Twentieth-Century Democracy and Its Social Base

Abstract

We start with the two benchmark criteria of democracy set by Robert Dahl and Edward Tufle, those of citizen effectiveness and of system capacity We outline the then (mid-twentieth century) authoritative arguments about how citizen effectiveness is attained in modern democracies through an appropriate political culture (the civic culture), social cohesion (through social capital) and political cohesion (through imagined communities in the form of national identities) as shaped by the then prevailing communication technologies (mostly print media). These conditions for democracy are then contrasted with those of mass societies, the conditions for mobilising people into totalitarian regimes. In the latter part of the chapter we present two of the major challenges to the established wisdom about the social and economic conditions (what we refer to here as the social base) for democracy. The first is the so-called transition paradigm; the second is a function of yet new technology, first television and then the Internet.