People power
人民的力量
Beginner’s luck
新手有好运
Why has democracy thrived in some places but been thwarted in others?
为什么民主在一些地方蓬勃发展，却在另一些地方受挫？
Greeks bearing gifts
TWO COMMON beliefs about democracy are that it began in ancient Athens and, on spreading from there, remained peculiarly Western. David Stasavage, a professor of politics at New York University, finds both views mistaken. Without them, he thinks it will be easier to get hopes and fears for present-day democracy into better perspective and balance.
关于民主有两种常见的看法，一是它始于古代雅典，二是它从那里传播开来后仍旧是更限于西方世界的制度。纽约大学政治学教授大卫·斯塔萨瓦奇（David Stasavage）认为这两种观点都是错误的。他认为，如果能抛却这两种观点，对当今民主的希望和担忧会更容易获得更佳的视角和平衡。
Understood as government by consultation and consent, democracy, he shows, can be found in many early civilisations, not just classical Greece—including ancient Mesopotamia, Buddhist India, the tribal lands of the American Great Lakes, pre-conquest Mesoamerica and pre-colonial Africa. With that spread in mind, he writes that under given conditions, “democratic governance…comes naturally to humans”. The puzzle is that autocratic governance was just as natural. It, too, was found in many places. In pre-modern China and the Islamic world, for example, autocracy—together with a centralised bureaucracy—was for centuries the norm.
他论证说，如果把民主理解为基于协商和民众同意的政府，那在许多早期文明中都能找到民主，而不仅仅是在古希腊。这些早期文明包括古代美索不达米亚、佛教盛行时期的印度、美国五大湖地区的部落、被征服前的中美洲以及被殖民前的非洲。有鉴于此，他写道，在特定条件下，“民主治理……对人类来说是自然而然的事。”问题在于，专制治理同样自然而然，同样可以在许多地方找到。例如在前现代的中国和伊斯兰世界，专制统治——连同中央集权的官僚机构——在几个世纪里都是常态。
To find out why early democracy occurred where it did, the author draws on evidence from archaeology, soil science, demographics and climate studies. The key, in his account, was information.
为了回答早期民主缘何在所发生之地发生，斯塔萨瓦奇利用了考古学、土壤科学、人口统计学和气候研究的证据。按他的说法，关键在于信息。
Early democracy tended to flourish where rulers knew little of what people were growing and had few ways to find out. They might underguess taxable produce (forgoing revenue) or overguess (provoking non-compliance). It was better to ask people how much they grew and, in return, listen to their demands. That pattern was typical where populations were small and a central state weak or non-existent.
早期民主往往在统治者对民众的耕种情况知之甚少、却也没有什么办法去查明的地方繁荣发展。他们可能会低估应税农产品的数量（丧失税收收入）或高估（引发民众违抗）。不如问民众种植了多少，而作为回馈，倾听他们的需求。这种模式在人口少且中央政府软弱或不存在的地方很典型。
With big populations, consultation was impractical. Rulers instead sent officials to see how much was grown and, before long, how many young men could be drafted into armies. Bureaucracies emerged. With their aid, autocratic rule imposed itself on local custom. In pre-modern settings, this autocratic bureaucracy was more common where soil was good, yields high and know-how advanced, especially in writing and measuring. Such systems were able to tax heavily. Song China (10th-13th centuries) and the Abbasid Caliphate (8th-13th centuries) extracted at their height respectively 10% and 7% of gross yearly product. Medieval European rulers managed barely 1%.
在人口众多的地方，协商就不现实了。统治者于是便指派官员去查看作物的种植量，不久又开始查看有多少年轻人可被征召入伍。官僚机构由此出现。在它们的帮助下，专制统治得以强加于地方习俗。在前现代的背景下，这种专制的官僚机构在土壤肥沃、收成好、专门知识（尤其是在文字和度量方面）先进的地方更常见。这样的体系能够征收重税。中国的宋朝（10至13世纪）和阿拉伯帝国的阿拔斯王朝（8至13世纪）在各自的鼎盛时期分别从全年生产总值中抽取10%和7%。中世纪的欧洲统治者只勉强抽得1%。
Once established, central bureaucracies were hard to dismantle. They took well to modernity and new technologies. Early democracy, by contrast, was notably—although not fatally—vulnerable to the rise of modern states and rapid economic development. It accordingly vanished in many places, while surviving in others.
中央官僚机构一旦建立，就很难废除。它们乐于接受现代化和新技术。相比之下，早期的民主特别容易受到现代国家崛起和经济快速发展的影响，尽管这种影响不至致命。因此，它在许多地方消失了，却也在其他地方幸存了下来。
Modernity and central states, in other words, allowed for either autocracy or democracy. But was there a pattern? Mr Stasavage thinks so. He calls it “sequencing”. “If the early democratic institutions of government by consent are established first,” he writes, “then it is possible to subsequently build a bureaucracy without veering inevitably into autocracy or despotism.” It depends on what went before.
换句话说，现代化和中央政府不是容纳了专制，就是容纳了民主。但其中是否存在某种模式？斯塔萨瓦奇认为是存在的，并称之为“次序”。他写道：“如果是民选政府的早期民主制度建立在先，那么就有可能在随后建立起一个官僚机构的同时不至于必然转向专制或独裁暴政。”关键要看什么发生在前。
First-mover advantage
Awkwardly for this argument, the West is the one part of the world where early democracy of the small-scale, direct kind evolved most securely into modern, representative democracy. Does that not make democracy peculiarly Western after all? In modern democracy’s three waves—in the 19th century, post-1945 and post-1989—Western democracy was first. Despite glaring collapses, it has fared best. Yet, in Mr Stasavage’s telling, there was nothing essential—a liberal outlook, say, or respect for property, or a gift for industry—that tied the West and modern democracy together, beyond the luck of the past.
先发优势
对于这一论点，比较尴尬的是，正是在西方，早期的那种小规模、直接的民主最安然无虞地演变成了现代的代议制民主。那么民主终究不还是西方特有吗？现代世界经历了三次民主化浪潮，分别发生在19世纪、1945年后和1989年后，其中第一次发生在西方。西方民主尽管出现过明显的回潮，但仍是迄今发展得最好的。然而在斯塔萨瓦奇的讲述中，除了先前的运气之外，没有什么关键要素将西方和现代民主联系在一起——比如自由的观念、对财产的尊重，或者是工业方面的天资。
Pre-modern Europe had (with exceptions) democratic customs and weak rulers without effective bureaucracies. Where it occurs, and is not wiped out by autocracy, consensual government, the author writes, leaves “very deep traces”. Democracy and autocracy each have strong roots. There are good reasons to expect each to endure.
前现代欧洲有民主习俗，以及缺乏有效官僚机构的软弱的统治者（也有例外）。作者写道，如果获得民众同意的政府在某地出现，且没有被专制彻底消灭，便会在那里留下“非常深刻的痕迹”。民主和专制都有牢固的根基。有充分的理由预期两者都会长久持续下去。
That conclusion may seem small yield for such intellectual labour. But a bracing stringency is one of the virtues of “The Decline and Rise of Democracy”. It sweeps across the globe in command of recent scholarship. It takes an economic view of politics as putative bargaining between rulers and ruled, dispensing with what actual people thought and did and skirting fastidious analysis of key ideas. Its strongest lessons are negative: it shows how complex democracy’s patterns are and, on the evidence, how simpler accounts of its past and prospects stumble. ■
作者付出大量脑力得出了这个结论，看起来似乎算不上成果丰硕。但这本《民主的兴衰》（The Decline and Rise of Democracy）的优点之一是它令人精神为之一振的严密性。它自如地运用近年的学术研究成果来放眼全球。它从经济视角看待政治，将之推定为统治者和被统治者之间的讨价还价，省去了现实中的人的想法和行为，回避了对关键概念一丝不苟的分析。这本书得出的最强有力的经验是消极的：它显示了民主的种种模式有多么复杂，并以证据表明，对民主的过去和前景更简单化的记述有多站不住脚。