7.12. 2019 se za laskavé podpory SBTC CZ konal již čtvrtý ročník Lacerta Cupu. Na soutěž se přihlásilo celkem 37 chlupáčů různých plemen, přičemž stafordšírských bulteriérů bylo deset. Závod provázela velmi příjemná atmosféra, soutěžící se vzájemně podporovali a fandili si. Paní rozhodčí Petra Štolová a Kristýna Másilková u všech týmů ocenily připravenost, hezký vztah a sportovní chování.

Stafbulíci nakonec soutěžili ve dvou třídách OB-Z a OB2. Ve třídě OB-Z byla nejhorší zadanou známkou velmi dobrá – týmy byly skvěle připravené. V OB2 už bylo znát, že se jedná o poměrně náročnou zkoušku, přesto 2 SBT atakovali „bednu“, jeden nesplnil limit zkoušky a jeden byl diskvalifikovaný za opuštění soutěžního prostoru. Opět byla účast mezinárodní, loňská polská vítězka OB1 letos soutěžila v OB2. Úroveň závodů rok od roku stoupá, je vidět, že obedience je pro naše plemeno velmi vhodným sportem, prohlubujícím dobrý vzájemný vztah s minimálními zdravotními riziky. Potěšilo mne i to, že všichni hafani zvládli bez problémů a v pohodě skupinové odložení.

Raritou byla Kateřina Uriková, která soutěžila se třemi fenkami ve dvou kategoriích, všechny tři stály na stupních vítězů a to i v celkovém skóre mezi ostatními plemeny.

Výsledky 4. Lacerta Cup 2019

Chci poděkovat klubu za finanční podporu, sponzorům Brit za nesmírně štědré ceny, časopisu Psí sporty za časopis pro každého účastníka a 3 předplatné, Ivaně Mrňákové za krásné pelechy pro vítěze obou kategorií, Canis Bull paní Innemanové za upomínkové hrníčky pro každého soutěžícího, firmě Kodak Moments za hodnotné a praktické ceny, firmě Mooria za originální obojek pro absolutního vítěze Kateřinu Urikovou a vítěze a manželům Vlčkovým za obedience pomůcky, bez kterých by se nedalo soutěžit.

Těšíme se na příští ročník, který bude opět v příjemném a prostředí vytápěné haly Psí Akademie D&J.

Some basic assumptions about the consolidation of democracy
Philippe C. Schmitter

The notion of a ‘‘consolidated democracy’’ seems oxymoronic – a
contradiction in terms. Democracies are never supposed to be fully
consolidated: unique among regime types, they should contain within
themselves the potentiality for continuous evolution and, eventually,
self-transformation. By a process of deliberation and collective choice,
citizens can both peacefully remove governments from power and,
presumably, choose to alter their governments’ basic rules and structure.
They can even – as happened several times in the history of
the Athenian polis and Roman republic – democratically decide to
become a different form of regime. Indeed, the very concept of dictatorship
originated in democratic practice.

This ‘‘historico-theoretical’’ reflection clashes, however, with the
everyday experience of well-established democracies. Not only have
their patterns and norms become routinized into a highly predictable
de facto structure, but considerable effort is expended de jure to make
it quite difficult to change these structures. The formative, so-called
‘‘founding,’’ generations wrote constitutions which sought to bind
subsequent ones to a specific institutional framework and set of rights
and they deliberately made them difficult to amend. They also drafted
statutes and codes which rendered certain kinds of political behaviour
punishable, created specific constituencies and rewarded particular
clientele, and made the entry of new parties into the electoral arena
difficult or impossible, and thus conferred monopolistic recognition
upon certain associations and e´ lites. Whilst constitutions can
be ignored, policies can be reversed, and laws can be changed in
response to pressures from the demos, one should not exaggerate
how easily and frequently this can occur in even the most loosely
structured of democracies.

Uncertainty may well be, as Adam Przeworski has argued, a
central characteristic of this type of regime, but it is a form of relative
uncertainty.1 For citizens to tolerate the possibility that unexpected
persons or groups may occupy governance over them and that these
newly empowered authorities may pursue different, possibly damaging,
courses of action requires a great deal of mutual trust, backed by
a great deal of structural reassurance.

Democratic consolidation can be conceptualized as the process – or
processes – that underlies such trust and reassurance and, therefore,
makes regular, uncertain, and yet circumscribed competition for office
and influence possible. It seeks to institutionalize uncertainty in one
subset of political roles and policy arenas, while institutionalizing
certainty in others.

Defining the challenge

How does democracy accomplish and legitimize such a delicate task?
What is the underlying principle that provides the essential elements
of trust and reassurance? The simple answer is ‘‘the consent of the
people’’; the more complex one is that it depends on ‘‘the contingent
consent of politicians and the eventual assent of citizens – all acting
under conditions of bounded uncertainty.’’2

The challenge for democratic consolidators, therefore, is to create
and maintain a set of institutions which embody contingent consent
among politicians, are capable of invoking the eventual assent of
citizens, and can limit the high degree of uncertainty that is characteristic
of the transition from autocracy. They do not necessarily have
to agree upon a set of goals or substantive policies that command
widespread consensus. This ‘‘democratic bargain,’’ to use Robert
Dahl’s felicitous expression,3 can vary a great deal from one society
to another, depending on inequalities and cleavage patterns as well
as on such subjective factors as the degree of mutual trust between
the government and citizens, the standard of fairness, the willingness
to compromise, and the legitimacy of different decision-making rules.
It may even be compatible with a great deal of dissent on specific,
substantive policy issues.

My self-assigned task in this essay is to try to understand where
these generic democratic principles come from and how they become
embodied in regular practices and rules without becoming distorted
or undermined by the legacies of autocracy or the compromises
between competing interests.
Establishing some assumptions
Before turning to a more detailed elaboration of what is involved in
the consolidation of democracy,4 it may be useful to establish some
general assumptions:

1. The consolidation of democracy poses distinctive problems to
political actors and, hence, to those who seek to understand –
usually retrospectively – what they are doing. It is not just a prolongation
of the transition from authoritarian rule. To a significant
extent, the consolidation of democracy engages different actors,
behaviours, processes, and, perhaps, even new values and resources.
This is not to say that everything changes when a polity
‘‘shifts’’ towards democracy: many of the people and collectivities
will be the same, but they will be facing different problems,
making different calculations and, it is hoped, behaving in different
ways.

2. This opens up the possibility – but not the inevitability – of contradictions
and tensions within the process of regime change. As
O’Donnell and I have stressed in previous work,5 the conditions
which encouraged the demise of authoritarian regimes are not
always, and not necessarily, those most appropriate for ensuring a
smooth and reliable transition to political democracy. Concordantly,
those ‘‘enabling conditions’’ most conducive to reducing
and managing the uncertainty of this crucial interim period may
turn into ‘‘confining conditions’’ that can make the consolidation
of what has been accomplished more difficult. Moreover, the shift
in problem–space may reduce the significance of actors who previously
played a central role and enhance that of others who, by
prudence or impotence, were marginal to the demise and transition.
Revolutions have a tendency to ‘‘eat their own children’’;
more peaceful and less consequential regime changes seem likely
to ‘‘disavow their own parents.’’6

3. Even more provocative is the possibility that the study of democratization
requires an epistemological shift on the part of the
analyst to accompany the behavioural changes that the actors
themselves are undergoing. During the transition, an exaggerated
form of ‘‘voluntaristic political causality’’ tends to predominate in
a situation of rapid change, high risk, shifting interests, and inde-
terminate strategic reactions. Actors believe that they are engaged
in a ‘‘war of movement,’’ where dramatic options are available
and the outcome depends critically on their choices. They find it
difficult to specify ex ante which classes, sectors, institutions, or
groups will support their efforts. Indeed, most of these collectivities
are likely to be divided or hesitant about what to do.
Once this heady and dangerous moment has passed, some of the
actors begin to ‘‘settle into the trenches.’’7 They organize their
internal structures more predictably, consult bases more reliably,
and consider the long-term consequences of their actions more
seriously. In so doing, they are compelled to experience the constraints
imposed by deeply rooted material deficiencies and normative
habits that have not changed with the fall of the ancien
re´gime.

For the theorist/analyst, this implies shifting from a raw form of
‘‘political causality,’’ characterized by singular and even unprecedented
choices taken by unpredictable and often courageous individuals,
8 towards a more settled form of ‘‘bounded rationality.’’
This is conditioned by capitalist class relations, long-standing
cultural and ethnic cleavages, persistent status conflicts, and international
antagonisms and is staffed by increasingly professional
politicians filling more predictable and less risky roles. From the
heady excitement and underdetermination of the transition from
autocracy comes the adjustment to the prosaic routine and overdetermination
of consolidated democracy.9

4. The consolidation of democracy requires explicit treatment as a
theoretical subject and as an object of empirical inquiry. One can
draw more confidently from previous scholarly work than when
trying to make sense of the demise of authoritarian regimes or the
initial transition to democratic ones. However, there remains a
great deal of difficult and delicate work in explaining to the actors
how to become more predictable and prosaic and why so many of
them may have to find another way of making a living.

Defining the subject

When a society changes from one political regime to another, it initially
passes through a period of considerable uncertainty during
which regression to the status quo ante remains possible and the destination
to which the efforts of the actors are leading remains unclear.
The transition period can vary in length, depending in large measure
on the manner of regime change that has been adopted, but eventually
it must end. The costs – both psychological and material – are
simply too great for the actors to endure indefinitely. While there will
always be some for whom the exhilaration of participating in a continuous
‘‘war of movement’’ remains an end in itself, most actors look
forward to settling into a ‘‘war of positions’’ with known allies,
established lines of cleavage, and predictable opponents – or to
getting on with other careers or pursuits.

The genus of social processes of which the consolidation of democracy
is a subspecies has been given a number of labels. ‘‘Structuration’’
is the currently fashionable one, thanks to the growing
influence of the work of Anthony Gidden.10 Routinization, institutionalization,
and stabilization – not to mention reification – were
concepts earlier used to refer to this process. The basic idea common
to these phenomena is that social relations can become social structures
or institutions (the two will be used interchangeably in this
text). Patterns of interaction can become so regular in their occurrence,
so endowed with meaning, so capable of motivating behaviour,
that they become autonomous in their internal functioning and resistant
to externally induced change. In ordinary parlance, structures/
institutions are collectivities in which ‘‘the whole has become greater
than the sum of its parts.’’ The strategies and norms of individuals
within these collectivities are constrained by the whole. Their actions
and goals are not reducible to those of its component parts: structures
and institutions cannot be understood purely by aggregating the
decisions – least of all, the preferences – of the individuals within
them.11

These notations are rather elementary and much of the theorizing
about them is quite abstract and devoid of clear statements from
which one could derive discretely researchable propositions. At best,
they can be exploited for a few broad guidelines and orienting
hypotheses. For our purposes, this very generic approach has an
unfortunate tendency to overlook the specificities of political action
in general and democratic processes in particular. A subtle analyst
like Gidden may well insist on the relative freedom of choice which
actors have even in highly ‘‘structurated’’ contexts, on the ambiguity
of the rules that bind them, and the indeterminacy of the resources
that they can bring to bear upon collective decisions. Yet this is still a
long way from conceptualizing the intrinsic competitiveness and
dynamic uncertainty of democratic politics. What we need is a more
specific definition and theory of the processes embraced by structuration, institutionalization, stabilization, and routinization that captures
these features and explains not only how they come to be
adopted, but also why actors might willingly prefer them.

Focusing on the state

The consolidation of democracy involves the structuration of a particular
regime type. Democracies, in turn, come in several different
types and they can exist at various levels of aggregation and
autonomy. Nevertheless, all democracies presumably share certain
characteristics. The ones which interest us here are all regimes of the
state in the sense that they are organized at the level of the most
comprehensive, ‘‘sovereign,’’ unit of authority and collective choice
in the present world-system. In our work on transition, O’Donnell
and I defined a regime as follows:

The ensemble of patterns, explicit or not, that determines the forms and
channels of access to principal governmental positions, the characteristics of
the actors who are admitted and excluded from such access, and the
resources and strategies that they can use to gain access.12
Retrospectively, I would add only that a state regime must also have
some explicit rules for determining how collective decisions are
made. Regime consolidation, then, reflects a transformation of the
accidental arrangements, prudential norms, and contingent solutions
that have emerged during the uncertain struggles of the transition
into institutions, and relationships that are reliably known, regularly
practised, and normatively accepted by the participants/citizens/
subjects of such institutions.

When actors change from some form of autocracy to democracy,
the problem of consolidation takes on special characteristics.13 The
number and variety of persons who are potentially capable of proposing
new rules and practices increase greatly. Moreover, these
empowered citizens, and the groups they form, have much more
autonomy in deciding whether they will accept the rules and practices
that are being offered to them. This is not to suggest that modern
political democracies are anarchies in which everyone is free to
choose his or her own norms and to act without regard for the norms
of others. Yet the problem of reducing uncertainty and ensuring the
orderly governance of the unit as a whole is likely to be more acute
than, for example, in the aftermath of implanting an autocracy.
Democracy does not, however, seek to remove all sources of
uncertainty. A polity in which there was no uncertainty about which
candidates would win elections, what policies the winners would
adopt, or which groups would be likely to influence those policies
could hardly be termed ‘‘democratic.’’14 But the uncertainty that
is embedded in all democracies is bounded. There are limitations
to which actors can enter the competitive struggle, raise issues, cooperate
with others, and expect to hold office or exercise influence.
There are limitations to what can be decided by any procedure, even if
the procedure reflects the majority and the minority was represented
in the making of the decision. What the exercise of democracy begins
to do during the transitional period is to reduce ‘‘abnormal’’ uncertainty
to ‘‘normal’’ uncertainty, through the generation of formal rules
and informal practices. Rules and practices that manage to acquire
some autonomy and to reproduce themselves successfully over time
become institutions.

As a process, democratic consolidation involves choosing these
institutions. Much of this takes place in an open and deliberative
fashion and manifests itself in formal public acts – the drafting and
ratifying of a constitution, the passing of ‘‘framework legislation’’
by parliament, the issuance of executive decrees and administrative
regulations. Some of it, however, emerges more incidentally and
unselfconsciously from the ongoing ‘‘private’’ arrangements within
and between the organizations of civil society and from the interactions
between them and various agencies of the state.

Disaggregating the process into partial regimes

Rather than ‘‘a single regime,’’ modern democracy should be conceptualized
as a composite of ‘‘partial regimes.’’ As the consolidation
of democracy progresses, each of these partial regimes becomes
institutionalized in a particular sequence, according to distinctive
principles, and around different sites. All, however, concern the
representation of social groups and the resolution of their conflicts.
Parties, associations, movements, localities, and various clientele
compete and coalesce around these different sites in an effort to
capture office and influence policy. Their structured activity has the
effect of channelling conflicts toward the public arena, thereby
diminishing recourse to such private means as settling disputes by
violence and imposing one’s will by authoritarian fiat. Authorities
with different functions and at different levels of aggregation interact
with these representatives, base their legitimacy upon their account
ability to different citizen interests (and passions), and reproduce that
special form of authority that stems from exercising an effective
monopoly over the use of violence.

Constitutions are efforts to establish a single, overarching set of
‘‘meta-rules’’ that would render these partial regimes coherent, assign
specific tasks to each, and impose some hierarchical relation among
them. But such formal documents are rarely successful in delineating
and controlling all such relationships. The process of producing an
acceptable draft and ratifying it by vote and/or plebiscite undoubtedly
represents a significant moment in the consolidation of democracy,
but many partial regimes will be left undefined. For it is precisely in
the interstices between different types of representatives that constitutional
norms are most vague and least prescriptive.15

Imagine trying to deduce from even the most detailed of constitutions – and they are
becoming more detailed – how parties, associations, and movements
will interact to influence policies, or trying to discern how capital and
labour will bargain over income shares under the new meta-rules.
If political democracy is not a regime but a composite of regimes,
then the appropriate strategy for studying its consolidation must be
disaggregated. This is both theoretically and empirically desirable.
Figure 2.1 attempts to sketch out the property–space that is involved
and to suggest some of the specific partial regimes that are likely to
emerge. On the vertical axis, the space is defined in terms of the
institutional domain of action, ranging from authoritatively defined
state agencies to self-constituted units of civil society. Horizontally,
the variance concerns the power resources that actors can bring to
bear on the emerging political process: numbers in the case of those
relying primarily on the counting of individual votes; intensities for
those that are based on weighing the contribution of particular
groups of citizens.

Competing theories of democracy – liberal–statist, majoritarian–
consociational, unitary–federal, presidential–parliamentary – have
long argued the merits of the particular locations cited in figure 2.1.
In my view, all are potentially democratic, provided that they respect
the overarching principles of citizenship and the procedural minimum
of civil rights, fair elections, and free associability. Given the growing
diversity of tasks performed by public authorities, the number and
variety of partial regimes has tended to increase. Most scholars still
place the party and electoral systems – the arrangements regulating
government formation and executive–legislative relations and the
formula for the territorial division of authority – at the core. It has
been argued that the system of interest intermediation deserves
equivalent attention,16 and that, given the specific circumstances of
most transitions from autocracy, it would seem prudent to include the
nature of civil–military relations in that inner circle.17

Putting the pieces back together

The consolidation of democracy, then, consists of transforming the ad
hoc political relations that have emerged partially into stable structures
in such a way that the ensuing channels of access, patterns of
inclusion, resources for action, and norms about decision-making
conform to an overriding standard:

. . . that of citizenship. This involves both the right to be treated by fellow
human beings as equal with respect to the making of collective choices and
the obligation of those implementing such choices to be equally accountable
and accessible to all members of the polity. Inversely, this principle imposes
the obligation on the ruled to respect the legitimacy of choices made by
deliberation among equals (or their representatives), and the right for the
rulers to act with authority (and, therefore, to apply coercion when necessary)
in order to promote the effectiveness of such choices and to protect the
regime from threats to its persistence.18

Conformity to the principle of citizenship and its corollary rights and
obligations by no means guarantees that regime structuration will
result in a particular or unique set of institutions. Lots of different
decision-making rules, inclusion formulas, distributions of resources,
forms of participation, strategies of influence, and so forth, can claim
to embody this generic principle. Across time and space – not to
mention culture and class – opinions have differed concerning what
institutions and rules are to be considered democratic. The concrete
institutions and rules which have been established in different
‘‘democratic’’ countries have similarly differed. Given the positive
connotation which the term has acquired, each country tends to claim
that the way its institution and rules are structured is the most democratic.
The ‘‘others,’’ especially one’s enemies and competitors, are
accused of having some inferior type of democracy or another kind of
regime altogether. With the United States of America, this meant
that the particular – not to say, peculiar – configuration of its regime
was often taken as ‘‘the’’ model of conformity to the citizenship
principle. Not so long ago it was Great Britain, the ‘‘mother of Parliaments,’’
that was regarded as the model. In the contemporary
period, the appeal of both American and British practices has diminished
considerably. Neodemocracies are likely to look elsewhere for
their institutions – to France, Germany, Sweden, and now Spain.
Coping with the plurality of institutions
The major implication of the preceding discussion is that no single set
of institutions and rules – and, above all, no single institution or rule –
defines political democracy. Not even such fundamental characteristics
as majority rule, territorial representation, competitive elections,
parliamentary sovereignty, a popularly elected executive, or a
‘‘responsible party system’’ can be taken as its distinctive hallmark.
Needless to say, this is a serious obstacle when it comes to measuring
the consolidation of democracy. One cannot simply seize on some
key ‘‘meta-relation’’ such as the manner of forming executive power –
for example presidentialism versus parliamentarianism – and trace its
transformation into a structure, assuming that all the others – such as
the party system, the decision-making rules – will fall into line once it
has crossed some critical threshold. What must be analysed is an
emerging gestalt, a network of relationships involving multiple processes
and sites. It may not be difficult to agree on what Robert Dahl
has called the ‘‘institutional guarantees’’ and others have called the
‘‘procedural minimum’’ without which no democracy could be said to
exist – secret balloting, universal adult suffrage, regular elections,
partisan competition, associational freedom, and executive accountability.
19 Yet underlying these accomplishments and flowing from
them are much more subtle and complex relations which define both
the substance and form of nascent democratic regimes.

Of course it is important that elections be held; that parties compete
with varying chances of winning; that voter preferences be
secretly recorded and honestly counted; that associations be free to
form, recruit members, and exercise influence; that citizens be allowed
to contest the policies of their government and hold leaders responsible
for their actions. The longer these structures and rules of the
‘‘procedural minimum’’ exist, the greater is the likelihood they will
persist. Polities that have had regular elections of uncertain outcome
for, say, 40 years are more likely to continue having them in the future
than is a polity which has only had them for, say, 10 years. Therefore,
it is probably correct, ceteris paribus, to assume that Italian democracy
is more consolidated than Portuguese or Spanish democracy.

But the sheer longevity of such structures and rules is an inadequate base upon which to build an understanding of the consolidation
of democracy. Indeed, it does not adequately answer why or how
they have persisted; it just records the fact ex post. A more serious
accusation is that such an approach tends to privilege one set of
democratic institutions – usually political parties and elections – and
reifies (not to say, fetishizes) their presence at the expense of others.
It could even lead to adopting a historically or culturally peculiar
outcome as the standard against which to measure the progress of
contemporary new democracies. The obvious danger is to consider
the popular election of the chief executive and competition between
two centrist ‘‘catch-all’’ parties as the norm for institutions, and rotation
in exclusive responsibility for governance as the hallmark of
success: that is, to apply the US model to evaluate what is happening
in Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Whatever metric one
applies, it must be capacious enough to embrace the emergence of a
wide range of possible types of democracy.