Democracy

In his opening speech to the Constituent Assembly, Adolfo Suárez, the prime minister of the Spanish transition to democracy, announced that henceforth “the future is not written, because only the people can write it” (Verou 1976). Heralding this plunge into the unknown, he caught two quintessential features of democracy: Outcomes of the democratic process are uncertain, indeterminate ex ante; and it is “the people,” political forces competing to promote their interests and values, who determine what these outcomes will be.

Democracy is a system in which parties lose elections. There are parties: divisions of interests, values, and opinions. There is competition, organized by rules. And there are periodic winners and losers. Obviously not all democracies are the same; one can list innumerable variations and distinguish several types of democratic institutions. Yet beneath all the institutional diversity, one elementary feature – contestation open to participation (Dahl 1971) – is sufficient to identify a political system as democratic.

Democracy is, as Linz (1984) put it, government pro tempore. Conflicts are regularly terminated under established rules. They are “terminated” (Coser 1959), temporarily suspended, rather than resolved definitively. Elections fill offices, legislatures establish rules, bureaucracies issue decisions, associations arrive at agreements, courts adjudicate conflicts, and these outcomes are binding until and unless they are altered according to rules. At the same time, all such outcomes are temporary, since losers do not forfeit the right to compete in elections, negotiate again, influence legislation, pressure the bureaucracy, or seek recourse to courts.