Yet, "compared to undemocratic governments, broadly speaking, democratic governments offer protection for advantages received for larger shares of their subject populations, create systems of extraction and allocation that respond more fully to popular control, produce more collective benefits, organize broader welfare programs, and redistribute more resources in favor of vulnerable populations within their constituencies more extensively." [Ibid]
Presumably writing about recent trends within the United States, Tilly concludes: "[I]f rich states dismantle the redistributive and equalizing arrangements that have grown up within democratic capitalism and rich people disconnect their trust networks from public politics by such means as gated communities and private schooling, we should expect those measures to de-democratize their regimes." [p. 204]
Nevertheless, he adds that the absence of inequality "cannot be a necessary condition of democracy." [p. 117] "Instead, the democratic accomplishment consists in insulating public politics from whatever material inequalities exist…Democracy thrives on a lack of correspondence between the inequalities of everyday life and those of state-citizen relations." [pp. 117-18]
The third and final necessary element for democratization and democracy is the willingness and ability of the state to reduce autonomous power clusters within the polity. It's accomplished by: (1) broadening political participation, (2) equalizing access to non-state political resources and opportunities and (3) inhibiting autonomous or coercive power within and outside the state. [p. 139]
And here, surprisingly, Tilly uses President Putin as an example. "Putin's anti-democratic smashing of oligarchs to reestablish state control over energy supplies helped eliminate rival centers of coercive power within the Russian regime." [p. 139]
According to Tilly, once these three elements are in place, it still requires a strong state, led by democracy-tolerant elites, determined to ensure that "political relations between the state and its citizens feature broad, equal, protected and mutually binding consultation." [p. 189] Democracies seldom emerge or survive in weak states. Neither do they survive when political elites withdraw their own powerful trust networks.
In his examination of democracy in Russia, Tilly credits Mikhail Gorbachev not only for glasnost and perestroika, but especially for his stated ambition to create a "profound and consistent democracy" (during his extraordinary speech to the 19th party conference in June 1988). But he also notes how declining economic performance "and widespread demands for autonomy or even independence" weakened state capacity in the Soviet Union and, thus, prevented Gorbachev from leading a smooth transition to democracy on a national scale. [pp. 133-34]
Whatever one says about Yeltsin's decidedly mixed record as a democratizer, it is difficult to deny that such efforts were being pursued during a period when the state was losing its capacity to govern. Which is to say that serious democratization became virtually impossible during the later years of his rule, especially after his faltering health "caused feverish maneuvering for influence within the presidential circle." [p. 134]
Thus, Tilly credits President Putin, not only for destroying the oligarchs, but also for restoring political power in Russia. But, he also blames Putin for strengthening the state at the expense of de-democratizing Russia. Moreover, "as of 2006…Putin's regime was not striking bargains that subjected the Russian state to public politics or facilitated popular influence over public politics." [pp. 139-40]
Why? Because, the Russian government currently exercises direct control over huge oil and gas revenues, which renders such bargaining unnecessary. Thus, Putin's regime frees itself from political accountability.
Notwithstanding Professor Tilly's superb scholarship, we still must confront evidence that undermines his interpretation. First, we have President Putin's own commitment to democracy. Second, as mentioned earlier, Russians believe that their country under Putin's rule is more democratic than it was under Yeltsin. Finally, there is still that stubborn fact of elections. As Thomas Carothers has written recently: "Weak and problematic though elections often are, they now form a crucial step in the process of attaining political legitimacy throughout most of the world." [Carothers, "How Democracies Emerge: The 'Sequencing' Fallacy," Journal of Democracy p. 21]
Finally, even if one concludes that democracy in Putin's Russia is weak and undergoing de-democratization, that trend is not irreversible. For, as even Tilly notes: "If, in the future, the Russian state again becomes subject to protected, mutually binding consultation in dialogue with a broad, relatively equal citizenry, we may look back to Putin as the autocrat who took the first undemocratic steps toward that outcome." [p. 137]
More significantly, when one asks about current trends in Russia, he should also ask: "To what effect?" After all, the United States of America boasts about its possession of the oldest and most robust of democracies. Yet, the American public permitted itself to be duped into supporting an illegal, immoral war in Iraq and then tolerated some three years of worsening destruction and, finally, civil war there, before deciding, in the mid-term Congressional elections of November 2006, to hold President Bush and his administration accountable for it. Moreover, even at this late date, the issue moving the public is less the lies and immorality attending the decision to wage war than it is the fact that most Americans now believe that the war was not worth the cost.
By this standard, the sins committed by President Putin, by "turning back of some of the reforms that led to the decentralization of power out of the Kremlin," appear very minor, indeed.
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