Democratic Practice

Abstract

Abstract This book offers a new way to conceptualize and study differences among democracies, focusing on political conduct and interaction as well as related taken-for-granted assumptions. With an empirical basis in a multimethod study of Portugal and Spain, pioneers in the worldwide turn to democracy that began in the 1970s, the argument identifies how political inclusion and equality vary substantially as a result of processes that the book theorizes: Nationally predominant forms of democratic practice constitute cultural legacies of the countries’ pathways to democracy during the 1970s. Whereas Portugal moved from dictatorship to democracy through a social revolution that inverted hierarchies and reconfigured cultural patterns while also generating thorough political democratization, Spain experienced a regime-led process of political transition under pressure from the opposition. The book shows how this contrast in pathways put in place ways of understanding democracy that have had deep consequences for political inclusion and conduct. Points of contrast in contemporary democratic practice include patterns of interaction between social movement protest and elected power holders as well as conduct within representative entities and in crucial secondary institutions such as the news media and the educational system. Consequences are identified in distributional outcomes, housing and welfare state policies, employment policy, and in the handling of economic crises. The implications of Spain’s less inclusionary democratic practice for cultural “others” such as Catalans are taken up in the chapter on the Catalan crisis. Implications for democratic theory and for sociological and political science theory are also taken up.

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