Travelling Concepts of Democracy: Positivist and Interpretivist Methodologies

Sartori draws our attention to the travelling problem of comparative politics in an era of vast expansion of politics and the increasing diversity of political systems. Democracy is a highly contested concept in terms of its multi-dimensional character as well as internal tensions between its components. As Sartori suggests, in their attempt to grasp how concepts of democracy travel the wider world, Western scholars would find it hard to radically depart from the vocabulary of politics based on millennia long experience. His concern about ‘conceptual stretching’ stems from the positivist claims of universality and objectivity. The Sartori tradition of concept reconstruction offers terminological innovations such as ‘ladder of abstraction’, ‘diminished subtypes’, and ‘three-level concepts’ in order to face the challenge. In contrast to concept reconstruction that corrects everyday usage of terms, interpretivist concept elucidation investigates how concepts of democracy help constitute social reality and how they reflect relations of power. Elucidative methods of ‘locating’ and ‘exposing’ guide us in deciding how far, and how we can travel with the help of the available vocabulary of democracy. This paper compares how positivist and interpretivist methodologies deal with the issue of travelling concepts in non-Western contexts and examines the possibility of a constructive dialogue between them. Firstly, it describes two methodologies by focusing on the guides provided by Goertz, who has made major contributions to the Sartori tradition, and by Schaffer, whose powerful guide of elucidation allows social scientists to apply interpretivist methodology. Goertz argues that complex concepts are based on three levels: Basic level (ontology about the disease), secondary level (constitutive elements, internal “causes”), and indicator level (the symptoms). The indicator level connects the theoretical analysis in the basic and secondary levels to empirical practice. In other words, the components of democracy at the indicator level demonstrate how concepts adapt to non-Western contexts. The term ‘equifinality’ refers to multiple paths to a given goal. Schaffer’s elucidative ‘locating’ explores the linguistic and historical particularity of a concept, while ‘exposing’ sheds light on the power politics behind a concept. Secondly, this study applies these guides on concepts of democracy with the aim to establish a dialogue between two methodologies. It argues that informal institutions help us understand how concepts of democracy are vernacularized. Non-Western contexts include a wide array of cases ranging from gender democracy in Sub-Saharan Africa to the Mexican concertacesiones, to state-nations in India, and to factionalism in Taiwan. It elucidates the indicator level components of democracy by locating family resemblances across contexts and paying attention to historicity and use of the term. It elucidates concepts as instruments of power. Therefore, the institutional context of a concept will be exposed by asking a) how institutions create the conditions for designating particular names for different phenomena, b) how concepts of democracy are reframed by affecting the roles, relationships and expectations invoked by using a particular word or phrase. This paper argues that both methodologies can benefit from a dialogue that addresses universality and normativity. Some terms should be translated and not elucidated.