Annual Review of Political Science - Volume 2, 1999

This article analyzes American democracy from a European perspective. It argues that American democracy (like European democracies) is based on antinomies, two societal and two institutional, deeply rooted in American constitutional development. Thus, each time American democracy has been used as a model and exported, the attempt has ended in failure. An antinomic model can be studied but not imitated. The article concludes that what is interesting for non-Americans is the way American democracy has historically dealt with these antinomies, more than the American model per se. The American method has to do with a peculiar constitutional structure that, having had the chance to institutionalize liberal principles, has tended to promote a positive-sum solution to those antinomies, in accord with individualistic values. Here resides the great divide between American and European constitutional structures; for opposite reasons, the European constitutional structure tends to promote a zero-sum solution to similar antinomies, in agreement with collectivistic values. In both structures, something important may be lost—private freedom in the latter and public good in the former. Could a reciprocal constitutional learning process allow both sides to learn the missing side of the story?

Contemporary policy analysis of the governance of common-pool resources is based on three core assumptions: (a) resource users are norm-free maximizers of immediate gains, who will not cooperate to overcome the commons dilemmas they face; (b) designing rules to change incentives of participants is a relatively simple analytical task; and (c) organization itself requires central direction. The chapter shows that these assumptions are a poor foundation for policy analysis. Findings from carefully controlled laboratory experiments that challenge the first assumption are summarized. A different assumption that humans are fallible, boundedly rational, and norm-using is adopted. The complexity of using rules as tools to change the structure of commons dilemmas is then discussed, drawing on extensive research on rules in field settings. Viewing all policies as experiments with a probability of failure, recent research on a different form of general organization—that of complex adaptive systems—is applied to the process of changing rules. The last sections examine the capabilities and limits of a series of completely independent resource governance systems and the importance of encouraging the evolution of polycentric governance systems.

Prominent scholars engaged in comparative research on democratic regimes are in sharp disagreement over the choice between a dichotomous or graded approach to the distinction between democracy and nondemocracy. This choice is substantively important because it affects the findings of empirical research. It is methodologically important because it raises basic issues, faced by both qualitative and quantitative analysts, concerning appropriate standards for justifying choices about concepts. In our view, generic claims that the concept of democracy should inherently be treated as dichotomous or graded are incomplete. The burden of demonstration should instead rest on more specific arguments linked to the goals of research. We thus take the pragmatic position that how scholars understand and operationalize a concept can and should depend in part on what they are going to do with it. We consider justifications focused on the conceptualization of democratization as an event, the conceptual requirements for analyzing subtypes of democracy, the empirical distribution of cases, normative evaluation, the idea of regimes as bounded wholes, and the goal of achieving sharper analytic differentiation.