Democracy, accountability, and coalition bargaining

Democracy is the most ambitious political project of the twentieth century, and the study of democracy has been one of the major preoccupations of modern political scientists. Stein Rokkan’s main concern was with the development of democratic mass politics in Europe. On this score, he found many lessons in the Norwegian experience. To Rokkan and to many other political scientists, a critical aspect of democracy was representation, the people’s ability freely to select representatives from their own ranks who would faithfully stand up for their interests. Before the advent of mass democracy, during the stage Robert Dahl (1971) calls competitive oligarchy, parliaments did not always represent all the people. Granting all adult citizens the freedom and authority to select these representatives was a precondition for the more inclusive democracy we now often take for granted. And when well-defined groups with distinctive interests suddenly became enfranchised, as did millions of European men and women during the first half of this century, the election of representatives who shared their most salient characteristics was a dramatic advance.