Diagonales en cruz

Democratization is structured by dominant ideas of political community or peoplehood, the belief that a certain category of persons are tied together by something—be it de- scent, choice, providential fate or contingent history—in such a way that their association is experienced by its participants as meaningful and political (Smith 2003).45 _{The be-}

liefs about a particular political people, like Renan’s ‘nation,’ contain prescriptions for a shared “program to realize” in the present and future. This is not accidental. Rather it reflects the fact that a political people is an ongoing ideological project—never under the control of any one group and never articulated ex nihilo—whose proponents “aim to construct communities that are also enduring structures of political power” (Smith 2003, 41).

Projects of political community, the construction of narratives, stories, and the as- sertion of constitutive principles, are instrumental. The “stories” are crafted—out of an existing pool of culturally resonant resources—by aspiring rulers aiming to secure the support of a constituency and stitch together a coalition capable of governing. Some might be content to govern from within existing institutional arrangements while oth- ers’ ambitions might lead them to displace these and construct new ones. Regardless, the ideas of political community are meant to constitute the interests of potential con- stituents and coalition partners by identifying what should be valued and associating this with the continued rule of the particular coalition.

Perhaps most importantly for our purposes, ideas of political community are inher- ently exclusionary. However broad a particular understanding of peoplehood might be, however large the pale of inclusion intended and porous the boundaries, all people- building coalitions will require some form of exclusion and some form of border main-

45_{John Lie defines modern peoplehood as “an inclusionary and involuntary group identity with a putatively} shared history and distinct way of life. It is inclusionary because everyone in the group, regardless of status, gender, or moral worth, belongs” (Lie 2004, 1). Burke would have disagreed: “I have often endeavored to compute and to class those who, in any political view, are to be called the people.... In England and Scotland, I compute that those of adult age, not declining in life, of tolerable leisure for such discussions, and of some means of information more or less and who are above menial dependence, (or what virtually is such) may amount to about four hundred thousand” (Burke 1881, 284). Bagehot’s position on the inclusionary nature of peoplehood was slightly more ambiguous: “The working classes contribute almost nothing to our corporate public opinion, and therefore, the fact of their want of influence in Parliament does not impair the coincidence of Parliament with public opinion. They are left out in the representation, and also in the thing represented” (Bagehot 1866, 276).

tenance (Smith 2003, 56). So long as democracy is bounded by ideas of belonging— what constitutes a political people, and who is included accordingly—the prospects for democracy in this sense will be bounded as well.

Democratic Exclusion

Democratization is structured by political orders of peoplehood insofar as enfranchise- ment or disfranchisement of a category of persons is (1) seen as violating the strictures of the ideal of peoplehood, and (2) this violation carries costs even for those who might, from the perspective of simple estimates of electoral gain, be best situated to benefit. These costs make it more difficult for the disfranchised to find allies among the enfran- chised, who might lose political support for making common cause with persons outside the “projected” community.

Certain categories of persons are systematically excluded from otherwise representa- tive regimes because the institutional and coalitional arrangements that structure politics in a given place and time reflect and reinforce particular understandings of community— the ideational organizing of a particular set of persons into a ‘people’ and the proper forms in which this people should be governed. The specifics of who is disfranchised are determined in large part by the political ideas of membership, which are reflective of the contingent political exigencies that shaped the formative coalition-building.

But the initial interests alone do not explain the extent of disfranchisement or its endurance. Rather, the ideas that were articulated at the outset have constituted new interests—or reconfigured understandings of prior interests—and have informed the design of new institutions. Accordingly, they have an impact beyond the original material interests for which they may have been designed. In the United Kingdom, ‘no Popery’ remained a more resonant cry in England and Scotland than the material interests at stake would suggest.46 _{By the end of the antebellum period in the United States,}

considerably more people believed they had a stake in white supremacy than southern slaveholders: even in areas where there were very few African Americans, there was broad support for black exclusion. Even when not concerned directly with free black

46_{In Ireland there was a strong material interest for Protestants, landlords and otherwise, in maintaining} the Protestant Constitution. English landlords with property in Ireland likewise had a strong material interests, as did the Church of England. All of these sought to encourage an ideological commitment among English and Scots who were not directly implicated in maintaining the settlement of Ireland. And ‘no Popery’ by all accounts had broad public support outside of Catholic Ireland, precisely because it had been encouraged and understood to refer to a broader set of interests than the specific material interests of landlords or the Church.

suffrage, many Americans had come to associate this with abolitionism and thus with disunion, an ideological association that invoked profound material and psychological interests.

What makes ideas of peoplehood distinctive and more relevant for our analysis? For one, the ideas of peoplehood are especially relevant for the design of the institutions of citizenship, ranging from the demarcation of citizen as a legal relationship between an individual and a state through to the demarcation of citizen as one with full rights in a community. That is they are more likely to impinge on the organization of political au- thority, including rules of citizenship, suffrage, and representative institutions, and so are especially relevant for analyzing the effect of ideas on enfranchisement and disfranchise- ment from the right to vote. Additionally, they are likely to be crafted with a broader appeal and resonance in mind than what might be necessary to achieve a minimum winning coalition. And perhaps most importantly, ideas of political community must necessarily draw some boundary of exclusion. And the history of democratization, from the French Republic’s denial of citizenship to the privileged orders, to the aggressive ideology of laicité in countries such as Turkey and France, suggests that the boundary is often drawn within already existing communities—an ideological partition—rather than circumscribing these by including all resident within a territory or with longstanding ties to a territorial community.

Sequence

Ideas matter in distinctive ways across different stages in a historical sequence. I do not want to suggest that this sequence will everywhere be the same; nonetheless, I believe certain features will be generalizable, largely because it rests on an iterative succession between stable political orders and shifts in governing authority—sometimes amounting to critical junctures.

It makes sense to begin with the shift in governing authority, although analyses will need to look backward beyond this for the purpose of establishing a baseline and for un- derstanding what caused the shift. As discussed above, shifts in governing authority refer to those periods in which the developmental trajectory of a country, along some relevant dimension, was durably altered. These may or may not amount to critical junctures— relatively brief periods in which highly consequential political outcomes are especially sensitive to agency and idiosyncratic choices. But the more they approximate critical junctures, the less important are the antecedent ideas and institutions in conditioning

political behavior and determining policy outcomes, and the greater the role of con- tingency and individual idiosyncrasy. During these periods either newly constituted or pre-existing coalitions compete to gain control over governing institutions, recognizing that in doing so they will be uniquely situated to recast the institutional and ideological bases of governing authority. These coalitions advance new or importantly reconfigured understandings of political peoplehood for the purpose of reconciling their divergent factions, and the importance of these narratives in constituting the coalition’s interests, strategies, and sense of purpose are especially important. As Stephen Hanson has shown in the case of the French critical juncture of 1870-1877, the greater the investment in ide- ological purpose, the more a party was able to coordinate its adherents, giving the most ideologically developed coalitions—the Legitimists and the Republicans—an outsized influence in shaping events (2010).47

The next stage is the period in which the specific ideas of peoplehood are consoli- dated, both behaviorally—in discourse and position taking—as well as through formal institutional design. The critical juncture sees a marked diminution in the predictability of others’ behavior—reflecting a abruptly declining importance of existing institutional arrangements and therefore a greater difficulty in generating stable expectations of oth- ers’ preferences and strategies. The consolidation period sees is the gradual working out of new expectations about behavior as the new institutional environment is explored and understood.

The third stage is the period of reinforcement, in which the ideas of peoplehood advanced by the coalition are relatively dominant and politics and policy largely reflects the constraints that they impose. This is not a static period, as there are likely to be processes of self-reinforcement and self-undermining occurring alongside each other. It is nonetheless more predictable in the bias of policy changes and the likely coalitions that form around the right to vote than during the critical juncture. As this period draws to a close, the processes of self-undermining become more prominent, and the cycle begins anew.

47_{Seven years might be stretching the concept of a critical juncture too far. It is more accurate to say} that (1) the remarkable slowness of the National Assembly in writing a constitution (which they never fully accomplished) made the entire period something of an exceptional outlier in how long a critical juncture might be, and (2) there was a succession of critical junctures between 1870 and 1877, from the Government of National Defense to theSeize Mai Crisis.