Paths to Polyarchy: Revisiting Dahl's Insights for Contemporary Research

One of the contributions of Polyarchy was to frame successful democratization as dependent upon the timing of contestation and participation (Dahl 1971). Dahl’s use of the concepts made them rather ambiguous, however, making it difficult to pin down exactly how political competition and inclusion affect democracy and which aspects of democracy they should affect. Authors who have empirically tested Dahl’s arguments overlooked important qualifiers that Dahl pointed out—that exclusive elections may be important for developing tolerance and commitments between elites, and that expanded electorates were often mobilized through mass-based party organizations. This paper argues that the general intuition of Dahl was correct, but that comparing the effects of contestation and participation ought to focus on the role of political parties and election constraints. As electoral authoritarian regimes have demonstrated, the institutionalization of parties can be as obstructive to democracy as it can be helpful. Thus, testing Polyarchy requires distinguishing between the need to establish mutual security between actors and the effects of unconstrained group-based activity. The paper overviews corroborating evidence that non-party and elite-dominated elections historically preceded mass-based party, and that this pattern may be positively related to the establishment of democracy. Subsequently, it uses data from the Varieties of Democracy Project to test the impacts of different proxies for contestation and participation on a sample of roughly 200 countries between 1789 and 2017. The value of revisiting the ideas in Polyarchy and honing the concepts of contestation and participation comes from developing a set of testable questions that can advance research on democratization and statebuilding by combining insights from the literature on authoritarian institutions. The research question embodies many of the themes of the workshop, which concerns the ‘precociousness’ of democratization in weak states and the potential impacts of expanded political participation.