34 Electoral democracy and its disenchantment

Varun Patil

Electoral democracy and its disenchantment

The gap between the ideal type of our existing democracies, as enshrined in our constitutions, and the actual functioning of them is widening. There is a widespread agreement that our electoral democracy is in crisis. In this module we will look to understand the various dimensions and causes of the disenchantment with existing democracies. We will look at how the crisis of electoral democracy is both institutional and socio-economic; that it is both the present structure of our institutions as well as their functioning in an unequal socio-economic context, which is leading to the crisis. In the later parts we will look at possible solutions to overcome the disenchantment by looking at measures of democratising democracy from across the world.

1.1 The introduction and experience of electoral democracy so far

Modern electoral democracy is a specific historical system of democracy which emerged in the 18th century in the western world following the rise of bourgeois society and developed in the course of British, American and French revolutions, and which was initially adopted by most western capitalist societies and later, by many countries in Global South including India. This tradition of democracy was largely informed by its association with Western liberalism and hence is also called as liberal democracy. The practices and principles underpinning actually existing electoral democracies are heterodoxic, having taken different forms in different societies since their emergence, and so any single definition of it can only be partial and incomplete. For the purpose of the module, we shall define electoral democracies at the broad level of imaginary, noting that most of the times they have consisted of political equality of all individuals, representation based on regular elections and voting, a strong public sphere, constitutionalism, the separation of powers, an independent judiciary, and a system of checks and balances between branches of government (Taylor: 2004, Arditi: 2007).

Within India, electoral democracy was introduced fully soon after Independence. Many western observers initially felt that India’s tryst with electoral democracy would be the “biggest gamble in history”(Guha, 2008). This is because in independent India the franchise was immediately granted to all adults, regardless of education, wealth, gender or caste. In older democracies such as France, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America, the privilege was first extended to rich men, later to educated men, then to all men, and finally, after a very long struggle, to women as well. Even a supposedly ‘advanced’ country such as Switzerland permitted its women citizens to vote only as late as 1971. The American constitution was adopted in 1787, but people of colour have effectively had the right to vote only since the 1960s. However, Dalits in India voted, and Dalit candidates were elected to Parliament, within two years of the writing of our own Constitution. Electoral democracy in India was seen as an act of faith, a challenge to logic and the received wisdom.

However the fears were unfounded, as electoral democracy was a big success in India. In India elections occur at several levels, including the villages, blocs, districts, states, and the national. There are 2, 27, 000 villages councils, 5900 block councils, and 470 district councils. There are 5, 000 MLA’s and over 500 M. P. s. As many as just over three million men and women at any given time hold elected offices1. Elections have been regularly held in India since 1952, and on average sixty percent of the electorate vote, reaching as high as 85% in some states in some elections. Over the last fifty years, the turnout in Europe and North America has declined. In India the turnout has either remained stable or actually gone up. In India the poor, illiterate and underprivileged people vote in larger proportion as compared to the rich and privileged sections. This is in contrast to western democracies. More than half of the people also identify themselves as being close to one or the other political party2. The electoral system is highly fluid as ruling parties routinely lose elections in India both at the national and state level.

Thus we can say fairly that electoral democracy in India has fairly been a success. There are several reasons for this. It gives voters a sense of dignity. Poor voters are courted, respected and valued in a way they are not in other areas of life. Elections also give them a sense of power and an opportunity to press their demands. Lower castes rub shoulders and enjoy equality with higher castes, which they do not in their normal relations. And they can punish their erstwhile masters in a polling booth which they dare not even imagine in the ordinary course of life.

Further as Pratap Bhanu Mehta (2003) notes introduction of electoral democracy politicised all areas of organized collective existence in India, including history and culture. Democracy meant the disillusionment of inherited modes of authority; it introduced over time, a process of critique that questions and subverts all certainties of social life. Electoral democracy in India has been a wonderful mechanism for chastening certain kinds of authority, making the structure of political power more fluid and creating an assertive and intensely politicized civil society. Deeper democratisation produced numerous points of dissent, new conflicts of values and identities, a permanent antagonism of meanings and interests. The very mundane process of seeking majorities, of building new coalitions, led to the mobilization of new groups, unsettled existing power relations and produced new openings.

1.2 Problems with electoral democracy today

Of late though, there is a widespread concern that electoral democracy is in a crisis in India, and across the world. That it has stopped performing its basic job of reflecting the popular will and holding power accountable. This crisis has five major dimensions.

1https://www.cambridgetrust.org/assets/documents/Lecture_32.pdf accessed on 27/2/16

2http://www.ncert.nic.in/ncerts/l/iess404.pdf accessed on 20/2/16

Firstly there is an emerging perception that competitive elections are not performing their duties of authorisation and accountability, especially due to the presence of unequal socio-economic relations. Regular elections, in the presence of wide unequal social relations, have often become conduits for the formation of oligarchies. As Adam Przeworski notes, incumbents can manipulate electoral rules, manage public opinion by influencing the media, throw state resources behind candidates friendly to the government so much so that between 1788 and 2000, incumbents won about 80 per cent of the elections in the world (2010: 167). Elections require tremendous resources in capitalist societies which allow for a cosy relationship between the political class and the economic elite. For example, one of the main criteria to run for president in United States of America is how much campaign money one can raise, which deters many interesting contenders from running.

Competitive elections have also failed to stem the lack of accountability in terms of transparency in the exercise of the representatives’ mandate. Przeworski (2010) notes that one of the main challenges facing actually existing democracy is the incapacity to ensure that governments do what they are supposed to do and not do what they are not mandated to do. In Venezuela, AD President Carlos Andrés Pérez, elected on a populist platform promising to oppose international financial pressures and introduce new welfare measures, turned round and did precisely the opposite, introducing an IMF deflationary package (Raby, 2006: 42). The problem of accountability is not a problem of conservative governments alone, even Syriza, the left government in Greece which was elected on the mandate to end austerity did a U-turn, agreeing for the unjust demands of the troika (of European supra-national institutions) to re-impose austerity policies3.

The second major crisis of electoral democracy is that political parties have ceased to be effective vehicles of popular democracy. Very often parties do not seem to offer a meaningful choice to the voters. In recent years there has been a decline in the ideological differences among parties in most parts of the world. Many major political parties, which have to function within the existing capitalist economy, are increasingly choosing to implement monetary policies of fiscal deficit and GDP growth over social welfare policies which entail a form of re-distribution. As a result, sometimes there is no meaningful difference between major political parties such as Labour and Conservatives in England, Republicans and Democrats in America, and UPA and NDA, in terms of broad policy paradigms.

There is also a lack of intraparty democracy in particular, that has impeded the growth of a healthier party system. All over the world there is a tendency in political parties towards the concentration of power in one or few leaders at the top. Parties do not keep membership registers, do not hold organisational meetings, and do not conduct internal elections regularly. Ordinary members of the party do not get sufficient information on what happens inside the party. Some families tend to dominate political parties; tickets are distributed to relatives from these families.

3http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jul/09/greece-debt-crisis-athens-accepts-harsh-austerity-as-bailout-deal-nears 14/7/15

There is also a gradual but inexorable withdrawal of the parties from the realm of civil society towards the realm of government and the state. As Peter Mair (2013) notes this process involves a downgrading of ‘the party on the ground’ in favour of ‘the party in parliament’, or in government, as leaders opted for ‘responsibility’ at the expense of ‘responsiveness’. He documents the homogenisation of the UK Labour Party, as it has transitioned from being a dispersed federal organisation, to a centralised operation that has consistently discarded those grassroots resolutions with which the leadership disagrees—on pensions, defence policy, the social ownership of railways, and much else besides.

The third major problem of existing electoral democracies is the declining quality of public deliberation. Our public sphere is in crisis (Mehta, 2003). Since matters requiring collective action affect all and citizens hold different views on how these should be addressed, collective affairs should be publicly discussed and based on some sort of a consensus. Different points of view should have opportunities to express themselves and engage in a public dialogue. However the public sphere is in crisis given the lack of political information circulating in the political system and the growing distance between state and society. The quality of deliberation, especially about complex policy issues is lacking. Some of this information may even be legally available, but most times they are not made part of a deliberative process. There is also continuous attempts by democratic states to weaken the right to information laws by radically limiting its scope and applicability.

The radical possibilities of public opinion are also continuously thwarted by the growing corporatisation of Media which, rather than reflecting the plurality of opinions, is increasingly promoting a narrow set of views (See Chomsky and Herman, 2010). To take a recent example, the mainstream media in western democracies has not initiated a wide discussion of the various trade laws being currently pushed by global capital like the Transatlantic Trade In Services Agreement (TISA). According to WikiLeaks which made public the some sections of the secret draft text of the agreement, it sets rules that would assist the expansion of financial multinationals into other nations by preventing regulatory barriers and prohibits more regulation of financial services, despite the fact that the 2007-08 financial meltdown is generally perceived as resulting from a lack of regulation4.

The fourth major crisis afflicting electoral democracy is that legislatures which are the domain of popular decision-making are in crisis. Firstly, the other arms of the state are eclipsing the traditional role of the legislatures. There is a tremendous growth of executive power marginalising legislatures, traditionally considered as the seat of popular sovereignty (Rooper, 2013: 239). The most emblematic example of this crisis is the indiscriminate abuse of the ‘state of exception device’ in much of liberal democracies today. The ‘State of exception’ enotes a situation where powers are granted to the executive to make and pass laws in case of an emergency situation like a war or economic crisis. Gorgio Agamben notes that the state of exception is today the rule rather than an exception and that it has become the paradigm of government, including in the so-called democratic states (2005: 2). Until the 1990s, around seventy Governments have taken regular recourse to this mechanism (Keith and Poe: 2004). In the decade old rule of UPA government in India, around 61 ordinances were passed, including the all-important Food Security Bill5. Legislatures are further threatened by the expansion of the power and the reach of courts—domestic as well as international. As Wendy Brown notes, courts themselves have shifted from deciding what is prohibited to saying what must be done—in short, from a limiting function to a legislative one that effectively usurps the classic task of democratic politics (2012: 48).

4https://wikileaks.org/tisa-financial/ 16/5/15

We can also see a proliferation of manifold unelected technical, professional’ entities like central banks and planning commissions in our democracies, that take a great deal of relevant policy decisions and which are insulated from ‘majoritarian’ redistributive pressures. Nowhere is this move to supplant legislatures by technocracy more clearly visible than in the functioning of the European Union. The European Central Bank, or ECB, is thus the most ‘depoliticised’ decision-makers of all in the Eurozone. There is a tendency of EU towards a political system of de-politicized expert ‘governance’, specifically constructed to exclude parties, popular democracy and, with them, redistributive politics (Mair, 2013). We can also see this marginalisation of legislatures in India with the rise of ‘good governance’ paradigm which entails the substitution of assembly politics – which is what democracy is all about — with management (by PMO). As G. Sampath notes this paradigm seeks to insulate policy-making from the chaotic pressures of democracy and its twin pillars are democracy without politics and citizenship without rights6. It is used to push through many anti-democratic policies like Land acquisition, pro-actively cutting public expenditure on health and education as well as the dilution of the rights of industrial workers.

Secondly national legislatures are also in a crisis due to the constraints imposed on them by multilateral agreements and globalization which seem to diminish the authority of legislatures considerably. As Wolfgang Streeck points out, today states and their governments are facing two sovereigns at the same time: their peoples, organized nationally, and “the markets, ” organized on a global scale7. At the national level, we can see that the agents of global capital, World Trade Organisation, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, and various international agreements have successfully removed certain policy solutions from the reach of elected national legislatures. India’s domestic policy recently also came into conflict with World Trade Organisation rules on agriculture. The conflict heated up when India

5 http://www.frontline.in/the-nation/tyranny-of-the-majority/article6756766.ece accessed on 22/1/15

6http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/comment-g-sampath-on-modi-government-why-everyone-loves-good-governance/article7389373.ece Accessed on 8/7/15

7https://thecurrentmoment.wordpress.com/2012/01/03/interview-with-wolfgang-streeck/ 23/7/15

demanded an explicit assurance at the WTO that it could maintain its right-to-food programme8. The United States resisted, and the standoff derailed the first new global trade agreement at the WTO since the 1990s. Though the impasse now seems to be resolved (with American support, India has secured a “peace clause” at the WTO that protects its food programme from legal challenges), further pressures are building up to change its domestic policies.

Finally electoral Democracy is facing crisis for failure to be an effective mechanism for mitigating the effects of social inequality and for the provision of public goods. There is a tremendous growth of social inequality in actually existing democracies. As McNally observes: while more than a billion people do not have access to clean water or adequate food and shelter, there are now 793 billionaires in the world whose combined wealth is an almost incomprehensible $US2. 6 trillion – more than the gross domestic product of all but six countries in the world. In fact, the assets of the world’s 200 richest people are greater than the combined income of 41 per cent of humankind (McNally, 2006: 129). Leo Panitch adds how there are some 40, 000 multinational corporations—fifty of them now receiving more revenue than two-thirds of the world’s states (2001: 108).

The social democratic state and union rights are being slowly dismantled in many democracies. Wolfgang Streeck (2015) notes that democratic capitalism, a product of the post-1945 compromise between capital and labour, an unstable attempt at combining public expectations with private interests, is falling apart. Now more and more “capital controls, ” in a broad sense, are being removed while one promise after the other that had been made to buy labour in after 1945 is being slowly withdrawn. Such promises included a steady increase in living standards, progressive de-commodification of labour through an expanding welfare state, politically guaranteed full employment, industrial democracy with an encompassing regime of collective bargaining and trade union rights, a broad public sector providing citizens with social services as well as with stable employment, equal access to education and social advancement, a moderate level of social and economic inequality, and the like. All these are now disappearing or being “reformed, ” often beyond recognition.

1. 3 Overcoming the disenchantment with electoral democracy

Many suggestions have been put forward to overcome the crisis of electoral democracy. In this section we will look into such suggestions, especially drawing from the recent experience of democratisation of electoral democracy in Latin America. Firstlythere is a call for new complementarities between representative and participatory democracy to improve the authorisation and accountability process of competitive elections

8http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/12/opinion/let-india-make-cheap-drugs.html?_r=0 accessed on 3/4/2015

(Santos and Avritzer, 2007). This includes a process of decentring of representation and encouraging new direct avenues for participation in legislation and administration in the form of frequent referendums and democratic assemblies.

Many such experiments are currently underway in Latin America. The most successful one is the practice of participatory budgeting (henceforth P. B) in Porto Alegre in Brazil, a local policy that includes common citizens in a process of negotiation and deliberation about how to allocate the resources for the municipal budget. Through district-level assemblies in each of the city’s 16 districts, the P. B allows the citizens directly to allocate a significant proportion of the city’s budget, especially the new capital investments. Priorities are elected on the basis of the principle “one man one vote”, according to which every citizen disposes of the same number of votes. Once the priorities in both the assemblies are decided, delegates are elected to represent the region at the city-wide level in the city-wide PB council. After all the delegates’ reports about their respective regions’ needs are heard, the PB council reconciles demands with available resources and proposes a municipal budget in conjunction with members of the administration. It is then sent to the municipal assembly for final approval. The participation in P. B also extends to the administrative level as citizens are actively involved in monitoring of the budget, which is a complex exercise (Santos and Avritzer, 2007). The PB Council is implicated in the allocation of public contracts. It also determines the decision-making system, the criteria for allocating resources, the number of plenary meetings, and themes for discussion.

As a result of P. B, budgetary expenditures have been more carefully aligned with democratic preferences. Avritzer (2002) notes how the Brazilian state is notorious for its degree of penetration by political interests, and municipalities have long been ruled by oligarchical interests who have transformed budgeting and planning into little more than an exercise in organised rent seeking. One of the main accomplishments of P. B has thus been to plug fiscal leaks from patronage payoffs and loosen the grip of traditional political elites.

There is a move to include accountability mechanisms other than that of elections. Many Latin American democracies have also introduced mechanisms of delegation and recall to strengthen accountability of representatives. In Venezuela, if twenty per cent of the population express their desire, a recall mechanism can be initiated against the president. The opposition used the recall mechanism in 2004 to force a referendum on the Chavez government, which he won with 58 per-cent votes (Ellner: 2010). Similarly, in 2008 in Bolivia, the Evo Morales government had to face a recall, which it won eventually by 67 per cent (Webber, 2011). In India the Constitution was amended to prevent elected MLAs and MPs from changing parties to tackle the problem of defection. Secondly across the world many steps and suggestions are being implemented/put forward to democratise the functioning of political parties. The Indian Supreme Court passed an order to reduce the influence of money and criminals. Now, it is mandatory for every candidate who contests elections to file an affidavit giving details of his property and criminal cases pending against him. The Election Commission passed an order making it necessary for political parties to hold their organisational elections and file their income tax returns. Besides these, many suggestions are beingproposed by electoral reform commissions to reform political parties9. This includes a law to regulate the internal affairs of political parties: to make compulsory for political parties to maintain a register of its members, to follow its own constitution, to have an independent authority, to act as a judge in case of party disputes, to hold open elections to the highest posts and for political parties to give a minimum number of tickets, about one-third, to women candidates. There is also a proposal for state funding of elections.

Thirdly there are several attempts at improving the process of public deliberation within modern democracies. Many scholars are increasingly arguing that the overwhelming focus on elections has displaced the all-important process of public deliberation in a polity (see Habermas, 1990, Rawls 1971, Gutmann and Thompson 2004, Dryzek 2000). They argue for a revival of public sphere, stressing that the job of politics is arriving at a common consensus through reasoned dialogue among citizens.

Deliberative mechanisms are being used in many places to bring a closer synergy between the state and civil society. In Bolivia, the section on ‘Participation and Social Control’ in the constitution established that the ‘sovereign people, through organised civil society, participates in the design of public policies and exercises social control’ over state administration, public enterprises and institutions (Wolff: 2013, 7). The National Public Policy Conferences (NPPC), a national – level experiment promoted by the federal Executive in Brazil, along with civil society organizations, gathers together ordinary citizens, civil society organizations, private entrepreneurs and elected representatives from all three levels of government to deliberate together and agree on a common policy agenda for the country. In Brazil alone, 7 million people are reported to have participated in 82 national public policy conferences that took place between 2003 and 201110.

Fourthly there is a move to revive the centrality of legislatures by democratising the separation of powers within the state and also by moving towards a democratisation of international relations. In Bolivia, all three classical branches of government are subject to increasing vertical control ‘from below’. In the case of the judiciary, the top echelons of the judiciary are to be elected by popular vote (Wolff, 2013: 10). The constitution has also increased the political influence on supposedly ‘technical’ issues and bodies. For instance, the Central Bank has lost its previous level of independence’. There is also a move to resist global financial institutions by carrying out debt audits. In November 2008, Ecuador became the first country to undertake an examination of the legitimacy and structure of its foreign debt. An independent debt audit commissioned by the government of Ecuador documented hundreds of allegations of irregularity, illegality, and illegitimacy in contracts of debt to predatory international lenders11. As a result, it declared 70% of its national debt as illegitimate.

9http://lawcommissionofindia.nic.in/reports/Report255.pdf accessed on 23/2/16

10http://library.fes.de/pdf-files/iez/10209.pdf accessed on 25/2/16

Fifthly electoral democracies areinitiatingmany mechanisms to overcome the problem of pervasive social inequality. Firstly there is an attempt to deepen the rights discourse in our democracy by moving it away from its current narrow focus on property rights and negative freedoms(see Purcell, 2008, Bowles and Gintis (1986), Saskia Sassen (1999)). This move from formal to a substantial notion of rights and citizenship can be seen in the recent Latin American democratisation process. The ‘fundamental rights’ recognised by the new Bolivian constitution clearly go beyond the usual series of political and civil rights by strengthening socio-economic and collective rights (Wolff, 2013: 9). They include universal entitlements to free education and health care, access to potable water/sewage, electricity, cooking gas, and basic postal and telecommunication services as well as social security and retirement. Within the Bolivian framework the right to private property is conditional on its performing a ‘social function’ and land rights are limited by a ban on the latifundio(large commercial estates) which includes an upper limit of 5, 000 hectares and the requirement to fulfil a ‘social-economic function’ (Ibid).

In Brazil, there is an interesting experiment to democratise the control of urban space through the right to the city. It has enacted the “City Statute” designed to ensure substantial citizenship rights in a city (Purcell: 2008). The first principle is the regularization of informal settlements (i. e. favelas) so that inhabitants can be more fully included in the various protections and opportunities that the formal sector offers. Here the claim is a right to housing, but also to the many services that typically serve urban residential areas. The second principle concerns the “social use value” of urban space, which is opposed to its economic value. The traditional situation in Brazilian cities is that urban land is conceived almost exclusively as a commodity, the economic content of which is to be determined by the individual interests of owners. Under the City Statute, property rights are subjected to the counter-claim of appropriation. It injects a strongly collective, social, and public understanding of urban space as a counterbalance to the privatized view of neoliberals (ibid: 97).

The problem of social inequality is also being tackled by de-centering capitalism as the mainstay of economy, and looking at the economy as made up of a diversity of capitalist, alternative capitalist, and non-capitalist practices. And also by strengthening worker’s democracy and initiating land reforms. The Venezuelan government, under Hugo Chavez, for example adopted an endogenous development model that prioritised ‘social economy’ (Chavez, Barrett, Rodríguez-Garavito, 2008: 80). Through the various forms of micro and small credits granted by state financial entities, new productive organisations of the social economy were developed: small and medium-sized companies, co-operatives and other forms of associative production. The 2002-2003 oil lockout also gave an important opportunity for workers in Venezuela to organise and control production within Public industries (Ellner 2010). Venezuela has also encouraged slum dwellers to create Urban Land Committees for the purpose of rationalizing land tenancy where they live.

11http://www.projectcensored.org/10-ecuador-declares-foreign-debt-illegitimate/ accessed on 3/3/2015

associative production. The 2002-2003 oil lockout also gave an important opportunity for workers in Venezuela to organise and control production within Public industries (Ellner 2010). Venezuela has also encouraged slum dwellers to create Urban Land Committees for the purpose of rationalizing land tenancy where they live.

Conclusion

The existing electoral democracies do mark a great improvement over feudal monarchical and present day authoritarian regimes. The civil liberties and voting rights of ordinary people in electoral democracies today are indeed remarkable when compared with the politico-juridical and coercive domination and exploitation experienced by slaves in classical antiquity or serfs and peasants in feudalism (Rooper, 2013 : 216). There are strong democratic components within existing democracies, many of which were bought into existence as a result of continuous conflicts and class struggles. However while one can certainly say that democracy has broadened, one cannot say with the same certainty that it has deepened (Manin, 1995: 234).

The deepening of electoral democracy requires both institutional changes as well as changes in our social relations. Democratisation cannot stop with reforming the state; rather there is a concomitant need to democratise all spheres of the society. The concentration of political power in actually existing democracies cannot be understood without looking at the concomitant concentration of economic and social power due to caste, capitalism and patriarchy.

This insight is crucial as analysis of politics in popular media is dominated by technocratic and liberal approaches which usually tend to ignore the dynamic connections between social relations and political relations. In such approaches democracy is completely ‘depoliticized’, becoming a set of abstract rules and procedures that only pose ‘technical’ problems. The heroic enterprise of creating a democratic state is thus reduced to the establishment of a system of rules and procedures unrelated to the social context proper to democracy and indifferent to the implications that deep-seated social contradictions and class inequalities have for the political process. The problem of democracy becomes the problem of how to insulate political processes from what are considered to be non-political or pre-political processes, those characteristic, for example, of the economy, the family, and informal everyday life (see Rawls: 1971). In contradistinction to liberal political theory, Karl Marx (1967, 1978) argued that political theory could not stand on its own if it analysed only the state. The inescapable reality is that all forms of democracy rest upon specific social and economic infrastructures and can only be understood adequately in relation to these infrastructures. We need to thus avoid the liberal pitfall that problems of democracy are an issue that can be resolved once and for all, through a proper (technical) constitutional design. Democratic institutions open a whole range of possibilities, the realisation of which will necessarily depend on the processes of political confrontation and on the capacity to appropriate and deepen the instruments generated in this struggle. To create a government that is accountable, a citizenry that is discriminating, imaginative and tolerant, institutions that effectively deliver public goods, and laws that are properly enforced and institutionalized, we require transformation of civil society of a kind that has little to do with the formal design of electoral systems (Mehta, 2003). Most of the reforms we require to reform electoral democracy thus cannot be introduced by legislative fiat, but require the hard labour of politics and self-transformation (ibid).

Further Reading

Agamben Gorgio (2005) The State of exception. University of Chicago press.
Arditi Benjamin. (2007). Politics on the Edges of Liberalism. Edinburgh University Press.
Avritzer, Leonardo. (2002). Democracy and the Public Space in Latin America. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Bowles, S. and H. Gintis (1986). Democracy and Capitalism: Property, Community, and the Contradictions of Modern Social Thought. New York, Basic Books.
Brown Wendy. ( 2012). “We are all democrats now…”. In Agameben eds. Democracy in What State? Columbia University Press.
Chavez Daniel, Barrett Patrick, César Rodríguez-Garavito. (2008). The New Latin American Left: Utopia Reborn. Transnational Institute. Pluto press.
Dryzek, John. (2000). Deliberative Democracy and Beyond. New York: Oxford University Press.
Ellner, Steve. (2010). Hugo Chávez’s First Decade in Office: Breakthroughs and Shortcomings. Latin American Perspectives 2010; 37; 77
Guha Ramachandra. (2008). India After Gandhi: The History Of The World’s Largest Democracy. Harper Perennial.
Gutmann, A. & Thompson, D. (1996). Democracy and disagreement. Cambridge MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Habermas, Jürgen. (1996). Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Keith and Poe. (2004). ‘Are Constitutional State of Emergency Clauses Effective? An Empirical Exploration’, 26 Human Rights Quarterly.
Mair Peter. (2013). Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy, Verso: London and New York.
Manin Bernard (1997). The Principles of Representative Government. Cambridge University Pres Marx Karl. (1967 [1867]). Capital, Vol. 1. New York: International Publishers. ——(1978) (1843) “On the Jewish Question”. In: The Marx-Engels Reader. Edited by Robert

Tucker, New York: Norton & Company.McNally, D. (2006). Another World is Possible. Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring.
Mehta Pratap Bhanu. (2003). The Burden of Democracy. Penguin.
Panitch Leo. (2001). Renewing Socialism: Democracy, Strategy, and Imagination. Westview Press.
Purcell Mark. (2008). Recapturing Democracy: Neoliberalization and the Struggle for Alternative Urban Futures . Routledge.
Przeworski, A. (2010): Democracy and the Limits of Self-government. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Raby. D (2006). Democracy and Revolution: Latin America and SocialismToday. Pluto Press
Rawls, John. (1971) A Theory of Justice. Belknap.
Roper Brian. (2013). The History of Democracy: A Marxist Interpretation. Pluto Press.
Santos Boaventura de Souza and Avritzer. (2007). Democratizing Democracy: Beyond the Liberal DemocraticCanon. Verso.
Sassen, S. (1999). Whose City Is It? Globalization and the Formation of New Claims. Cities and Citizenship. J. Holston (ed.). Durham, Duke University Press.
Streeck, Wolfgang. (2015) Buying Time, London, Verso.
Taylor Charles. (2004). Modern Social Imaginaries. Duke University Press.
Webber Jeffery (2010). From Rebellion to Reform in Bolivia: Class Struggle, Indigenous
Liberation and the Politics of Evo Morales, by. Chicago: Haymarket Books.
Wolff Jonas. (2013). Towards Post-Liberal Democracy in Latin America? A Conceptual Framework Applied to Bolivia, in: Journal of Latin American Studies, Jg. 45, Vol.1