Questions to Consider
1 Free speech and other individual political rights are well protected in Germany, yet Germans are also very willing to allow the government to intervene in economic decisions. Is there any contradiction in this? Do you think support of economic intervention by the government makes it harder to ensure general freedom for people? Explain your response.
2 As noted in the discussion of ideologies, no well-organized political movement in the United States has ever supported high governmental intervention in both economic matters and social issues. (The upper-right quadrant of Figure 1.3 is empty, in other words.) In Germany, however, many religious citizens who want the government to reflect religious values in its policies also favor economic intervention. How might politics in the United States be different if that part of the political landscape were equally well populated?
These comparative and historical explanations work together to give us a richer understanding of volunteering in America than we could gain simply from an observation that Americans volunteer a lot.
Consequences for Democracy
Does it matter that the United States is a democracy with a strong emphasis on individual self-reliance and freedom? This may seem a strange question to ask. It is hard to imagine the United States being anything else, and the word democracy so purrs with respectability that it is a little hard to take the question seriously. Nonetheless, it is worth raising the question. After all, relatively few countries in the world have been democracies consistently for even the last few decades. As we saw, fewer than a third of the world’s countries were democracies in 1977.
What would be different about the United States if it were not a democracy? Though it is difficult to speculate about such a broad question, there are some things we can probably conclude from comparisons with other countries. First of all, the United States would probably be just as prosperous if it were not a democracy. Most analyses of democracy and economic growth have concluded that it does not make much difference to the prospects for economic growth whether a country is democratic or not.22 And we can see from many examples, such as China or Singapore, that a country can grow and prosper even though it is not a democracy.
Though democracy is not the source of countries’ prosperity, however, it does affect how the fruits of that prosperity are distributed. In general, democracies are better than non-democracies at responding to the broad needs of their people. This makes sense, since in a democracy, the government is accountable to all of the people. A review of the well-being of people in democracies and in non-democracies concluded that democratic governments’ policies in health and other areas were sufficiently better than those of nondemocratic governments that people in democracies had life expectancies that were three or four years greater than in non-democracies.23 We can assume from this that if the United States were not a democracy, various policies of the government would be significantly less helpful to the broad range of people in the country.
But there is much more to it than this. In country after country around the world in the 1970s and 1980s, as people established democracy in their countries, they did not do it to improve their living standard or their health but because of deep aspirations for human dignity. The basic appeal of democracy is the individual dignity it confers on each citizen by giving him or her a small share of the power of government, and the protection its rule of law offers against arbitrary acts by the government. These are the values behind the movement toward democracy in other countries in the twenty-first century. And as we have seen, they are values deeply rooted in the American culture. Probably the greatest difference democracy makes to Americans is that it fulfills those values.
Critical Thinking Questions
1 In the introductory comparison of Singapore and the United States, we saw that Singapore is cleaner, has less crime, and enjoys a slightly higher average income than the United States, but Singapore does not allow open competition between opposing values in its limited democracy. Which do you think would be the better country to live in? Why?
2 We introduced the concept of public goods on page 9 and along with defense spending, we used the space program and basic medical research as examples of public goods. Why do the space program and basic medical research, for example, qualify as public goods?
3 Germans are less willing than Americans to sacrifice (pay taxes, accept a lower income) to help prevent environmental pollution.24 And yet Germans are much more active in recycling than Americans; they divide their recycling into several different categories, and Germany has drastically reduced its production of garbage and trash. How might you explain this paradox?
4 Can you think of reasons why Americans might be unusually religious compared with people in other prosperous countries?
Key Terms
citizen, 3
classical liberalism, 14
comparison, 19
conservatism, 17
democracy, 4
direct democracy, 4
fascism, 18
free riders, 9
government, 3
historical analysis, 19
ideology, 16
indirect democracy, 4
individualism, 13
liberalism, 17
libertarianism, 17
majority rule, 7
minority rights, 7
politics, 2
public good, 9
republic, 8
rule of law, 14
socialism, 18
Descriptions of Images and Figures
Back to Figure
The details are as follows.
Democracies of the world: United States, Canada, Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Costa Rica, Panama, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, all South American countries except Venezuela and French Guiana, all European countries except Belarus, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia; Tunisia, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Namibia, Botswana, South Africa, Lesotho, Malawi, Madagascar, India, Sri Lanka, Mongolia, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Philippines, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Australia, New Zealand.
Non democratic countries: All the rest.
Back to Figure
The horizontal axis shows the years 1913 to 2015 and the vertical axis shows the percentage of all economic activity from 0 to 70 in increments of 10.
The details are as follows with all values approximated from the graph.
U.S.: The line starts at 8% and rises to 31 by 1980, at which level it stays until 1996. Thereafter, it rises again, ending at 38% in 2015.
U.K.: The line starts at 12, rises to 37 in 1937, drops to 32 in 1960,