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March 20, 2012

Dear Workshop Participants,

This paper is the first publicly presented draft of a bulked-up segment of a review essay that I

have been invited to submit to World Politics later this spring. It still lacks the reviews of the

four Asian case-study monographs, but it goes into more theoretical depth than the final versionof this essay will be permitted. That being said, its engagement with canonical democratic theory

is admittedly, even embarrassingly thin, though I hope not offensively superficial or misguided.

To preserve the narrative flow of the essay, I have relegated much of my conversation withdemocratic theory to the footnotes, which I very much hope you all will have the time and

patience to read.

The bigger picture is that I am taking the opportunity of this review essay to try to lay thegroundwork for my second individual book project. The working title is something likeAdvancing Accountability: Democratic Dynamics in the Postcolonial World. The current idea is

to use a comparative-historical approach to explore and explain accountability dynamics in aboutten cases in Asia and Latin America (or perhaps just Asia), building upon the analytical

framework presented in the diagrammatic figures at the end of the paper.

Naturally I warmly welcome any critical reactions and suggestions regarding the paper itself, as

well as thoughts on how (and whether) I expand upon these ideas in a longer-term book project.

For those of you who are interested in the Asian case-studies, I would of course be more than

happy to discuss them during Q&A. I will also be presenting a full draft of this review essay at

the Comparative Politics Workshop on Wednesday, May 2

nd

, and would be deeply grateful for astrong turnout among my Political Theory colleagues at that event as well.

For the time being, of course, please do not cite or distribute this paper without express

permission. My email address is below for anyone who might be interested in following up

afterwards.

With many thanks and warmest wishes,

Dan

Dan SlaterAssociate Professor

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Review Article

DEMOCRATIC CAREENING

By DAN SLATER1

Larry Diamond. The Spirit of Democracy: The Struggle to Build Free Societies throughout the

World. New York: Henry Holt, 2008.Ethan B. Kapstein and Nathan Converse. The Fate of Young Democracies. New York:

Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Pasuk Phongpaichit and Chris Baker. Thaksin. Chiang Mai, Thailand: Silkworm, 2009.Mikael Mattlin. Politicized Society: The Long Shadow of Taiwans One-Party Legacy.

Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2011.

Christophe Jaffrelot.Religion, Caste, and Politics in India. New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 2011.

Harold Crouch. Political Reform in Indonesia after Soeharto. Singapore: ISEAS, 2010.

Introduction

Democracy in the developing world is generally outliving expectations, but not outperforming

them. Nearly four decades after the Third Wave of democratization began and more than two

decades after the Cold War ended, there has not been any third reverse wave of

authoritarianism, unlike the deadly reverse waves that crashed over interwar Europe and postwar

Asia and Latin America, most notably.2

Even in some deeply divided and impoverished

societies, where the odds of democracy taking root have always been perceived to be especially

long, the specter of a relapse into authoritarianism of either the tightly closed or increasingly

1 Even before assuming its maiden written form, this essay has benefited greatly from audience

feedback at the University of Wisconsin-Madisons Center for Southeast Asian Studies, as well

as more informal conversations with Mark Deming, Sofia Fenner, Bob Gooding-Williams,

Jingkai He, Dominika Koter, John McCormick, Marie-Eve Reny, Jacob Schiff, Alberto Simpser,

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common competitive variety3

has largely ceased to be an everyday political concern. Of

course, only an untenably teleological reading of history could countenance the claim that

authoritarianism in developing-world democracies has become an irrelevant thing of the past.

Yet even highly unpromising democracies mostly appear to be remaining democracies.

Democratic collapse has happily been a far rarer event thus far in the 21st

century than in the 20th

.

By the same token, it does not exactly strike the right chord to say that most (or even

many) developing-country democracies are consolidating. Virtually everywhere one looks,

democracies continue to exhibit the wobbly characteristics of fledglings, even after aging out of

literal fledgling status. Even in cases where sufficient state capacity exists to stabilize

governance,4 and where democracy has, in the classic parlance of democratic consolidation,

become the only game in town, this by no means ensures that all sides are willing to play by

the same rules, or perceive what the democratic game is in similar terms. In cases ranging from

Mexico to Taiwan to South Africa, and from Indonesia to Argentina to Korea, democracy

certainly seems to have become the only game in town but what game is it, exactly? And how

3 The distinction between closed and competitive authoritarian regimes is developed in Steven

Levitsky and Lucan Way, Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War

(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Throughout this review, I share these authors

opinion that regimes in which [e]lectoral manipulation, unfair media access, abuse of state

resources, and.harassment and violence skewed the playing field in favor of incumbents

should be considered subtypes of authoritarianism rather than democracy (p. 3). Far from

counseling complacency about any irreversibly non-authoritarian character of contemporary

democracies, this strict definition should signal the gravity of such discriminatory abuses of

political opposition whenever they occur, anywhere. Thanks to Lisa Wedeen for conversations

on this score.

4While wholeheartedly agreeing with Charles Tilly that state-building is essential for substantive

democratization, this review hopes to illuminate the dynamics of destabilization that arise from

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might we best make sense of instances when the democratic game changes in decisive ways, yet

democracy does not seem either to collapse or become more firmly consolidated in the process?

This review essay ventures the claim that political scientists need to transcend our

rightful concerns with how and why young democracies collapse or consolidate, and devote

more attention to considering how and why they careen. Careening is proposed here as a

heuristic term that encompasses a variety of unpredictable and alarming sudden movements,

such as lurching, swerving, swaying, and tipping over. It suggests a certain bandying back and

forth from side to side, with no clear prospect for steadying in sight. The term thus seems to

capture rather well the sense of endemic unsettledness and rapid ricocheting that characterizes so

many democracies that are clearly struggling, yet not clearly collapsing. It also invites further

analysis into why some democracies in the developing world (say, Ecuador and Thailand) seem

to be careening so much more frequently and severely than others (Brazil and India, for

instance).

All careening democracies are, like Tolstoys unhappy families, careening in their own

distinctive ways. Yet I wish to take the opportunity of this review essay to develop the claim that

there are striking patterns within the apparent everyday chaos, both within and across cases. At

the broadest theoretical level, I argue that there exists an underappreciated tension between

different notions of democratic accountability i.e. vertical accountability vs. horizontal

accountability and that this tension lies at the very heart of democratic careening. When this

tension becomes actively manifested in partisan conflict, it has destabilizing consequences, but

usually not deadly consequences, for democratic politics.

To be more specific, I define democratic careening as regime instability and uncertainty

sparked by intense conflict between political actors deploying competing visions of democraticaccountability. It occurs when actors who conceive of democracy as requiring substantial

inclusivity of the entire populace (i.e. vertical accountability) clash with rivals who value

democracy for its constraints against excessive concentrations of unaccountable power,

5

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quite plausibly claim to be on the side of the democratic angels, as it were, and to be combating

resolutely antidemocratic rivals, such conflicts tend to be particularly implacable and intense.

Because no party to the conflict seeks or endorses a restoration of authoritarian rule, however,

the resultant regime dynamics are not well captured by the authoritarian/democratic distinction.

These dynamics will often be better portrayed as careening between populist and oligarchic

modes of politics than as consolidating democracy or collapsing into authoritarianism.6

It is peculiar that the basic tension between democratic inclusivity and democratic

constraints remains inadequately theorized in comparative politics, considering that it can readily

be traced back to the likes of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, James Madison, Niccolo Machiavelli, and

Carl Schmitt in political theory. The six books under review in this essay provide abundant

empirical examples of vertical and horizontal accountability coming into friction but very little

guidance on how to theorize it. Democratization studies remain too wedded to the collapse vs.

consolidation paradigm, which privileges inter-regime dynamics while neglecting intra-regime

dynamics. Even the massive emerging literature on the quality of democracy (which I am

unable to review here) is yet to specify in a reasonably parsimonious way the distinctive

dimensions along which democracies can suffer from low quality, much less apprehend the

representativeness and responsiveness, and thus avoids rather than advances conversations on the

distinctions among these closely linked concepts. For those who prefer that accountability be

distinguished more sharply from such notions, perhaps the best way to characterize my

framework is as an inquiry into the substantive vertical or horizontal orientation of procedurally

democratic politics. The classic work distinguishing vertical from horizontal accountability is

Guillermo ODonnell, Delegative Democracy,Journal of Democracy 5:1 (January 1994), pp.

55-69. On the distinction between responsiveness and representativeness, see Susan Stokes,

Mandates and Democracy: Neoliberalism by Surprise in Latin America (New York: Cambridge

University Press, 2001).

6Unlike Jeffrey Winters, I do not conceive of oligarchy as reducible to the politics of wealth

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distinctive dynamics at work when democracies careen along these different dimensions.7

In

essence, this literature assesses democratic quality on the same kind of 0:1 scale as the collapse

vs. consolidation literature, telling us little about how and why democracies careen without either

collapsing or consolidating.

Leading works also tend to argue or presume that vertical and horizontal accountability

are mutually reinforcing rather than potentially conflicting.8

To be sure, Rousseauian popular

inclusivity and Madisonian elite constraints can go hand in hand, and often do.9

A robust free

7Leonardo Morlino has improved this literature by attending to the (plural) qualities of

democracy, which he arrays along five dimensions, including interinstitutional (horizontal)

accountability and electoral (vertical) accountability. Like the analysis here, Morlino argues that

accountability or, better, the two accountabilities are the key mechanisms that make the goal of

popular sovereignty something other than largely illusory. Yet Morlino does not seize the

opportunity to define these types of accountability in ways capacious enough to encompass his

other three democratic qualities: rule of law, participation, and competition. In my view, rule of

law is vital to horizontal accountability, while participation and competition are essential to my

substantive conceptualization of vertical accountability. See his Changes for Democracy: Actors,

Structures, Processes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 224-25.

8 The title of Marc Plattners March/April 1998 essay in Foreign Affairs puts it quite clearly:

Liberalism and Democracy: Cant Have One Without the Other. While agreeing with Plattner

that effective constitutionalist constraints are a constitutive feature of substantive democracy, I

argue here that, as an empirical matter, a regime can certainly have either effective constraints or

meaningful inclusivity, but not the other. Also see Morlino et. al.s central claim that Morlinos

five different dimensions of democracy generally improve in tandem through a funnel of

causality in which good things go together. See their The Quality of Democracy in Asia-

Pacific: Issues and Findings,International Political Science Review 32:5 (2011), pp. 491-511.

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press and an independent national election commission, for instance, simultaneously constrain

ruling executives and their surrogates from abusing their powers and help strengthen popular

inclusion in the democratic process. Yet there is also ample reason to believe that elected

executives seeking to broaden substantive democratic inclusion might clash with elites who prize

democracys constraints against absolute power more than its promise to empower the many.

Such clashes constitute modern-day parallels to the collisions between defenders of an oligarchic

governo stretto and proponents of a plebiscitarian governo largo that Machiavelli chronicled in

ancient Rome.10

It is only when such collisions culminate in the declaration and maintenance of

authoritarian emergency rule through dynamics most famously theorized by Schmitt that

democracy goes beyond merely careening, and can be said to have collapsed by contemporary

standards.11

The purpose of invoking these prominent theorists is not to reinterpret their timeless

works. It is to provide a more systematic theoretical grounding for the tremendous empirical

complexity and variation in the dynamics of political accountability that we encounter across

government wisely tempered. See Victor Gourevitch (ed.),Rousseau: The Discourses and

Other Early Political Writings (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 115.

10 John McCormick,Machiavellian Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

11 The parallels between Machiavelli and Schmitt on this front are admittedly and intriguingly

close. Like Machiavelli in Rome, Schmitt perceived a collision between horizontal and vertical

visions of democracy in interwar Europe, and argued that parliament appears an artificial

machinery and that dictatorial and Caesaristic methods not only can produce the acclamation

of the people but can also be a direct expression of democratic substance and power. See The

Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985 [1923]), p. 17. Given

Schmitts close association with the idea that emergency conditions justified personalistic,

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Asia and throughout developing-world democracies.12

In the review that follows, India and

Indonesia will be shown to be cases where vertical and horizontal accountability have recently

been advanced in tandem more than at each others expense, which has kept democratic

careening to a relative minimum. These Asian democratic behemoths also offer fascinating

within-case variation, however, as careening dynamics have unfolded at particular moments and

in particular regions, and could well do so again. By contrast, Thailand and Taiwan have recently

experienced more serious clashes between proponents of vertical accountability and defenders of

horizontal accountability at a national scale, although in subtly distinctive ways. These cases thus

offer intriguing lessons for how we might theorize different varieties of democratic careening.

Its proposed theoretical correctives notwithstanding, the essay to follow will lavish much

praise on each of the six volumes being reviewed. Beyond their impressive global empirical

scope, the volumes on democratic collapse and consolidation by Diamond and by Kapstein and

Converse deserve great conceptual credit for nudging empirical democratization scholars away

from a minimalist, proceduralist, or Schumpeterian notion of democracy toward a much more

maximalist and substantive vision.13 They do so by treating both effective constraints upon ruling

12 More speculatively, the framework here might also offer insights into varieties of what Tilly

would call de-democratization in contemporary Western democracies, such as the oligarchic

effects of the campaign-finance system in the United States and the anti-Madisonian implications

of rule-by-decree practiced by the likes of George W. Bush and Silvio Berlusconi. See Tilly,

Democracy.

13 A particularly forceful and influential defense of a minimalist definition when studying

democratic transitions and reversals can be found in Adam Przeworski et. al.,Democracy and

Development: Political Institutions and Well-Being in the World, 1950-1990 (New York:

Cambridge University Press, 2000). For an important critique, see Lisa Wedeen, Concepts and

Commitments in the Study of Democracy, in Ian Shapiro et. al. (eds.), Problems and Methods

in the Study of Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). While Wedeen worries

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elites androbust inclusion of the mass populace as essential features of a functioning democracy.

Given their focus on what would appear to be the most minimalist concern of all i.e., mere

democratic survival these works embracing of a substantive understanding of democracy

suggests that the tired old procedural-substantive debate has perhaps finally been laid to rest in

comparative politics. (In short, we all appear to be substantivists and maximalists now.)14

There is much to admire and learn from the four empirical Asian case-studies as well,

even as each of them flies well beneath the radar screen in American political science. From a

methodological perspective, this review hopes to highlight the indispensable contributions to the

comparative politics of democratization made by such monographs. Each is a learned historical

analysis of a significant Asian democratic case, drawing upon decades of scholarly case

expertise. Each provides rich examples and keen insights into the dynamics of distinct types of

democratic accountability, and the variety of ways in which they can either come into friction or

advance in tandem. These books are the stuff that better theories of democratic politics are made

of.15 The primary challenge for this review essay, and for the future research it hopes to spark, is

to explore how the complex and distinctive accountability dynamics uncovered in these expert

Asian case-studies might be made amenable to comparative analysis and causal explanation.

vertical dimension of democratic substance by looking at socioeconomic outcomes, but at the

inclusive and equalizingpractices and priorities of democratically elected governments. For

instance, Brazils Workers Party (PT) presides over one of the most substantively democratic

governments on earth because of its highly inclusive practices and redistributive priorities, even

as socioeconomic inequality in Brazil the kind of outcome that Przeworski et. al. justifiably

want to exclude from the very definition of democracy remains incredibly steep.14

Even when scholars still hew to a procedural definition of democracy, they increasingly adopt

a substantive vision of democracy, as the focus of contemporary research has definitively turned

toward considering how to build a democracy of maximal quality. See Daniel Levine and Jose

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I. From Democratic Survival to Democratic Substance

Considering the epic human tragedies that recurrently accompanied the collapse of democracy

during the 20th

century, from Nazi Germany to New Order Indonesia, it is understandable that

political scientists remain obsessed with the specter of such history repeating itself. Yet in the

two best recent books on the subject, one is struck by the rarity of democratic breakdown during

the contemporary era in comparison with epochs past. The works by Diamond and by Kapstein

and Converse intriguingly reveal that the puzzle of democratic collapse has become, at least to

some degree, an obsolescing puzzle. Although pitched primarily as books about democratic

survival, both prove to be more informative treatises on democratic substance. Transcending a

classic Schumpeterian, proceduralist perspective, these authors similarly portray both meaningful

popular inclusivity and effective constraints against elite abuses of power as defining traits of

functioning democracies. In other words, these books similarly herald a substantive

understanding of democracy as requiring both vertical and horizontal accountability. On the

other hand, neither book clearly identifies the potential tension between democratic inclusivity

and democratic constraints, making them ill-suited to apprehend the dynamics of cases (e.g.

Thailand and Venezuela) that have recently experienced democratic careening.

DIAMOND, THE SPIRIT OF DEMOCRACYand

KAPSTEIN AND CONVERSE, THE FATE OF YOUNG DEMOCRACIES

It is hardly novel or controversial to claim that democratic procedures do not always yield much

democratic substance. The worldwide proliferation of low-quality or illiberal democraciessince the end of the Cold War (in tandem with their more patently undemocratic, electoral

authoritarian counterparts) has made the gap between democratic procedures and substance

even more keenly felt.16

To hew to a narrowly proceduralist notion of democracy in todays age

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is effectively to disregard the abusive actions and the abject absence of public responsiveness

exhibited by so many freely elected governments. Thankfully, the books under review here rise

to the challenge of recognizing the hollowness of democratic procedures lacking democratic

substance. Their inquiries into why democracies consolidate or collapse thus become studies of

the substantive foundations of functioning democracies. For democratic structures to endure

and to be worthy of endurance, Diamond argues, they must be more than a shell (p. 292).

The Kapstein and Converse volume makes an especially sharp turn from explaining

democratic collapse to specifying democratic substance. In their preface, the authors note that

their primary goal is to explain the differences between those young democracies that manage

to consolidate their regimes and those that backslide or revert to authoritarianism (p. xv).

Ambiguity immediately arises in this formulation, however. Can a democracy backslide yet

remain a democracy? Or is a reversion to authoritarianism equivalent to democratic backsliding?

As we will see, a similar ambiguity emerges in Diamonds central notion of a democratic

recession. Do democratic recession and backsliding mean regime collapse, or simply a decline

in the substantive quality of democracy?

If the post-Cold War world had been riddled with cases of democratic collapse, there

would be no need for these authors to search for verbiage that implies declining democratic

quality but not full-blown authoritarian takeovers. Kapstein and Converses global dataset of

democratizations from 1960-2004 in fact shows a steeply declining propensity for democracies

to collapse. Democratizations that took place before 1980 appear to have faced a substantially

larger chance of reversal than those in subsequent decades (p. 64), their data show.17

More

qualitatively, Kapstein and Converse strain to find cases where democracy has unambiguously

collapsed since the Cold Wars end. Recent power grabs by the leaders of such countries asRussia, Georgia, Venezuela, and Bolivia have all set back the cause of democracy in those

most of Zakarias cases lack both substantive popular inclusivity beyond elections and effective

checks on executive abuses, they are better conceived as electoral authoritarian than

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nations (p. xiv). Yet these former Soviet cases have rather convincingly been theorized as cases

of uninterrupted competitive authoritarianism rather than democratic collapse, while these

Latin American cases have commonly been portrayed by leading area experts as undergoing

tumultuous left turns within democracy, not exiting democracy and entering authoritarianism.18

My point is not that Kapstein and Converse incorrectly code these cases, each of which

could debatably be placed on the authoritarian side of the democratic-authoritarian divide. It is

that subsuming such borderline cases under the category of either collapse or survival is

minimally informative. The critical limitations lie in the categories, not in the cases or their

coding.

Kapstein and Converses data show that democratic collapse is something of an

obsolescing worry within cases as well as across world-historical time. Indeed, the primary

rationale for them to analyze the fate of young democracies is that these are the ones most at

risk of collapse. Our research shows that newly democratic states are especially at risk of

reversal during their first five years of existence (p. xviii). This helps explain why democratic

collapse has become a receding worry in recent decades, and should hypothetically recede

further as democracies that avoided infant mortality persevere like their immediate

predecessors.

Yet here we see the greatest limitation of Kapstein and Converses stress on the question

of young democraciesfate. To die may be a fate, but to live is to keep ones fate unanswered.

The big challenge for contemporary studies of democratization is less to specify what conditions

make democracies more or less likely to collapse, than it is to apprehend what is transpiring in

democracies that are neither clearly collapsing nor clearly consolidating.

Both books eventually adopt such an approach, if perhaps inadvertently andunexpectedly. For Diamond as for Kapstein and Converse, the threat of outright democratic

collapse appears to be receding, as in global terms the overall number of democracies more or

less stabilized after 1995 (p. 6). Yet ironically, democracy is literally said to be receding as

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have been setbacks to democracy in highly influential states such as Russia, Venezuela, Nigeria,

and Thailand, and democracy is seriously deteriorating in other big, important countries like the

Philippines and Bangladesh (p. 12). While democracy is more often backsliding than

collapsing for Kapstein and Converse, it is deteriorating and suffering setbacks for Diamond.

This invites deeper investigation into how and why this wide array of countries might be

experiencing similarly sharp yet divergent types of democratic shifts and setbacks, rather than

democratic collapse or consolidation per se.

It is perhaps the greatest shared strength of these volumes that they seize upon this

invitation to consider what makes some democracies substantively stronger than others. In this

respect, these authors echo the quality of democracy literature in exploring the gap between

democratic procedures and substance. Yet by doing so in books that are centrally concerned with

the puzzle of democratic collapse and consolidation, Diamond and Kapstein and Converse

intriguingly make the questions of democratic survival and democratic substance effectively

inseparable. In short, if a democracy lacks substance, does it really make much sense to obsess

over whether it has survived?

The line between democratic substance and survival becomes especially blurry albeit in

ultimately productive ways in the Kapstein and Converse volume. For these authors, substance

begets survival, and substance lies in both horizontal accountability among elites and those

elites vertical accountability to the populace at large.19

In short, they summarize, when

political arrangements encourage politicians to concentrate power, or induce them to target

specific groups at the expense of broader social welfare, then democracy is less likely to take

root (p. 36, emphasis in original). Although the bulk of Kapstein and Converses analysis

centers on the importance of building Madisonian institutions of executive constraint for19

In seeing politicians as acting more or less accountable to the populace, and not only as being

more or less effectively heldaccountable by the populace, I embrace what Jane Mansbridge calls

the selection model as well as the more common sanctions model of vertical accountability.

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sustaining democracy, they also insist in a more Rousseauian, egalitarian vein that [a]s with

political power, economic power also needs to be redistributed if democracy is to consolidate

(p. xvi). In stark contrast to political economists who see the primary threat to democratic

consolidation lying in anti-redistributive wealthy elites, Kapstein and Converse see greater perils

in denying the multitude any material stake in democratic survival.20

If large segments of the

population do not share in the nations wealth, they may view the political order, even if

democratic in institutional form, as being unresponsive or even detrimental to their interests

(p. 47).

Kapstein and Converse thus see both Rousseauian vertical inclusivity and Madisonian

horizontal constraints as fundamental to democratic survival. Indeed, their parentheses around

democratic evince their substantive rather than procedural standard for democratic politics. Yet

from the kind of substantive democratic perspective offered in both of these volumes, inclusivity

and constraints do not simply sustain democracy; they define it. Instead of arguing that the

absence of effective checks and balances is among the most powerfulpredictors of democratic

failure (p. 4, emphasis added), then, one might equally well argue that shriveling executive

constraints are among the most powerful signals that a kind of democratic failure has already

occurred.

Diamond goes even further than Kapstein and Converse in embracing a substantive

notion of democracy, grounded in vertical as well as horizontal accountability. And he similarly

suggests that the questions of substance and survival are ultimately inseparable. Democratic

structures will be mere facades unless people come to value the essential principles of

democracy: popular sovereignty, accountability of rulers, freedom, and the rule of law,

Diamond argues. And without those essential principles in place, those seeming democracieswill eventually give way to tyranny, whether in civilian or military guise (p. 20). Once again,

however, it could be argued that a lack of substantive inclusivity and constraints itself constitutes

democracy giving way, long before a Musharraf or Alberto Fujimori comes along to conjure

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Neither Diamond nor Kapstein and Converse ultimately manage to convey, in a

digestible theoretical framework, the variety of ways that democracies might incrementally

decline in their substantive quality. In line with the quality of democracy literature more

generally, these authors instead lay out a plethora of maladies from which democracies may

suffer, and suggest that the presence of any single malady moves a country further from 1

(democracy) and closer to 0 (authoritarianism).21

I lack the space here to detail the variety of

ways in which these authors (quite rightly and with admirable thoroughness) see democracies

potentially going wrong. Suffice it to say that all of these maladies can ultimately be treated as

weaknesses of either popular inclusivity (vertical accountability) or constraints on power holders

(horizontal accountability), yet neither book captures how these two distinct types of

accountability might come into direct friction.

As a result, even as these books offer a refreshingly multifaceted vision of democratic

politics as requiring both vertical and horizontal accountability, the collapse vs. consolidation

paradigm effectively compresses variation into a single, 0:1 dimension. Figure 1 visually

represents these two types of accountability, the democratic-authoritarian divide, and the

collapse-consolidation axis as treated in the works by Diamond and by Kapstein and Converse

specifically, and in the quality of democracy literature more generally.

[INSERT FIGURE 1 HERE]

The claim here is not that regimes never slide back and forth between democracy and

authoritarianism, or that categorical distinctions between democratic and authoritarian regimes

are not worth making. It is that the collapse-consolidation axis captures only one theoreticaldimension along which regimes change and evidently a decreasingly relevant axis of change, at

that. What the collapse-consolidation axis cannot capture theoretically, naturally it cannot

21Levine and Molinas aim to conceive of the quality of democracy not as an all-or-nothing

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capture empirically in specific cases. While both books offer informative treatments of cases

where democracy has taken root most notably Diamonds outstanding, even inspiring case-

study of India (Chapter 7, What Sustains Democracy) both also struggle to convey the

dynamics of cases where democracy is radically changing course, or even manifestly

experiencing decline, but not disappearing. This is especially true in cases where, I would argue,

democracy has been careening between oligarchic and populist modes of politics, mimicking the

Machiavellian struggles between popular sovereignty and its rivals in republican Rome. Figure 2

visually represents the core corrective that I have in mind.22

[INSERT FIGURE 2 HERE]

In short, democracies might careen between populist domineering on the one hand and oligarchic

assertion on the other, without becoming clearly more or less democratic. Rather, what they

clearly become through such careening processes is differently insufficiently democratic. I will

argue at length in the next section that this notion of Machiavellian careening makes far better

sense of recent regime dynamics in Thailand than the collapse vs. consolidation paradigm. For

now, consider how Diamond and Kapstein and Converse struggle to systematically describe,

much less theorize, what is afoot in cases such as Thailand, Venezuela, and Bolivia, which Iwould consider consummate careening cases.

22 Like Dahls classic framework for polyarchy, this framework attempts to balance parsimony

and multidimensionality by positing two (and only two) distinct dimensions along which

democracies vary. Also like Dahls, my framework seeks not to pinpoint regimes in specific,

static spots, but to capture how regimes shift through concrete struggles between competing

political actors. It is also worth noting that both of Dahls dimensions participation and

competition effectively capture elements of what I am terming vertical accountability, or

inclusivity. No Madisonian, Dahl sidelined the horizontal, constraining dimension of democracy

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For the most part, both books treat these complex and unstable cases, at least in

theoretical terms, as straightforward instances of democratic collapse or decline. Thailand is the

first case Kapstein and Converse see fit to mention, implying that they see it as an especially

egregious and obvious case of a young democracy suffering a deadly fate. They note on the

opening page of their preface that the democratically elected regime of Thaksin Shinawatra in

Thailand was overthrown by a military coup in September 2006 (representing the fourth time

that democracy had collapsed there) (p. xiii, emphasis in original). This interpretation is ironic,

considering these authors stress on Madisonian constraints against executive abuses of power as

the most important substantive feature of a functioning democracy. Thaksins wanton disregard

for such constraints was a vital ingredient in the civil society coup that ultimately toppled

him.23

Kapstein and Converse also see such constraints as the best possible insurance against

democratic collapse. Yet even by their own account, this argument accords badly with events in

Thailand, where constitutional reforms initiated in the wake of the 1997 economic crisis

provided for a much more vigorous set of checks and balances while strengthening the countrys

party system. But Thailands young democracy was not yet consolidated and remained

threatened by those elites who sought to capture state institutions for personal gain (p. 110). An

uncharitable reading might say that Kapstein and Converse are tautologically claiming that Thaidemocracy collapsed because it was not consolidated. And as we will see below, Thaksin could

as easily be portrayed as the elite who sought to capture state institutions for personal gain as

those who overthrew him.

As perhaps the most determined and experienced scholar of democratization writing

today, Diamond unsurprisingly knows the Thai case in far greater depth than Kapstein and

Converse. As such, he adroitly captures Thaksins strides toward embracing the rural masses

with populist, redistributive economic appeals as well as his making mincemeat of Thailands

newly promulgated institutional constraints (pp. 79-83). Yet Diamond, like Kapstein and

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his analyses of democratic substance and survival. This prompts him to set aside Thaksins

vertical virtues in his summary assessment of Thailands democratic collapse. When the Thai

Constitutional Court acquitted newly elected Prime Minister Thaksin of falsely declaring assets

in 2001, Diamond calls it a huge blow to accountability (p. 309). Yet the court in this instance

could be interpreted precisely as defending or at least deferring to vertical accountability the

expressed will of a majority of Thai voters, who had just anointed Thaksin in the countrys most

decisive electoral landslide ever. What we see here is not so much democracy advancing or

receding, as one type of democratic accountability coming into direct friction with another.

In assessing the regime implications of the anti-Thaksin coup of 2006, Diamond makes

the case that vertical and horizontal accountability must work in tandem for democracy to

survive. This has devilishly unclear implications for whether the coup-makers or the power-

abusers should get the rap for Thailands putative democratic collapse. The Thai experience

shows that even elaborate and well-designed accountability institutions are at risk of being

conquered or subverted unless society has the will, the organization, and the resources to defend

its institutions, Diamond insists. Horizontal accountability needs to be stimulated and

reinforced by vertical pressures from civil society (p. 310). Yet as we shall see below, this is

precisely what Thailands monarchist Yellow Shirts did in opposition to Thaksins shocking

abuses of executive power. The result was not democratic consolidation, but a military coup. Or,in the language of Figure 2 above, it was an instance of oligarchic assertion against populist

domineering, with far muddier implications for democracy than the collapse-consolidation

continuum can capture.

Similar problems beguile these books assessment of careening cases in Latin America,

especially Venezuela and Bolivia. Like Thaksin, Presidents Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Evo

Morales in Bolivia force these authors to prioritize either vertical or horizontal accountability, if

they wish to place these complex and controversial regimes along a collapse-consolidation

continuum. Kapstein and Converse appear to lose sight of their theoretical commitment to

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not outright reversal (pp. 77-78). Puzzlingly, Kapstein and Converse place all of the blame for

this on populists rather than the backbreaking inequality that makes populism so appealing.

Frustration at the lack of widespread improvement in living standards in Latin America.has

served to generate substantial popular support for efforts by presidents of all stripes to sweep

aside institutional constraints on executive power, purportedly to give them the policy space to

tackle pressing problems, they argue. We believe that such efforts put democracy at risk in the

region (p. 81). It might be more illuminating to posit that democracys lack of vertical

inclusivity has invited attacks against substantive democracys horizontal constraints.

Diamond clings a bit more tightly to his balanced theoretical emphasis on both vertical

and horizontal accountability in making democracy work. On the one hand, Venezuelas Chavez

is basically beyond the pale. His decade-plus in office has seen him subvert democracy (p. 25)

and assert extraconstitutional powers through his authoritarian lurch (p. 68). On the other hand,

Diamond fully recognizes that populism has not simply undermined Venezuelan democracy (as

for Kapstein and Converse), but oligarchy. Venezuelas long sad political descent had its seeds

in the early period of domination by two powerful, factionalized parties that constrained political

competition and divided up the oil income, Diamond notes. The rapidly growing and

increasingly impoverished underclass became fed up with its exclusion, and the country tired of

the stranglehold on power held by the two dominant political parties (p. 67). As Diamondpithily argues later in language that we shall revisit in the Indonesian case, especially pre-

Chavez elitist parties were a consummate example of parties that collude but do not include

(pp. 300-301, emphasis added). It was this elitist, oligarchic exclusion that allowed Chavez to

win power through the ballot box in 1998 (after failing to do so through a coup in 1992) on his

radical populist platform (pp. 68). Popular sovereignty was not advanced through a

consensually expanding democratic social contract a la Rousseau, but through aggressive

plebiscitarian attacks on Venezuelas version of an oligarchic governo stretto a la Machiavelli.

Rather than seeing the battle royale between Chavez and the traditional parties who

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support Chavez while continuing to believe in democracy, as survey data suggest they do. The

results are paradoxical, because while they seem to suggest public tolerance for Venezuelas

democratic regression, they also show comparatively high levels of support for democracy (p.

83).

This paradox is instantly unraveled by recognizing the tension between vertical and

horizontal understandings of democracy, as well as the tendency for sustained periods of

oligarchy to make citizens value democracys promise of popular sovereignty more than its

constraints against executive, majoritarian abuses of power. In other words, severe inequality

under an unresponsive oligarchy invites voters to pursue the Rousseauian ends of increased

inclusion through Machiavellian means. Chavezs supporters presumably do not see his rule as a

time of democratic regression at all, and with good reason he appears to them more like a

Machiavellian democrat than a Schmittian dictator. Though Diamond later acknowledges that

many ordinary Venezuelans might back Chavez because of his populist mobilization and

massive social spending (178), he does not tie this insight back to his theoretical point

established empirically through his case-study of India that democracy requires substantive

inclusivity as well as constraints. The analytical confusion only deepens when Diamond praises

Bolivia for its election to the presidency of Evo Morales, a member of the countrys long-

marginalized indigenous majority (p. 179). Hence while virtually any Latin Americanist wouldportray Chavezs Venezuela and Morales Bolivia as cases shifting in the same (populist)

direction, Diamond ultimately portrays them as moving in opposite directions: Bolivia toward a

more inclusive democracy, and Venezuela toward outright democratic collapse.

When all is said and done, both Diamond and Kapstein and Converse offer state-of-the-

art analyses of democratic consolidation and collapse in the wake of democratizations Third

Wave. Due to the recent rarity of democratic breakdown, however, their attentions to democratic

survival inexorably evolve into questions of democratic substance. They call theoretically for an

appreciation of the importance of both vertical inclusivity and horizontal constraints in making

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clearly envisaged by Machiavelli, and not just to consolidate a la Madison or Rousseau or to

collapse altogether a la Schmitt. (See Figure 3.)24

The four case-studies to follow will help me

make the case that a framework centering on the tension between horizontal and vertical

accountability proves more analytically accurate and useful than a collapse vs. consolidation or

even a quality of democracy approach. This is true not only for cases that are seriously

careening such as Thailand, but cases where careening has mostly been avoided such as India, as

well as informative intermediate cases of democratic destabilization such as Taiwan and

Indonesia.

[INSERT FIGURE 3 HERE]

II. Varieties of Democratic Careening: Thailand and Taiwan

PASUK AND BAKER, THAKSIN

MATTLIN, POLITICIZED SOCIETY

III. Accountability Struggles: India and Indonesia

JAFFRELOT,RELIGION, CASTE AND POLITICS IN INDIA

CROUCH, POLITICAL REFORM IN INDONESIA AFTER SOEHARTO

IV. Toward a Comparative-Historical Framework

V. Conclusion

FIGURE 1: Accountability Types the Democratic-Authoritarian Divide

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22

FIGURE 1: Accountability Types, the Democratic-Authoritarian Divide,

and the Collapse-Consolidation Axis

Horizontal

Accountability

(Constraints)Weak

Weak

Strong

Strong

Vertical

Accountability

Inclusivit

Democracy

Authoritarianism

Democratic

Consolidation

Democratic

Collapse

Democratic-

Authoritarian

Divide

Collapse-

Consolidation

Axis

FIGURE 2: Democratic Collapse and Consolidation vs.

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23

Horizontal

Accountability

(Constraints)Weak

Weak

Strong

Strong

Vertical

Accountability

(Inclusivity)

Democratic

Populist

OligarchicAuthoritarian

Oligarchic

Assertion

Democratic

Consolidation

Democratic

Collapse

Populist

Domineering

FIGURE 2: Democratic Collapse and Consolidation vs.

Careening Between Oligarchy and Populism

FIGURE 3: Accountability Dynamics from the

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24

Horizontal

Accountability

(Constraints)Weak

Weak

Strong

Strong

Vertical

Accountability(Inclusivity)

DemocraticPopulist

OligarchicAuthoritarian

FIGURE 3: Accountability Dynamics from the

Perspective of Democratic Theory

RousseauMachiavelli

Madison

Schmitt