Roselyn Y. Hsueh, Department of Political Science

Today the concept and reality of "democracy" is not so much a restricted and specific term as a vague endorsement of a popular idea, as most regimes stake out some sort of claim to the title of "democracy," said political scientist Guillermo O'Donnell, one of the most prominent authorities on authoritarianism and democracy. As a prescriptive, he proposed "a realistic and restricted but not minimalist or processualist definition of a democratic regime," at a lecture sponsored by the Center for Law and Society and the Center for Latin American Studies on May 10, 2002. His lecture, "Some Thoughts on New Democracies and the Rule of Law," was based on his article, "Democracy, Law and Comparative Politics" published in a Spring 2001 issue of the Studies in Comparative International Development.

O'Donnell, once a practicing lawyer in Argentina, began by acknowledging the efforts of political and legal scholars for their parsimonious theories of democracy that stress procedures over social context and agency. However, he questioned the theories' usefulness on the comparative level when facilitating conditions such as a legal system and the overall social context conducive to democracy are left out of the equation.

Guillermo O'Donnell

Democracy experts claim that "bureaucratic authoritarian" states in Latin America, which O'Donnell studied in the 1970s and 1980s, are now purportedly nascent democracies. In fact, they would argue that O'Donnell's native Argentina is at best an unstable democracy and at worst a regressive one. But, O'Donnell asked, can we and should we call them democracies if the regime is democratic but the "state-qua-legal" system is not? For example, in the West, it can be assumed that bureaucracies on the local and national levels also follow democratic rules if the regime itself is democratic. However, this is not necessarily true in the newly democratizing countries, namely those in Latin America. National elections may be democratic, but local politics are often rife with clientelism.

Exasperated with the limitations of procedural definitions of democracy, O'Donnell emphasized that these definitions lead to mislabeling; many countries that are supposedly democracies under electoral definitions are still in fact undergoing transition, or their social context does not embody democratic values. He conceded that while prospects for democratization may be elevated in countries that are at least procedurally democratic, realistic accounts that make explicit the social context in which procedural rights can be fully exploited do a better job spelling out the conditions under which democracy can endure.

O'Donnell maintained that for the minimalist definition of democracy to function properly, the implicit must be made explicit. He argued that "good empirical analysis should take into account normative components of democracy that are intrinsic to the historic understanding" of sustainable democracy. In other words, for free competition for a free vote to exist, conditions external to the electoral process must be met. Basic freedoms, presumably related to the "legal and moral principles of the community," must be effective for all.

Advocating an organicist understanding, O'Donnell argued that democracy should not be analyzed only at the level of the political regime, but that it must also be studied in relation to the state (especially the "state-qua-legal system), and to certain aspects of the overall social context. In this line of argument, democracy changes from an event, the electoral process, to an enduring regime, backed by a legal system where legally bounded and morally grounded political and civil citizenship are truly omnipresent.

O'Donnell is reluctant to separate conditions from indicators. His analysis spotlights the legal system because it "enacts and backs fundamental aspects of both agency and democracy," he said. "The existence of a democratic regime implies a state that bounds territorially those who are political citizens, i.e., the carriers of the rights and obligations instituted by the regime. It also implies a legal system that, whatever its deficiencies in other respects, guarantees that universalistic and inclusive effectiveness of the positive rights of voting and being elected, as well as of some basic 'political rights' included in the definition of a democratic regime."

The discussion of what democracy is and is not raises questions surrounding diagnostic features (indicator of the presence or absence of something) and facilitating conditions (elements for bringing about the outcome) of democracy. O'Donnell argued that civil and social citizenship embedded in a legal system are facilitating conditions that serve as causes, while other theorists would argue that they are simply diagnostic features, since procedural democracy leads to a social context where civil and social citizenship are ubiquitous. Moreover, critics of O'Donnell have argued against O'Donnell's use of democracy as a metric, when it is clear what he is describing is a type of democracy. However, I tend to agree with O'Donnell, that facilitating conditions which are perpetuated by democratic institutions need to be present for democracy to manifest.

• Paper on Horizontal Accountability by Professor O'Donnell (from the website of the Kellogg Institute of International Studies)

(Co-sponsored with Center for the Study of Law and Society)

Robert Kagan, professor of political science and chair of the Center for the Study of Law and Society, chats with Professor O'Donnell prior to his talk.