That first government, run by Louis Botha and Jan Smuts, gradually began to reinforce many of the vast inequalities in South African society, a process that culminated in the creation of full-blown apartheid with the election of the National Party (NP) under D. F. Malan in 1948. For example, in 1913, the Natives Land Act stopped Africans from purchasing land outside of “native areas,” which were reserves set aside for Africans, consisting in 1939 of about 12 percent of the land area (Africans represented 70 percent of the population in this period; see Thompson 1995, Table 1, p. 278).
At the same time, the first organized black political consciousness began to emerge with the founding of the African National Congress (ANC) in 1912. At first, it was a modest movement organized by middle-class Africans but, following the Second World War, the ANC became radicalized because of the failure to liberalize the system. In 1943, the ANC adopted a statement called Africans’ Claims in South Africa, demanding for the first time universal adult suffrage.
The application of apartheid after 1948 reached its apogee during the primeministership of Hendrik Verwoerd between 1958 and 1966. The government attempted to move all Africans into eight (then ten) homelands, and only Africans whose labor was needed in the white economy could be present in “European areas.” They had to carry “passes,” proving that they were legally outside of the tribal areas.
The apartheid regime was sustained by massive infringements on political and civil rights. The government established tight control over the media and had a monopoly on radio and television. The police were given vast powers to arrest people without trial and hold them indefinitely in solitary confinement. Under the Public Safety Act of 1953, the government could declare a state of emergency and rule by proclamation.
Throughout the 1950s, the ANC continually contested in the streets and in the law courts the policies of the NP. In one such demonstration in Sharpeville in 1960, a riot exploded and police fired into the crowd, killing eighty-three people. After this incident, the government moved to finally eradicate the ANC and, in 1964, Nelson Mandela and other top leaders were imprisoned on Robben Island. Despite losing much of their leadership to South African prisons or exile, the ANC continued to be the focus of opposition to the regime. The NP pressed ahead with its goal of creating independent homelands (or bantustans), where all Africans would be citizens. In 1976, the Transkei and Bophuthatswana were declared independent nations by the government (although they were never recognized by any other national government or international agency).
In 1976, a riot in Soweto, a large African township just outside Johannesburg, ended in 575 deaths (Thompson 1995, pp. 212-13). Soweto marked a turning point. In the 1960s, the apartheid government had managed to crush the ANC leadership, but
after the Soweto uprising, a protest culture pervaded the black population of South Africa. Students and workers, children and adults, men and women, the educated and the uneducated became involved in efforts to liberate the country from apartheid. (Thompson 1995, p. 228)
The apartheid government had no choice but to make some concessions. It immediately announced the cessation of the creation of homelands; however, as soon as the turmoil subsided, the government reneged and two more homelands were created in the early 1980s. More significant, the government moved to legalize African trade unions and in 1984 introduced a new constitution in which both Indians and Coloureds had their own legislatures. The whites remained in a solid majority in the legislature. After P. W. Botha was elected president, he had only one Indian and one Coloured in his cabinet, neither with a specific portfolio. After 1984, the government also removed job reservations, which stopped Africans from undertaking specific occupations.
Nevertheless, the basic philosophy or structure of apartheid was unaltered. These concessions were, therefore, not sufficient to prevent the strikes, riots, and social unrest that became more widespread. For instance, in 1985, 879 people were killed in political violence, and there were 390 strikes involving 240,000 workers. The African trade unions, whose legitimization had been a concession after Soweto, were in the forefront of antistate activities. In June 1986, the Botha government responded to these events by declaring a state of emergency and sending the army into the townships to restore order.
The situation got worse for the apartheid regime in October 1986 when the United State imposed sanctions. From the mid-1980s onward, sensing the in-feasibility of continuing with the same set of institutions, many members of the South African white elite started to make overtures to the ANC and black leaders. The industrial chaos caused by the strikes was severely damaging to profits and, from the late 1970s onward, there was sustained capital outflow from South Africa (Wood 2000, Figure 6.3, p. 154). Prominent white businessmen met with the ANC in London and other places, and Mandela himself was moved from Robben Island and had many discussions with different members of the Botha government.
As Mandela recognized, if there was to be peaceful transition, a way would have to be found to reconcile the ANC demand for majority rule with “the insistence of whites on structural guarantees that majority rule will not mean domination of the white minority by the blacks.” (Thompson 1995, p. 244)
In February 1989, L. W. de Klerk took over from P. W. Botha as the head of the NP and was elected president in September.
De Klerk ... understood that domestic and foreign pressures were undermining the racial order. De Klerk concluded that the best hope for his people was to negotiate a settlement from a position of strength, while his government was still the dominant force in the country. (Thompson 1995, p. 244)
At the beginning of 1990, he lifted the ban on the ANC and released Mandela from prison. Intense negotiations started over the nature of the transition from the apartheid era and what sort of society would follow it. Constitutional negotiations began in December 1991 with the NP proposing a series of measures to weaken the threat of black majority rule.
South Africa was to become a confederation of states with vast and irremovable powers. Its central executive was to be a coalition of every party that won a substantial number of seats in an election, the chairmanship was to rotate among party leaders, and all decisions were to be made by consensus or special majorities. (Thompson 1995, p. 248)
Such stipulations were unacceptable to the ANC and in June 1992 the negotiations broke down. In September, they were restarted and, by February 1993, there was an agreed-upon timetable for transitions to the April 1994 election. An interim constitution was agreed upon with the first new Parliament elected in 1994, charged with devising a permanent constitution. The interim constitution incorporated thirty-four basic principles and dictated that no subsequent amendment would be valid if it contradicted them; whether it did so was to be determined by a constitutional court appointed by President Mandela. Other amendments required a two-thirds majority of both Houses of Parliament. The main concession to the NP was that there had to be compulsory power-sharing in the cabinet, with any party that won at least twenty seats in the national assembly getting representation in the cabinet in proportion to its seats. The ANC received 62.7 percent of the vote in the 1994 election.
From its roots, like many colonial societies, South Africa was a society of great inequalities, both economic and political. In the twentieth century, this inheritance led to a highly undemocratic polity in which only whites were enfranchised. After the Second World War, Africans began to successfully mobilize against this political status quo, and they were able to exert increasing pressure, rendering the existing apartheid regime infeasible and threatening mass revolt. Attempts by the regime to make concessions, although leaving the system basically unaltered, failed to achieve this objective, and the apartheid regime maintained power through the use of extensive repression and violence. In 1994, the regime was forced to democratize rather than risk potentially far worse alternatives.
5. The Agenda
We see four very different paths of political development in these narratives. Britain exemplifies
the path to consolidated democracy, without any significant reversals in the process. Argentina illustrates the possibility of a transition to an unconsolidated democracy, which then reverts back to nondemocracy, with the process potentially repeating itself multiple times. Singapore is an example of a society in which a nondemocratic regime can survive a long time with relatively minor concessions but also without significant repression. South Africa before the collapse of apartheid exemplifies a nondemocratic regime that survives by using repression. We now propose a framework to understand these various paths and develop predictions for when we expect to see one path versus another.
2
Our Argument
Why did Britain, Argentina, Singapore, and South Africa follow different political paths? More generally, why are some countries democratic whereas others are ruled by dictatorships or other nondemocratic regimes? Why do many nondemocracies transition into democracy? What determines when and how this transition takes place? And, relatedly, why do some democracies, once created, become consolidated and endure whereas others, like many of those in Latin America, fall prey to coups and revert back to dictatorship?
These are central questions for political science, political economy, and social science more generally, but there are neither widely shared answers nor an accepted framework to tackle them. The aims of this book are to develop a framework for analyzing these questions, provide some tentative answers, and outline future areas for research. As part of our investigation, we first provide an analysis of the role of various political institutions in shaping policies and social choices, emphasizing how politics differs in democratic and nondemocratic regimes. To do so, we model the attitudes of various individuals and groups toward different policies and, therefore, toward the political institutions leading to these policies.
To facilitate the initial exposition of our ideas, it is useful to conceive of society as consisting of two groups - the elites and the citizens - in which the latter are more numerous. Our framework emphasizes that social choices are inherently conflictual. For example, if the elites are the relatively rich individuals - for short, the rich - they will be opposed to redistributive taxation; whereas the citizens, who will be relatively poor - for short, the poor - will be in favor of taxation that would redistribute resources to them. More generally, policies or social choices that benefit the elites will be different from those that benefit the citizens. This conflict over social choices and policies is a central theme of our approach.
Who is the majority and who is the elite? This depends to some extent on context and the complex way in which political identities form in different societies. In many cases, it is useful to think of the elite as being the relatively rich in society, as was the case in nineteenth-century Britain and Argentina. However, this is not always the case; for instance, in South Africa, the elites were the whites and, in many African countries, the elites are associated with a particular ethnic group. In other societies, such as Argentina during some periods, the elite is the military.
It may not be a coincidence that in many situations the elite and the rich coincide. In some cases, those who are initially rich may use their resources to attain power, perhaps by bribing the military or other politicians. In other circumstances, power may be attained by people who are not initially rich. Nevertheless, once attained, political power can be used to acquire income and wealth so that those with power naturally tend to become rich. In either case, there is a close association between the elite and the rich.
Our theory of which societies will transit from dictatorship to democracy and under what circumstances democracy will be consolidated is related to the conflict between the elite and the citizens over politics. These groups have opposing preferences over different political institutions, democracy and dictatorship, which they recognize lead to different social choices. However, we also emphasize that political institutions do not simply determine the extent of redistribution or who benefits from policies today, they also play the role of regulating the future allocation of political power. In democracy, the citizens have more power both today and in the future than they would in nondemocratic regimes because they participate in the political process.
The framework we develop is formal, so our exposition emphasizes both the concepts that we believe are essential in thinking about democracy as well as how those concepts and issues can be formally modeled using game theory.
1. Democracy versus Nondemocracy
At the outset, we have to be clear about the precise questions that we tackle and the basic building blocks of our approach. In building models of social phenomena, an often-useful principle is the so-called Occam’s razor. The principal, popularized by the fourteenth-century English philosopher William of Occam, is that one should not increase the number of entities required to explain a given phenomenon beyond what is necessary. In other words, one should strive for a high degree of parsimony in formulating answers to complex questions. Given the complexity of the issues with which we are dealing, we frequently make use of this principle in this book not only to simplify the answers to complex questions but, perhaps even more daringly, to also simplify the questions. In fact, in an attempt to focus our basic questions, we use Occam’s razor rather brutally and heroically. We abstract from many interesting details and also leave some equally important questions out of our investigation. Our hope is that this gambit pays off by providing us with relatively sharp answers to some interesting questions. Of course, the reader is the judge of whether our strategy ultimately pays off.
Our first choice is about the classification of different regimes. Many societies are today governed by democratic regimes, but no two democracies are exactly alike and most exhibit a number of marked institutional differences. Consider, for instance, the contrast between the French presidential system and the British parliamentary system, or that between the majoritarian electoral institutions as used in the United States and the system of proportional representation used in much of continental Europe. Despite these differences, there are some important commonalities. In a democracy, the majority of the population is allowed to vote and express their preferences about policies, and the government is supposed to represent the preferences of the whole population - or, using a common description, “democracy is the government by the people for the people.” In contrast, many other countries are still ruled by dictators and nondemocratic regimes.1 There are even more stark differences between some of these nondemocratic regimes than the differences between democracies. For example, reflect on the contrast between the rule of the Chinese Communist Party since 1948 and that of General Pinochet in Chile between 1973 and 1989. When we turn to other nondemocratic regimes, such as the limited constitutional regimes in Europe in the nineteenth century, the differences are even more marked.
Nevertheless, these nondemocratic regimes share one common element: instead of representing the wishes of the population at large, they represent the preferences of a subgroup of the population: the “elite.” In China, it is mainly the wishes of the Communist Party that matter. In Chile, most decisions were made by a military junta; it was their preferences, and perhaps the preferences of certain affluent segments of the society supporting the dictatorship, that counted. In Britain before the First Reform Act of 1832, less than 10 percent of the adult population - the very rich and aristocratic segments - was allowed to vote, and policies naturally catered to their demands.
From this, it is clear that democracies generally approximate a situation of political equality relative to nondemocracies that, in turn, represent the preferences of a much smaller subset of society and thus correspond more to a situation of political inequality. Our focus is to understand the social and economic forces pushing some societies toward regimes with greater political equality versus those encouraging the development of more nondemocratic systems. In our models, except in Chapter 8, we work with a dichotomous distinction between democracy and nondemocracy. Nevertheless, in deciding how de
mocratic actual regimes are and in empirical work, it is more useful to think of various shades of democracy. For example, none of the nineteenth-century reform acts in Britain introduced universal adult suffrage, but they were all movements in the direction of increased democracy. We want to understand these movements; to do so, we begin by simply considering a move from nondemocracy to full democracy (universal adult suffrage). Our definition is “Schumpetarian” (Schumpeter 1942) in the sense that we emphasize that a country is democratic if a certain political process takes place - if certain key institutions, such as free and fair elections and free entry into politics, are in place. To the extent that democracy is associated with particular outcomes, it will be because they stem from its institutional features.
Our approach means that we are not simply interested in when universal adult suffrage was introduced but rather in understanding all movements in the direction of increased democracy. For example, in Argentina, universal male suffrage was introduced by the constitution of 1853, but electoral corruption was so endemic that democracy was not a reality until after the political reforms under President Sáenz Peña in 1912. In this case, we consider 1912 to be a key movement toward democracy. In the case of Britain, the reforms of 1867 greatly extended voting rights, but universal male suffrage was not conceded until 1919. However, electoral corruption was eliminated and secret voting was introduced in 1872. In this case, we see 1867 as representing an important step toward political equality in Britain.
Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy Page 4
