In textbooks and primers on democracy and democratization studies, one searches in vain for a dedicated chapter on the relationship between police and democracy (cf. Crick, 2002; Grugel, 2002; Haerpfer et al., 2009; Saage, 2005; Schmidt, 2010; Vorländer, 2010). One can only speculate on the reasons for this deficiency. Is it because the very existence of a democratic system so “obviously” requires an institution like the police, in order to maintain the state's sovereignty in the domestic sphere and guarantee it during conflicts? Or is it because the police, both past and present, were not and are not an institution of democracies only, since authoritarian and/or totalitarian regimes are similarly (and more heavily) reliant on police and parapolice organizations for the maintenance of power, meaning that the police are not a genuinely democratic institution per se?

Regardless of where these causes might lie, it is certainly possible to go beyond empirical and historical research into police roles and functions in real-life political systems both past and present, in order to formulate a theoretical framework that outlines the specific relationships between police and democracy—and because they are clearly different from those existing under authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, it makes sense to examine these interrelationships more closely. Of course, democracies and autocracies are clearly quite different in how they exercise the state's monopoly on the legitimate use of force so that the differences in police role and function are very much a difference in entirety (Busch et al., 1988, 29). Although the police is sociologically speaking a nonaligned institution, since it can serve any regime and is therefore neither intrinsically democratic nor intrinsically authoritarian or totalitarian (cf. Dupont et al., 2003, 331ff.; Hinton and Newburn, 2008), there nonetheless does exist a conceptual, historical and systematic connection between police and democracy.

Method(s)

The goal of this article is to draw constructive relationships between the fields of police studies and democracy studies. This also means linking the methods used in police studies with those of democracy studies, in order to combine the strengths of one methodology with those of the other, as highlighted by international discussions concerning methodological triangulation as a major advantage of method integration.