Living By The Agreement

Political actors who subscribe to democratic rules may differ in their motives but have one thing in common: they have subscribed to the rules. This has implications for the chances of reviving breakdown games and for the quality of conflict in the new phase. Once the new democratic rules have been recognized—once the prospects of emerging from the transition with some more hybrid regime, most agreeable to some political actors but least to others, have been set aside (albeit for calculus)—those prospects, and with them the prospects of reviving breakdown games, should get dimmer and roundabout. The drama of impending failure should recede. This new phase is new because it imposes previously less significant constraints on the revival of breakdown games and new incentives to focus on the more constructive democratic game.

The first constraint is the very collectiveness of the agreement to adopt new rules—the decision whether to enter into or exit from the agreement is influenced by what other actors do about it. Just as reluctant actors may have reasons for being included in the agreement when support for it increases, so they also may have reasons (despite their inclination to reconsider) for not being the first ones to abandon it. A move to scuttle the agreement might eventually rescind it, or may isolate the perpetrators. It may leave them out of what is emerging as the only game in town. The more, therefore, the game goes on, and the more actors practice it, the more costly it seems not to play it. If nothing else, there may be no other or safer way of attending to one's interests. So, if Dahl's costs of tolerance and cooperation are of concern to some political actors before they consider the agreement, afterward it is the cost of intolerance and repression that should worry them more.

The behavior of Communist parties in postwar Western Europe aptly illustrates this process of behavioral adaptation to first choices, an adaptation to which the parties have at times consciously contributed. Undeniably, because it has nonetheless taken some time for the Communist parties to practice the game fully and without afterthoughts, the path of democratic development has shown idiosyncracies. But a mix of subjective reasons, motives, and calculations can be found in various degrees behind practically every existing democracy. Further, the mix of reasons is not only a mix of different actors but also a mix inside single actors.

Closely connected with the constraint just discussed, the new phase also offers inducements to move away from breakdown games. The more costly it becomes to exit from the agreement, the more the partners to the agreement, even reluctant ones, will be motivated to focus their attention on the actual operation of emerging rules and institutions.

Whatever reservations they may nurture, they will formulate them in the spirit of those rules and in view of what they promise. Thus the agreement will be progressively tested, with still some drama but with fewer actual risks, on democracy's own terms and within the democratic compromise. In this sense, too, a decision to revert to breakdown games requires justification of a special sort. In other words, measuring the agreement against institutional performance is a cause of uncertainty (of voice), but not one of necessary instability (of exit).^[4]

Another inducement to move away from breakdown games is that, in the new phase, the political actors and the political agenda change in ways that strengthen the relevance of democratic processes for both. In the first place, the political arena, which at first tends to be occupied by elites and selectively mobilized constituencies exploiting positional, legal, professional, charismatic, or military advantage, is now shared with social and political formations sensitive to electoral and mass appeals. In the second place, the political arena is now regulated by a set of democratic rules, therefore democratic state institutions also join in as a significant part, indeed the gatekeepers, of the arena. In the third place, the emergency tasks of the transition proper (the reestablishment of law and order, the removal of the dictatorship and its institutional residues, the search for a democratic agreement, the accommodation of vital corporate interests) are progressively overshadowed by activities concerned with group positioning, institutional routinization, and in sum the definition of how the democratic game is actually unfolding, how rules are working out, and how benefits are distributed. Thus, finally, the originally overloaded and cramped agenda gives way to a decisional process that is better timed, more normal, more informed, and more attentive to recognizable and socially sanctioned groups and institutions.

It is in good part because of these developments that the political actors' time perspectives on performance tend to become more relaxed, as we shall soon see, than they were during the transition. In the midst of the transition, when an agreement is still being sought, time seems to be of the essence, if not for all actors then at least for those who seek a democratic exit. Afterward, the justified desire to cut time short, or at least to set precise deadlines, tends to be replaced by an equally justified appreciation that, to prove itself, the agreement deserves and can afford more measured tempos in keeping with the typical give-and-take of the newly begun democratic process.

But the final and most important inducement to shift actors' attention toward the democratic game resides in what is special about its rules. Democratic rules are special in two ways. In the first place, political actors know that the rules do not concern themselves directly with outcomes, that agreeing on the rules is agreeing mostly on procedures and institutions, that each procedure and institution will impinge on outcomes only partially and probabilistically; in sum, political actors know that performance is not meant to mirror the agreement faithfully. That is why the process of entering into the agreement is surrounded by obstinate jockeying and wrangling. But that is also why, once the agreement is reached, the discovery that outcomes may occasionally vary from what the agreed-upon rules may have led one to expect should not engender necessary dismay and rejection. The agreement could still endure and thus continue to gather support.

In turn, democratic rules justify and reward patience. And this is the second way in which such rules are special. Plainly, they open the political arena to participation and the airing of political demands, they process demands through various institutions (rather than make them fall on one dictator, one

junta, one party), they let public opinion register disagreement by voting out the government rather than overthrowing the regime. If these political practices contribute to a climate of apparent political instability and democratic irresoluteness, they also function as safety valves defusing resentment and dispersing its targets. In fact, they do more. By distributing decisions among various institutions, the new practices call for a mixture of repetitive conflict-and-cooperation games.

The mixture, the availability of multiple decisional channels, and the opportunity to adjust and repeat decisions all improve the chances of producing decisional equity—or, perhaps more important, they increase the perception that such chances exist. Closely in keeping with the perception is the propensity to base the assessment of democratic performance on something broader and more elastic than the satisfaction of individual demands.^[5] Because democratic decisions emerge out of aggregation, elimination, reformulation, deferment, give-and-take, the mixture of conflict and cooperation that often surrounds these processes is not only about which demands should be entertained and which deferred but also about how the processes should be conducted, what role the contestants located in and out of government should play, what symbolic or tangible side-rewards the losers should reap. It is the conduct of processes, as much as their outcomes, that actors will focus on in order to evaluate performance. Thus their evaluation will be broad and encompassing, both with respect to the evidence it relies on and the time span it covers. Once again, with this span the democratic agreement can continue to gather support.

There are unmistakable problems of habituation to the new tempos of democracy, as there are problems with its give-and-take. Scholars are often impressed by dramatic cases of democratic collapse, such as Spain's second republic, Italy's

pre-Fascist democracy (1919–21), or the Weimar Republic, and cite them as evidence that many political actors remain unwilling to adopt a long-range perspective on democracy's achievements, that their impatience can converge even as they may oppose each other, and that therefore democracy, with its moderate-to-reformist perspectives, can prove itself inadequate. But, before drawing such conclusions, we should take equal note of those cases where reformist perspectives prevailed.^[6] These cases are often rather uneventful, and their diminished newsworthiness does not invite attention. In the folds of nonevents (or of deceptive events), we may yet discover that the new tempos demanded by democracy are well understood by those who have already entered into the agreement.

In fact, sensitivity to the investment made by entering into the agreement and reluctance to scuttle the democratic experiment prematurely are not always uneventful achievements. At times their presence is brought to light by salient episodes that, at first, suggest quite a different turn of events. I have in mind episodes, such as an attempted coup, that threaten the agreement, but by so doing may actually rally around the agreement the other political forces. The usual expectation, well illustrated by the denouement of the second Spanish republic, is that such episodes of destabilization set in dramatic motion a spiral of escalating events. If, let us say, the military threatens a coup, then the popular sector will respond in kind and democratic moderates will waffle and backslide, triggering a polarization that reveals how weakly most actors are committed to the democratic game and how ineffective the game can be. Against this plausible scenario there stands, however, the fact that not all episodes of destabilization come out this way. But, again, these are precisely the episodes that are more easily forgotten because the drama is unfulfilled.

We should also not forget that, if a coup or any other destabilizing event has greater chances of succeeding before an agreement on the rules is reached, these chances should diminish afterward. In this sense, another episode from Spain's history, the attempted coup of 1981, proved in some fundamental ways ill-timed, in that, though it came at a moment of serious internal crisis of the centrist governing party, it also came well after a broad constitutional agreement had been reached. Thus the coup had the effect of strengthening democratic resolve in the government and all other significant actors. It can be argued that the coup lacked credibility and full military support to start with. But this is part of the point I wish to make. The emergence of an agreement on democratic rules (to which the military or some of its sectors may in fact have directly or indirectly contributed) should discourage, as a starter, new breakdown games, given their diminishing chances of support.

Indeed, the record of military coups against reconstituted democratic governments illustrates well why the governments are more resilient than generally expected. Many coups are threatened, not all threats are serious, and only some of the serious ones succeed. The reason is the military's traditional reluctance to engage in coup activities unless prodded by significant civilian constituencies in a context of spreading social and political disintegration. Without such prodding, military conspiracies can prove insubstantial and ineffective.^[7] Such may be the case if conspiracies resurface after a properly constituted democratic government is in place; then, the conspiracies not only may rekindle democratic support even among reluctant popular sectors but may also find little response among the military itself and its old civilian allies.

In sum, the investment placed in democracy by entering into the agreement may, to be sure, invite disenchantment

later on, as has happened even in the most successful of recent democratizations. Also, little will go without turmoil in the processes I have been describing. Because the agreement is in many ways a means to an end, and for many actors a second-best option, political actors will try to bend it in their favor, using performance as a basis for their claims. It is therefore naive to expect that political actors who managed to reach rule agreement through much struggle will suddenly convert to peaceful, orderly, and uneventful politics. Rather, the task of maintaining the agreement will still be accompanied by its own share of confrontation, tension, and animosity—a target of which is performance. Yet a charged political atmosphere, just like signs of disenchantment, should not be confused with an impending crisis of the agreement, or with what we may classically call a crisis of both performance and legitimacy. Such an atmosphere is indeed common to practically all new democracies and should be kept separate from accomplishments. The expectations vested in the agreement may produce later disenchantment, but they also counsel prudence before scuttling the agreement as defective.

Peter McDonough, Samuel Barnes, and Antonio López Pina have reported recently that Spaniards who show sympathy for the Franco regime are not necessarily averse to the new democracy. Spaniards in general look at the two regimes as distinct experiences, the more so as time goes by, and judge them on the basis of different clusters of orientations toward government.^[8] The opinion data were collected following the conclusion of the Spanish constitutional process and during a period that covered an attempted coup as well as the advent of a new Socialist government. The fact that, at least in Spain, attitudes toward the past did not hold the key to the present fits well with the thrust of our argument.

Political actors may respond to democracy, or to specific

democratic institutions and accomplishments, on their own terms—or indeed in view of the times within which a new democracy happens to fall: times of prosperity, of international support for democracy, or of lowering expectations (or their opposite). Nor does adjustment to democracy demand extended attitudinal change so that feelings toward the old dictatorship be made more consonant with feelings toward the new democracy. Even as feelings remain dissonant, I wish to suggest that—if democracy or the times have indeed made the past, past—lingering nostalgia, while cushioning those who have deserted the past, may prove to be a less than forceful guide to present behavior.

There is a note of caution in the conditional form of the last statement. Making sure that the past is past, irrelevant, and obsolete—and, similarly, making sure that the temptation to try new forms of dictatorship or guided democracy remains inoperative—is in good part the task of democratic government. Nothing I have said so far invites democratic governments to be complacent. Despite the great importance assigned to the presence of a democratic agreement, nothing ensures that democratic governments will avoid excessive complacence, boldness, or fear. It is still possible that, by their mistakes, governments will set in motion a breakdown spiral that other political actors will exploit. The cumulation of unresolved issues, especially if a new democracy has a limited capacity to address them forcefully or without sacrifices, must be a matter of constant monitoring by democratic governments.

This is not just because democratic leaders would know the real extent of the threat only after the facts but especially because (whether or not the threat exists, whether or not public opinion has a case against government) good governance, as finally judged by public opinion, is what democratic government is all about. For all the leeway tolerated

in performance, for all the starting credit democratic government may enjoy, for all the benefits it may draw from international support or the temper of the times, for all the psychological investment involved in the original agreement, democratic consent is also a reflection of performance, and democracies seek to renew that consent.

This section has listed some of the reasons why, as democracy moves beyond transition, political actors may be led to stay in the game and renew their consent. With performance in mind, I now wish to pursue one of the reasons in greater detail.