Abstract
We start with the two benchmark criteria of democracy set by Robert Dahl and Edward Tufle, those of citizen effectiveness and of system capacity We outline the then (mid-twentieth century) authoritative arguments about how citizen effectiveness is attained in modern democracies through an appropriate political culture (the civic culture), social cohesion (through social capital) and political cohesion (through imagined communities in the form of national identities) as shaped by the then prevailing communication technologies (mostly print media). These conditions for democracy are then contrasted with those of mass societies, the conditions for mobilising people into totalitarian regimes. In the latter part of the chapter we present two of the major challenges to the established wisdom about the social and economic conditions (what we refer to here as the social base) for democracy. The first is the so-called transition paradigm; the second is a function of yet new technology, first television and then the Internet.
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Notes
A. Gat (2006) War in Human Civilization (Oxford: Oxford University Press), PP. 445, 449.
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Where this process of inclusive national identity formation failed, it invariably occurred in territories with multi-cultural populations, where these sub-cultural entities came to be the units of collective identity formation, to the point where each of these entities came to see (imagine) themselves as incipient whole societies, and where they raised public demands accordingly. In societies deeply divided in this way, democratic stability, even democracy of any quality, has been extremely difficult to maintain, and its concomitant features of a civil society that is embedded in a civic culture has been conspicuous by its absence. Majority domination, civil war, authoritarian repression and the threat of secession have been recurring features of these political entities for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Post-communist Yugoslavia as well as Nigeria, Northern Ireland, South Africa, Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia and Lebanon are some of the regimes which experienced almost perennial political upheaval for many decades. Finding appropriate constitutional rules for the maintenance of democracy in these types of societies with the absence of civic cultures became one of the leading challenges for democratic theory in the latter half of the twentieth century. See D.L. Horowitz (1985) Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press).
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Putnam, Bowling Alone, pp. 283, 284. Subsequent research has confirmed that this may in fact be a peculiarly American phenomenon. See D. Stolle (2007) ‘Social Capital’, in Dalton and Klingeman (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Political Behavior (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 655–674.
P. Norris (1996) ‘Does Television Erode Social Capital? A Reply to Putnam’ PS Political Science and Politics, XXIX, 474–479.
W.L. Bennett (1998) ‘The UnCivic Culture: Communication, Identity, and the Rise of Lifestyle Politics’, PS, Political Science and Politics, XXXI(4), 741–762.
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© 2014 Barend Lutz and Pierre du Toit
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Lutz, B., du Toit, P. (2014). Twentieth-Century Democracy and Its Social Base. In: Defining Democracy in a Digital Age: Political Support on Social Media. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137496195_2
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