From How democracy Ends (David Runciman, 2018) p44-7
A coup d’état is not the only sort of coup, however. Luttwak’s cookery book lists the different ingredients for the end of democracy, but he was only interested in making one kind of dish: an armed takeover of the state. What about the other ways in which a democracy can be subverted?
The American political scientist Nancy Bermeo has recently identified six different varieties of coup, of which the coup d’état is only one. The others are:
- ‘Executive coups’, when those already in power suspend democratic institutions.
- ‘Election-day vote fraud’, when the electoral process is fixed to produce a particular result.
- ‘Promissory coups’, when democracy is taken over by people who then hold elections to legitimise their rule.
- ‘Executive aggrandisement’, when those already in power chip away at democratic institutions without ever overturning them.
- ‘Strategic election manipulation’, when elections fall short of being free and fair but also fall short of being stolen outright.’”
In none of these kinds of coup is it necessary for soldiers to sneak in at night to arrest the government. That’s because the coup is either being undertaken by the government itself or it is being dressed up as something other than a coup. Most often it is both.
Whichever way you slice and dice the different types of coup, there is one fundamental distinction between them: some coups need to make clear that democracy is over in order to succeed; and some coups need to pretend that democracy is still intact. Coups d’état fall into the first category. But the others tend to fall into the second, especially the latter three. These coups are about keeping up appearances. People manipulate elections because the appearance of victory at the ballot box is what gives them the authority to rule. Promissory coups and executive aggrandisement require that the appear- ance of democracy be maintained, because the success of the coup depends on people believing that democracy continues to exist. For some kinds of coup, democracy is not the enemy. It provides the cover for subversion, which makes it the plotters’ friend.
By fixing on coups d’état, we get a misleading impression of where and when coups are likely to happen. Bermeo notes that armed coups, executive coups and stolen elections have long been in decline as methods of political change around the world — as democracy becomes more established, it gets harder and harder to overturn it by force or outright fraud. During the 1960s Greek democracy was so weak that it had versions of all three: the election of ‘violence and fraud’ in 1961, when the vote was widely believed to have been stolen; the ‘royalist coup’ in 1965, when the king replaced the elected government without a democratic mandate; and finally, the colonels’ coup d’état in 1967. Contemporary Greece does not look remotely vulnerable to a similar sequence of events. In established democracies, there is very little scope for cowing the people into submission when an explicit power grab is underway.But the scope for the other sorts of coup is greater once democracy has become the default. The more democracy is taken for granted, the more chance there is to subvert it without having to overthrow it. In particular, executive aggrandisement — when elected strongmen chip away at democracy while paying lip service to it — looks like being the biggest threat to democracy in the twenty- first century. It appears to be happening in, among other places, India, Turkey, the Philippines, Ecuador, Hungary and Poland; and it is possible that it is happening in the United States as well. The problem is that it can be difficult to know for sure. The big difference between a coup d’état and these other sorts of coups is that the former is an all-or-nothing event and the latter are incremental processes. One sort of coup will succeed or fail in a matter of hours. The others take place over a period of years without anyone being sure whether they have succeeded or not. It becomes much harder to draw the line. More than that: while people are waiting for the real coup to reveal itself, the bit-by-bit coup may have been long underway.
Bermeo notes that a big problem with incremental coups is knowing how to oppose them. Democracies that ‘erode rather than shatter often lack the spark that ignites an effective call to action’. There is no single moment to rally the forces of democracy against the threat that confronts it. Instead, political infighting produces a series of disjointed confrontations that each side sees differently: while the opponents of the regime shout, ‘Coup!’, its defenders say that those accusations are hyperbole and hysteria. Lawyers and journalists who see themselves as the last line of defence against the subversion of democracy can be recast by the other side as just another group of ‘special interests’, claiming the benefits of democracy for themselves.
One part of Luttwak’s definition of a coup still holds. If democracy is going to be subverted, then it is essential that the people as a whole remain bystanders. No coup can succeed if the public rises up against it. At that point, the only alternatives are the collapse of the coup or a civil war for real. However, there is more than one way to keep the public quiet. A coup d’état works on the basis of intimidation and coercion. But a coup that hides behind the workings of democracy can hope to get by on the public’s innate passivity. In most functioning democracies, the people are bystanders much of the time anyway. They watch on as political decisions are taken on their behalf by elected representatives who then ask for their assent at election time. If that’s what democracy has become, it provides excellent cover for the attempt to undermine democracy, because the two look remarkably similar.
Contemporary political science has devised a range of terms to describe this state of affairs: ‘audience democracy’, ‘spectator democracy’, ‘plebiscitary democracy’. These terms might be too mild: ‘zombie democracy’ might be better. The basic idea is that the people are simply watching a performance in which their role is to give or withhold their applause at the appropriate moments. Democratic politics has become an elaborate show, needing ever more characterful performers to hold the public’s attention. The increasing reliance on referendums in many democracies fits this pattern. A referendum looks democratic but it is not. The spectators get dragged on stage to say a simple yes or no to a proposition they have played no part in devising. Then the politicians get back to the business of deciding what they meant by what they said, while the voters look on, many of them growing frustrated at not having a chance to play a.further part. If necessary, another referendum can be called to get them to agree to whatever it was they’ were taken to have decided first time round. Not every referendum is evidence of a promissory coup. But referendums are one way to manage it.
What makes referendums particularly effective in this context is that they can be presented as the antithesis of the subversion of democracy. What could be more democratic than asking the people as a whole what they think? A direct question gets a direct answer. Often, the answer comes back as a demand for more democracy. The Brexit vote in the United Kingdom was advertised as an example of direct democracy in action. It was won with the aid of a slogan that reinforced the appeal of direct democracy: “Take back control’. Yet the result was to hand more control to the British executive, whose job it became to deliver on what the British people wanted. The executive is now locked in a tussle with the British parliament to try to ensure that it retains those powers even after Brexit has happened. No one could argue that the Brexit referendum was a successful instance of an executive coup, given that the prime minister who called it lost his job as a result. What it does show is how easily the popular demand for more democracy can end up having the opposite effect.
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