Postcommunism and the Theory of Democracy by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9780691230948
Google: F00gEAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 57341898
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2001-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

Political Identity in Nondemocracy and Democracy

Political texts cue people to make decisions whether they share identity with contestants for political power—with rulers in a nondemocracy, with politicians in a democracy. The issue is whether political discourse bifurcates society along a horizontal cleavage, with rulers and their enforcers of rule above and ruled below, or divides society along one or more vertical cleavages separating a politician and his or her voters from rivals and their voters. In the former case, nondemocracy, political discourse must cue recognition of two separate identities—that of rulers (with their enforcers) and that of ruled. In the latter case, democracy, political discourse cues one shared identity—that of citizen—linking politicians to voters.

Of course, within each separate identity characteristic of a nondemocracy, and within the shared identity characteristic of a democracy, there are plural personal and social identities.4 In any nondemocracy, the rulers recognize differences between each other and among their enforcers, for example, in the Soviet case, between party officials and economic managers. In democracy the politicians use discourse to cue recognition of plural partisan identities. But these identities within the basic categorization are far more fluid and diffuse than the rigid division between rulers and ruled characteristic of nondemocracy. This rigid division forms the horizontal barrier, which is crossed only by entry into or expulsion from the ruling group, and normally no more than once by any person. (By contrast, Soviet party officials and economic managers could and did switch occupational identities with some frequency). The discourse of democratic politicians, on the other hand, not only assumes that individuals can, but positively invites them to, change sides across the vertical divide separating political parties—a divide whose very existence is obscured by the many “independents” and “leaners” whose political identities straddle or border it.

Besides being more fluid, the multiple partisan identities within the unified identity of citizenship differ in principle from the dual identities of a nondemocracy. In democracy, political discourse assigns positive definitions to all the opposing partisan identities. In nondemocracy, discourse defines the cleavage between rulers and ruled by a “privative opposition”—a paired opposition in which one member of the pair is defined by some positive quality and the other member is undefined except by the absence of the quality defining the first member (Forsyth 1970, 6). In nondemocracy, discourse cues a positive identity only for the rulers and the enforcers of their rule. Despotic discourse deprives the ruled of any positive political identity at all. Privative opposition, juxtaposing a positive identity for the rulers and the agents of their rule to a negative identity assigned to the population at large, is observable in the use of “not” or its variants to introduce reference to the population living under despotic rule. This reference by negation appears in the Soviet distinction between “communists” and “nonparty persons” (bespartiinye), the two political categories into which Soviet citizens were divided.5 In non-democracy, the identity of the populace is the residual of the identity of the rulers. In democracy, the various political identities are not each other’s residuals.

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