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A Primary/Secondary Democracy Distinction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Herbert H. Werlin
Herbert H. Werlin*
Affiliation:
Independent Consultant
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Extract

Just as sportsmanship is essential for competitive sports, statesmanship is necessary for competitive democracy. This obvious assertion, which I followed with a distinction between primary and secondary democracy, was greeted with some misunderstanding when it was presented at a 1993 American Political Science Association workshop on democratization headed by Gabriel Almond. Because this distinction appears to be controversial, let me defend it here as a way to overcome some of the quandaries found in the literature on democracy; to link democracy to development; and to suggest more fruitful approaches to encouraging democracy than elections.

Professor Almond's response to my primary/secondary democracy distinction was to point out that those participating in his workshop had used a definition of democracy presented by Dahl (1971) in his book on polyarchy, emphasizing two dimensions: widespread participation and contestation (including competition and conflict). This seems to me a one-sided definition (focusing almost exclusively on what I call “primary democracy”), leaving out the aspects emerging from secondary democracy: a mutual respect among competing groups and between leaders and followers and consensus on governmental goals and procedures.

Without secondary democracy, primary democracy tends to be meaningless, much like an Olympics without the necessary conditions for sporting events and rules for participating, competing, and officiating. Another way of making the distinction here presented would be the “two ideals of democracy” suggested by Mansbridge (1991, 7): “one based on conflict, the other on commonality.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 27 , Issue 3 , September 1994 , pp. 530 - 534
Copyright
Copyright © The American Political Science Association 1994

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