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States, Revolutionary Conflict and Democracy: El Salvador and Nicaragua in Comparative Perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Matthew Soberg Shugart
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EL SALVADOR AND NICARAGUA, TWO SOCIETIES WHICH HAVE recently experienced revolutionary conflict, have also embarked upon electoral processes. The US government cdls El Salvador's regime ‘democratic’ and aids its fight against leftist revolutionaries, while calling Nicaragua's regime ‘totalitarian’ and its elections a sham. What would democracy in these countries require and what are democracy's prospects?

One criterion of democracy, opposition or competitiveness, is insufficient because it says nothing about the social bases of competing elites. In order to provide some guarantee that a regime will be responsive to politicized social needs, we must stress the criterion of participation or inclusiveness as a necessary condition for democracy. In a context of intense conflict a democratic regime must allow all sectors – or rather their representatives chosen in competitive elections – to participate in decisions which will affect them. Such a regime's prospects for success are further enhanced by pacts of mutual guarantees of security among the contending actors, as in the consociational democracies.

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Articles
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Government and Opposition , Volume 22 , Issue 1 , 01 January 1987 , pp. 13 - 32
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1987

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References

1 See Dahl, Robert A., Polyarchy, Yale, 1971 Google Scholar; Arthur Lewis, W., Politics in WestAfrica, Allen & Unwin, 1965, as cited in Arend Lijphart, Democracy in PluralSocieties, Yale, 1978, p. 145.Google Scholar

2 See Lijphart, op. cit., and for an excellent review of the literature on consoci-ational democracy and responses to his critics, Lijphart, Power-Sharing in SouthAfrica, Institute of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 1986. Inthis paper I frequently use the term ‘conflict regulation’, which was introduced to theliterature by Eric Nordlinger, Conflict Regulation in Divided Societies, Harvard,1972.

3 The position taken here is that taken by Lijphart in his work on South Africa, cited in note 2: if any type of democracy will work in such a divided society, it will necessarily be of the consociational type, achieved as a negotiated compromise between conflicting political tendencies.

4 Skocpol, Theda, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France,Russia, and China, Cambridge, 1979.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Ibid., p. 32.

6 My focus on the prospects for consociational democracy — which requiresdeliberate action on the part of elites to overcome societal divisions — may seem tocontradict Skocpol’s structural definition of the political realm and her view thatpolitical behaviour during crises in states is not purposive. See Skocpol, op. cit.,pp. 14—18. However, the issue should be seen as whether or not the structure of theinternal and external systems might reward behaviour of elites who seek democraticsolutions to the crises of their states’ extractive, coercive, or administrative arms, notwhether rational, purposive behaviour can create a democracy. See the discussion ofstructural constraints in Waltz, Kenneth, Theory of International Politics, Addison-Wesley, 1979 Google Scholar, especially his contrast of rational action and structural approaches, pp.73—78. The rewards for such behaviour are here defined as increased legitimacy,which in turn leads to improved extractive capacity, particularly from the international system, but also from a more efficient administration.

7 Among the best sources on Nicaragua are Booth, John A., The End and theBeginning: the Nicaraguan Revolution, Westview, 1985 Google Scholar; Christian, Shirley, Nicaragua:The Revolution in the Family, Random House, 1985 Google Scholar; and, for a brief account of theSandinista ascension to power, Dix, Robert H., ‘Why Revolutions Succeed or Fail’, Polity, 16, 3, 1984, 554–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar On El Salvador see Arnson, Cynthia, ‘The Salvadoran Military and Regime Transformation’ in Grabendorff, Wolf, Krumwiede, Heinrich-W. and Todt, Jorg (eds), Political Change in Central America: Internal and External Dimensions, Westview, 1984;Google Scholar Baloyra, Enrique, El Salvador in Transition, University of North Carolina, 1982;Google Scholar and Sue Montgomery, Tommie, Revolution in El Salvador: Origins and Evolution, Westview, 1982.Google Scholar I have also relied extensively on confidential interviews wih US policy-makers.

8 Krumwiede, Heinrich-W., ‘Regimes and Revolutions in Central America’, in Grabendorff, , et al, op. cit.Google Scholar

9 See Dix, op. cit., for a comparison of Nicaragua and El Salvador.

10 This is the assessment of the ‘US intelligence community’, according to US Congress, House, Joint Resolution Relating to the additional Authority and Assistance for the Nicaraguan Democratic Resistance Requested by the President, Rpt. 99–483, 99th Congress, 2nd Session, 1986. The resolution specifically contrasts the successful (in terms akin to those which I employ) Salvadoran and unsuccessful Nicaraguan insurgencies.

11 See Dillon, Sam, ‘Duarte’s Fix’, New Republic, 3, 674, 06 17, 1985, 14–16 Google Scholar and Sharpe, Kenneth E., ‘El Salvador: Duarte's in a Box’, Los Angeles Times, 9 06 1986 , part II, p. 11.Google Scholar

12 See Blasier, Cole, The Hovering Giant: U.S. Responses to Revolutionary Change in Latin America, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1976.Google Scholar

13 See Christian, op. cit., and esp. Booth, op. cit.

14 Krumwiede, ‘Sandinist Democracy: Problems of Institutionalization’, in Grabendorff, et at, op. cit., p. 68.Google Scholar

15 Quoted in Christian, op. cit., p. 171. Christian, however, fails to note subsequentchanges in Sandinista actions regarding elections, discussed below.

16 Booth, op. cit., p. 215.Google Scholar

17 See Booth, op. cit., and The Electoral Process in Nicaragua: Domestic andInternational Influence, Report of the Latin American Studies Association, 19 11 1984 .Google Scholar

18 This point is especially stressed by Christian, op. cit. For an overview ofNicaraguan relations with Western Europe, see Nadia Malley, ‘Nicaraguan Relationswith Western Europe and the Socialist International’, paper prepared for delivery atthe 1984 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington,DC, 30 August-2 September 1984.

19 Booth, op. cit., p. 217 Google Scholar. According to the LASA Report, cited in footnote 24, it isan uncontroversial point in Nicaragua that all of the legally recognised parties(including those of the Coordinadora) which abstained did so by their own choice,not because of government exclusion (p. 19). My subsequent discussion of this issueis based largely upon confidential briefings. See the overview of US interference inthe LASA Report, pp. 29–32.

20 Booth, The Electoral Process in Nicaragua, pp. 32—4.Google Scholar

21 See Baloyra, Enrique A.. ‘The United States and Central America: DemocraticCapitalism or Reactionary Despotism?’, unpublished, Institute for Latin AmericanStudies, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.Google Scholar Baloyra draws on the discussionof mobilization of peasants by reactionary movements contained in BarringtonMoore, Jr, The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, Beacon, 1966.

22 See the suggestions of Glejeises, Piero, ‘The Case for Power Sharing in El Salvador’,Foreign Affairs, 61, 5, Summer 1983: 1048–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23 An excellent account of these events, based on an interview with the then-USambassador to Nicaragua, Lawrence Pezzullo, is contained in Christian, op. cit.

24 Baloyra, op. cit.Google Scholar

25 See Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe Schmitter, , ‘Political Life After Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions About Uncertain Transitions’, in O’Donnell, G.,Schmitter, P. C. and Whitehead, L. (eds), Transitions from Authoritarian Rule, JohnsHopkins Press, 1986.Google Scholar

26 Dix, Robert H., ‘Incumbency and Electoral Turnover in Latin America’, Journal of Inter american Studies and World Affairs, 26, 4 11 1984 , 435—48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27 The best study of which I am aware of the social bases of the PRI and the Mexicanstate is Judith Adler Hellman, Mexico in Crisis, 2nd edition, New York, Holmes and Meier, 1983.

28 See Booth, The Electoral Process in Nicaragua.Google Scholar

29 Juan Linz has pointed out that a presidential election tends to be more polarizing than a parliamentary election and that there is no democratic procedure which can easily defuse conflicts between the executive and legislature. See his ‘Democracy: Presidential or Parliamentary — Does it Make a Difference?’ prepared for the project ‘The Role of Political Parties in the Return to Democracy in the Southern Cone’, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 1985. Elsewhere I have suggested that the plebiscitarian nature of presidential elections has often in Latin America led to distorted congressional representation (compared to what outcome would have been likely in a legislative election not dominated by a popular or unpopular presidential candidate). See ‘The Effects of the Timing of Elections on Party Systems Under Presidential Government’, unpublished, 1986. Yet alternative constitutional forms are rarely considered in Latin America.

30 The Philippines under Mrs Aquino may be in a similar position.

31 The author wishes to thank Evelyne Huber Stephens, Arend Lijphart, Bernt Hagtvet and Theda Skocpol for their many useful comments on earlier drafts of this article