ISSN 00806757 Doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9477.2011.00265.

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Divided We Stand? Democracy as

a Method of Processing Conflicts1
The 2010 Johan Skytte Prize Lecture

Adam Przeworski*

Conflicts, liberty and peace do not coexist easily. Through most of history, civil peace was
maintained by the threat of force. Contemporary ideologues of authoritarian regimes maintain
that political conflicts inevitably result in violence, and the founders of modern representative
institutions in the West have shared this view. Yet we now know that political institutions can
cope with conflicts, that conflicts can be structured, regulated and contained, and that purely
procedural rules can be effective in processing conflicts. Most importantly, we have come to
realise that choosing governments through competitive elections is the only way to foster
political freedom in divided societies. Competitive elections support social peace by enabling
political forces to think in inter-temporal terms. In turn, civil peace is maintained between
elections when when opposition groups expect to be reasonably successful within the halls of
representative institutions.

How do we manage to process political conflicts in peace and freedom?

Suppose that people whether individuals, groups or organisations are in
conflict over some good such as land, income, university places, replacement
organs or military promotions. I want it and someone else wants it; some-
times I want what is at the moment not mine. An application of some rule
indicates that someone else should get it. Why would I obey this rule?
Political conflicts often concern issues other than distribution. Some con-
flicts arise because actions of one affect the welfare of others, some simply
because people have views about how others should behave. Moreover,
some conflicts are driven by a sheer desire for power, ambition or vanity.
Even minute issues can evoke passions: in France, for example, everyone has
intense views as to whether football players should be compelled to sing La
Marseillaise.
Conflicts are ubiquitous and passions at times intense. How, then, do we
manage to process conflicts in peace without curtailing political freedom,

* Adam Przeworski, Department of Politics, New York University, 19 W. 4th Street, New York,
NY 10012, USA. E-mail: adam.przeworski@nyu.edu

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relying on procedures that indicate whose interests, values or ambitions

should prevail at a particular moment? I anticipate that some readers may
be surprised by this question. After all, we take it for granted that at some
regular intervals political parties compete for office, citizens vote, elaborate
rules tell us who won and who lost, and these rules are routinely obeyed.
Moreover, once governments are formed, they govern in relative tranquility.
Even when election results raise serious doubts, as in the United States in
2000, civil peace is maintained.
Yet this is a new world. During almost all known history, political order
was maintained by the use or the threat of force. Electoral defeats of
incumbents had been rare until very recently and peaceful change of gov-
ernments even more so: between 1788 and 1975, only one in six national
elections resulted in the defeat of the incumbents and only one in seven
resulted in peaceful partisan alternations in office. Figure 1 shows over time
the proportion of elections that resulted in a defeat of incumbents and the
proportion that resulted in peaceful partisan alternation in the office of the
chief executive.
Electoral defeats of incumbents have been rare because they could use
their control over the state apparatus public bureaucracies as well as the
Figure 1. Defeats of Incumbents and Alternations over Time.

Note: The upper line is for defeats of incumbents, while the lower is for alternations in the office of the
chief executive between parties. Note that the number of countries holding elections changes over time.
The alternation measure is downward biased because it includes all cases in which the newly elected chief
executive belonged to a different party than his or her predecessor, even if they were members of the
same coalition.

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Figure 2. Civil Wars and Coups.

Note: The data on coups are based on 12,106 from my own data, and those on civil wars on 11,412
annual observations from Correlates of War. Note that the number of countries changes over time.

coercive forces to manipulate the rules, intimidate their opponents, per-

petuate fraud or apply naked force. Voting did not entail electing. As a
result, conflicts tended to assume violent forms: coups and civil wars
(Figure 2).
In what follows, I first describe the fear of conflict that was common
among the founders of modern representative institutions and continues to
pervade contemporary ideologies of what is sometimes referred to as non-
Western democracy. I then outline how conflicts are peacefully processed
in democracies, distinguishing the role of competitive elections from mecha-
nisms that serve to maintain civil peace between elections. Finally, I raise
some questions that remain open.

Fear of Conflict
Many years ago, in 1965, I participated in a survey of local leaders in India,
Poland, the United States and Yugoslavia. One of the questions was whether
there were any conflicts in local communities. It turned out that in the
United States there were many and even in communist Poland and Yugo-
slavia quite a few for example, where to locate a bus stop, whether shops
should have a lunch break, whether to build a new school or a hospital. In

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India, however, there were none. We soon discovered that this was because,
in India, the word conflict connotes unbridled violence, extending even to
killing.
I recalled this experience in the early 1990s during a panel discussion on
the labour movement in the newly democratic South Korea. When I sug-
gested that perhaps the best solution to intermittent violence that accom-
panied illegal strikes was to legalise and regulate them, the then Minister of
Labour immediately informed us that regulated, limited conflicts are not
possible in Korea. The only alternatives, we were told, were harmony and
consensus, or violence.
Harmony and consensus are normatively attractive, as is another
political mantra unity. They offer a prospect of rationality, peace and
freedom. If interests and values are harmonious, everyone wants to live
under the same laws. Consensus2 means that everyone wants the same
outcome to prevail, so that it makes no difference who makes collective
decisions and by what procedures. Anyone can decide for all. Moreover,
collective decisions are self-implementing: if someone else tells me to do
what I want to do anyway, I do not need be coerced to obey the decision.
I am free.
Harmony and consensus are the slogans underlying different contem-
porary projects of non-Western democracy. Their ideologists claim that
society is naturally harmonious, or at least that the goal of politics should
be to maintain harmony and cooperation. In their view, political divisions
are artificial, spuriously generated by selfish and quarrelsome politicians.
If conflicts were allowed to be organized most importantly through
political parties they would become dangerous: once conflicts are per-
mitted to see the political light of day, they are unstoppable and lead to
a breakdown of order, even to civil war.3 As Sukarno, the first president
of Indonesia, complained, parliamentary democracy incorporates the
concept of an active opposition, and it is precisely the addition of this
concept that has given rise to the difficulties we have experienced in the
last eleven years (quoted in Goh Cheng Teik 1972, 231). Hence democ-
racy needs to be tutelary (Sun Yat-sen, according to Keller 2010, 9),
guided (Indonesia), or sovereign, directed by the state (as in contem-
porary Russia).
It is perhaps surprising that these beliefs were shared with only minor
variation by the founders of representative institutions in the West. United
We Stand was the only way the Founding Fathers thought the American
people could stand. The first virtue of the United States Constitution James
Madison vaunted in the opening sentence of Federalist #10 was the ten-
dency to break and control the violence of factions. There is nothing I
dread so much, revealed John Adams, the second President of the United
States, as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged

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under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other

(quoted in Dunn 2004, 39). Ironically, one solution to partisan divisions,
advocated by James Monroe, the fifth President, was a single party, uniting
everyone in the pursuit of common good.4
Thus, however unity was to be attained, unity had to prevail. If . . . sepa-
rate interest be not checked, and not be directed to the public, David Hume
(2002 [1742]) predicted, we ought to look for nothing but faction, disorder,
and tyranny. If elections were to be contested, a French political theorist
(Ral de Curban, quoted in Palmer 1964) wrote in the middle of the eigh-
teenth century: Given men as they are, there would be no agreement on
merit; each would think himself or his leader more meritorious than others;
conflict and even civil war would follow. John Stuart Mill (1991 [1857], 230)
believed that ethnic and linguistic divisions made representative govern-
ment next to impossible.5
The Founding Fathers view about political opposition did not differ
much from that of Sukarnos. To give the flavour of the time, just consider
two texts: George Washingtons Farewell Address written in 1796,6 and the
last decree of the French Constituent Assembly passed in 1791.
Here is Washington (2002 [1796], 47):
all combinations and associations, under whatever plausible character, with the real design
to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted
authorities, are destructive . . . and of fatal tendency. They serve to organize faction; . . . to
put in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party, often a small but artful
and enterprising minority of the community, and according to the alternate triumphs of
different parties to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-conceived and
incongruous projects of faction rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plan,
digested by common councils and modified by mutual interests.

Revolutionary France was not any more tolerant:

No society, club, association of citizens can have, in no form, a political existence, nor
exercise any kind of inspection over the act of constituted powers and legal authorities;
under no pretext can they appear under a collective name, whether to form petitions or
deputations, participate in public ceremonies, or whatever other goal. (cited in Rosanvallon
2004, 59)

Mechanisms
It took more than a century before Western democratic theorists realised
that we can even stand divided. We now know that political institutions can
cope with conflicts; that conflicts can be structured, regulated and contained;
that purely procedural rules can be effective in processing conflicts without
relying on force. We now believe that political opposition may in fact
improve the quality of collective decisions. And most importantly, we realise
that choosing governments through competitive elections is the only way to
foster political freedom in divided societies. Obviously, if a society is

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divided, there are winners and losers: some people during at least some time
have to live under governments they do not like.As Condorcet (1986 [1785],
22) already pointed out: [W]hat is entailed in a law that was not adopted
unanimously is submitting people to an opinion which is not theirs or to a
decision which they believe to be contrary to their interest. Yet, somehow,
we tolerate it.
How then do we manage to do it? It is useful to inquire separately about
the role of elections and about the mechanisms that maintain political peace
with freedom between elections.

Elections
One mechanism by which conflicts can be peacefully regulated are competi-
tive elections in which the incumbents can be removed from office by the
peoples vote and after which they leave if they lose. This mechanism is
simple to understand and, given that I analysed it in several forms (Prze-
worski 1991, 2005, 2010; Benhabib & Przeworski 2006), here I sketch only
the central intuition.
Suppose that political parties or coalitions thereof face some important
conflict and that this conflict is to be resolved once-and-for-all, or at least
indefinitely. The losing side may then revert to force rather than having to
tolerate this outcome forever.Yet if the current losers have some reasonable
prospect of reversing the outcome by using the same procedure in the
future, they may prefer to wait rather than fight. Think of political succes-
sion: if at stake is which dynasty would rule for an indeterminate number of
generations, conflicts over succession may assume the form of civil war; if at
stake is who will govern during the next four years, the losers are more likely
to wait for their turn.
Elections induce peace because they enable inter-temporal horizons. Even
if one thinks that people care about outcomes rather than procedures, the
prospect that parties sympathetic to their interests may gain the reins of
government induces hope and generates patience. For many, the American
election of 2000 was a disaster, but we knew that there would be another one
in 2004.When the 2004 election ended up even worse, we still hoped for 2008.
And,as unbelievable as it still appears,the country that elected and re-elected
Bush and Cheney, voted for Obama. Elections are the siren of democracy.
They incessantly rekindle our hopes. We are repeatedly eager to be lured by
promises, to put our stakes on electoral bets. Hence, we obey and wait.
This mechanism does not work under all conditions. Most striking is the
effect of wealth. Partisan alternations in office are much more frequent,
while coups and civil wars are much less frequent indeed, absent
in societies that reach a certain level of income (measured in 1996
Geary-Khamis dollars, from Maddison 2003) (see Figures 3 and 4). One

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Figure 3. Partisan Alternations by Per Capita Income.

Figure 4. Civil Wars and Coups as a Function of Per Capita Income.

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explanation of this pattern is intuitive. When people are wealthier, they

value less whatever they can gain by fighting. And if fighting is costly, as it is,
at some income level the potential gain is not worth the sacrifice. Hence,
losers accept results of elections and wait for the next one.7
The effect of income dependence is so strong that, as Fernando Limongi
and I first noted in 1997, no democracy ever fell in a country with per capita
income higher than that of Argentina in 1976 (Przeworski & Limongi 1997).
Until now, there have been more than 40 democracies, which lived over a
total of 1,200 years with such high incomes. They experienced economic
crises, wars, corruption scandals. And yet not a single democracy fell at such
levels of per capita income.
While the effect of income is overwhelming, other factors also play a role.
Theoretical models suggest that the income that matters is not the average
income, but the income of the particular groups that have the capacity to use
force. Hence, given the same per capita income, equality should be condu-
cive to civil peace. Unfortunately, the cross-national data on income distri-
bution are scarce and unreliable, so this hypothesis cannot be tested
systematically (but see Przeworski et al. 2000). Some other factors also
matter, but I am deeply sceptical that culture plays an exogenous role
(Przeworski et al. 1998).

Between Elections
How is peace with freedom maintained between elections? The question
arises because the mere fact that some party or a coalition won a majority
in an election need not imply that all its policies enjoy universal support.
Moreover, while the electoral mechanism does not permit the revelation of
intensity, some policies evoke opposition that is intense and some forms of
political participation allow individuals or groups to signal, sincerely or not,
their intensity.
It bears emphasising that in a widespread view elections should be the
only mechanism by which the people influence the course of public policies.
According to Hofstadter (1969, 9): When [the Founding Fathers] began
their work, they spoke a great deal indeed they spoke almost incessantly
about freedom, and they understood that freedom requires some latitude
for opposition. But they were far from clear how opposition should make
itself felt, for they also valued social unity or harmony, and they had not
arrived at the view that opposition, manifested in organized popular parties,
could sustain freedom without fatally shattering such harmony. Lavaux
(1998, 140), in turn, observed that: The conceptions of democracies that
emerged from the tradition of the Social Contract do not necessarily treat
the role of the minority as that of the opposition. Democracy conceived as
identity of the rulers and the ruled does not leave room for recognizing the

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right of opposition. Madison (1982 [1788], Federalist #67) argued that the
people should have no role in governing. Lippmann (1956) insisted that the
duty of citizens is to fill the office and not to direct the office-holder.
Schumpeter (1942) admonished voters that they must understand that,
once they elected an individual, political action is his business not theirs.
This means that they must refrain from instructing him what he is to do. The
dilemma of electoral losers was perhaps best summarised by John McGurk,
the Chairman of the British Labour Party in 1919:
We are either constitutionalists or we are not constitutionalists. If we are constitutionalists,
if we believe in the efficacy of the political weapon (and we do, or why do we have a Labour
Party?) then it is both unwise and undemocratic because we fail to get a majority at the polls
to turn around and demand that we should substitute industrial action. (quoted in Miliband
1961, 69)

This reduction of politics to elections, considered by ODonnell (1994) to

be a Latin American pathology, delegative democracy, was thus broadly
considered as the model according to which democracy should normally
function. Yet as a description, this picture is obviously inaccurate. Conflicts
over policies, competition for political influence, are the bread-and-butter of
everyday politics. Political activities are not limited to elections not even to
efforts oriented to influence outcomes of future elections. Manin (1997,
170), for one, argues that
Freedom of public opinion is a democratic feature of representative systems, in that it
provides a means whereby the voice of the people can reach those who govern. . . . Repre-
sentatives are not required to act on the wishes of the people, but neither can they ignore
them: freedom of public opinion ensures that such wishes can be expressed and be brought
to the attention of those who govern. It is the representatives who make the final decision,
but a framework is created in which the will of the people is one of the considerations in
their decision process.

But how does opposition to a policy become a consideration in the deci-

sion making by governments? This issue was confronted by Kelsen (1988
[1929], 65), who was the first to see democracy as a system for processing
conflicts. The mechanism that in his view enabled peaceful management of
political conflicts was concessions made by the majority to the minority.
Kelsen thought that: The application of the majority principle contains
quasi-natural limits. Majority and minority must understand each other if
they are to agree. However, he encountered a problem so thorny that it
required Freudian psychology, the unconscious, to solve: why would con-
cessions by the majority to the minority be specific to democracy? The only
reason he could adduce was psychological: Democracy and autocracy thus
distinguish themselves by a psychological difference in their political state
(Kelsen 1988 [1929], 64).
There are, however, more identifiable reasons for governments to make
concessions. First, all governments must anticipate that they will be submit-

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ted to the test of elections (accountability mechanism). Concerned about

winning the next election and uncertain about the preferences of the elec-
torate, governments may desist from pursuing policies that do not enjoy
support beyond the majority that supports it.
Second, in many democracies, the opposition has recourse to institutional
devices that can stop or modify some actions of the government. In
Germany, presidencies of parliamentary committees are distributed propor-
tionately to party strength; in the United Kingdom, the Committee of Public
Accounts is by convention controlled by the opposition; in Argentina, leg-
islation can be considered only when a requirement of a super-majoritarian
quorum is satisfied. The opposition can threaten with obstructive tactics (a
government proposal to private an electric utility company was met with
thousands of amendments in France; filibuster in the United States Senate);
it can threaten with non-cooperation at the lower levels of governments it
controls.
Finally, governments fear breakdowns of public order specifically that
the opposition will seek recourse in the streets rather than channel
demands through the institutional framework. Consider a situation in
which a government has the monopoly of legislative initiative and is
assured of the support of a majority in the legislature. All bills are initi-
ated by the executive and all the bills become laws. Moreover, the gov-
ernment acts with full legality, so any recourse to the judicial system
would be futile. Examine this situation from the point of view of a social
group opposed to a particular policy. This group has no chance to influ-
ence government policy within the institutional system: the government
wants to adopt the policy, the legislature is just a rubber stamp and the
courts have no grounds to intervene. The most this group can expect of
the system of representative institutions is that if the policy turns out to be
sufficiently unpopular, the government will lose the next election and the
policy will be reversed. Suppose, however, that in addition the government
is quite adept in using its partisan control to advance its chances of being
re-elected. Then this group has nothing to gain by acting within the insti-
tutional framework. Under such conditions it may be sufficiently desper-
ate to try stopping the policy by acting outside the institutional channels,
say blocking roads, cutting bridges or provoking riots.
Note that the line between the exercise of the democratic right to peaceful
demonstrations and strikes, on the one hand, and disturbances of public
order, on the other, is thin and can be easily manipulated. Just consider the
reaction of David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, to demonstrations
by student against raising tuition: Protests are a part of democracy but
violence and violations of law are not. The fact is that the incidences of mass
demonstrations, national strikes and riots vary significantly across democ-
racies. During the half century between 1946 and 1996, such events erupted

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only once in every ten years in Norway and Iceland, once every four years
in Sweden, and once every two years in Costa Rica, but as often as once
every two months in Italy and France and every three months in democratic
Argentina (Banks 1996).
Even more dangerously, many elected governments face the possibility of
being removed by force: for a long time, the main preoccupation of many
elected Latin American governments was to complete their term in office,
rather than to win the next election. Praetorian politics, in which some
civilian forces deliberately provoke the military to act against the incum-
bent government, are a standard repertoire of the opposition in many
countries. To draw once again a contrast, Costa Rica has been free of
military intervention since 1948, while during the same period Argentina
experienced five military coups.
Consider the issue analytically, supposing that during each electoral
period there is a pie to divide between the government and the opposi-
tion(s). There are models (Przeworski 2009; Scartasini & Tommasi 2009)
which suggest that three equilibria can ensue: the government takes all
while the opposition waits for the next election, when it will take all; the
government offers the opposition a part, which the opposition accepts, and
if the opposition wins the subsequent election, the situation is reversed; and
the government takes all while the opposition spills into the streets. The first
two equilibria are peaceful, while the third one may entail the use of force.
The first two equilibria prevail when opposition groups expect to be rea-
sonably successful within the halls of the institutions: if they are sufficiently
patient and think they have a good chance of winning the next election or if
they are less patient and see a chance of influencing the policies of the
incumbent government between elections.
This hypothesis is supported by some evidence. Scartascini and Tommasi
(2009) show that in Latin America people who are more likely to contact
their representatives are less disposed to participate in violent conflicts. My
own data show that the incidence of riots is inversely correlated with elec-
toral turnout. Perhaps most telling is the evidence offered by Saiegh (2009,
reproduced with his permission) that shows that the incidence of riots is
high when democratic governments are either not at all effective or when
the legislature is just a rubber stamp (see Figure 5).

Open Questions
To summarise, conflicts are processed in freedom and peace when losers do
not lose too much and when they have a chance to become winners that
is, when not too much is at stake. Economic development reduces the stakes:
there is less to gain by fighting. However, we do not have to wait for
everyone to become wealthy. We can reduce these stakes by designing

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Figure 5. Riots and Box Score.

Note: Box score is the proportion of legislative initiatives of the executive passed by the legislature
within a year. Data on riots are from Banks (1996).

appropriate institutions and by controlling the use of violence. The open

question is how to do it.
The research on the effects of particular institutional arrangements has
been exceedingly intense during the past decade. We know that results of
elections are obeyed, while coups and civil wars are absent, in wealthy and
more equal societies, regardless of the significant institutional differences
among them. Hence, it seems that wealthy societies can function in peace
under different institutional arrangements. My view, thus, is that institutions
matter in poor societies but not in wealthy ones: specifically, in poor soci-
eties political institutions must give those powerful in terms of extra-
institutional (primarily military) resources enough power to make it
attractive for them to process their interests within this institutional frame-
work.8 What is still far from clear, however, is which institutional arrange-
ments are conducive to peaceful transfers of power and to civil peace
between elections: presidentialism or parliamentarism, consociational
agreements or proportional representation systems, bicameral or unicam-
eral legislatures, constitutional courts, and so on.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, to understand civil peace, or any
kind of political order, it is necessary to ascertain what would have occurred

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if order broke down. No order is completely peaceful, so some amount of

repression is actually present even when peace prevails. That a country is
peaceful does not mean that there is no violence. Yet the capacity of any
institutional framework to regulate conflicts depends on the counterfactual
outcomes of violent confrontations. To understand peace, we need to know
what would have happened in a war.
What this implies is that institutions function under the shadow of vio-
lence, which means that if one party dominates in terms of physical force,
it must also dominate within the system of institutions. Already Herodotus
(quoted in Bryce 1921, 256) thought that in a democracy the physical
force of the citizens coincides with their voting power. Centuries later,
Condorcet (1986 [1785], 11) observed that in ancient, brutal times, for the
good of peace and general utility, it was necessary to place authority
where the force was. If there have been so many elections in which the
incumbents were certain to win, some without any opposition at all, and if
such regimes maintained civil peace, it must have been because the incum-
bents controlled superior physical force such that any rebellion would be
futile.
We are still far from understanding the political actions of people with
guns. Let me just pose some puzzles. One is that the repressive apparatus
that exercises day-to-day coercion is not the military, but various kinds of
police forces. Yet, paradoxically, almost all coups are made by the military,
not the police. Second, about half of military coups that occurred in the
world after 1950 were directed against military governments and half were
initiated by lower ranks, which suggests that relations within the military
hierarchy, perhaps simple impatience to reach higher ranks, may motivate
coups independently of civilmilitary relations (Rivero 2010).
I have often wondered why people with guns ever obey people without
them. And I think we still do not know at least I do not. All I can say is that
the organisation and the political role of physical force is the most under-
studied topic in political science.

Conclusion
Conflict, liberty and peace do not co-exist easily. When one looks at world
history in the perspective of centuries, democracy appears as no more than
a speck. Through most of history, civil peace could be maintained only by
force, by massive repression. Democracy is a miraculous invention. Even if
the everyday life of actual existing democracies is not always an inspiring
spectacle, we should not lose sight of how privileged we are to be free to
struggle peacefully to improve the world according to our divergent visions,
values and interests.

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NOTES
1. This is a revised and extended version of a lecture delivered at Uppsala University on
the occasion of receiving the 2010 Johan Skytte Prize.
2. Describing what he calls decisions by apparent consensus, Urfalino (2007) emphasises
that: Le consensus apparent exige non pas lunanimit mais, ct de ceux qui
approuvent, le consentement des rticents. . . . La contribution des participants la
dcision est marque par le contraste entre un droit gal la participation et une
ingalit lgitime des influences.
3. On the importance of harmony and the fear of conflict in Confucianism, see Nathan
(1986); Hu (2000).
4. According to Hofstadter (1969, 23): It is party conflict that is evil, Monroe postulated,
but a single party may be laudable and useful, . . . if it can make itself universal and
strong enough to embody the common interest and to choke party strife.
5. Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities.
Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different
languages, the united public opinion necessary to the working of representative gov-
ernment cannot exist.
6. The Address was never delivered. Some parts of it were drafted by Alexander
Hamilton.
7. More technically, this proposition holds if utility functions are concave in whatever is
the object of conflict and if the costs of fighting are constant or increasing in whatever
is the subject of conflict (see Przeworski 2006).
8. Commenting on the experience of mid-nineteenth-century Mexico, Aguilar Rivera
(1998) points out, for example, that constitutions that make the legislature supreme
(strict separation of powers) deteriorate into regimes of exception when the institu-
tionally weak presidents command the armed forces.

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