6.

Political geography of democracy

The discussion of states and citizenship in the previous chapters demonstrated that
states are powerful political institutions in the capitalist world-economy and indi - viduals and
groups exercise politics to gain access to, and benefits from, the state. Political geography
tradi - tionally engaged the questions of access to the state by study of elections. Indeed,
electoral geography has been a prolific component of political geography. However, focusing
upon elections as the primary process of democratic politics creates a number of problems.
First, elections are only partially successful in connect - ing individuals to the state. The
agendas offered by political parties represent only a fraction of political options and ideology,
and voters’ concerns are often mangled through the wheeling and dealing of the legislative
process. Second, elections have been limited to particular geographical-historical contexts in
the capitalist world-economy. They are predominantly features of the core and other forms of
politics are more likely in the semi-periphery and periphery. Third, by focusing upon elections
to gain access to the state, political geographers have not only reinforced a corecentric focus
but also gone along with the assump - tions that states equal society. What is needed is
placing state-based elections within the structure of the worldeconomy. Finally, an exclusive
focus on elections ignores other forms of democratic behaviour, namely the right to protest,
demonstrate and affect change through social organization. Hence, attention needs to be
given to the political geography of social movements.
At a time when the spread of democratic practices across the world provides some hope
for humanizing globalization, political geography can contribute to debates on
democratization and to act as an empirical vehicle to make ‘theoretical connections between
the actions of voters within localities and global flows and structures’ (Flint 2002: 395).
However, such processes are strongly tied to practices of war (military invasion is justified by
the dubious claim that it aids in the diffusion of democracy) and the structure of the capitalist
world-economy. Hence, the need for some serious rethinking of electoral geography. A
renaming of the topic is, perhaps, necessary. Rather than the restrictive focus of electoral
geography we need to study the geography of the ‘politics of dem - ocracy’ (Low 2008). In
this chapter we offer one way in addressing the political geography of democracy through,
primarily, a world-systems framework.
We begin by noting the geography of elections and their tendency to be features of the
core of the capitalist world-economy, and address how this leads to acautionary approach to
current proclamations of a new wave of democratization. We then offer a worldsystems
explanation of the core-periphery geography of elections, a framework that explains the
different political geography of elections in both core and periphery. We treat liberal
democracy as a particular political process that developed through conflicts specifically in
core countries from the nineteenth century to the present. In contrast, we define elections in
the periphery as ‘the politics of failure’. Parties in the periphery are unable to construct
lasting and viable constituencies of support because of the lack of resources that parties in
power can award to supporters.
Our analysis of elections in the core and the periphery illustrate that elections and
democratization are by no means a perfect mechanism for offering representation to
citizens. Rather they are a negotiated form of politics that offers better repre - sentation and
access to the state for some groups relative to others. Elections are a form of politics that,
though still an expression of power, tend to provide a better politics of democracy in the core
than the periphery. Hence, it is not surprising that other types of politics are mobilized as part
of citizenship, or democratic, rights. In the last section of the chapter we intro-duce a political
geography of social move - ments. Social movements provide interesting political
geographies as they are not so tied to the territorial limits of states. Though built within
particular placespecific contexts, social movements engage in a politics of scale that has the
potential to engage the scale of reality rather than being trapped in the state, the scale of
ideology.

Chapter framework The chapter relates the empirical analysis of elections to the following
components of political geography that we introduced in the Prologue: • voting is
conceptualized within a model of liberal social democracy; • the geography of liberal social
democracy is understood within the persistent and spatial differences of the capitalist world-
economy; • the individual act of voting is understood within the related scales of local
context, nation-state political systems, and the capitalist world-economy; • the politics of
democracy is situated within the larger whole of global politics; • social movements are
situated within the politics of place and the larger whole of the capitalist world-economy.

Where in the world is liberal democracy?

Democratization, as an ideal and a practice, continues to dominate contemporary
geopolitics. The purpose of military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan has been promoted
as creating the circumstances for democracy to flourish. On the other hand, states such as
North Korea are identified as being dangerous partly because of their lack of democracy.
Underlying all these representations is an implicit belief that all states can, if they so wish,
become democratic – perhaps with a little assistance from the military might of the United
States. In this sense, democracy and democratization are conceptualised through the
dominant lens of social science: processes of democracy are seen to operate simply within
state boundaries and there is a developmental path that states may follow to become
democratic. From a world-systems perspective this state-society and developmentalist
approach is false. The geography of democracy is not a function of will or ability of particular
states, rather it is their situation within the core-periphery hierarchy of the capitalist
worldeconomy that is crucial.
Over 30 years ago, Coulter (1975) endeavoured to analyse the broad pattern or existence
of liberal democracy in the world by measuring degrees of liberal democracy across 85
states. He identified three aspects of liberal democracy – political competitiveness, political
participation and public liberties – and combined them into a single index (Coulter 1975: 1–
3). Multi-party elections, voter participation and freedom of group oppositions were all
elements of this index, so it effectively measured the variations in the degree of importance
of elections in determining governments. Variations in liberal democracy for the period
1946–66 are shown in Figure 6.1.
But what explains whether a country is liberal democratic or not? Coulter used existing
explanations that made a connection between social mobilization and democracy (Deutsch
1961). Deutsch thought that the mobilization of people out of traditional patterns of life and
into new values and behaviours enabled the development of democracy. This occurs to the
extent that a population is urbanized, is literate, is exposed to mass media, is employed in
non-primary occupations and is relatively affluent. We can see that even though this
approach is about 50 years old the assumptions remain very strong, and are at the heart of
US rhetoric in the War on Terror. Using these ideas Coulter carried out a statistical analysis
to see if there was a strong relationship between social mobilization and liberal democracy
(Figure 6.2a). In this way Coulter has been able to show that liberal democracy can be
statistically accounted for, in large measure, by the indices of social mobilization. The linear
analysis posits that the more social mobilization, or more generally modernization, there was
in a country the greater the level of liberal democracy.

Two interpretations of a relationship

However, such analysis is a classic use of the statesociety and developmentalist
assumptions we challenged in Chapter 2. For Coulter, and Deutsch, the scope of the
processes that they analysed were trapped or restricted within the borders of individual
states. Hence, each dot in Figure 6.2 represents one country, treated in isolation, that has
either high or low levels of social mobilization and that is seen to influence the level of
democracy. Figure 6.2(a) shows the basic trend line, whereby an increase in social
mobilization is associated with an increase in liberal democracy, and also Coulter’s
interpretation of his results. All countries that lie close to the trend line are termed optimally
democratized. By this he means that the level of liberal democracy in these countries is
about as high as would be expected on the basis of their social mobilization. By using the
term ‘optimal’, he implies that politics in these countries is correctly adjusted to their social
situation. Among this group we find all the Western European states, as we might expect,
but Haiti and South Africa are also designated optimally democratized, despite their
repressive regimes at this time. Countries that lie below the optimally democratized band in
Figure 6.2(a) are designated under-democratized, indicating a lower level of liberal
democracy than would be expected on the basis of social mobilization. Such countries
include Spain and Portugal, so we might be tempted to argue that the democratic revolutions
in these two countries after 1966 represent a move to conform with Deutsch’s model of
political development. Countries lying above the middle band are designated over-
democratized, since they have ‘more’ liberal democracy than their social mobilization would
warrant. These include Greece, Uganda and Chile, and we may interpret moves against
liberal democracy after 1966 by the Greek colonels, Idi Amin and General Augusto Pinochet
to produce murderous regimes as similarly contributing to their countries’ conforming to
Deutsch’s model.
Perhaps the most surprising result of this analysis is that Coulter (1975) finds – in 1966,
remember, in the middle of the Cold War – the Soviet Union to be optimally democratized
and the United States to be under-democratized. This is counter to our ex - pectations,
although it does not mean that the Soviet Union was more liberal than the United States but
simply that, relative to their respective levels of social mobilization, the Soviet Union scored
higher on liberal democracy. However, these results must make us wonder about the model.
Either the measurements are unsatisfactory or the structure of the model is incorrect. We
argue here that both are at fault. In Figure 6.2(b), the same scatter of points is presented in
a completely different way. Instead of concentrating on a trend line, we identify two clusters
of points, one defined by a vertical oval and the other by a horizontal oval. They represent
separate, non-overlapping levels of social mobilization. But as we have seen, the most
important component of social mobilization is economic development. We shall, therefore,
interpret these two distinct levels of ‘social mobilization’ as representing economic core and
peripheral processes. Now the scatter of points begins to make some sense. All core
countries experience liberal democracy. In peripheral countries there is a wide range of
political systems, showing many different levels of liberal democracy. This will depend upon
the nature of the peripheral state, as discussed in Chapter 5.
This interpretation makes much more sense than Coulter’s global model. It is entirely
consistent with our world-systems framework in its emphasis upon two different sets of
processes operating in the worldeconomy. The world-systems interpretation is, again, more
insightful than a developmental model, that in this case sees countries on an ‘optimal path to
political development’. Quite simply, politics do not develop separately country by country
but are all part of a larger unfolding system of political economy.
Coulter’s analysis was conducted in the middle of a geopolitical world order that no longer
exists, the Cold War. Hence, it is necessary to see if the broad patterns of liberal democracy
identified then remain. The post-Cold War period was seen as a geopolitical moment that
was the culmination of competition between different political ideologies. Simply put, the end
of the Cold War was interpreted as the victory of liberal democracy over all other forms of
political organization (Communism and fascism, primarily (Fukuyama 1992)). But was this
simply geopolitical grand-standing by the victors, or was a new era of democratization
fundamentally altering the core-periphery geography we identified in our interpretation of
Figure 6.2?

A new geography of democratization?

There is no doubt that the end of the Cold War has given a world-political stimulus to
‘democracy’ in regions beyond the core. This has been both ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’:
there have been genuine uprisings of peoples in the third world demanding ‘people power’
as well as core governments imposing the condition of multi-party democracy before
dispensing economic aid. Both of these factors have led to a spread of competitive electoral
politics, especially in Africa. From our world-systems interpretation it will be understood that
we expect these to be transient, democratic interludes only. Empirical analysis tends to
confirm our theoretical scepticism. O’Loughlin et al. (1998) conducted a broad study of the
diffusion of democracy from 1946 to 1994 and found that about 60 per cent of countries can
now be classified as democracies, compared with 28 per cent in 1950. However, these
aggregate statistics do not represent a smooth and uniform trend towards the
democratization of the globe. There is a distinct regionalization of democracies and
autocracies, with similar political systems clustering next to each other. Also, there have
been spurts of democratization followed by periods of reversal as some of the newly
democratic countries reverted to autocracy (Huntington 1991; O’Loughlin et al. 1998). The
clustering of democratization in time and space is consistent with our materialist explanation
of the geography of democracy. The structure and dynamics of the world-system provide
limited opportunity for the expansion of democracy. However, we should not thereby simply
disregard the slow spread of elections, rather we need to examine whether this is actually an
expansion of democratic practices.
Figure 6.3 maps the distribution of democracies for three snapshots since 1946
(O’Loughlin et al. 1998). These maps illustrate the instances of decolonization during
Kondratieff IVA, spurred on by the hegemonic ideology of the United States, and the
increase in the number of countries classified as strongly democratic. However, the
existence of reversals towards autocracy should also be noted: India and Venezuela
between 1972 and 1994; Egypt, Turkey and Brazil between 1950 and 1972; and Indonesia
between 1950 and 1972, for example. The recent trend towards an increase in the level of
democracy in the world-system is further illustrated by calculating the mean democracy
score for all the years since 1946 (Table 6.1). Although the number of countries changes for
each year (O’Loughlin et al. did not include colonies in their calculations), it is clear that the
level of democracy fell to a low of –2.40 in 1977 and then increased to a high of 2.98 in
1994. The fall in the 1960s is a function of the inclusion of newly independent African
countries and their turn towards autocracy after independence – what we identify as the
politics of failure below.
Despite the overarching picture of a trend towards democracy, further analysis raises
doubts about the sustainability of some democratic countries. Figure 6.4 maps the
regionalization of democracies and autocracies. For each country, a statistic is calculated
that measures the extent to which it is surrounded by countries with similar democracy
scores. For example, a high positive score is obtained if a democratic country has other
democracies as neighbours, while a country obtains a high negative score if it is an
autocracy surrounded by other autocracies. Low scores are given to countries if they are
democracies surrounded by autocracies or autocracies surrounded by democracies. Figure
6.4 clearly shows the extent to which democracies and autocracies have been clustered into
particular regions. In 1950, only North America, Australasia and north-western Europe can
be treated as democratic regions, while the autocratic region was centred in communist
Eastern Europe and the Middle East. In 1972, the democratic region had not changed, but
the autocratic region now encompassed most of Africa. The communist countries and most
of South America were regions of moderate autocracy. By 1994, the democratic region had
spread to include all the Americas and Western and Southern Europe. The autocratic region
extends from southern Africa through the Middle East to central Asia and China.
O’Loughlin et al.’s mapping of the limited dif - fusion of democracy needs to be
accompanied by consideration of what is actually spreading: is the world becoming more
democratic because more countries are holding elections? Paul Collier (2009) certainly
believes that more elections have not led to a diffusion of democracy. Instead he claims that
autocratic dictators have displayed the ‘visible trap - pings of democracy’ (Collier 2009: 5)
rather than making substantial and lasting change. Many elections that are held in the poorer
countries of the world cannot be considered to be democracy as rules of conduct are not
adhered to and no constitutional system of checks and balances is established (Collier 2009:
15). Succinctly, Collier argues against a positive or transformative view of democratization:
The great political sea change may superficially have looked like the spread of
democracy, but it was actually the spread of elections. If there are no limits on the power of
the winner, the election becomes a matter of life and death. (Collier 2009: 15)

Or more simply Collier defines the outcome as ‘democrazy’ (Collier 2009) rather than
democracy.
Collier’s claims are more than a definitional challenge to democratization. They are based
upon analysis of the relationship between elections and political violence since 1960 (Collier
2009: 20). In richer countries the general trend has been one in which elections lead to less
violence because of broader political changes that have increased accountability of leaders.
On the other hand, in poor countries elections have led to an increase in political violence
over the same time period, because they are not accompanied by institutional changes that
embed representational democracy. The conclusion is an indictment of democratization;
‘democracy makes poor societies more dangerous’ (Collier 2009: 21). So how do
established autocrats manage elections to ensure victory? In other words, what does
democrazy look like? Collier (2009: 29–36) identifies six common strategies:
 1. Lie to electors – through control of the media.
2. Scapegoat a minority – establish a politics of hatred against a minority or foreigners.
3. Bribery – plays to a key advantage of autocrats because of money amassed through
corruption, but it is unreliable as opponents may also employ this tactic.
4. Intimidation – although you may not be able to know how people vote, you do know
whether they vote; in identity/hate politics this is all that is needed to purposively unleash
thugs targeting particular communities.
However, violence breeds violence and so this is a risky strategy as it may prevent even
sham elections being held.
5. Restrict the field to exclude the strongest candidates – accuse key opponents of
corruption (since it will probably be true) and hence prevent any viable challenge.
6. Miscount the votes – this is reliable, unless international observers are present and
effective, and the international community shows enough interest.

In combination, overt violence, intimidation, corruption and misuse of state institutions

are, sadly, readily mobilized to prevent a meaningful demonstration of representative
democracy.
So, where in the world is democracy and what do we actually mean by the term? The
Cold War-era analysis of Coulter and the more recent mapping of democratization have
shown a persistent global pattern of elections. In addition, Collier’s analysis demonstrates
that what is labelled as ‘democracy’ is a very different beast depending on a state’s position
in the capitalist world-economy. In our world-systems perspective we can see a strong
tendency for elections to be a feature of the core of the capitalist worldeconomy. We now
move on to an explanation of that pattern, and to make sense of the difference between core
practices of democracy and peripheral practices of ‘democracy’.

A world-systems interpretation of elections

Of all modern social institutions, elections would seem to be a set of activities that have to
be understood at the scale of the individual state. Elections occur separately on a country-
by-country basis and are strictly organized within one state at a time. The geography of
elections therefore presents a particular challenge to world-systems political geog - raphy
with its one-society assumption. Surely, here we have a case where we need a multiple-
society view of the world to make sense of national elections. In fact, it is relatively easy to
show that the activities surrounding elections are in no way insulated from the world-
economy.
We provide a framework for looking at elections in the core that does not show them as
unproblematic, as smoothly working systems allowing representation for citizens. Rather we
show that elections are a means of exercising power, and that through the interaction of elite
politics (the politics of power) with electoral politics (the politics of support) there are
moments when elections are used to maintain the power status quo and other moments
when elites can be challenged. Hence, elections in the core are not systems ensuring
representation for citizens but mechanisms of social struggle. Elections in the periphery are
very different, and as noted above, are often marked by high levels of violence, unstable or
despotic regimes after the elections, and levels of social dissatisfaction that result in either
the suppression of elections or another round of equally problematic voting. We call this
situation the politics of failure, an idea that relates the practice of voting to position within the
capitalist world-economy.
We begin by using the example of party labels to show how trans-state processes are
directly implicated in national elections. From the period when elections moved beyond the
stage of confirming local elites in power, political parties have come to dominate electoral
activities. Most parties represent a set of ideas that will be linked to a political ideology,
however loosely conceived. Hence the plethora of Labour parties and Liberal parties,
Christian Democrats and Conservatives, Communist and Social Democratic parties. Every
one of these party labels denotes a set of ideas that are in no sense unique to any one
country. Particular interpretations of these general ideas within different countries will
inevitably vary, but no parties are independent of the political world beyond their country’s
border. Perhaps an extreme example will help to fix ideas. The power of English liberalism at
the time of British hegemony is reflected in this statement by a nineteenth-century Brazilian
liberal politician:
When I enter the Chamber [of deputies] I am entirely under the influence of English
liberalism, as if I were working under orders of Gladstone . . . I am an English liberal . . . in
the Brazilian Parliament. (Smith 1981: 34)

As usual, hegemonic processes give us a limiting case, but in general we can conclude
that all electoral politics occurs within the overall political processes of the world-economy.
A world-systems approach to electoral geography is able to generate an explanation for
the variations in the use and meaning of elections in different zones of the world-economy.
We consider this topic in length before concluding the chapter with a discussion of social
movements.

Liberal democracy and social democracy

The idea of liberal democracy is an even more recent phenomenon in the world-economy
than nationalism. For most of the nineteenth century, for instance, liberals faced what they
saw as the dilemma of democracy. A fully democratized state represented ‘the great fear’
that the lower classes would take control of the state and use it to attack property and
privilege (Arblaster 1984). This ‘liberals versus democracy’ phase is the very antithesis of
liberal democracy and is often forgotten in simple developmental theories about democracy.
These evolutionary arguments were a product of the optimistic era of social science in the
post-1945 period, when liberal democracy was viewed as the natural result of political
progress. But as late as 1939, about half of the European liberal democracies of the 1950s
were under authoritarian rule. The 1930s were a time when pessimism about democracy
reigned. We have to transcend these phases of pessimism and optimism about liberal
democracy. What they tell us in world-systems terms is that liberal democracy is
concentrated in time as well as place – in the core zone after 1945. But to understand this
world-systems location, we have to return to the nineteenth century.
In Chapter 5 we concentrated on one particular problem confronting politicians in the
nineteenth century: the national question. This was in reality just one of many new political
questions that was competing to join the political agenda at this time. Three important
questions relate to the emergence of liberal democracy (Figure 6.5). First, there was the
constitutional problem posed by the liberals. They advocated the replacement of arbitrary
(royal) power by constitutional checks and balances. Second, there was the political
question posed by the democrats. They argued that the people as a whole should wield
power in the new liberal constitutions. Third, there was the social question posed by the
socialists. They asked how the new elected governments were going to deal with the new
urban poverty. The answer to the first two questions was the liberal democratic state; the
answer to the latter two questions was the social democratic state.
We shall consider each in turn before we describe their crucial historical coalescence
after 1945 (Figure 6.5). We shall interpret liberal democracy as much more than a label for a
party or policy; it is a type of state. Liberal democratic states have three basic properties.
First, pluralistic elections, in which there is competition between two or more parties to form
the government, are held regularly. Second, all adult citizens are entitled to vote in these
elections. Third, there are political freedoms that allow all citizens to associate freely and
express their political opinions. These properties are found with only minor blemishes in all
core countries at the present time. In addition, these states exhibit a further important
property: political stability. Since 1945, countries in the core have experienced continuous
liberal democracy. Hence they are liberal democratic states. They can be distinguished from
states that have had liberal democratic interludes alternating with illiberal regimes. These
more unstable states are typical of much of the world beyond the core. It is central to any
world-systems analysis to distinguish between the liberal democratic state and liberal
democratic interludes in other states.
In order to understand the space and time con - centration of the liberal democratic state
we need to consider social democracy. Again, we shall interpret this politics to represent
more than a party or a policy; it is a type of state. Social democratic states have three basic
properties. First, the state takes responsibility for the basic welfare of its citizens, so a wide
range of social services and supports are provided. Second, there is a political consensus
among all major party competitors for government that the resulting historically large welfare
exto be found in the social imperialism processes discussed in Chapter 4. Whatever the
means, however, by the late 1940s ‘welfare states’ were being created throughout the core,
and they have remained a typical characteristic of core political processes despite recent
cutbacks.
The three political problems from the nineteenth century had generated two forms of state
by the midtwentieth century. And it is not a coincidence that these forms of state have
coalesced: all liberal democ - racies today are social democracies (see Figure 6.5). We
might say that we are looking at the same state from two different angles.
From a world-systems perspective, this ‘liberal– social democratic’ state is the result of
two processes, one economic and one political. First, the worldeconomy location in the core
during the fourth Kondratieff cycle enabled this small number of countries to develop a
politics of redistribution that was not possible in states at other times and in other places.
This means that these states were rich enough to have meaningful competition between
parties on the distribution of the national ‘cake’, where all citizens could potentially benefit.
Elections matter; the issue of ‘who gets what’ encompasses all strata. Second, in the
emerging Cold War geopolitical world order, the liberal–social democratic form of state is
easily the most preferable for providing an alternative ‘social progressive’ politics to
communism. Hence the new politics of redistribution was encouraged by the United States
because it provided a bulwark against communism, especially in Western Europe. But notice
that the ideological concept of ‘free world’, first coined to describe non-communist Europe,
has not transferred easily to areas beyond the core.penditure is both necessary and proper.
Third, the welfare is paid for through progressive taxation, which involves some degree of
redistribution of income by the state. These properties are found in all core countries from
1945 to different degrees through to the present time, ranging from New Deal-and Great
Society-type programmes in the United States to the more redistributive socialism of
Sweden. Some of the origins of this type of state are to be found in the social imperialism
processes discussed in Chapter 4. Whatever the means, however, by the late 1940s ‘welfare
states’ were being created throughout the core, and they have remained a typical
characteristic of core political processes despite recent cutbacks. The three political
problems from the nineteenth century had generated two forms of state by the midtwentieth
century. And it is not a coincidence that these forms of state have coalesced: all liberal
democ - racies today are social democracies (see Figure 6.5). We might say that we are
looking at the same state from two different angles. From a world-systems perspective, this
‘liberal– social democratic’ state is the result of two processes, one economic and one
political. First, the worldeconomy location in the core during the fourth Kondratieff cycle
enabled this small number of countries to develop a politics of redistribution that was not
possible in states at other times and in other places. This means that these states were rich
enough to have meaningful competition between parties on the distribution of the national
‘cake’, where all citizens could potentially benefit. Elections matter; the issue of ‘who gets
what’ encompasses all strata. Second, in the emerging Cold War geopolitical world order,
the liberal–social democratic form of state is easily the most preferable for providing an
alternative ‘social progressive’ politics to communism. Hence the new politics of
redistribution was encouraged by the United States because it provided a bulwark against
communism, especially in Western Europe. But notice that the ideological concept of ‘free
world’, first coined to describe non-communist Europe, has not transferred easily to areas
beyond the core.

Theoretical corollary: the paradox of democratization

The above argument leads on to an important theoretical corollary. Since the world-
economy is inherently polarized, the political benefits of liberal and social democracy can
never be wholly transferred to the periphery. Hence the ideal of the liberal–social democratic
state that is offered to these countries is beyond their reach. But this is the only modern state
form in which liberal democracy has prospered. Why should the vast majority of a state’s
people participate in an election if there is little or no politics of redistribution? This means
that the simple call for ‘a return to democracy’ in poor countries, which we have heard since
the 1960s, is simply not a sustainable goal. As we know, elections have too often turned out
to be mini civil wars, with campaign deaths counted as well as votes (Collier 2009). The
implications of this US promotion of a ‘free world’ based upon democracy during the Cold
War were dangerously debilitating; the subsequent implications for the 1990s post-Cold War
spread of democracy are even more worrying. The contemporary paradox is a simple one. In
a world where economic polarization over more than two decades has reversed social
democratic tendencies, more and more countries have adopted democratic means of
forming governments. From our analysis these two trends are contradictory, implying one of
two things. One possibility is that the new democracies, for instance in South Africa and
Brazil, will turn out to be very fragile and current ‘democratic gains’ will be soon reversed. In
the case of Brazil, the politics of impeachment or threat of impeachment, connected to
allegations of widespread political corruption, are the key dynamic of political change, rather
than elections. In 2016, President Dilma Rousseff was forced to resign on a technicality
amidst allegations of corruption and threats of impeachment. Within a year her successor,
Michel Temer, was facing the possibility of impeachment in a new corruption scandal.
The second possibility is the new democracies, or at least some of them, will invent new
social arrangements that may make continuing elections and increasing polarization
compatible, such as a reversion to, effectively, one-party or non-competitive elections in
Russia. This would be a different sort of democracy from that described above. Despite this
pessimism one model of democracy stands out. India has been able to sustain a democracy
for over half a century in conditions of mass poverty, and may be more of a pointer to the
future of the new democracies than past North American and Western European democratic
experiences.
The regional pattern of democracy and autocracy identified by O’Loughlin et al. and
Collier in the first section of the chapter is consistent with our material framework that we will
discuss fully later in this chapter. Simply, democracy is an option only for those countries
that are able to extract enough of the global surplus to distribute to their populations. The
spread of democracy represents political changes stemming from changes in the capitalist
worldeconomy. But does the increase in democracy chal - lenge the essential core-periphery
structure of the world-economy? Without the benefit of foresight, we cannot answer that
question. However, our material framework suggests two responses.
First, a further investigation of the temporal dynamics of democratization reminds us that
we should not infer a one-way street towards democratization. Figure 6.6 shows the general
trend towards democratization since 1815, with the three waves of democratization identified
by Huntington (1991): 1828–1926, 1943–62 and 1974 to the present. However, after each of
the two previous waves, there has been a reverse trend as some of the newly democratized
countries reverted to autocracy. This cyclical pattern suggests that any triumphalist claims
about the victory of liberalism and liberal democracy, such as Fukuyama’s (1992) post-Cold
War polemic, should be qualified. Although many countries aspire to core status, and receive
benefits such as liberal democracy, the structural constraints of the worldeconomy mean that
some of those efforts will be futile. In other words, the short-term agency of social
movements and politicians is impeded by the struc - ture of the world-economy. The
structural constraints of the world-economy are also illustrated by the regionalization of
democracy and autocracy. It is hard for societies to make democracy prosper outside the
core.
However, O’Loughlin et al. (1998) do show evidence that democracy has spread into
semiperipheral and peripheral regions. Although it is possible that these trends may be a
function of shortterm material gains, the world-systems perspective provides another
explanation. In Chapter 3, we described the power of hegemons to shape political and
economic practices via the dissemination of hegemonic codes. Important components of the
hegemonic code of the United States were selfdetermination, consumerism and democracy.
The United States has ordered the globe through the espousal of the belief that all countries
could have similar economic and political opportunities to those in the United States. The
spread of democracy has been stimulated by the imperatives of current US hegemonic
practices: were the East European revolutions of 1989 spurred on by the thought of
democracy or the promise of consumerism? The answer is both, but we should not
underestimate the latter. In fact, our materialist perspective suggests that the diffusion of
such core-like political practices is unsustainable without some widespread achievement of
the ‘good life’, which is ultimately impossible with increased polarization. The pressing
question, there - fore, is whether reverse trends towards autocracy will lead to greater social
unrest now that US ideology has let the democratic genie out of the bottle.
 The economic difficulties of establishing liberal social democracy in the semi-periphery
and per iph - ery can be further complicated by geographies of ethnic and religious
difference. The geopolitics of democratization, as part of a global hegemonic project, is
enacted by a diverse set of political groups within nation-states, each with its own agenda.
The hegemonic power’s attempt to catalyse the diffusion of democracy was most evident in
the US-sponsored War on Terror. A new region was targeted as being ripe for democratic
change, the Middle East and central Asia. Elections were held in Afghanistan after the US-
led invasion had overthrown the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban regime. Iraq was next on the
agenda and dominated the news. However, the call for elections in the first Palestinian
parliamentary elections in January 2006 caused a diplomatic problem. The winners were
Hamas, whose political agenda included outright hostility to Israel as well as the promotion
of religious law; this was not the sort of party that the United States was hoping would
emerge from a bout of democratization. Post-war elections in Iraq have failed to produce a
stable and democratic government. Hence, there is an interesting paradox emerging in the
geopolitics of democratization. Democracy is being diffused by the United States in its role
as hegemonic power in an attempt to secure political influence in the Middle East and other
regions, but the process is bringing parties to power that are antagonistic to US goals.
Perhaps, a reversewave of democratic failure in the Middle East will leave anti-US parties
even more emboldened within their nation-states?

Electoral geography contrasts between core and periphery

Our theory implies that elections will be substantially different in different zones of the
world-economy. This will be reflected in contrasting electoral geographies. Consider the
situation in the core where a viable politics of redistribution allows parties to build stable
support bases as they implement policies that favour their supporters. In Britain, for instance,
Labour does better in working-class districts, and the Conservatives obtain more support
from middle-class districts. In contrast, in non-core areas without a viable politics of
redistribution, this basic mechanism of keeping voter loyalty is missing. A party is far less
able to reward the mass of its supporters and sustain its votes. Hence we expect less stable
bases for party support, which will be reflected in unstable geographies of voting. We can
test this basic hypothesis with a simple empirical analysis of contrasting geographies of
election.
The degree of geographical stability of a party’s vote can be measured by factor
analysing the geographical pattern of the vote over a series of elections. If the pattern is
exactly the same in every election, the first factor in the analysis will account for 100 per cent
of the variance. The less geographically stable the vote over time the further the first factor
will be from the 100 per cent limit. Hence the ‘importance’ of the first factor provides a sort of
percentage geographical stability score. Such measures are reported from the major parties
of ten countries in Table 6.2, covering elections between 1950 and 1980.
The countries in Table 6.2 are divided into seven core states and three peripheral states
to highlight the differences in the electoral politics of the two zones. In all the European core
countries the geographical stability is very high. The major parties in these countries are able
to successfully ‘renew their clienteles’ over time (Rokkan 1970). In contrast, in the three
peripheral states the degree of clientele renewal is very low. At this time Jamaica seemed to
come closest to a level of geographical stability consistent with a viable politics of
redistribution, but even in this case the percentage levels are well below European states,
with their more fully developed politics of redistribution. What this means is that in these
peripheral states the geographical pattern of support changes appreciably from one election
to the next. Parties are unable to maintain the support of those who have voted for them in
the past. In short, there seems to be a very different political process going on. Even though
the Jamaican, Ghanaian and Indian elections upon which this analysis is based may be as
fair and as open as the European elections, this fundamentally different electoral geography
is indicative of something other than a ‘liberal–social democratic’ state.
We must conclude, therefore, that in order to study elections worldwide we will need to
bear in mind the very different politics resulting from huge differences in material well-being
between countries in the core and in the periphery. In the next section, we deal with electoral
geography in the core, and in the final section we consider the role of elections in the far
harsher politics beyond the core.

Summary In the previous sections we have introduced a world-systems interpretation of

the geography of elections. In doing so we have: • introduced the concept liberal social
democracy; • built upon this concept to argue that we will see different politics, including
different electoral politics, in the core and periphery of the world-economy; • considered that
democratization is likely to be constrained by the structure of the worldeconomy