Institute of Governmental Studies Scholars and Their Colleagues Ask: Are We Witnessing New Forms of Democracy?

Initiatives and referendums. Party primaries. Freedom of information laws. In the past quarter century, the industrialized democracies have seen an unprecedented expansion of citizen involvement in political decision making. At the same time, participation in traditional forms of politics--particularly voting in elections and interest in political parties and campaigns--has reached historic lows in the U.S. and Europe.

Are we witnessing the creation of "new forms of democracy"--away from representative democracy toward direct democracy? Or are these changes merely window-dressing? IGS scholars are collaborating with colleagues around the world to examine these crucial questions in a project cosponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, the UC Irvine Center for the Study of Democracy, Berkeley's Institute for European Studies, and IGS. The initiative is led by IGS Director Bruce Cain, UC Irvine's Russell Dalton, and Susan Scarrow of the University of Houston. The three are editing a volume that will examine the "new forms of democracy" and explore whether real change is occurring.

"The past quarter century has seen two concurrent trends with major potential consequences for Western democracies: decreased interest and participation in the institutions of representative democracy and a groundswell of demand for institutional reforms to expand citizen involvement in political decision-making," writes Dalton in the book's introductory chapter. "This project asks whether contemporary changes are really transforming the foundations of the democratic process, or whether these alterations are accommodating popular pressures without altering the basic nature of representative democracy. Is the potential for reform truly being realized, and if so, what are the broader implications for the nature and practice of democracy?"

The volume is the result of a series of workshops, the most recent in May when participants met at IGS to discuss the opening up of parties to electoral participation; electoral reforms that increase parties' access to ballots and public financing; the rise of nonpartisan elections; participatory democracy at the local scale; and the injection of courts into the political process.

UC Berkeley and IGS discussants included political scientists Henry Brady, Giuseppe di Palma, and Austin Ranney, visiting professor Eckhard Schroeter (most recently of Humboldt University-Berlin) and visiting scholar Yoon-Soo Jung, on leave from South Korea's Myongji University.

In September, the final stage of the "New Forms of Democracy" project will unfold at the Bellagio Study and Conference Center on Lake Como in Italy. The Center is located in a historic villa operated by the Rockefeller Foundation as a retreat for scholars meeting on topics of international significance. There, participants will convene to discuss completed drafts of papers and finalize their work for publication.

In a chapter entitled "Political Parties and the Rhetoric and Realities of Democratization," Miki Caul Kittilson of the University of Texas-San Antonio and Susan E. Scarrow of the University of Houston examine the rhetoric of democratization invoked by political parties in their campaign documents, their constitutions that govern internal operations, and the ways they select candidates. Over the past 40 years, parties throughout the Western democracies have shifted their rhetoric and rules to statements that more favorably mention citizen involvement and procedures that are more representative and open to participation.

In "Changing Party Access to Politics," Shaun Bowler of UC Riverside, and Elisabeth Carter and David M. Farrell of the University of Manchester, using a comprehensive analysis of changes to election laws in OECD countries over the past 40 years, find that laws have changed significantly concerning ballot access, party access to the media, and state subsidization of political parties and campaigns. The result of the changes is mixed: the changes create a more liberal environment for all political parties, and hypothetically make it easier for new political actors to enter the system. However, the laws also channel resources to established parties, benefiting them disproportionately compared to smaller parties.

In her chapter on "Non-Party Elections," Susan Scarrow investigates changes in the extent to which political parties occupy central mediating roles in the electoral procedures of contemporary democracies, and asks whether we see any increase in the degree to which electoral institutions permit or even require citizens to make choices without, or in addition to, the choice of party label. She finds limited but unmistakable institutional change in the direction of "unmediated democracy"-- at the local and national levels-- through movement toward constitutional and legislative referendums and direct election of executives at the national and subnational levels.

Berkeley's Chris Ansell and Jane Gingrich observe, in their chapter entitled "The Administrative Revolution: Populist Reforms of the Administrative State," that calls for reform in the electoral arena have been paralleled by demands for direct democracy in the administrative realm. Many of the facets of this "administrative revolution" --including its contradictory impulses--can be understood through the lens of populism. Ansell and Gingrich distinguish between two different versions of populism--market populism and democratic populism. Market populism is associated broadly with deregulation, privatization, and other attempts to reorganize the state's monopoly over certain kinds of services and functions. Democratic populists seek to guarantee popular sovereignty by ensuring strict democratic accountability and by keeping the democratic process open and transparent. They use these concepts to examine the reform of public administration and the overarching structure of the state in OECD countries.

In "Knowledge is Power," Bruce Cain and Patrick Egan of UC Berkeley and Sergio Fabbrini of the University of Trento note that the call for political reform in Western democracies has been accompanied by passage of freedom of information laws in almost all OECD countries, the great majority of them enacted in the past 20 years. They examine the institutional and political characteristics that lead to passage and offer case studies to analyze how citizens use the laws. In some nations, freedom of information laws appear to leave the deference traditionally granted to bureaucratic authority unaltered.

In "Opening Up the Bureaucracy Through Culture Governance," Henrik P. Bang of the University of Copenhagen identifies a phenomena he calls culture governance, which he uses to describe the challenge faced by hypermodern political systems to enable more and more organizations, individuals, and communities to engage in their rule, transforming or reforming their identities and conducts so that they become amenable to this rule. He writes that most of the calls for political reform in Europe, for example, "EU Good Governance" or "The Third Way," are examples of culture governance.

Under culture governance, authority is hierarchical, bureaucratic, communicative, and negotiable. Political parties must be able to combine concerns for government and governance, and public projects involving civil society and citizens must be connected with a politics of presence.

In recent decades, note Rachel Cichowski of the University of Washington and Alec Stone Sweet of UC Irvine and Oxford in their chapter, "University Participation, Representative Democracy, and the Courts," the authority of courts to review the acts of public authorities--including legislatures, executives, and administrative agencies--has deepened in established democracies and spread to new ones, sustaining important debates about the democratic legitimacy of judicial power. Scholars, lawyers, and judges routinely produce elaborate justifications for judicial review, arguments that are just as regularly countered by opponents in the academy, at the bar, or on the bench.