Hamas, Palestine, and the Economics of Democracy--Posner: "

President Bush has suggested that spreading democracy is the surest antidote to Islamist terrorism. He can draw on a literature that finds that democracies very rarely go to war with each other, although a conspicuous exception is the U.S. Civil War, since both the Union and the Confederacy were democracies.
Hamas, which has just won a majority in the parliament of the Palestinian proto-state, is a political party that has an armed terrorist wing and is pledged to the destruction of Israel. Can that surprising outcome of what appears to have been a genuinely free election be squared with the belief that democracy is the best antidote to war and terrorism?
The first thing to note is that one democratic election is not the equivalent of democracy. When Hitler in 1933 was asked by President Hindenburg to form a government, the processes of democracy appeared to be working. The Nazi Party was the largest party in the Reichstag; it was natural to invite its leader to form a government. Within months, Germany was a dictatorship. So the fact that Hamas has won power fairly and squarely does not necessarily portend the continuation of Palestinian democracy.
But suppose Palestine remains democratic. What can we look forward to? I don't think the question is answerable if democracy is analyzed realistically. The great economist Joseph Schumpeter sketched in his 1942 book Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy what has come to be called the theory of "elite" or "procedural" or "competitive" democracy. In this concept, which I have elaborated in my book Law, Pragmatism, and Democracy (2003), and which seems to me descriptive of most modern democracies, including that of the United States, there is a governing class, consisting of people who compete for political office, and a citizen mass. The governing class corresponds to the selling side of an economic market, and the citizen mass to the consuming side. Instead of competing for sales, however, the members of the governing class compete for votes. The voters are largely ignorant of policy, just as consumers are ignorant of the inner workings of the products they buy. But the power of the electorate to turn elected officials out of office at the next election gives the officials an incentive to adopt policies that do not outrage public opinion and to administer the policies with some minimum of honesty and competence. It was Fatah's dramatic failure along these dimensions that opened the way to Hamas's surprisingly strong electoral showing. Hamas cleverly coupled armed resistance to Israel with the provision of social welfare services managed more efficiently and honestly than the services provided by the notoriously corrupt official Palestinian government, controlled by Fatah....

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