Democratization is a sociopolitical process and the society that
may grow out of it where people make decisions on matters affecting
them. It is an unending struggle to win such rights and power, to
hold and to extend them. The contending classes are essentially the
poor and weak majority of the people and the elite of wealth,
status, and power. This book begins with the study of politics in
democratic Athens 508-322 BCE, and how it revolved around the
divisions between an uneducated poor majority of citizens and a
small, wealthy elite. All citizens were deemed equally capable of
holding political office, and life in democratic Athens was itself
an education through the wide political experience a citizen
necessarily acquired. The second study is of Britain's centuries
long and profoundly incomplete democratization, polarizing usually
the urban poor, unequally against the Grandees, the oligarchy, and
subsequent elites. A third exemplifier is South Africa, beginning
in the 1970s-80s when two big processes were going on
simultaneously: an external armed struggle led by the African
National Congress (ANC), and a path-breaking domestic
democratization represented by the United Democratic Front and the
trade unions. The democratization that emerges here is a matter of
aspiration and impulse by determined men and women, which fail more
often than they succeed, yet appear again in other times and
places. Two main models of democracy are in contention. A
representative from revolving around free elections, in which
competing elites "get themselves elected" utilizing their wealth
and celebrity. The liberal form achieved preeminence in Britain and
the United States over some 150 years, but is now under serious
threat from its own dysfunctionalities and the alienation of its
citizens from its institutions and their elitist, self-serving
values. And there is the participatory model, now being approached
again since the mid-1970s in many places, from Portugal, Poland and
Czechoslovakia, to South Africa, Tunisia, Egypt, and Iceland. Many
such impulses will fail, but they offer hope, and on the record,
immense satisfaction to their participants.
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