Democracy enables bargaining over contention boundaries that autocrats suppress

Evidence

As for democracy, it operates simultaneously as a facilitator and a constraint. Given consent of citizens, it facilitates the carrying out of large collective programs such as health care and education. But it limits the ability of rulers and their agents to intervene arbitrarily and without fear of retaliation. Much more direct bargaining over the boundaries among prescribed, tolerated, and forbidden forms of claim-making therefore occurs in democracies than in nondemocracies. A significant share of that bargaining occurs within the campaigns, performances, and WUNC displays of social movements. — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 1311

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

Related

• Democratic institutions channel contention into electoral forms while autocracies push it underground (similarity 0.86)
• Democracies install baseline rights even where capacity is low and violence high (similarity 0.78)
• Democratization always results from and generates extensive contention (similarity 0.78)