Outcomes of Democracy: Class 10 Civics · Chapter 5

Your report card at the end of the year does not give you one mark for being a good student. It grades you subject by subject, and a top score in one subject does not hide a weak score in another. In this chapter we write a report card for democracy in the same way.

The first four chapters of this book looked at particular parts of democracy: sharing power, federalism, social divisions and political parties. Now we step back and ask the larger questions. What can we expect democracy to deliver? Does it deliver it? We first settle how to judge democracy, and then grade it in five subjects:

1. The quality of government: is it accountable, responsive and legitimate?
2. Economic growth and development
3. Reducing inequality and poverty
4. Living together with social differences
5. The dignity and freedom of citizens

5.1 How do we assess democracy's outcomes?

In Class 9 (What is Democracy? Why Democracy?) you compared democracy with other ways of ruling a country and found good reasons to prefer it. In short, democracy:

• treats every citizen as an equal;
• respects each person's self-respect and worth;
• makes better decisions, because many people discuss them;
• gives a peaceful way to settle disagreements; and
• leaves room to spot mistakes and fix them.

Those reasons describe democracy at its best. Now run a quick survey at home or in class. Hardly anyone will want to give up elections for rule by a monarch, the army or religious leaders. Ask the same people how satisfied they are with democracy as it actually works around them, though, and the complaints pour out. Democracy wins easy approval as an idea but mixed reviews in practice.

This gap forces us to ask why we value democracy. Is the reason only moral, because people ought to govern themselves? Or are there also prudential (practical) reasons, because democracy actually produces better results? To answer, we have to examine what democracies achieve.

Picture two democracies: a small, wealthy country whose institutions are centuries old, and a vast, young republic where many people are poor. Both have a constitution, hold elections, allow parties and promise rights, as do more than a hundred countries today. Yet nobody would expect them to show the same results. The fair test is narrower: which outcomes should follow from democracy itself, whatever a country's size, wealth or culture?

Think of a well-equipped school. Classrooms, a library and trained teachers create the conditions for learning, but a student who never opens a book will not learn. Democracy works in a similar way. It is a form of government, a method of choosing rulers and making decisions. It provides conditions such as free elections, rights and open debate, and citizens must use them to reach their goals (Fig. 5.1). Expecting democracy to fix everything from unemployment to potholes, and then blaming it, or doubting that we live in a democracy at all, misreads what a form of government can do.

5.2 Accountable, responsive and legitimate government

Start with the outcome that matters most. In a democracy people pick their rulers, keep a check on them and, where they can, join in decisions. In return, the first thing they should get is a government that answers to them and pays attention to what they need. Two words sum this up: accountable (जवाबदेह) and responsive.

5.2.1 Slow but accepted

Before testing accountability, we meet a common objection: democracy is slow. A ruler in a dictatorship answers to no elected assembly, no opposition and no public opinion, so he can announce a decision in the morning and enforce it by evening. A democracy has to discuss, bargain and vote first. This process of deliberation takes time. Does it make democracy inefficient?

Speed is not the only measure, though. An overnight order may be one that people neither understand nor accept. They resist it, ignore it or challenge it in court, and the ruler must either force it through or quietly drop it. A proposal that has been through debate has already heard objections and been changed to meet some of them. People are therefore more willing to accept it and carry it out (Fig. 5.2). The time democracy spends on procedure is a real cost, but often one worth paying.

There is a second gain, best seen through an example. Suppose a town council gives a school-building contract to a company. In a democracy, decisions like this must follow written rules. So any resident can ask to see the bids and the minutes of the meeting, and check who proposed the deal and who signed off. This openness is called transparency (पारदर्शिता). Governments that answer to nobody usually keep such papers secret.

5.2.2 What to look for

How would you check whether a particular democracy delivers this? Look for the channels through which people watch, question and influence those in power. Three are essential:

• elections held on time, freely and fairly;
• public discussion of big policies and new laws before they are decided;
• a legal right for citizens to see information about what the government does.

Together these make a loop of accountability (Fig. 5.3). In India the third practice is backed by law. The Right to Information (RTI) Act, 2005, in force since 12 October 2005, lets any citizen ask a public office for information it holds.

5.2.3 How democracies score

How do real democracies score on these tests? The answer is a mixed report card (Democracy's record on government). Elections and debate are their strong subjects. Fairness for every candidate, discussion of every big decision and openness with information are weaker ones. Even so, on every one of these tests a democracy scores higher than a government that holds no free elections at all.

Procedures are only half the story; we also judge a government by what it delivers. Ideally a democratic government would notice what people need and would not misuse public money. In practice, people in many democracies wait years for basic services, and cases of corruption make news in every democracy. Yet the comparison still matters. Nothing shows that governments without elections are cleaner or more caring; they are simply harder to question.

5.2.4 Legitimate government

Now the good news. Imagine that your candidate loses an election. You may be disappointed, but you still accept that the winner has the right to govern, because the result came from a process everyone agreed to. A government accepted in this way is legitimate (वैध), and here democracy is certainly ahead of every alternative. A democratic government can be slow, clumsy, deaf to some complaints and even corrupt, yet people still see it as theirs. This is why, across the world, people back the idea of democracy even while they grumble about how it works. That democracy can win and keep its people's support is itself an important outcome.

5.3 Economic growth and development

Good government is one thing; prosperity is another. Many people assume that a country with free elections will also grow rich faster. Does the evidence support that hope? Only partly.

The best-known evidence comes from four political scientists, Adam Przeworski, Michael Alvarez, José Antonio Cheibub and Fernando Limongi, who compared 135 countries from 1950 to 1990 in Democracy and Development (2000). On average, a country's total income grew a little faster under dictatorship, by about 4.4% a year against about 4.0% under democracy (Fig. 5.4). Your textbook's table reports this finding as economic growth rates and labels the period 1950–2000.

The same study adds two findings that change the picture. Populations grew faster under dictatorships, so income per person actually rose faster under democracies. And when only poor countries are compared, the growth rates of the two kinds of regime are almost identical. The gap, small to begin with, nearly disappears where it would matter most.

Should slower total growth make us give up on democracy? Not on this evidence. As you learn in Economics, how fast a country develops depends on many things besides its form of government. Its population, the state of the world economy, trade and help from other countries, and the economic priorities it chooses all play a part (Fig. 5.5).

Putting it together: democracy does not promise economic development, though we can fairly expect it to keep pace with dictatorships. Since the difference in growth is so small, democracy's other advantages tip the balance clearly in its favour.

5.4 Reduction of inequality and poverty

Growth tells us how big the national cake becomes. A sharper test for democracy may be how the cake is shared. When a democracy grows richer, does everyone gain, or only some? Do the poor get a fair share of income, jobs and schooling?

Look at Fig. 5.6. On polling day, the poorest fifth of Brazil's people and the richest fifth have exactly the same say: one adult, one vote, whether a factory owner or a farm worker. This is political equality, and every democracy rests on it. On payday the picture flips. The richest fifth takes home more than half of the country's income, the poorest fifth less than 4%. Gaps like this, called economic inequality (आर्थिक असमानता), have widened in many countries, with a thin layer at the very top gaining most. For families at the bottom, meeting basic needs such as food, clothes, a home, schooling and health care can be a daily struggle.

How unequal a democracy is varies a great deal from country to country (Fig. 5.7). In South Africa and Brazil the richest fifth of the population receives more than half of all income, while the poorest fifth gets less than 4%. In Norway and Slovenia the gap is far narrower. Your textbook's older table makes the same point with earlier figures, when the richest fifth in South Africa and Brazil received more than 60%. All six countries hold free elections, so democracy by itself does not decide how equal a society becomes.

So on this subject democracy's grade is low: on the whole, democracies have not done well at narrowing economic gaps. There is a puzzle here, which links with Poverty as a Challenge in Class 9 Economics. In India poor people are a huge share of voters, and every party wants their votes. Yet critics argue that elected governments have often treated poverty as less urgent than those numbers would suggest. Elsewhere the picture can be bleaker: some of the poorest countries rely on richer ones even for food.

5.5 Accommodation of social diversity

India has 22 languages listed in its Constitution, followers of all the world's major religions, and many castes and tribes. Can a democracy keep such a mix living together in peace? Chapter 1 (Power-sharing) showed one success: Belgium held together by sharing power between its Dutch- and French-speakers. Chapter 3 showed how social differences enter politics. The key is that democracies turn group rivalry into a contest with rules (elections, courts, negotiation), so tensions are less likely to turn violent.

Do not expect any system to end group conflicts for good; no society has managed that. The realistic hope is a society whose groups respect one another's differences and have agreed ways to bargain over them, and democracy is built for that kind of bargaining. Regimes without elections more often deny that their divisions exist, or crush any group that protests. That may buy quiet for a time while anger builds underneath. So handling social diversity peacefully counts as a clear plus on democracy's report card.

Sri Lanka's story, which you also met in Chapter 1, shows that this outcome is not automatic. A democracy accommodates diversity only if it meets two conditions:

1. Winning a vote is not the end of the matter. Those in the majority have to work with those in the minority, so that the government speaks for the country as a whole. Being in the minority on one issue does not mean being in it on the next.
2. Majorities must keep changing. Majority rule must never turn into permanent rule by one religion, race or language group. Each election and each decision should allow a different combination of people and groups to make up the majority.

A simple test follows (Fig. 5.8): can every citizen expect to be on the winning side sometimes? If the answer for some group is ‘never, because of the community they were born into’, then for that group democracy has stopped working as an accommodating system.

5.6 Dignity and freedom of the citizens

Think of a time someone spoke to you rudely at a counter, or brushed you aside because you were young. Being disrespected hurts, and many quarrels begin that way. Democracy is built on the opposite idea: every person deserves respect and freedom simply for being a person. This is the outcome where democracy is furthest ahead of every other form of government. All democracies accept the principle of dignity (गरिमा), though some have gone much further than others in practice.

Old habits make this hard: where some groups ranked above others for centuries, treating everyone as equal does not come naturally. Two examples show both the progress and the distance still to go (Fig. 5.9).

5.6.1 Dignity of women

Take a woman who is paid less than a man for the same work. In a democracy she can go to court, and the law is on her side; she can also argue in public that the practice is wrong, and many people will agree. This was not always so. Most societies were run by men for centuries, and women won equal treatment only after long struggles; even the vote came late in many democracies (see the timeline). Women still face disrespect and discrimination. The difference is that it is now illegal and widely seen as wrong, which makes it easier to fight. Under a government that does not recognise individual dignity, she would have no such legal ground to stand on.

5.6.2 Caste and equal status

Caste follows the same pattern. For centuries some castes were kept out of temples, wells and schools. Today the Constitution abolishes untouchability (Article 17). Two laws, the Protection of Civil Rights Act, 1955 and the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, make caste discrimination and violence crimes. Discrimination and atrocities still happen, as Chapter 3 showed. But a person who suffers them can now point to the law and to public morality, both on their side. Knowing that equal standing is theirs by right is one reason why ordinary people, especially from groups once kept down, value democracy so much.

5.6.3 An examination that never ends

Every outcome in this chapter is also a yardstick: you can hold any democracy up against it. And unlike your exams, democracy's tests never finish. Clear one hurdle and people raise the next: once villages get roads, they ask for buses; once children are in school, parents demand better teachers. You sit your board exams once, set by a few examiners. A democracy sits exams every year, and its examiners are millions of citizens.

Listen to any tea-stall conversation about government and you will hear complaints about roads, prices, delays and corruption. That noise is good news. People grumble because they know their rights, expect things from those in power and are not afraid to say so. A subject, who only obeys, does not complain about rulers; a citizen (नागरिक) does (Fig. 5.10). Surveys add that most people believe their vote matters to how they are governed (see the activity below).