19
key themes of this paper: the effect of economic development after the transition to
democracy is not to merely stabilize democracy but to also keep it evolving. This is the
point that has escaped the thoughts of many scholars. A thing stabilizes if it does not
change; if it does change, it is developing or evolving. Democracy is a continuous or an
open-ended concept.
While several scholars have argued that democracy is a continuous concept, they
usually and mainly refer to the political process that occurs between autocratic rule and
democratic transition (See Bollen, K., 1991; Gastil, R., 1991; Arat, Z., 1988; Gurr, T. and
K. Jaggers, 1995; Coppedge, M. and W. Reinicke, 1991; Vanhanen, T., 1997).
7
Dahl
(1971) in his earlier work suggested that democratic development could go beyond the
autocracy-democratic transition continuum and argued that current democracies or
polyarchies are only an approximation of the ideal democracy. However, Dahl’s
understanding and mine about the continuous nature of democracy are quite distinct. The
main reason that we do not have a more perfect democracy today is, according to Dahl
(and I agree), the presence of income inequality. Thus, to speed up the establishment of a
more equal democratic system, Dahl (1985), for instance, has prescribed for the
replacement of the current private enterprise economy by a system that allows employee-
ownership of firms. Dahl seems to imply that some form of political agreement and
action would bring about political equality. On the other hand, I assume that the major
driving forces for bringing about a more equal distribution of power are economic
7
Some scholars argue that political systems should not be considered continuos but dichotomous (see
Sartori, G., 1987; Alvarez, M. et al., 1996) or dichotomous and semi-dichotomous (Collier, D. and R.
Adcock, 1999).
Convention