Prime
Explanations on democracy progress
Mr Michael Buteera Mugisha
What you need to know:
Democracy features a net movement towards broader, equal, protected and mutually binding consultation
In my article published on August 17, while responding to Daniel Kalinaki’s op-ed published on August 11, I contested his argument that Kenya has made or is making progress in her democracy thanks to her galvanised and organised civil society, the 2010 Constitution that placed a restraint on the power of the President, and a fiscal decentralisation that has expanded regional access to the national budget, thereby diffusing winner-takes-it-all national contests that tend to be rancorous and fuel political violence.
In Kalinaki’s piece, he equates the electoral process that fosters a regime transition to democracy and makes a rather daring prediction: that Kenya’s ratchets of democracy appear to have fallen in place that reversal in this process (that is to say, de-democracy) is almost unlikely.
I contested this view by arguing that to gain greater insight in understanding how democratic progress, but also reversal happens, requires a broader definition of democracy that extends beyond parameters, such as elections (even though important) to give greater scope in reflections on combinations and sequences of events that herald democracy progress as well as regression.
Following Charles Tilly, I instead, defined democracy as a regime in which political relations between citizens and the state feature broader, equal, protected, and mutually binding consultation.
This broader definition does one important thing: it brings a wider scope of public politics (which is to say, transactions between the state and citizens into the analysis) beyond elections to include other elements such as voter and national identification registration, taxation, and military conscription to mention a few.
Therefore, in assessing how and why countries make progress or not, democracy-wise we ask: (1) how wide a range do citizens expressed views come into play in public politics (2) how equally different groups of citizens experience a translation of their demands into state behaviour? (3) to what extent do citizens expressed collective demands receive state protection? and (4) how much the process of translation commits both sides, the citizens and the state?
Consider it one way, questions 1, 2, and 4 aid in assessing the extent to which public politics feature broad, equal, and mutually binding consultations, and 3 focuses on state protection of citizens’ expressed demands; seen in a rights categorisaton: questions 1, 2 and 4 relate to political rights and 3 concerns itself with civil liberties.
Democracy thus features a net movement towards broader, equal, protected and mutually binding consultations whereas de-democratisation or reversal in democracy consists a net movement towards narrow, less equal, less protected and less mutually binding consultations.
Given the above, the crucial question then becomes: under what conditions do countries make a transition from narrow, less equal, less protected and less mutually binding consultations to broader, equal, protected, and mutually binding consultations and vice versa.
The latter, particularly, implies that popular political participation exerts greater influence on public politics, and public politics exercise greater control over state actions. That is to say, the broader, more equal, citizens expressed demands are, the more likely the state is likely to protect rather than thwart citizens expressed demands. But what facilitates or inhibits these transitions?
Tilly invokes three factors: increase (or decrease) in trust networks, increase (decrease) in categorical inequalities on public politics, and increase (decrease) in autonomous centres of power within and outside the state. Over the coming weeks, I shall explain how each of these variables facilitate democracy and de-democratisation, and subsequently conclude the series by providing my take on opportunities and threats to Uganda’s democracy progress.
Mr Mugisha is a Ph.D Candidate at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Lecturer at Makerere University. [email protected]
