The framework suggests not only the importance of analyzing the content of ideas of political community, but also suggests a research strategy for assessing their causal rele- vance. The following analyses focus on parties-in-legislatures and especially legislators’ discursive rationales and voting behavior. This approach stems from the growing recog- nition that the literature on democratization has largely neglected empirical engagement with the micro-foundations of behavior. As a result, the literature has generated robust correlational analyses with little confidence in the causal processes assumed to generate the relation (Capoccia and Ziblatt 2010). The theory developed here connects the be- havior of legislators and political leaders to patterns of institutional change. But there is another important reason to focus primarily on legislative behavior, rather than the behind-the-scenes activity that characterize many accounts of democracy and exclu- sion. In addition to their obvious importance in drafting and approving laws, legislative assemblies have provided a platform for legislators to communicate with national and constituency audiences as well as a venue for coalition building and maintenance, a clearinghouse for the varied and changing concerns to which party leaders must be responsive in order to maintain the active support of their members.
Vivien Schmidt distinguishes between coordinative and communicative discourses, the first occurring primarily among “individuals and groups at the center of policy construction who are involved in the creation, elaboration, and justification of policy and programmatic ideas,” and the second occurring in the “political sphere. . . [among] the individuals and groups involved in the presentation, deliberation, and legitimation of political ideas to the general public” (Schmidt 2008, 310). The distinction is useful insofar as it highlights the variation in discourse—in the mode of argument, in the
tone of discussion, in the appropriate vernaculars—across different discursive settings.48
The difference, however, is not necessarily in the discursive style but in the visibility of the discussion and in the assumptions about the participants. Coordinative discourse, in Schmidt’s telling, takes place among a small number of actors sharing (relatively) common assumptions and technical expertise, and it takes place in private or in relatively closed contexts. Communicative discourse takes place in public, and occurs between actors who are unable to assume a shared technical language or theoretical assumptions. It might be the simple communication of policy to a passive audience, but it might also entail a rejection of this policy and an insistence on modifications and the incorporation of other concerns.
Representative institutions can, but do not always, integrate these two discourses. It has become customary to treat all legislative rhetoric as position-taking, as signaling solicitude to some constituency. And this is certainly one of its central functions. But it has also been a site for debate, although this has varied considerably across time and institutions. Legislators’ posture that they are speaking to their assembled colleagues has often been genuine. In his study of the Scots Reform Act of 1832, for instance, Gordon Pentland notes that reformers emphasized different claims in the House of Commons than in the ‘Fox dinners,’ local gatherings of Whigs that provided one of the main organizational venues in the period before the organization of a more coherent party structure. In the ‘dinners’ they were addressing like-minded fellow partisans, while in parliament they “had to answer strong and coherent anti-reform arguments and, as such, developed strategies with which to counter these positions” (Pentland 2008, 22). Parliamentary debate was not always intended to persuade opponents, but to reassure cautious supporters that they would be able to have strong responses to criticisms that they would face from opponents in their districts. And as such the legislative assembly was an important site for policy coordination among partisans—especially before the organization of effective caucus or party apparatuses.
But this was coordinative discourse that would often be reprinted in newspapers, in pamphlets, and in the case of especially good speeches in the French Third Republic, could be ordered printed and posted in every city hall in the country. If the discourse vio-
48A given epistemic community–such as experts on health policy—will have its norms of communication and persuasion, which they are likely to recognize as operative only within a limited range of settings. Insofar as political operatives—or the policy experts acting as political operatives—pick up these ideas, they are likely to reformulate them to conform to styles of argument and persuasion that have broader appeal.
lates the strictures of resonant narratives of political community, or any other popularly resonant ideology, then the legislator will possibly be called to account by their con- stituents. But if the discourse deviates too markedly from other coordinative discourse that takes privately, then wavering partisans might worry that they will lack a response suitable for public consumption in the event that their opponents criticize them for their policy.
While the theory is concerned with identifying the role of ideas, the discussion above has been concerned with discourse. The reason for this is in part methodological: the degree to which a belief is held is only inferable from repeated observations of actions and the relevant agent’s explanation for their actions, and even this does not allow us to confidently infer that the belief was sincere but rather that the performance of the belief’s implications and the invocation of it were consistent. Observed behavior—and especially discourse, the communicated arguments and explanation of beliefs—are all we have access to, and even this is subject to manipulation.49
The theory outlined above does not work primarily through sincere beliefs. Rather, it works through the ability to persuade possible coalition members that there is an alignment of interests and through the expectation of costs and benefits being attached to public behavior. The theory of ideas’ causal importance is based on processes that are, if not always public, at least always social. The reliance on discourse and behavior, then, is suited to the theoretical framework.
But there are additional advantages to emphasizing discourse. For one, the lan- guage of discourse highlights the degree to which the ‘ideas’ of political community are not a perfectly stable and well-understood set of talking points drafted by a small number of people. Rather, the ideas are themselves constituted in discursive networks, with particular ideas gaining prominence—and thus leading to a greater production of discourse—insofar as the participants in these networks found them compelling, useful, clever. And these participants then repeat and reformulate the ideas themselves. That is, the advantage of ‘discourse’ over ‘ideas’ is not simply the possibility of capturing the processes in some observable and quantifiable capacity, but in underscoring the degree to which the action of discussing or articulating an idea works to constitute the idea itself. What is important is not “simply that which was thought or said per se, ‘but all the discursive rules and categories that were a priori, assumed as a constituent part of
49A note passed from one minister to another in a Cabinet meeting might appear to be a more genuine reflection of their beliefs than a public statement, but in reality we cannot know this unless we know why they passed the note. Private correspondence is not necessarily more truthful than public rhetoric.
discourse and therefore of knowledge”’ (Hook 2001, 522; citing Young 1981). The context of discourse shapes the ideas that are formulated.
That said, it is important to insist that this is a theory of ideas’ causal relevance, which while implicated in the relevance of discourse is not reducible to this. Ideas were communicated in different formulations across different discursive settings, and it was through communication, arguments, debate, that these ideas were formulated and mod- ified. But what was being communicated was relatively stable across discursive contexts. As we shall see in the UK case study, the terms of the Liberal vision of progressive Britain were forged in private communication, in books, and—perhaps especially—in public meetings and dinners, where ideological principles were expressed in the form of easily repeated toasts that helped constitute a party identity. But while the expression of these principles—in their tone and style of reasoning—varied across discursive and institutional contexts, the principles and their implications remained remarkably consis- tent.50 The discursive process shaped and reshaped these ideas, but they nonetheless
were intelligible and relatively stable ideas that were being communicated.
The theory predicts certain behavioral patterns, especially in the discourse of ac- tivists and party leaders, with different patterns expected to predominate—but not to the exclusion of the other—during and outside of critical junctures:
1. Party leaders and activists will seek to encourage understandings of political com- munity that they believe will reconcile potentially divergent factions and support their claim to govern. The ideas of political belonging were initially developed for coalitional purposes, and they especially important in the interests of divergent factions. We should accordingly see in the period antecedent to a critical juncture, as well as during the juncture itself, an effort by political entrepreneurs to ensure coalitional stability by formulating ideas meant to reconcile their interests and strategies.
2. Both during and after the critical juncture, support or opposition to franchise changes will be framed in terms of the narrative of political community strongly associated with a given political coalition. During periods of political stability, the ideas serve as benchmarks against which the behavior of coalition members can
50The one major exception was Ireland, where private and public discourse (among Liberals) varied considerably. In private they often called for the country to be treated as a Crown Colony, ruled as a temporary dictatorship until the people had become fit for Liberal citizenship. In public they adamantly rejected such discourse, and claimed that it was characteristic of the Conservatives. In policy, they split the difference, combining coercion with reform measures, the former of which found broad support in parliament while the latter were supported by the majority of the Liberal party, which was not always sufficient for passage through the Commons and Lords.
be assessed. And so we should expect that legislator behavior will reflect an effort to signal their continued adherence, or to question the adherence of others, to the understandings of political belonging around which the coalition has organized. 3. Legislators will reveal in their rhetoric a belief that there are costs associated with
violating the strictures of the ideal of peoplehood. Legislators and party operatives will reveal trepidation in taking positions that are understood to be violations of the strictures of the given idea of peoplehood. Such a violation might be support- ing the enfranchisement of a class against the dominant ideas of belonging, or it might be supporting the disfranchisement of a class that is considered to be within the pale of political community. This trepidation can be evaluated by noting be- havioral patterns: disclaiming questionable affinities or antagonisms, seeking to avoid having their positions attributed to them, and in general seeking to down- play the significance of positions that seemingly violate the ideas’ strictures. The opposite is also true, and we can infer that a position is seen as costly through the actions of rivals in publicizing the deviant behavior. Additionally, organizations and constituencies who have invested in a given narrative of political community will have a stake in opposing deviations from these as potentially undermining their own position.51
4. Finally, strategies to alter the political order need to be both accommodative of the existing political order as well as seek to transform it. Those seeking the enfran- chisement of a class seen as outside the political people will attempt to reinterpret the existing order of peoplehood in an effort to assert that they are not violat- ing the strictures of peoplehood properly understood. One possible consequence of this is that such transformative efforts might achieve medium-term success but longer term stymying of their objectives, as their accommodative accepting of an the exclusionary political order makes it difficult to fully secure its transformation. Alternatively, a coalition might reject the resonant beliefs in political community altogether. In doing so, they are likely to gain in ideological consistency and a motivated sense of purpose, but lose popular appeal or political resonance. This strategy, however, can quickly pay dividends if the party is well-placed to take advantage of the highly fluid dynamics within a critical juncture.
More generally, I need to show two patterns in each case: that political entrepreneurs
51Ideas of political belonging are probably not necessary to explain the opposition of Southern planters to black suffrage or Ulster settlers’ opposition to the enfranchisement of Irish Catholics. But they do help explain why there was considerable hostility to these enfranchisements well beyond the situations in which there was an obvious material interest. The hostility was in part based in the fact that other groups had invested in the particular ideas of peoplehood, so even though their interests were not obviously at stake from enfranchisement, they believed they were. This, for instance, helps explain why so many northern whites so far removed from slavery or from any likelihood of a large free or freed black community were so adamantly opposed to black suffrage: they believed it meant the break-up of a Union in which their material and psychological well-being was deeply invested.
sought to secure governing authority and build coalitions by advancing new or recon- figured understandings of peoplehood, and that concern with violating the strictures of these ideas conditioned behavior in ways that resulted in the patterns of democratic exclusion discussed in the introductory chapter.
The model of ideas’ causal importance outlined above suggests that the effect of these ideas will vary depending on the degree to which they are constitutive of institutional arrangements and understandings of political interest. This in turn will depend on the degree to which the party system is capable of coordinate its membership around their constitutive understandings: the more a party can impose disciplinary punishments for violating the strictures of this party’s narrative of political purpose, the more we should expect legislators to conform. But it will also depend on the degree to which the representational system is organized to generate costs and benefits to political actors who violate or affirm the constitutive ideas. Where a legislature meets in private—or where there are no published accounts of their speeches—they are likely to be less responsive to public opinion.52 These sources of potential variation in the effect of ideas of political
community will be discussed in the framework chapter preceding each case study. The focus on legislative behavior and party coordination is in contrast to most works in democratization, which tend to focus on the interplay between organized social move- ments and the calculations of party and state leadership or on macro-level statistical analyses. This is frequently an appropriate research strategy. But we should also be attentive to the degree to which democratization can occur as the result of ‘normal’ politics, which in turn means we cannot simply ignore political institutions, such as leg- islative assemblies. As the exponent of ‘high politics,’ Maurice Cowling noted that in
52Isaac Butt, an early leader of the Home Rule party, noted the importance of publicity on member behavior and representation in 1877. He was calling for an official journal of Parliamentary proceedings, rather than the unofficial Hansard: “There was a time when it was a breach of privilege to report the proceedings of this House. All that is changed now, and this House was forced, many years ago, by the gradual progress of public opinion to submit to unauthorized reports of its proceedings being given to the public. . . . [E]very Member who now speaks to this House is no longer speaking as the Member of a private assembly irresponsible to public opinion, but that for his speech and even for his acts he is responsible to his constituents, and that the public have a right to be informed as to the nature of those speeches and of those acts. . . . But, still, I think it is an unfortunate thing that our debates should lose their control over public opinion. . . . I am sure, for myself, that I should be glad if what I say on many occasions were not reported, or, at any rate, that it were put into better shape by the reporters; but, still, I think my constituents have a right to know what is the exact position which I take in this House. They have a right to know if I talk good English, or if I am in the habit of disgracing them by idle Amendments.” “I am afaid,” he concluded, “that our debates in general, instead of guiding public opinion, are but the register of public opinion formed outside.” Butt, House of Commons,Hansard, 3rd Series, vol.233, cc.1629-31.
passing the 1867 Reform Act Parliament “was not afraid of public agitation: nor was its action determined by it. . . . It is in Parliament, and in light of Parliament’s view of public feeling, that the centre of explanation will be found” (Cowling1967, 2-3). Legislative behavior constitutes the “micro-foundations” of democratization, and its centrality to the theory advanced here invites us to move beyond macro-analyses of democratization or historical analyses of “transitions.” Instead, we combine attention to the macro-level patterns with historical analyses of the actions and motivations of political agents during critical junctures and across relatively discrete periods.