Citizens and the State1: A Changing Relationship?
by DIETER FUCHS AND HANS-DIETER KLINGEMANN
in: Fuchs/Klingemann (eds): »Citizens and the state«, Oxford University Press 1995
We try to answer two different types of question in this book. The first is descriptive: has the relationship between citizens and the state in West European democracies undergone a fundamental change in the last two or three decades? Several influential studies claim that it has; if that is true, it would have serious consequences for the condition of these democracies. The second question is related to these consequences: are there grounds for believing that the nature and scope of changes in the relationship between citizens and the state constitute a challenge to representative democracy in Western Europe?
These two questions are discussed at some length in this introductory chapter. The empirical analyses presented in the chapters which follow look at different aspects of the relationship between citizens and the state, examining the political involvement of citizens, the linkages between citizens and the state established by political parties and interest groups, and the level of generalised support among citizens which these democracies can count on. These chapters shed light on the first question. The extent to which these changes constitute a challenge to representative democracy, our second question, is discussed in the concluding chapter.
The General Issue
In democracies, the relationship between citizens and the state is necessarily a precarious one, in which the nature of democracy is kept permanently open. This holds true at least since the transformation from democratic city-states to democratic nation-states, which Dahl (1989) refers to as the 'second transformation'. This transformation was actuated, and presumably even imposed, by the increase in scale of these democracies and the increase in complexity of these societies. It was characterised by the conjunction of the idea of democracy and the idea of representation. At the institutional level, it led to the differentiation of a specific system to assume the business of governing a community of citizens on their behalf. Within the framework of the formal rules in this system of government, collectively binding decisions are made by elected actors. By election, the community of citizens delegates its sovereignty to representatives who are empowered to make decisions. This second democratic transformation was completed only at the beginning of this century with the introduction of universal suffrage and the emergence of modem party systems. Dahl describes the democracies which represent the provisional outcome of this long historical process as 'polyarchies', and all contemporary Western European democracies are such polyarchies. In so far as their general and defining feature is representation, they can also be designated by the somewhat less artificial term representative democracy.
The precariousness of the relationship between citizens and the state lies in this essential feature of representation. Representative government inevitably establishes distance between the rulers and the ruled, implying the possibility that this distance may attain such proportions that it would be difficult to continue to speak of democracy. Political processes in democracies therefore can, and must, always confront the question of whether they satisfy democratic criteria. How responsive are these political processes to the demands of citizens, and to what extent can citizens control this responsiveness?
If only because of this fundamental structural problem, the relationship between citizens and the state is the object of permanent public and academic scrutiny. The intensity of this scrutiny varies, depending on how the relationship appears to be faring. In modern societies, both the public and the scientific community are, among other things, critical agents who are able to discharge a democratic control function by observing the operation of political processes. The type of observation which each of these agents performs is necessarily different in nature.
The concept of congruence can serve as a point of reference for observing the relationship between citizens and the state. Congruence usually arises on at least two, hierarchically related, levels. The lower level of congruence is that of everyday political processes in a country. These processes, in turn, are controlled by the structures of the system of government, which constitute the higher level. Congruence at the level of political processes exists where the specialised actors (parties, governments, politicians), who are the vehicles and organisers of these processes, can give citizens what they want. If they can do so, they satisfy the democratic criterion of responsiveness. In return, these actors receive a corresponding degree of support from the citizens. This, in its turn, is one of the conditions for democratic processes to function. However, there are two reasons why democratic processes must systematically generate a greater or lesser degree of dissatisfaction among citizens. First, because the resources available to any government to implement its policies are limited and, secondly, because implementing a particular policy necessarily rules out others.
The institutional mechanism which is supposed to regulate systematically generated dissatisfaction in representative democracies is that of government and opposition. The effectiveness of this mechanism depends on how many citizens regard at least one party as suitable and competent to represent their interests, and how many citizens believe that 'their' party has a real chance of assuming government in the foreseeable future. The more effectively the government/opposition mechanism operates, the easier it is to limit and canalise dissatisfaction to avoid its generalisation to the higher levels of the system - that is, to dissatisfaction with the formal, constitutionally determined, structures of government.
Congruence between citizens and the state at the level of the formal structures exists when citizens perceive these structures as commensurate with generally accepted values and norms. The more pronounced the commensurability, the greater will be the support which citizens give to the formal structures. This is the core consideration in almost all concepts of legitimacy.
It is evident, then, that congruence between citizens and the state and the support accorded to the state by its citizens refer to quite different levels and have quite different sources.
Nevertheless, the two levels are systematically related in a manner which is crucial to the functioning of democracy in any country. Acceptance of the formal structures is the precondition for the outcomes of political processes being acknowledged as binding, even when they are not condoned. Such acknowledgement is rooted in the understanding that outcomes come about on the basis of legitimate rules of procedure. The acceptance of formal structures is also a precondition for transforming the inevitable dissatisfaction of a section of the citizenry with the outcomes of political processes into behaviour which is consistent with the system; that is, into appropriate electoral behaviour. This has already been characterised as the government/opposition mechanism.
Moreover, if there is lasting serious dissatisfaction at the process level which cannot be channelled within the government/opposition mechanism, it is unlikely that formal structures can - enduringly - be legitimated on the basis of values and norms. The probable consequence would be the more or less pronounced generalisation of dissatisfaction with the formal structures. In discussing the relationship between citizens and the state, both the fundamental distinction between the structural level and the process level, and the interdependence of the two levels, must thus be taken into account. Easton (1965) has already pointed this out, and it must be kept in mind in the treatment of crisis theories which follows.
At the process level, congruence between citizens and the state is disturbed when the state can no longer satisfy the demands of its citizens. However, this type of disturbance is inherent in the system. Such disturbances lead to a crisis of the state, and in our case this means to a crisis of representative democracy, when they can no longer be absorbed by existing institutional mechanisms (e.g. the government vs. opposition mechanism) but require quite new institutional solutions. Since the end of the allegedly quiet 1950s, much influential comment from among the public and the academic community has been heard to the effect that the representative democracies of modern societies are indeed in this situation. However, before one joins in this crisis rhetoric on the basis of this or that evidence, it is advisable to remember that the rhetorical figure of crisis is promoted by the specific rationality of actors in the various arenas of society.
Under the conditions of a competitive party system, for example, it is perfectly rational for opposition parties to postulate a societal or political crisis to convince voters of the urgency of removing the governing parties from power. In the mass media, talk of crisis is one of the surest ways to attract the attention of the public. Generating attention is, in its turn, one of the guiding lights for actors in the mass media. In the scholarly debate, too, the diagnosis of a crisis presumably has a greater chance of gaining attention than merely ascertaining conflict.
The latter point is relatively trivial, since democracy means, and needs, conflict by its very nature. Thus, because of the tendency to stylise conflict as crisis, it is important to distinguish between the rhetoric and the substance of crisis.
Yet the fact that there are mechanisms to generate or stabilise the rhetoric of crisis does not preclude the possibility that an actual crisis exists. In the scholarly debate, such separation can be effected in two ways. In the first place, we can examine the theoretical validity of the arguments supporting a crisis hypothesis. We do this in the following section. Secondly, and above all, we can do it by empirically testing the hypothesis. This is the task of the subsequent chapters in this volume.
The Theoretical Argument
The scholarly debate on the crisis in Western representative democracies reached a climax around the mid-l970s, at least as far as its theoretical elaboration was concerned. Almost in parallel, a number of crisis hypotheses were advanced, such as the legitimation crisis (Habermas 1973, inter alia), the governability crisis (Brittan 1975; King 1975, inter alia), and the crisis of democracy (Crozier, Huntington, and Watanuki 1975, inter alia). Although the ideological and theoretical bases for these crisis hypotheses varied greatly, their diagnoses concurred in one essential point: the demands made by citizens on democratic governments were increasing, and doing so irreversibly, while, at the same time, the capacity of governments to realise their policy objectives was declining due, among other things, to lower economic growth. However, the crisis hypotheses postulated by critics differed widely in locating the societal causes for these alleged problems.
Arguing in a neo-Marxist vein, Habermas (1973) believed that the cause of the legitimation crisis lay in a fundamental contradiction in late capitalist societies between social production and private appropriation. At the level of the political system, this contradiction took the form of collective taxation along with the highly particular expenditure of scarce tax revenues. This contradiction, which cannot be legitimated by prevailing values and norms, could, according to Habermas, be kept latent only by compensating citizens with continuous growth in income, leisure, and security. Habermas argued that, for various reasons, the governmental system is increasingly less successful in fulfilling the growing demands of citizens. One of the causes was lower economic growth; another, that the state has assumed an increasing number of functions. In consequence, the scope for making demands on the state has grown.
Whereas Habermas's hypothesis of a legitimation crisis located the causes, primarily, outside the political system, Crozier et al. (1975) saw endogenous causes for the crisis of democracy which they postulated. The crisis was due to governments being overloaded by the growing demands of citizens. One of the decisive factors in this development, they argued, was the limited capacity of the state to select between demands which are equally legitimate. Another factor is grounded in one of the vital institutional elements of representative democracy: the system of party competition forces parties constantly to outbid one another in terms of their policy programmes, thus inflating the demands of citizens. Consequently, according to Crozier et al., the institutional arrangements for limiting and canalising demands in a representative democracy operate in reverse.
Although different reasons were advanced, all the crisis theories in this debate assumed an overloading of the state by the escalating demands of citizens, with a consequent shortfall in the performance of the state. But to speak of a crisis of representative democracy makes sense only when dissatisfaction with the democratic process is generalised to apply to the structures of democracy, thus threatening their survival in the long term. However, the gloomy forecasts-that an impending crisis threatened representative democracies in Western societies-were not corroborated by developments in the years that followed. Moreover, apart from the obvious fact that all these democracies continued to operate, the development of a crisis could be refuted on less dramatic evidence.
First of all, and contrary to theoretical assumptions, a number of countries succeeded in fending off and reducing the demands made on the state. This did not lead to breaches of legitimation, as the predominant findings from systematic survey data show. Western democracies obviously still had a reserve of legitimation at the structural level which provided a sufficient buffer against the shortfall in performance at the process level. A further reason for the inaccurate predictions of the crisis theories is the absence of a credible alternative to these democracies. If not before, this became dramatically apparent upon the collapse of the socialist regimes in Eastern Europe, generally regarded as the major alternative political order to the representative democracies of the West. The question of the continued existence of these democracies in their basic institutional structures can be shelved for the time being.
Over the past decade, critical assessments of the condition of Western democracies have formulated the issue of the proper relationship between citizens and the state quite differently, coming to quite different conclusions about their future development. The essence of these analyses is that the institutions of representative democracy, and the professional political actors within that structural framework, have not reacted adequately to the processes of
ocietal change, or have yet to do so.2We deal with these processes of change in greater detail later. At this stage, it only needs to be noted that these analyses concluded that the supposed adaptation problems imply a challenge to representative democracy. What, in detail, constitutes this challenge and how it is to be met is stated with varying degrees of clarity and definition. Reference to a challenge, however, is precise only if it relates not simply to more or less serious problems, but also embraces the assumption that, owing to the nature of their institutional structures, these democracies are unable to react adequately to the problems they face. In contradiction to the crisis theories, this 'structural deficit' can be seen to relate not to representative democracies as a whole, but only to particular structural components or to the structure of subsystems-as, for example, the party systems.
On the premiss that there are structure-related problems about adapting to societal processes of change, in the sense outlined above, two quite different consequences may be anticipated, depending on whether or not there are structural alternatives acceptable to the citizens. If no credible alternatives are available, the problems of structural adaptation must induce growing dissatisfaction among citizens with the institutions of democracy and the major actors of democracy. This might well lead to paralysis in the political decision-making processes without any structural change taking place, let alone the system collapsing. Under these conditions, the challenge to representative democracy would go no further than the permanent articulation of criticism or political apathy among a more or less extensive section of the citizenry. Hirschman (1982) assumes that both phenomena occur in cycles of commitment and withdrawal. This kind of challenge, an ignis fatuus with no point of reference, can be described as a 'soft' challenge.
The situation is different if the critique of representative democracy is made for the perspective of an alternative with some prospect of winning favour among a majority of the population. This can be regarded as a real challenge, since it means that structural change is both conceivable and possible. In defining democratic alternatives, a distinction is often drawn between direct and indirect democracy. Cohen (1971) understands this as the fundamental analytic distinction in describing democracies. This distinction underwent a far-reaching shift in emphasis in the critical debate about democratic theory during the l980s. Indirect democracy, and in our case this means Western representative democracies, is confronted less by various forms of direct democracy than by a mixed form containing both indirect and direct institutional elements. Among critics making this point, this is particularly true of Beck (1986), and Rödel, Frankenberg, and Dubiel (1989), but other analyses also point in this direction. The practical necessity of representative democracy is to a large extent accepted in this critique. Thus the representative system is understood as the indispensable institutional framework within which the institutions of direct democracy can, or even must, be introduced in order to restore congruence between citizens and the state. However, a precise description of the shape taken by this alternative form of democratic order is to a large extent waived. It is seen more as the relatively open terminus in an evolutionary process. This is also the view espoused by Dahl, to whom we shall return in our final chapter.
If representative democracy is essentially accepted, even though, because of practical constraints, it may be the second-best solution, a further type of challenge becomes apparent. What is then challenged is not representative democracy as such, but merely a certain form of institutionalisation in a particular country or group of countries. The alternative is provided by other forms of institutionalisation in other countries. Comparisons between existing democracies in particular countries have inestimable advantages: not only do alleged merits represent a future possibility, but they can be scrutinised within the democratic reality of the countries concerned. This sort of challenge is perfectly capable of bringing about a considerable and far-reaching systemic change within the general category of representative democracies, as shown by the transformation of the Fourth French Republic into the Fifth Republic. This was a shift from a parliamentary system with a proportional voting system to a presidential system with a majority system, substantially modifying the character of politics in France. Our point of departure is the frequently advanced hypothesis that societal change generates problems for Western representative democracies which disturb the congruence between citizens and the state, and which the institutional mechanisms of representative democracy alone can no longer resolve. Notwithstanding these three different types of challenge, the concept of challenge contains a meaning which distinguishes it decisively from the concept of crisis. The issue of the survival of representative democracy as a form of political order in Western European countries is not on the agenda. Rather, what is at issue are the relative merits of variants of representative democracy in comparable countries, or of a mixed form in which the institutions of a representative system are complemented by the institutions of direct democracy. But these changes, too, would considerably influence the operation of democratic processes in individual countries. It is, therefore, pertinent to question whether, and to what extent, a challenge to Western representative democracies actually exists.