main question about whether democraticization process today are global or bounded by cultures and nation-states remains open. The Democracy and Local Governance Research, however, clearly indicates that it is global and is penetrating local political processes. Unlike the First Democratic Revolution of the late, 18th century, the Second, 200 years later, rather than dividing the world into democratic and non-democratic camps, may be encapsulating the world into an inclusionary democratic order of many varieties, local as well as national.
Although this report is primarily focused on democratic values, necessary but not sufficient to guarantee the perserverance of the legitimacy of democracy in the exercise of authority, other information in the research supporst the "civic society" basis of local democracy as well as the availability and use of multiple channels for political participation that may assure accountability to the people. In addition to elections, which in the new democracies appear to be the lynch pin of democratic processes, other forms of political organization, civic groups but especially political parties, tend to be found in those countries and localities with political leaders committed to democratic values.
The viability of democracy locally, depending on the expansion of choice and the recognition of diversity, is taking place withing a global context, an incipient global order. Choice depends on options as well as prediction of outcomes. The opportunities provided by the world outside of nation-states is linked to the democratic values of local political leaders. At the same time, many leaders see the foreign as disruptive. But the story of change is one of who gains and who loses. The question now is whether the total gains are greater than the perceived loses, and those that feel threatened can envision gains at least in the near term.
Please send all questions and comments to
either Dr. Henry Teune, University of
Pennsylvania or
Tatiana
Iskra, Pultusk School of Humanities, Pultusk, Poland.
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