Democratization in Confucian East Asia: Citizen Politics in China ...

If political elites commit to democracy, democratic institutions, such as competitive elections and constitutional government, can be built by conscious effort. In fact, it can happen in places with no socioeconomic requisites for democracy, such as in 1989 in Mongolia (Fish, 1998). As Huntington (1991) argues, democracies are created not by causes, but by the “causer.”

What the transition arguments fail to point out is that political choices of the elite are structured by the situations in which they find themselves. These situations, above all, depend on socioeconomic development. In this regard, the modernization theories of democratization—arguing for preconditions of democracy—certainly have a point. But people who argue for the social prerequisites of democracy, the classical modernization theorists, miss one important point. Socioeconomic variables, however important, do not explain how certain structural factors translate into political outcomes. For example, it is frequently argued that one favorable condition for democracy is a relatively high proportion of educated middle class. But one must go beyond this and ask why when the society has a strong middle class, political elites would make choices that lead to democratic reforms. Notably, an educated middle class favors democracy because such democratic institutions favor the market in the economic arena. Such preferences of a big portion of the population present the elite with pressure to reform institutions. In the end, structural factors do not produce democratic reforms; it is the political demands resulting from a certain social structure that matter.

In fact, the link between these two major schools of thought lies in public attitudes about democracy.