Thinking on Modern Political Democracy: Reflections on the Concept

and Modern Practice of Democracy

Manuel Alejandro Guerrero
2000

During the last two hundred years a democratic revolution has occurred in the practice of
government and in the configuration of political institutions. This democratic revolution has
included issues such as the enlargement of the voting franchises, the creation of clear and
open rules for political organisation and competition for power, and the creation of
mechanisms of political accountability. But it has also covered other kind of issues related
to the civilian control of the military and police forces, the defence of equality in the
treatment of individuals before the law, the development of means to avoid the
accumulation of power in single hands, and so forth. All these issues compose the
democratic revolution in the practice of politics that originated in the North Western world.

However, mainstream democratic theory, especially since the early 1940s, has tended to
emphasise the first sort of issues in order to seek for minimal definitions of democracy that
can be relatively better “controlled” in a research, understating the second sort of issues
within its theoretical frameworks in spite of the fact that these are inherent components of
the democratic practice in today’s full fledged democracies (FFDs). To consider
democracy as a concept linked only to political participation, competition and
accountability, leaves unattended other important aspects of the democratic rule, such as the
ones noticed by O’Donnell when talking about “horizontal accountability”. At the same
time, when analysing some of the so-called Third-Wave democracies, a large amount of
literature has started to deal with “deficiencies” that qualify the democratic character of
such polities, generating all sorts of species and sub-species of democracy, of “inferior”
forms of democracy, without being able to convincingly explain them within actual
democratic mainstream theories. We are using partial definitions for understanding more
complex situations.

1
We need more comprehensive ways of looking at democracy beyond limiting the scope to
electoral processes, political participation and competition. But how much wider this sight
should be? Certainly one cannot extend the definition of democracy and make it a
comprehensive catalogue of all sorts of rights without transforming democracy into a
normative category. This work departs from the consideration of Sebastian Mazzuca that
the forms of access to power and the forms of the exercise of power are basic attributes of a
definition of a political regime.1 However, contrary to Mazzuca, who considers democracy
to be only a form of access to power, I sustain that democracy should be viewed as a type
of political regime, thus defined by certain specific forms to access power and to exercise
such power. A democratic regime is composed by two (analytically) different sorts of
minimal procedures that relate, on the one hand, to the forms of access and, on the other, to
the forms of exercise of power. This work shows that only by considering democracy in
these broader terms we will be able to tackle five aspects that other contemporary theories
of democracy leave aside:
 Important political developments that are now crucial aspects of democratic practice
are incorporated into the theory.
 Transitions that ideally move from authoritarianism to democracy are not seen as lineal
processes, but as multilinear ones.
 Linkages between the state and regime are recognised, but the problems of considering
democracy as a quality of both, as O’Donnell does, are avoided.
 It is only by considering the exercise of power as an essential component of a
democratic regime, that it becomes possible to talk about “the quality of democracy”,
since along the aspects of access to power we can also consider those related to the
forms in which such power is actually exercised.
 An evaluation of the “democratic performance” of actual so called Full Fledged
Democracies (FFDs) is possible on aspects (those of the ways power is exercised) that
actual mainstream theories have not been able to shed much light on, leaving these FFD
as democracies per secula seculorum.

Practice and Theory of Democracy

1
Sebastian Mazzuca, “Acceso al poder versus ejercicio del poder. Democracia y patrimonialismo en America

2
For centuries democracy meant the rule of the many and at least until the early 1800s it was
usually associated with claims of social, more than political, egalitarianism. Democracy
was not considered in high esteem because it was believed it could easily degenerate into a
tyranny of the mobs, of the majority over the few. The French Revolution reinforced the
link between democracy and popular mobilisation and uprising shaping the attitudes to
democracy according to the position taken before the events in France. For some,
democracy contained the promises of liberty, fraternity and equality; for others, it was
associated with Jacobin dictatorship, rebellion and mass violence.

At the beginning of the XIX century democracy was not only distrusted by conservatives of
all sorts, but by republicans and liberals as well. For republicans, democracy essentially
meant the destruction of public virtue. In this view the exercise of government should be
reserved only to individuals able to rise above selfish and private interests. This was the
image of the virtuous public man that democracy, understood as the direct involvement of
people in government, naturally opposed. Republicans also feared the possibility of
democracies degenerating into mob tyrannies in which the few –rich—would be oppressed
by the many –poor—; a topic that would later be developed by liberals like Tocqueville and
J.S. Mill. For liberals, democracy meant the end of individual liberties and a challenge
against property.

However, at the very same time the Enlightenment, the American and the French
revolutions brought along a new faith in the common man that was eventually translated
into a cry for political inclusion helped by the processes of urbanisation and economic
development that occurred in Western Europe and the United States between the late XVIII
and the mid-XIX centuries. In Britain and France, these changes reflected on the debates
about the enlargement of electoral franchises; in the United States, on the debates on the
principle of representation. In Britain and France, the issue about enlarging the franchises
became a crucial issue during the second third of the XIX century. The Utilitarians, like
Jeremy Bentham and James Mill already supported strongly the enlargement of franchising
in Britain on the bases that the government’s goal must be to pursue the greatest happiness

Latina”

3
 2
for the greatest number. The way to attain this was through universal suffrage in which all
(adult male) individuals could participate in the process of selecting their representatives
and appointing them to Parliament. The only persons who could be trusted to pursue the
individuals’ good were their freely chosen and selected representatives. The Chartist
movements in Britain during the 1830s and 1840s also pressed for universal suffrage.
Though an important electoral reform was passed in 1832, it was not until the 1867 Act
when the bases for wider representation were finally established. In France, the Third
Republic opened the electoral process to all adult males. Even in Prussia, though the power
of the Reichstag was more limited than Britain’s and France’s parliaments, universal male
suffrage was conceded in 1867 (though Bismark’s intentions to do this obeyed quite
conservative reasons).

Discussions about the enlargement of franchises, the meaning of representation and respect
for individual rights and freedoms, favoured a practical association of democracy not only
with the conditions that provided for political participation and free, competitive and fair
elections but also with important aspects of constitutional liberalism (this means a liberal
rule of law, the non-concentration of power in single hands and a respect for basic
individual rights and freedoms of speech, assembly, religion and property). At the time of
these important developments towards enlarging people’s participation in politics, there
appeared also a trend to restrain the power of these new representative governments
through securing the rights and liberties of individuals. The conception of a modern
citizenship supposed then a combination of the old liberal individual rights with a sort of
popular indirect participation and with the belief that all individuals had to be equal before
the law.

In this way, between the 1880s and 1920s the United States and some Western European
countries had a political life characterised by an expanded and (in principle) inclusive
political participation that, through party competition, was supposed to conform
representative governments whose actions were expected to be limited and shaped by a rule

2
See the classical works of Leslie Stephen, The English Utilitarians, Thoemmes Pr., 1997 (1900), and of
John Plamenatz, The English Utilitarians, Oxford, Blackwell, 1949.

4
of law based upon liberal principles and individual rights. It was these political
arrangements which became identified with democracy, moving the concept away from
pure direct popular participation in government and liberating it from the negative violent
connotation it historically had by clothing it with liberal and republican principles and
helping it to become an entirely political concept loosing its originally social revolutionary
connotations. As C.B. Macpherson notes:

Democracy used to be a bad word. Everybody who was anybody knew that democracy, in its
original sense of rule by the people or government in accordance with the will of the bulk of the
people, would be a bad thing –fatal to individual freedom and to all graces of civilized living. That
was the position taken by pretty nearly all men of intelligence from the earliest historical times
3
down to about hundred years ago. Then, within fifty years, democracy became a good thing.

However, in spite of this democratic revolution in the forms of accessing power and in the
forms of exercising such power, mainstream theoretical developments after the Second
World War have tended to emphasise only the first kind of elements of democratic practice,
i.e, the conditions for free and competitive elections (Schumpeter, for instance) and
political participation of the individual in politics along with political accountability4
(Dahl). Theoretical developments focused only on the elements related to the aspects of
how to access political power and left aside the aspects of how such power is actually
exercised in democracies. Why? I will try an explanation.

At the very same time when there was taking place a democratic revolution in the ways of
ruling (due to the enlargement of franchises, the discussions about extending the vote to
women, an extension of political and civil rights to individuals, and the recognition of
certain minimal social responsibilities of the governments towards their populations), there
also emerged theories about the new mass societies according to which individuals
experienced an undifferentiated, alienated and homogenised existence. Ferdinand Tönnies
with his idea of the passage from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft is a good example.5 For

3
C.B. Macpherson, The Real World of Democracy, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1966, p.1.
4
The possibility of the citizens to vote a government out of office.
5
Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Society (Gemeischaft und Gesellschaft),Transaction Publishers, 1995.

5
writers like Gustave Le Bon or Georges Sorel, the “masses” tended to behave irrationally
and were easy to manipulate. In this sense, the “evidence” shown by the manipulation of
the minds, first by First World War propaganda, and later by fascists and Nazi regimes in
Europe seemed to prove these ideas. Moreover, already in 1922 Walter Lippmann’s book,
Public Opinion, explained how individuals are mostly uninterested in public affairs and
how they usually take decisions about these issues without enough or even correct
information.6 Along with these conceptions about this mass behaviour, there also developed
studies that emphasised the role of elites in political organisations and action, from Michels
to Mosca and Pareto.

Not surprisingly, many theoretical developments of democracy tended to emphasise the

elitist components of it. Schumpeter is a case in point when he defines democracy as a
political method for arriving at political decisions and such method consists of a strong
competition among political elites from which the voters select their rulers.7 The emphasis
on the elitist components of democracy –which undoubtedly exist—leaves in darkness
many other crucial aspects, like political participation and accountability. Robert Dahl
when defining his idea of Polyarchy combines very well the elements that compose both
political participation and political competition with accountability.8

Dahl assumes that polyarchies can exist when society’s institutions can provide for eight
guarantees: freedom to join and form organisations; freedom of expression; right to vote;
right of political leaders to compete for support; alternative sources of information (with the
existence of these five guarantees the citizens –considered to be political equals—have the
opportunity to formulate their political preferences); eligibility for public office; free and
fair elections (all these seven guarantees permit the citizens to signify their preferences to
their fellow citizens and the government by individual and collective action); and finally,
there must be institutions for making government policies dependent on votes and other
expressions of preference (all eight permit the citizens to have their preferences weighed
equally in the conduct of the government, that is, weighed with no discrimination because

6
Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion,, New York, Penguin Books,, 1946 (1922).
7
Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, London, Allen & Unwin, 1943.
8
Robert A. Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition, New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 1971.

6
of the content or source of the preference). The systems that meet these conditions
successfully have an acceptable degree of public contestation and participation in a context
in which the opposition has real chances of winning in elections and taking office.

All these advances are very good, but they still leave aside questions about constitutional
liberal practices in full fledged democracies. In political philosophy an important question
in relation to the forms of rule in many authors as diverse as Aristotle and Machiavelli, has
to do not only with how many persons rule in a polity, but also for whom do these person or
persons rule. If we translate these classical issues into modern terms, I think we can pose
the questions like this: what are the criteria that compose the access to power, and how is
such power exercised? If we accept that both access to power and exercise of power are
basic attributes of a definition of political regime, I contend here that democracy should
then be viewed as a kind of political regime that consists of certain specific criteria for
accessing power and certain other specific criteria for exercising such power. I discuss this
idea below.

Contemporary democratic theories tend to emphasise the aspects and the criteria related to
the access to power –i.e. political participation, political competition and accountability—
but tend to understate the exercise component of the democratic regime’s equation. The
Argentinean scholar, Guillermo O’Donnell, has noted the lack of consideration for
problems related to constitutional liberalism within democratic theories.9 O’Donnell refers
how in many New Democratic Countries (NDCs), though conditions for fair competition,
political participation and accountability mechanisms exist allowing them to be classified
as polyarchies, they are still unable of enforcing a rule of law that effectively protects their
citizens from power abuses and violence, that is unable to give fair treatment to diverse
social groups in courts, that cannot provide many of its citizens with the services they are

9
Some of the works of O’Donnell in this respect are: “Delegative Democracy?”, Working Paper 172, Hellen
Kellogg Institute for International Studies, University of Notre Dame, March 1992; “On the State,
Democratization and Some Conceptual Problems (A Latin American View with Glances at Some Post-
Communist Countries)”, Working Paper 192, Hellen Kellogg Institute for International Studies, University of
Notre Dame, April 1993; “Illusions about Consolidation”, Journal of Democracy, Vol.7, no.2, 1996;
“Horizontal Accountability and New Polyarchies”, Working Paper 253, Hellen Kellogg Institute for
International Studies, University of Notre Dame, April 1998; “Polyarchies and the (Un)Rule of Law in Latin

7
entitled to receive, and so forth. Thus in many of these new polyarchies, citizenship and the
respect for human rights are severely curtailed. For O’Donnell, the problems they face are
concentrated at the level of the state institutions –which remain democratically weak and
where the lack of horizontal accountability seems to be found--, whereas at the same time
these countries have relatively solved the problems of participation and competition for
power which are the core of a democratic regime or polyarchy.10 In such cases, democratic
regimes or polyarchies are then found to operate within still authoritarian states. In this
way, O’Donnell suggests that in many Latin American cases while the emergence of
polyarchies must be understood along a continuum that runs from “authoritarian to
democratic regimes”, the emergence of horizontal accountability must be understood along
another continuum that runs from “authoritarian to democratic states”.11 The major
confusion here from my point of view is that most of the time when we discuss about the
“democratic deficits of the state”, in reality we will be talking about problems of
modernisation of the state –i.e. the emergence of a modern bureaucratic state, in Weberian
terms. Moreover, the idea of having on one side democratic regimes and on the other
democratic states demands implicitly for two kind of “transitions” to democracy that not
only become problematic in analytical terms, but also leave us with the theoretical
possibility of defining cases that, in the same fashion as O’Donnell inserts some Latin
American countries within the category of “democratic regimes within authoritarian states”,
might show the opposite: “authoritarian regimes within democratic states”. At least
theoretically, the possibility of such category exists. For instance, to which extent does late
XIX Century Germany, where most civil rights were respected within a certain liberal rule
of law, fit in the latter category?

Though a linkage between regime and state exists, it is better to avoid the confusions that
are brought about by attaching democratic qualities to both. Instead I insist that we should
consider democracy as a kind of political regime that consists of two kind of elements:
certain specific minimal procedures related to the access of political power and certain

America”, in J. Mendez, G. O’Donnell and P.S. Pinheiro (eds.), The Rule of Law and the Underprivileged in
Latin America, Notre Dame, Notre Dame Press, 1999.
10
O’Donnell (1993), pgs.11-12.
11
O’Donnell (1998) and (1999).

8
other specific minimal procedures related to the exercise of such political power. Thus, a
democratic regime is composed by two (analytically) different sort of procedures that
relate, on the one hand, to the forms of access and, on the other, to the forms of exercise of
power. As said before in the introduction, it is only by considering democracy in these
terms that we will be able to tackle five aspects that mainstream theories of democracy
leave aside. Let me consider some of them in the following sections.

Democracy as a Political Regime

I propose to approach the study of democracy as a political regime by focusing on the
different minimum procedures that form its two components, access and exercise of power.
The access to power refers to the forms in which different groups and individuals compete
for obtaining it, to the degree in which there exists political accountability, and to the extent
to which political rights for participating in politics are granted to the individuals (from
counting on freedom of organisation and freedom of speech to securing the rights to receive
information, vote, etc.). In a democratic regime, certain elements are required to grant that
there exists a balanced and fair competition among the elites for power and a respect for the
political rights of the individuals to organise and participate in the public life. These
elements are mostly considered within the well-known requisites that Robert Dahl uses to
define a polyarchy that were mentioned above, so I will not repeat them here.12

Now, the study of the exercise of power requires to picture two different dimensions: the
forms in which political power extends into society, and the forms in which such power is
distributed, shared and equilibrated among political institutions, agencies and actors. The
forms in which power extends into society refers to the formal limits within which political
power is exercised in a polity. In democratic regimes, this first dimension of the exercise of
power is based upon a fundamental individual ideal that finds its roots at the beginning of
the modern era with the wars of religion, which unleashed a process whose outcome is the
right to resist oppression, the right of the individuals not to be oppressed by power and to
enjoy certain basic liberties condensed in what we now call human and civil rights.
Norberto Bobbio, elaborating on these ideas, explains that for centuries the individual was

12
Dahl (1971).

9
essentially an object of power, a passive subject characterised more by his/her duties to
obey the laws than from having rights that protected him/her from political power.13
However, between the XVI and the XIX centuries a Copernican revolution took place in
the North Western world transforming the individual into the most important holder of
rights. For Bobbio,

This inversion of the traditional relation between the individual and the state also involves the
inversion of the traditional relation between rights and duties. In relation to individuals, rights now
come before duties, and in relation to the state, duties come first and then rights... It is with the birth
of the constitutional state that there is the final transition from the sovereign’s point of view to that
of the citizen. In the despotic state, the individual has duties, not rights. In the absolutist state,
individuals can claim private rights in relation to the sovereign. In the constitutional state, the
individual in relation to the state enjoys not only private rights but also public rights. The
constitutional state is a citizen’s state.14

Democratic regimes must count on two essential kind of limits, both formally enacted and
efficient in practice, meant to restrain the forms in which political power is exercised in a
polity. Such limits are legal and administrative in nature and in both cases they are inspired
to protect individuals and groups from power abuses. Essential to this notion is the idea that
human and civil rights are not only valuable in themselves, but that can be positively
granted because individuals and groups count on developed mechanisms to defend
themselves from such abuses. From this perspective human and civil rights that protect
individuals from not being oppressed by political power constitute one essential part of the
hardcore of the idea of citizenship (the other being the political rights, of course) and form
the bases upon which der Recht, or le Droit –understood as the general legal standards—is
conformed. At the same time, this kind of Recht or Droit is worked out through specific
legal prescriptions contained in statutes, laws and regulations that conform the Gesetz or la
Loi that make those general legal standards on the defence of human and civil rights to be
enforced in practice and not only to be formally recognised. In democratic regimes a rule of
law based upon constitutional liberalism is thus required to limit the exercise of political

13
Norberto Bobbio, The Age of Rights, translated by Allan Cameron, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1996. See
especially parts I and II.

10
power in order to protect human and civil rights. In this sense, certain minimal procedures –
or guarantees, as Dahl would say—must be met, such as:
a) Military and police forces must act within a legal framework that protects civil and
human rights. There is the obligation of military and police forces to respect a liberal
constitutional rule of law in which they are not entitled to trespass the limits of their
functions serving as an unconstrained arm of the government for repression or other
kind of abuses of human and civil rights of the population.15
b) The exist the conditions for an effective equal treatment of individuals before the law.
This implies the non-existence of legal doctrines that discriminate among individuals.
Impartiality and the opportunity of each party involved in a conflict to present his/her
case and be heard are crucial. The effective equal treatment is granted, in principle,
when the principle of fairness is secured, i.e. like cases are expected to be treated alike,
and when all individuals can have at least the possibility to present and defend his/her
interests and advance his/her interests a priori.
c) The possibility for individuals to have a relatively equal access to justice. Though this is
not to accept that all legal needs can be met through court resolutions or that legal
norms cover all aspects of social life, access to courts must be in principle open to
individuals and groups who apply for them without discrimination. Though this implies
a practical problem of provision of legal advice, of prices, costs and other economic
barriers for a prompt access to justice, equality in the access to courts means that, at
least in principle, the judiciary is not considered to be distant, discriminatory, and
useless by the large majority of the society. In many countries there are mechanisms to
provide with legal assistance for individuals who are unable to afford the costs of a
legal process or a trial.

However, it would be seriously naive to believe that it is only through the existence of
formal limits of political power –legal and administrative—, that such power would, so to

14
“The Age of Rights”, in Ibid., pgs. 40 and 43.
15
Below, when referring to the linkages between the political regime and the State another aspect of the
military and police forces is dealt with: the possibility that in certain countries, groups within these forces can
act as relatively autonomous corps, repressing and violating the rights of individuals and groups in some
regions.

11
say, maintain itself within those limits. No king willingly abdicates from his power.
Moreover, in many non-democratic polities, there can be usually found a series of legal
(and at times also of administrative) provisions that recognise and grant human and civil
rights of individuals, but they are usually not enforced. The law and the practice go on
different tracks and formal limits to power constitute only a handbook of good intentions or
a form to legitimise before external observers. The mere formal recognition of such legal
and administrative limits to the exercise of power does not restrain it from abuses.

In order to give true content to the formal limits of political power within a polity a certain
degree of pressures “from below” –from the society—is required. It is not easy to imagine a
polity in which political power decides to limit itself (in the case of modern democracies
this means the granting of a rule of law based upon constitutional liberalism) without the
existence of some pressures from actors, organisations and other forces from the outside,
from the society. In the Western world it was such kind of pressures which greatly
contributed to move the pendulum from the ancien regime to the democratic revolution
between the XVIII and the XX centuries.

The kind of “pressures from below” that I am referring to as being crucial for keeping the
exercise of power within the limits defined by a rule of law based upon a constitutional
liberalism does not have to do with the possibility of individuals (citizens) of joining and
creating organisations to participate in the political life, but with the possibility of those
citizens to organise in order to defend and claim for specific rights. The idea of granting
citizens the rights to join and form organisations, like parties and other political
associations, to participate in the public life is contemplated within the requisites with
which Robert Dahl defines a polyarchy, and thus, is linked to the aspects of “access to
power”, since it has more to do with removing obstacles and securing the conditions for
exercising political rights. Here, I refer instead to another kind of civil organisations
intended to defend a wide variety of human and civil rights of specific groups. The
existence of organisations that defend and promote the rights of ethnic, sexual or religious
minorities, of women’s equality, and of other specific groups are the “vigilant units” of the
legal and administrative formal dispositions to limit the exercise of power within their

12
respective spheres. More than being the individual citizen alone –as the voter might be
when referring to the basic action of political participation related to the access aspects of
democracy—, here it is the different kind of civil organisations that act in the public sphere
for the defence and the promotion of rights the ones that constitute the major sources of
pressures from below that act and react when the exercise of power exceeds and affects
their specific domains.16 Thus, it is the existence of a wide variety of civil organisations
that act in combination with legal and administrative prescriptions based upon a liberal
constitutional rule of law, which contribute to maintain the well-defined formal limits of the
17
exercise of power.

The second dimension of the exercise of political power refers to how political power is
shared, distributed and equilibrated among political institutions, agencies and actors in a
polity. In a democratic regime the exercise of power is defined by what I would call here a
“counterbalanced exercise of power” for referring to the ways political power is shared,
distributed and equilibrated among actors and institutions in a democratic regime. There are
two basic forms in which the exercise of political power is counterbalanced in a democratic
political regime, one being that some power institutions and agencies should be in a
position to check on one another (more or less the classic notion of checks and balances),
and the other being that the exercise of power can be made accountable, not in Dahl’s
sense, but in the sense that public officials and agencies are all publicly responsible for
their actions while in office. The first meaning of a counterbalanced exercise of power is
thus highly linked to the classical idea of checks and balances as referred to by Madison in
the Federalist Paper 47 in which he defends an idea of non-accumulation of powers that,
though it does not necessarily mean that each of the three powers –Executive, Legislative

16
Here one must note that their role is not only “reactive”, but these organisations also seek to promote such
rights.
17
There is a wide range of authors that believe that civil society per se is the key variable for maintaining or
creating democratic governments (See for instance Robert Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic
Traditions in Modern Italy, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1993, p.182; Larry Diamond, “Toward
democratic consolidation”, in Larry Diamond and Marc F. Plattner (eds.), The Global Resurgence of
Democracy, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, p.230; Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan,
Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America and Post-
Communist Europe, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, p.76). My position here is that it is
possible that a strong civil society is a “true contributor” to democracy essentially when it works within a
relatively solid political institutional structure along with other actors of the public life and in an atmosphere
of clear rules, norms and practices.

13
and Judicial—need to be each in wholly separate hands, it means that they should not all be
in the same single hands. One power cannot be judge and part at the same time. In the case
of the United States a key institution for the checks and balances has been its independent
Judicial Power with constitutional review capacities that has preserved the rule of law and
checked on the constitutionality of the acts of power. This role does not mean that a
constant confrontation between the powers must be the dominant feature of the checks
system. As Charles Black has noted in the case of the United States’ Judicial,

The role of the Court has usually been conceived as that of invalidating “hasty” or “unwise”
legislation, of acting as a “check” in the other departments. It has played such a role on occasion,
and may play it again in the future... But a case can be made for believing that the prime and most
necessary function of the Court has been that of validation, not that of invalidation. What a
government of limited powers needs, at the beginning and forever, is some means of satisfying the
people that it has taken all steps humanly possible to stay within its powers. That is the condition of
its legitimacy, and its legitimacy in the long run, is the condition of its life. And the Court through
its history, has acted as the legitimator of the government. In a very real sense, the Government of
18
the United States is based on the opinions of the Supreme Court.

I do not think there should be any further confusion on this point referring to the non-
accumulation of power in single hands, since it has been widely treated in many other
works.19

The second meaning of a counterbalanced exercise of power in a democratic regime is

closely linked to the idea of accountability in the sense of public responsibility.
Accountability means “the ability to determine who in the government is responsible for a
decision or action and the ability to ensure that officials in government are answerable for
20
their actions”. Thus, this idea of accountability involves two different aspects. On the one

18
Charles L. Black Jr., The People and the Court: Judicial Review in a Democracy, New York, Macmillan,
1960, p.52.
19
See Epaminondas P. Panagopoulos, Essays on the History and Meaning of the Checks and Balances,
University Press of America, 1986.
20
Seymour M. Lipset (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Democracy, Washington, D.C : Congressional Quarterly,
Vol.I, 1995, p.9.

14
hand, it means that government must be accountable to the people, the parliament or any
other institution or body where sovereignty resides. The most basic elements designed to
ensure accountability in this sense are regular electoral processes (as discussed by Dahl),
and thus this first meaning is more related to the “access aspect” of a political regime. On
the other, it means that public officials and agencies are expected to act with a sense of
responsibility that, in democratic regimes, is ultimately codified in norms, laws and
regulations that rule their conduct in the forms they must use public resources and establish
diverse sanctions for corruption and misuses. It is then this point the one that relates to the
“exercise aspect” of a democratic political regime since, in principle, in these kind of
regimes public information as well as the behaviour of public officials and agencies are
legitimately subject to constant scrutiny and evaluation by the public opinion (except, of
course, on certain areas in which information is restricted due to motives of national or state
security). Moreover, in democratic regimes it is hoped to be found diverse requirements for
disclosure, a commitment for respecting the right to obtain public information by the
citizens, and proper mechanisms for investigating alleged misconduct and for sanctioning
proven misbehaviour, misuses of power, and corruption. This all means that in democratic
regimes public officials and agencies are legally and administratively answerable for their
actions while in office.

In these regimes certain elements are required to maintain a counterbalanced distribution

and equilibrium of power among different actors, groups and institutions. Such elements –
or as initially called minimal procedures—have to do essentially, though not exclusively,
with the following aspects:
a) A non-accumulative exercise of power in the sense that no single institution is capable
of exercising legally or de facto all three powers –Executive, Legislative and Judicial.
Especially important is that the same authority in charge of implementing decisions and
policy choices or that is in charge of elaborating the laws is not the same as that in
charge of imparting justice. Here, as Montesquieu put it long ago in his The Spirit of the
Laws (1748), what is required is that some power institutions can be in a position to
check on the others. As said before, one power cannot be judge and party at the same
time.

15
b) The existence of adequate mechanisms that incentive public responsibility in the tenure
of office. That is, the existence of proper means to determine who in the government is
responsible for a decision or action, to investigate alleged misconduct of public officials
and to punish proven misbehaviour and misuses of power (as serving their private
interests or the partial interests of others) during the tenure of public office. This makes
a difference with pure accountability (which relates more to the access side of a
political regime) since this latter involves the notion that the government is answerable,
in the last case to the citizens, for its actions, thus the most basic element to ensure it is
through regular election processes. The second notion of responsibility that seeks to be
advanced here is not limited to electoral terms, but has a more permanent institutional
aspect that has to do with the existence of administrative courts, with dispositions that
secure that public information must be disclosed and accessible to the population, and
with mechanisms that punish corruption and misuses of office’s resources and
functions.

Additionally an “external” element is also relevant for maintaining a counterbalanced

exercise of power in a democratic regime: an independent mass media structure. In
democratic political regimes the actors and agencies that conform the public authority are
expected to behave and implement their public choices in rather coherent, predictable and
responsible ways according to a system of previously accepted and publicly known set of
norms and rules that they cannot cancel or suspend at their own will. However, let us not
exaggerate about the reach of such norms and rules in binding the behaviour of politicians
in democracies. As Dunn puts it,

The democratic demands to be ruled in broad daylight –to be able to see what is politically
happening (which certainly requires being able to look for oneself, the right to try unimpededly to
find out)—and the classic claims on prerogative (the power of doing public good without a rule...),
cannot be conceptually reconciled simultaneously. If we really succeed in eliminating prerogative
from political life, we would not merely discomfit professional politicians (and even reasonably
ambitious bureaucrats) so radically that the supply of them might dry up, we would also find that
we had achieved very mainly plainly undesirable consequences at the same time. To be able to rule
beneficially, political leaders need to be able to act, and sometimes, to act boldly. They need a

16
considerable degree of freedom. The more we bind them, no doubt, the less they will be able to do
against us, but the less, too, and at least equally consequentially, they will be able to do for us.
Paralyzing rule is not a recipe for ensuring that it has a surplus of desired over undesired
consequences.21

An independent mass media is then required for maintaining at work a relatively acceptable
counterbalance of power (or if we want to be cynical, an acceptable level of power abuse).
One must note, however, that an independent mass media relates to both the access and the
exercise aspects of a democratic regime. Let me explain how does it relate to each of the
two components of a political regime.

It was John Stuart Mill who, in the mid-XIX Century, brilliantly synthesised the core of the
liberal positions concerning the importance of free discussion, free thought and a free
press.22 His examination of these topics became essential arguments for the liberal theories
that advocated the freedom of the mass media in contemporary societies. For J.S. Mill,
freedom of the press was required in order to maintain a space where a free exchange of
ideas and debates could eventually lead the individuals to find the “truth” (in terms of the
most rational argument in a public debate that would discard false ideas),23 to avoid the
tyranny of an overwhelming dominant opinion on those who dissent from them, thus
protecting individualism,24 and to secure “against corrupt or tyrannical government”.25

This liberal account of the media became increasingly identified with democracy --with the
liberal capitalist democracies that consolidated in Western societies along the late XIX and
XX Centuries. The mass media are conceived of as a sort of “fourth estate” in the
democratic check-and-balances public surveillance of the exercise of power. In this sense,

21
John Dunn, “Situating Democratic Political Acountability”, in Adam Przeworski, Susan C. Stokes and
Bernard Manin (eds.), Democracy, Accountability and Representation, Cambridge Studies in the Theory of
Democracy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999, pgs.339-340.
22
John Stuart Mill, “On Liberty” (1859), in J.S. Mill, On Liberty and Other Writings, edited by Stefan
Collini, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989.
See especially his second chapter “On the liberty of thought and discussion” and his third chapter “Of
individuality, as one of the elements of the well-being”.
23
Ibid., p.23.
24
Ibid., pgs. 8-9.
25
Ibid., p.19.

17
“States are dragged before the court of public opinion. In the name of the common or
public interest, the press chides tyrants and malefactors who stifle or evade public opinion.
The abuse of political power is exposed publicly”.26 The media are essential to protect
citizens’ civil and political rights and to maintain open the political decision-making
process, which otherwise would be "naturally" surrounded by secrecy.

The media are also seen as an open arena for public and rational deliberation in liberal
democratic polities, through which the society and the government can maintain constant
communication and through which the former exercises also an informal control over the
latter. The notions behind this assumption is that the mass media are neutral and essentially
reflect a potent, constant and contrasting public debate among citizens about public affairs,
which is free, rational and open in principle to all citizens who want to express their ideas.

This freedom of discussion benefits the public interest, since it is assumed that the most
significant points of view are being presented for discussion and also that an immense
amount of information will be made available for the individuals. 27 Therefore, there are
three crucial aspects in which the mass media is (ideally) linked to democracy:
 Provides the citizenry with information for basing their choices, opinions and decisions
on public matters.
 Becomes itself an open and free marketplace of ideas in which all citizens can
participate and where there are no guaranteed a priori predominant points of view, but
instead the dominant opinion becomes so only as a result of a permanent rational debate
and contrasting of arguments.
 Watches over and points out misuses of power, corruption and abuses of authority.

The first two points are linked to the access side of the democratic regime equation, since
they relate to the forms in which the media provides information on public matters for
individuals to make choices and take the decisions that best suit their interests when

26
John Keane, The Media and Democracy, London, Polity Press, 1991, pgs.21-22.
27
David Kelley and Roger Donway, “Liberalism and Free Speech”, in Fred S. Siebert, Theodore Peterson and
Wilbur Schram, Four Theories of the Press. The Authoritarian, Libertarian, Social Responsibility and Soviet
Communist Concepts of What the Press Should Be and Do, Books for Libraries Press, Freeport, N.Y., 1956,
pgs.89-91.

18
participating in the public life. This media’s informational role relates to the access side of
a democratic regime and is, in a way, contemplated within Dahl’s criteria of polyarchy. It is
thus the third aspect of the media the one that relates instead to the exercise side of a
democratic regime, and specifically contributes to the counterbalanced exercise of the
political power.

Independent media can play as “watchdogs” against abuses of power and are capable of
disclosing public misconduct. This role supposes that in democracies, the behaviour and
actions of public officials and agencies relating to office tenure can be legitimately subject
to open scrutiny and evaluation. The diverse mechanisms for disclosure, the commitment
for respecting freedom of the press and the right to obtain public information help to
develop a “watchdog” role of the media (not free from certain idealisation)28 against abuses
of power and legitimise its capability for disclosing public misconduct and corruption.

In sum, the model of democracy as a kind of regime composed of aspects related to the
access and exercise of political power is illustrated in Figure A below.

28
I am referring to the forms in which the mass media present information in non-communist polities

19
 Figure A
Model of Democratic Regimes
Access to Political Power Exercise of Political Power
Components Criteria: Components Criteria:

Effective equal treatment before

Political rights for citizens the law (non-discriminatory
to participate principles based upon
Well-defined Formal Constitutional liberalism)
Limits of exercise of Relatively equal access to justice
Pluralistic kind of Political Accountability Power
Access to power* Military and police forces act
within legality
Rules for fair, open and
free competition for Civil organisations to defend and
power promote human and civil rights
Counterbalanced Checks and balances (non-
Exercise of Power accumulation of power in
single hands)

Public responsibility
(mechanisms to prevent
misuses of power and
corruption, and right to
information and disclosure)

Watchdog role of the mass

media
*The following three criteria or dimensions (within which different partial regimes are developed) condense
the eight requisites of Dahl’s polyarchies.

1. Transitions to democracy
If we accept that a democratic regime is composed of a certain kind of elements related to
access and certain others related to exercise of power, transitions that ideally move from

20
authoritarianism to democracy cannot be seen as lineal processes, but as multi-lineal ones
in time. Democratisation processes involve the creation or emergence of diverse minimal
procedures that facilitate a pluralistic kind of access to political power and a
counterbalanced and formally well limited exercise of such power. A democratic regime
involves the creation or emergence not only of elements that secure and grant political
participation, free and fair competition and political accountability, but also of other
elements that limit the exercise of power through a liberal constitutional rule of law and
that imply a balance of power among actors and institutions that secure responsibility and
mutual checks. Both processes may involve different timing, actors and agreements, and
they can either overlap, or one can proceed the other, in time. In their democracy-building
processes, while Britain is a good example of a polity that first consolidated a relatively
limited and counterbalanced exercise of power before securing universal political
participation and accountability, the cases of Mexico and Brazil exemplify the opposite
process, that of opening the arena for competition, participation and accountability, but still
fighting for consolidating a limited and counterbalanced exercise of political power.

As have been discussed, democratic regimes have to cope with certain specific criteria for
accessing political power and for exercising it. The criterion for accessing political power
in democratic regimes was defined as a pluralistic sort of access.29 The pluralistic access –
by emphasising a free and fair competition, a respect for political participation and
accountability—differentiates between democratic and non-democratic regimes, since the
latter are characterised therefore by different degrees of restrictions to access power. In the
case of authoritarian regimes, as defined by Linz, a crucial feature is their limited political
pluralism that makes competition for power to become a relatively closed process that
remains within the control of a leader or a small political elite. 30 Political participation in
authoritarian regimes is also restricted because the individual’s political and the civil rights,

29
Which implies essentially the requisites met by Dahl’s polyarchies.
30
According to Linz, “authoritarian regimes are political systems with limited, not responsible, political
pluralism, without elaborate and guiding ideology, but with distinctive mentalities, without extensive nor
intensive political mobilisation, except at some points in their development, and in which a leader or
occasionally a small group exercises power within formally ill-defined limits but actually quite predictable
ones”. This definition firstly appeared in Juan Linz, “An Authoritarian Regime: The Case of Spain”, in Erick
Allardt and Yrjo Littunen (eds.), Cleavages, Ideologies and Party Systems, 1964. I am citing it from: Juan

21
though not necessarily revoked, are usually not respected. For instance, though in many
cases the party system is not totally cancelled (in spite of having some specific parties
banned) the vote is not the criterion for electing their representatives; there are many
barriers and obstacles for creating other political organisations; and in general all
independent participation is severely restricted, if not forbidden.31 Thus, a first
differentiation between democratic and non-democratic regimes, one that refers to the ways
of accessing political power, can be studied through opposing a pluralistic access against a
concentrated access to power.

As for the exercise of political power, this work focuses on two dimensions: the way in
which that power extends into society and the distribution and equilibrium of such power
among actors, groups and institutions within the regime. In democratic regimes it was said
that the exercise of power is both counterbalanced and counts on formally well-defined
limits. Conversely, in non-democratic regimes the limits of the exercise of power are
ambiguous and ill-defined and it is commonly found that the ruling elite’s power is seldom
counterbalanced by other actors and institutions within the regime. Many authoritarian
regimes try to maintain legalistic formalities that recognise human and civil rights. Though
at the same time they might enact new laws restricting some of these rights these regimes
do not completely suppress basic human and civil rights, at least formally. The legalistic
recognition of these rights, the condition of citizenship and other mechanisms for
individuals to defend themselves from abuses of power, though existent, are in practice
weak and highly inoperative. In this way, for instance, individuals are not treated equal
before the law, since at times –usually through means of bribing and corruption—some can
expect to obtain the treatment prescribed by law (or an even better one), while others with
less resources or who are “politically dangerous” can expect to have a worse treatment with

Linz, “Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes”, in Fred I. Greenstein and Nelson W. Polsby (eds.), Handbook
of Political Science, Vol.3, Macropolitical Theory, Addison-Wesly Publishing Co., 1975, p.264.
31
To conceptualise democratic and authoritarian forms of government as political regimes –and thus to make
them comparable at the levels of access and exercise of political power—should not obscure the fact that they
diverge in many other respects that are not considered within the concept of political regime, like for instance
the nature of the beliefs system that sustain each kind of regime, the proclaimed goals that they might pursue,
the content of the policies elaborated or the composition of their respective elite. All these further aspects
make a more complex picture of each kind of regime. In this work these other elements are not considered,
since it only seeks to establish the comparability of them in terms of the elements and aspects that define the

22
few hope that their political, civil and human rights granted in laws and constitutions will
be respected. Usually, the military and police forces serve as the arms for repression.

In authoritarian regimes the ill-defined limits of the exercise of power generate strong
ambiguities, since even when formal mechanisms and institutions for defending human and
civil rights exist and are granted by laws and constitutions, they are not expected to be
effective. And thus, though some formal limits to political power are found, in practice
such limits are frequently trespassed or they co-exist with other laws and practices that
restrict them, thus making those limits to become ill-defined. This first dimension of the
exercise of power can be studied through contrasting well-defined formal limits (that exist
in democracies) against ill-defined formal limits of political power.

The ruling elite in authoritarian regimes essentially concentrate the exercise of power and
mechanisms for institutional checks and balances are not properly at work, though some
might exist. Though in some cases the ruling elite do not cancel other political institutions,
like congresses or party systems, these are kept as mere formalities with very few effective
power and control. Moreover, mechanisms for enforcing public responsibility in the tenure
of offices are not used to combat corruption or misuses of power in regular or systematic
ways. Instead, they usually serve as instruments to punish members of the elite that may not
be loyal to the upper echelons or to the most important groups.

In relation to the media, authoritarian regimes tend to exercise a more or less strong control
–through various means—over broadcast, print and other sorts of media. There are many
forms through which censorship or self-censorship is exercised over the media. In this
sense, under an authoritarian rule it is very difficult for the media to keep or develop an
informational or watchdog function. Thus, this second dimension of the exercise of power
can be studied through opposing a counterbalanced exercise of power (existent in
democracies) against an unbalanced one.

ways in which to access political power and the aspects that define the ways in which they exercise this
power.

23
In this way, the transition from non-democratic to democratic regimes implies the creation
or emergence of certain kind of elements related to the forms of access to power and to the
forms in which such power is exercised. The important thing to notice is that the creation or
emergence of such elements is not a lineal process that runs plain from, say,
“authoritarianism to democracy”, but instead is a process that occurs at three levels that
might well overlap in time, or follow different patterns, since after the discussion of the
precedent pages, it becomes clear that each aspect of the democratic regime –access and the
two dimension of the exercise of power—involves different actors, institutions and timing.
Figure B pictures the opposition between ideal-type democratic and authoritarian regimes
and, though it is a static figure it stresses the fact that any transition implies necessarily a
multidimensional change from one level to another.

Figure B
Access and Exercise of Political Power
1

A
C
Democratic C
Regimes E
S
S

To

P
O
L
I
T
I
A  C
A
2 L

P
O
Authoritarian  W
E
Regimes R:
B
1-2

24
 EXERCISE OF POLITICAL POWER: A-B and 

1: Pluralistic access
2: Concentrated access (authoritarian regimes are characterised more by limited pluralism)
A: Well-defined formal limits of exercise of power
B: Ill-defined formal limits of exercise of power
 Counterbalanced exercise of power
 Unbalanced exercise of power

2. Relation between the State and the political regime

A second advantage of incorporating the exercise of power as a component of a democratic
regime is that it permits to establish a linkage between the state and the political regime, but
it avoids the confusion brought about by attributing democratic qualities to the state.

Let me depart from a Weberian–inspired concept of state: functionally, the modern state is
a political organisation that operates through three interrelated dimensions: a bureaucratic
administration, a legal institutional structure that applies the law through rational and
systematic procedures, and a geographically bounded territory over which the state claims
effective authority (and exercises the monopoly of violence). Weber explains that,

Since the concept of the state has only in modern times reached its full development, it is best to
define it in terms appropriate to the modern type of state, but at the same time, in terms which
abstract the values of the present day, since this are particularly subject to change. The primary
formal characteristics of the modern state are as follows: It possesses an administrative and legal
order subject to change by legislation, to which the organised corporate activity of the
administrative staff, which is also regulated by legislation, is oriented. This system of order claims
binding authority, not only over the members of the state, the citizens, most of whom have obtained
membership by birth, but also to a very large extent, over all action taking place in the area of its
jurisdiction. It is thus a compulsory association with a territorial basis. Furthermore, today, the use
of force is regarded as legitimate only in so far as it is either permitted by the state or prescribed by

25
it […]. The claim of the modern state to monopolize the use of force is as essential to it as its
character of compulsory jurisdiction and of continuous organization.32

For Weber, the bureaucratic type of administrative organisation is a crucial element for
domination of the modern state because it is capable of attaining the highest level of
efficiency since it relies on both technical and empirical knowledge that permits an
important degree of calculation and measurement in its results. Some of the most important
characteristics of this form of administration are listed next:
a) It is constituted by the principle of appointment, characterised by free contract that
makes free selection possible.
b) It demands continuous and increasing requirements for roles of technical qualification.
c) Its officials normally receive a fixed salary.
d) Its officials occupy their charges normally as their principal occupation.
e) It grants a separation of the official from the ownership of the means of administration.

Highly connected to the bureaucratisation of the administration in the modern states is also
the process of “formalisation of the law” characterised by the conformation of an
impersonal set of rules, norms and other legal precepts and the professional administration
of justice by individuals who have received their legal training and education in formally
logical manners that are based upon rational techniques and procedures. As Weber notes,

The more rational the administrative machinery of the princes or hierarchs became, that is, the
greater the extent to which administrative “officials” were used in the exercise of the power, the
greater was the likelihood that the legal procedure would also become “rational” both in form and in
substance. To the extent to which the rationality of the organisation of the authority increased,

32
Max Weber, Economy and Society. An Outline of Interpretative Sociology, edited by Guenther Roth and
Claus Wittich, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1978, (“Basic Sociological Terms”)
p.56. However, one must note that the last sentence of the text cited above in the original German version
underlines the “rational institutional character of the state” that the translation misses (“Dieser
Monopolcharakter der staatlichen Gewaltherrschaft ist ein ebenso wesentliches Merkmal ihrer
Gegenwartslage wie ihr rationaler ‘Anstalts’ –und kontinuerlicher ‘Betriebs’—Character”. Cited from Max
Weber, Witschaft und Gesellschaft, Tubingen, J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1972, p.30).

26
irrational forms of procedure were eliminated and the substantive law was systematized, i.e., the
law as a whole was rationalized.33

These formalisation of the law, though exists also in other forms of organisation (like some
Medieval kingdoms or the Papacy, as noted by Weber), is developed further in the modern
state where the secularisation of the law –i.e. the separation between religious and ethic
commands from law—generates a rational and formal legal system based upon either
logical or empirical elements, but in any case autonomous from religion or ethics. The
increasing rationalisation of administration, the needs of trade and commerce, and the
tensions between the requirements of the state and the incipient private sphere accompanied
a process of secularisation and formalisation of the law that supposed:
1. Universality, predictability and coherence of the legal precepts. The application of the
law is equal for all those subjects who are formally granted the same rights and
obligations. All those who are defined as citizens of a state enjoy the same rights and
have the same obligations, and are thus treated as equals before the law. Therefore, a
transgressor of legality can expect to receive a previously specified punishment
according to the kind of crime committed; a punishment that would be applied to all
those who under similar circumstances committed the same transgression of the law.
2. The systematic and formal functioning of the institutions in charge of the administration
of justice, i.e. a professional administration of justice. This means that the institutions in
charge of justice do not depend on the will of governmental authorities to carry out their
duties, since they count on autonomous capacities for organisation, qualify their
personnel, and take their decisions. However, they do count on the power of the
authorities to enforce their decisions.

The third dimension of the modern state –related to the former two—is the creation of a
coercive apparatus whose task is to enforce the law and the decisions of the political
authority who claims exclusivity over a geographically bounded territory. By defeating
other internal competitors, the central rulers in Western Europe gained control over local
resources, and eventually taxation, and could impose themselves effectively over larger

33
Ibid., “Formal and Substantive Rationalization –Theocratic and Secular Law”, p.809.

27
geographical areas within which modern states emerged.34 Within these territories it was
only the state who could legitimately monopolise the ultimate enforcement of legality by
violence. As Weber notes, it was precisely the monopolisation of the means of violence
over a geographical space that characterises the state.35 The expansion of the authority of
the state is given through the imposition of a legal order over all the individuals, groups and
organisations that exist along and across the territory without the possibility for them to
legitimately challenge the state’s authority, which is ultimately backed up by a coercive
apparatus created to enforce its commands and the overall legal order.

These three dimensions mentioned above link the State with the political regime,
specifically with the aspects related to the exercise of political power in a polity. I repeat,
the exercise of political power has two dimensions, one that has to do with the forms in
which power extends into society (which refers to the formal limits within which political
power is exercised in a polity), and the other that refers to how such power is distributed,
shared and equilibrated among political institutions, agencies and actors. The three
dimensions of the state have a direct incidence on the political regime through the forms in
which the political power is exercised in the following ways:
 The emergence of the bureaucratic type of administrative organisation as a crucial
element for domination of the modern state affects the ways in which power is
exercised because it determines the forms in which public responsibility will be
regarded in a polity. As explained before “public responsibility” means the existence of
proper mechanisms to establish who in the government is responsible for a decision or
action, and the possibility to investigate alleged misconduct of public officials and to
punish proven misbehaviour and misuses of power (as when serving their own interests
or the partial interests of others) during the tenure of office. It is only within the modern
state, one characterised by a bureaucratic type of administrative organisation, where
effective mechanisms of public responsibility can be enforced and expected to work.

34
See Charles Tilly (ed.), The Formation of National States in Western Europe, Princeton, NJ, Princeton
University Press, 1975; “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime”, in Peter Evans, Dieter
Rueshmayer and Theda Scokpol (eds.), Bringing the State Back In, Cambridge, Mass., Cambridge
University, 1985; and C. Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States. A.D. 990-1990, London, Basil
Blackwell, 1990.
35
Weber (1978), “The Economy and Social Norms”, pgs.313-4.

28
 Without a bureaucratic type of organisation in Weberian terms, it is not possible to
determine such responsibilities simply because there is a lack of rationalisation in the
norms, codes and procedures that rule the behaviour of the bureaucracy itself.
 The process of secularisation and rationalisation of the law generates universality,
predictability and coherence of the legal precepts and a relative professionalism in the
administration of justice. Again, this affects the way in which the regime exercises
power because such a process sets the kind of legal basis upon which individuals will
be treated and considered. The modern state, characterised by secularisation and
rationalisation of the law, is an institutional arrangement that permits (at least
theoretically) an effective equal treatment of the individuals before the law –
independently of the content of these laws—due to the requirements of the
administration and trade. In modern states, from XIX century Prussia to today’s France,
where the increasing rationalisation of administration, the needs of trade and commerce,
and the tensions between the requirements of the state and the private sphere have
accompanied a formalisation of the law, a relatively equal treatment of individuals
before the law has been secured. What is important to note is that this effective equality
granted by a rationalisation process of the law is independent of the content of the rules
and the legal precepts (though, as was said above, in Western polities eventually such
rules became identified with constitutional liberalism), and that the rationalisation and
secularisation of the law, only existent in modern state structures, permits that it can be
applied predictably, universally (at least to all those defined as subjects to it),
coherently and responsibly.
 The creation of a coercive apparatus whose task is to enforce the law and the decisions
of a political authority that claims exclusivity over a geographically delimited territory
have also an impact on the forms in which political power is exercised in a polity. The
requirements of war and competition among states generated the creation of
professional armed forces whose discipline and obedience to the political elite was
secured through diverse rules, loyalties, and regular payment. This professionalism in
the armed and police forces goes hand in hand with the delimitation of their tasks of
security and order that makes that more efficiency is expected in accomplishing such

29
 tasks while at the same time it is also expected less involvement in political matters and
in unauthorised actions by the political rulers. It is only within modern state structures
that an effective control of the armed and police forces by the political elite (no matter
if they themselves are from military origin) can be expected.

What is implied here is that there may exist a positive co-relation between the degree of
modernisation of the state (in terms of the three dimensions explained) and the capacity of
the political regime to exercise power36 independently of the content of the norms, laws and
the politico-constitutional arrangements that make some regimes to be democratic and
some others not. In brief, these three dimensions that compose the modern state are
required for securing the governance capacity in a polity, affecting thus directly the forms
in which power is actually exercised. The example of XIX century Prussia serves to
illustrate the fact that a modern state needs not to be democratic (i.e. to have a democratic
regime) in order to enjoy a rational application of law, a highly bureaucratised form of
administration and a coercive apparatus that acts within the legal framework of the day.
Due to its modern state structures and independently of the fact that Prussia was not a
democracy, it was effective in enforcing a rule of law, in defining a certain public
responsibility criteria and in controlling a well-disciplined and ordered military and police
forces.37

The opposite examples can be found in some Latin American countries where, in spite of
the fact that new constitutions and legal and administrative dispositions have created new
formally-committed means to enforce an equal-to-all rule of law (of liberal constitutional
characteristics during and after their transitions of the 1980s and 1990s from authoritarian
rule), to create better public responsibility mechanisms (against corruption mostly), and that
efforts have been made to make the army and police forces to act within legality, the
structural weaknesses of their states, prevent their new political regimes from facing and

36
At least on the aspects related to the true treatment of individuals before the law, to constraining the
military and police forces to act within legality, and to enforcing mechanisms of public responsibility. All
these independently, I insist, of the fact whether the regime is democratic or not.
37
See: Gordon A. Craig, The Germans, N.Y., N.Y., Meridian, 1991; of the same author, The Politics of the
Prussian Army, 1640-1945, N.Y., Oxford University Press, 1965; and James Sheehan, Imperial Germany,
New York, New Viewpoints, 1976.

30
solving such problems effectively, transferring those state weaknesses into an incapacity of
their newly elected regimes to consolidate a democratic exercise of power.

These new regimes, in many cases democratically elected (democratic access), seem unable
to secure their citizens their civil and human rights, to have a real control over police and
armed forces, to prosecute and punish corruption and other misuses of power, and to grant
an equal treatment before the law for all the individuals (democratic exercise). In brief, they
are unable to establish a democratic exercise of power, formally well-limited and
counterbalanced, because the state structures upon which the everyday authority is
exercised are weak or not completely modern in Weberian terms. The possible outcome is
a rapid disillusionment on the part of the population of their new governments, and of
democracy in general as a form of government, due to their incapacity to give proper
answers to the control of violence, to the equal application of justice and to corruption in
government and public practices. This situation, in turn, may very well create pressures at
the level of the access-side of the regime, moving people to sympathise with radical
electoral options of populist and anti-institutional vein. I will discuss this idea below.
Figure C next shows the co-relation between the level of modernisation of the state
(according to the three components discussed) and the institutional capacity of the political
regime to cope efficiently with its own goals, aims and tasks during its exercise of power
(to secure a stable governance during the tenure of office, so to speak).

Figure C
Co-relation between State’s Level of Modernisation and the Institutional Capacity of
the Political Regime’s Exercise of Power

Modern

Great
Britain
State México, Brazil
Venezuela
Colombia

Zambia

Less Capacity Greater Capacity

31
It is important to repeat here that the state structures are independent of the fact that the
regime is or is not democratic, and that modern state structures are required in order for the
political regime, be it democratic or not, to cope efficiently with its own goals, aims and
tasks during its tenure of office (its exercise of power). From this argument it is possible to
derive that if a particular state cannot provide a relatively solid institutional structure that

Pre-
Modern
can serve as a basis for the regime’s everyday governance, this regime will be subject to

Regime’s Capacity to Exercise Power

different sorts of pressures coming from social, economic and political actors.

Now, specifically in the case of a democratically elected regime, the pressures originated
from its incapacity to establish a democratic exercise of power will probably affect on the
access side of the equation as well. Democratically elected governments, in spite of their
commitment to improve the application of justice and to enforce the rule of law, to
effectively control violence within the territory, and to combat corruption and impunity, if
they are inserted within underdeveloped state structures, they will have a highly reduced
capacity to cope with such tasks and expectations.

This means that though elite and social actors may agree upon rules concerning
competition, participation, and even electoral accountability, within an underdeveloped
state apparatus little efficiency can be expected from the exercise of power. The
performance of the elected authorities becomes poor since they cannot solve corruption,
stop human rights violations, or grant public order and security for the citizens on the
streets and the countryside. An aspect that should be considered is that perhaps some of the
same political actors that have participated on the access side of the regime equation by
pressing for abertura and by competing in open, free and fair terms for power may find
attractive to maintain inefficiency and informality in the exercise of power, since, for
instance, a patrimonial bureaucracy and a biased and selective application of the law may
benefit the friends and partners of top democratically elected politicians during
privatisation processes by hiding corruption. Thus, even though it is possible that political

32
accountability mechanisms may work and the “corrupt government” be replaced by new
parties after elections, each new group that enters office will have strong incentives to
maintain the same behaviour and be an obstacle for modernising the state structures. This
maintains a vicious circle of inefficiency in the exercise of power in a regime, whose roots
are found in state weaknesses.

Before finishing this section there remains a question to be answered here: does all this
argument means that the state is required for democracy? This part of the work sustains that
a modern state is required for a political regime, be it democratic or not, to cope efficiently
with its own goals, aims and tasks during its tenure of office (its exercise of power). Now
on the specific issue about the linkage between the State and democracy, many authors
believe the former to be a sine qua non condition for democracy.38 However one should not
forget that if democracy is a kind of political regime characterised by certain specific
minimum procedures on how to access political power and how to exercise such power
there is no reason to believe that as long as these same specific minimum procedures are
inserted within a political arrangement (be it a supra- or an under-state arrangement) that
can successfully cope with the three functional dimensions of the state discussed above, a
democratic regime has chances to develop and consolidate. This means that democracy has
opportunities to flourish in different political arrangements like the supra-national European
Union, city-states, and the associative principalities and states like Liechtenstein or Puerto
Rico (as long as such association is voluntary and domination is not imposed, like in Tibet).

3.- Quality of Democracy

This work argues that only by considering democracy as a kind of political regime –
composed of aspects related to the access of power and aspects related to the exercise of
power that are not necessarily sequential in time, but that can also be coincidental and that
are neatly distinguished only for analytical purposes, but not necessarily in reality—it
becomes possible to talk about processes of democratic consolidation and about the quality
of democracy. If one remains attached to Dahlian or Schumpeterian definitions of
democracy then it becomes quite difficult to discuss consolidation and quality of

38
For instance, Linz and Stepan (1996).

33
democracy because those definitions are essentially related to the diverse aspects of
accessing political power, but they do not say much about how such power is actually
exercised, which happens to be a central element for evaluating the processes of
consolidation of democracy and the quality of it.

Thus, if we keep these restricted definitions and at the same time we insist upon discussing
something called “democratic consolidation” and “quality of democracy”, we will be
talking about the consolidation of open, free and fair conditions for political competition,
equal and fair conditions for political participation, and the quality of such conditions, but
nothing else. We cannot remain attached to definitions that emphasise only the access side
of the political regime equation. Moreover, it is possible to argue that whenever
“consolidation and quality” of democracy are discussed there is much more involved than
the conditions for competition, participation and political accountability, i.e. the conditions
for plural access.

By the beginning of the XXI century many countries cope already with these conditions of
accessing power, but they still have problems in consolidating political institutions that
respect the rights of their citizens and whose power is limited by a liberal constitutional rule
of law. Some authors departing from Dahlian or Schmpeterian definitions of democracy
have focused on these problems to note that the kind of democracy that have sprung in
many Newly Democratised Countries (NDCs) is quite different from that of Full-Fledged
Democracies (FFDs). Fareed Zakaria, for instance, notes that many of these countries are
developing illiberal brands of democracy.39 He says that “just as nations across the world
have become comfortable with many variations of capitalism, they could well adopt and
sustain varied forms of democracy. Western liberal democracy might prove to be not the
final destination on the democratic road, but just one of many possible exits”.40 Alan Ware
remarks that liberal democracy is only one kind of representative democracy, and that
democracy can be also illiberal.41 These trends have led to the elaboration of the most

39
Fareed Zakaria, “The rise of illiberal democracy”, Foreign Affairs, n.76, vol.6, Nov-Dec, 1997.
40
Ibid., p.24.
41
Alan Ware, “Liberal Democracy: One Form or Many”, in Political Studies, Special Issue, vol.XL, 1992,
p.17.

34
variegated types of democracy, that include “illiberal”, “censitarian”, “parliamentarian”,
“presidential”, and even “male” democracies. Moreover, all these different “types of
democracy” have led other scholars to propose methods to incorporate these differences,
while maintaining a minimal (Schumpeterian or Dahlian) hardcore definition of
democracy.42

The problem here is that these classifications of democratic varieties makes it difficult to
talk at the same time of something that we could call “democratic consolidation” or
“quality of democracy”, and thus to evaluate the performance of democratic regimes
because, on the one hand, we will be compelled to accept that in many cases NDCs have
already for some time coped with the minimal criteria of democracy becoming thus
democracies, and on the other hand, we do not feel satisfied because that kind of
democracy does not entirely looks like Western democracy –that is characterised in its
daily-life exercise of power by what I have defined as a counterbalanced and well-defined
formal limits of power. In this way our dilemma is that if we do not incorporate elements
related to the exercise of power in our understanding of democracy, we will have to accept
not only that many of the NDCs political regimes that cope with minimal Schumpeterian or
Dahlian criteria are democracies, but that in spite of their “illiberalism” or other features
that may distinguish them from Western democracies, they may even be “consolidating”,
since this will have to do only with the conditions of competition, participation and the
existence of acceptable levels of political accountability.

My argument is that we need to incorporate the elements related to the exercise of political
power to be able to “evaluate” the consolidation and the quality of a democratic regime in a
wider perspective because it is at this level where the practice of power is in constant
“touch” with society, more than in periodic electoral processes and in the voting out of
office the inefficient governments. It is at that level where criteria related to the application
of justice, to parliamentary rules, to power centralisation or de-centralisation, to military
and police forces actions, to the roles of the media, and to respect for human and civil rights
can be constantly controlled and evaluated –all of these aspects left aside by minimal

42
See for instance: David Collier and Steven Levitsky, “Democracy with Adjectives. Conceptual innovation

35
democratic definitions. Obviously the criteria that conform the elements (or the minimal
procedures) of the exercise of power vary a lot in different polities, since there is no unique
recipe on how such elements are actually institutionalised. What is important is to
incorporate these minimal procedures of the exercise of power (independently on how they
are actually institutionalised) into a whole evaluation of the consolidation and the quality of
democracy because it gives us a wider picture than that of focusing only on elements
related to the access-aspect of a political regime, that in the end is not completely
satisfactory because it is silent about the forms in which power is actually exercised in a
polity.

4. The Exercise of Power in Full Fledged Democracies

Mainstream (or Dahlian and Schmpeterian) definitions of democracy tend to be self-
contented about the quality of democratic life in FFDs. Since democracy is considered as a
polyarchy whose character is defined by the existence of eight guarantees or minimum
procedures that have to do basically with competition, participation and political
accountability, and since in FFDs such guarantees have been at work for some good time
already, the quality of such FFDs is not discussed, at least not on those grounds.
Democracy is implicitly considered as a stage to be reached and once this has been done it
seems that unless there are conditions for the whole regime to collapse, very few
discussions are raised on the democratic quality of FFDs. This does not mean that scholars
have ignored some very relevant problems within the elements that compose the access-
side of democracy, such as the very low levels of electoral participation in some of the
central democracies (Switzerland or the U.S.), and the growing areas of technical
specialisation within the governments that fall outside of any relevant form of political
accountability (for instance, the great discussion about the democratic character of the EU).
It means, however, that these problems are seldom analysed –and their consequences are
not usually discussed—within the theoretical frameworks of democratic theory and
democratisation.

in comparative research”, in World Politics, vol.49, n.3, April 1997.

36
Evidently, the same happens with problems that emerge from the elements that compose
the “exercise aspects” of democratic regimes. Here perhaps one of the most serious
challenges to democratic regimes is coming from the new patterns of development of the
mass media. It is interesting to note that notwithstanding the commonly held belief that
media are important for democracy, very scarce attention is paid to them from political
science and from democratic theoretical approaches. Even those few theorists that do
mention the media in their considerations do it in quite marginal terms, basically referring
to the availability of different sources of information as one of the criteria of a democratic
regime.43 Moreover, the emerging literature that have been dealing with the relation
between the media and democratisation usually focuses mainly on the issues of freedom of
information and independence from state and government pressures, and on the number of
media outlets, leaving unattended other important aspects dealing with the internal
organisation of the media, the professionalism of the journalistic work, and their (at times
new) political economy.

At the same time, classical mainstream approaches of mass media studies have not been
able to understand the media within a more complex framework that relates to the political
structures.44 An exception is the 1956 study of Siebert et.al., Four Theories of the Press, of
strong normative orientation, which establishes that there are four main media systems: the
libertarian (classical liberal system), the social responsibility, the authoritarian and the
totalitarian systems, though is unable to abandon a quite enthusiastic and uncritical defense
of the libertarian model.45 Thus, it takes for granted the “democratic-orientation” of the
media’s libertarian and social responsibility systems (since they reflected the American
commercial and the Western European public models of that day).

43
To name only some of the most conspicuous theorists see: Robert Dahl, (1971) or Philippe C. Schmitter and
Terry Lynn Karl, “What Democracy Is… and Is Not”, in Journal of Democracy, vol. 2, no.3, Summer 1991.
44
For instance: Gatekeeper theory (for example P.M. Hirsch, "Occupational, Organizational and Institutional
Models in Mass Communications", in P.M. Hirsch et.al., Strategies for Communication Research, London,
Sage, 1977. And A. Hetherington, News, Newspapers and Television, London Macmillan, 1985), Agenda-
Setting theory (Maxwell MacCombs and Donald L. Shaw and Maxwell E. McCombs, The Emergence of
American Political Issues: The Agenda-Setting Function of the Press, West Publishing Co., 1977), Cultivation
Analysis (Gerbner, 1984; Wober 1990), Diffusion theory (Brown 1991), Uses-and-Gratifications (Philippe
Elliot, 1975), Media-System Dependency (Marvin DeFleur and S.J.Ball-Rokeach, Theories of Mass
Communication, 1989).

37
Some recent studies have focused on the consequences of commercialism, media
corporations merging, and the growing coincidences of interests between media giants and
other industries that act within the public arena.46 How do these trends of the private media
–that even in Europe are rapidly expanding—affect the watchdog and/or the information
roles of the media in a democracy? And what are the consequences for democracy itself?
What are the consequences for democratic regimes that figures such as Italian Prime
Minister Silvio Berlusconi is absolutely, blindly and uncritically supported by his own
media corporation? In that case, is Italian democratic regime challenged by the coincidence
of media and political elite in the government? The consequences for democracy go beyond
the weakening of the watchdog role of the media and extend to other aspects of the exercise
of power such as the possible limitation to public responsibility in office due to collusion,
and the hiding of corruption and other unclear consequences of the policy-making and
enforcing due to the unchecked accumulation of power.

Since these kind of problems are not considered within mainstream minimal theories of
democracy, they are thus not seen as problems of democracy. We need to discuss all these
problems within democracies not as eventual anomalies of normally well-functioning
FFDs, but as issues that may challenge our belief that in these polities democracy has been
installed for good. Thus, we need to discuss the quality of democracy also in FFDs, and
therefore we need to expand our understanding of democracy to cover also the aspects
related to the exercise of political power, since from this “side” are coming new challenges
to this kind of regime. It is only by incorporating to our understanding of democracy the
exercise of power components that we are able to transform it from being a static form of
regime in which all we need is to cope with guarantees related to participation, competition
and political accountability into a dynamic form of regime in which we are enabled to
evaluate the performance of it in terms of certain criteria related to specific forms of
exercising day-to-day political power. Only in this way we will be able to recognise that,
paraphrasing Habermas, democracy is an unfinished task, and that far from being an

45
Siebert, et.al., (1956).
46
David Croteau and William Hoynes, By Invitation Only: How the media Limit Political Debate, Monroe,
Common Courage Press, 1994 and of the same authors, The Business of the Media. Corporate Media and the
Public Interest, Thousand Oaks, CA, Pine Forge Press, 2001.

38
already reached and permanent stage in FFDs, the maintenance of democratic regime is a
condition that needs to be constantly defended.

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