Democracy is widely accepted today, perhaps as never before, as the most suitable form of government. But what is democracy, and does it always produce good government? There is a tradition in popular thinking and in political science that associates democracy with the existence of competitive elections. This follows the tradition of Schumpeter (1950) and Downs (1957) in public choice. Competitive elections are undoubtedly a necessary condition for democracy. But they are not sufficient for true democracy or for democracy to function reasonably well. For example, the fathers of the American Constitution expressed their fear of factions and of mob sentiments. One problem with competitive elections is that they provide no protection for minorities. A second is that they may not express the long-term interests of the electorate itself, or their attitudes in sober second thought. Yet a third is the well-known Arrow problem of cyclical majorities – perhaps one of the central discoveries of modern public choice. A fourth is the recurring tension between the two principles of government by majority on the one hand and the rule of law on the other.

Contemplating the failures of democracy in theory, one early tradition in public choice theorizing was based on the idea that, whatever its failings in theory, democracy works well in practice. This puzzle arose early in public choice theory, and the question, “Why so much stability?” that is, specifically, “Why do democracies appear so much more stable in practice than in theory?

INTRODUCTION

Constitutional rules (or, more generally, constitutional variables) must be analyzed in competitive settings. These rules can constrain the behavior of public sector actors and ensure that political competition remains active and vigorous. Political competition, in turn, can affect the capacity of constitutions to constrain political action. Among the different ways of modeling political competition in the case of democratic societies, we retain two: a) electoral competition, as understood in the probabilistic voting model; and b) competition among centers of power in compound governments (Breton, 1996).

In that framework, the preferences and opinions of citizens in their capacity as voters or demanders of public policies necessarily count. In the literature, these preferences are usually restricted to goods and services; in what follows, they are defined over constitutional variables as well. Moreover, we assume that there will necessarily be trade-offs or compensations between goods and services on the one hand and constitutional variables on the other. This is often the case at the level of individual citizens, but it will obtain at the collective level as a matter of necessity. By itself, this creates a first strong linkage among all issues, including the constitutional ones. In addition, a second linkage derives from the fact that decision-makers in the public sector normally function in institutional settings – parliaments, cabinets, political parties, for instance – that make it natural and easy to bring together apparently unconnected issues.

INTRODUCTION

Political extremism is a multidimensional phenomenon. It can be taken to refer to, for example, the tail ends of the distribution of worldviews and beliefs held by individuals in a society, the kind of objectives sought, the means used in the pursuit of those objectives, or the preeminent position accorded to one specific issue over all others. In this chapter, we focus on a particular dimension of extremism – namely the intolerance, unwillingness to compromise, and rejection of evidence contradicting one's beliefs that are often associated with the phenomenon.

We look at the forces, within a social environment, that can contribute to the development of the above attitudes (Section 2). We then look at mechanisms that help reinforce and diffuse extreme positions (Sections 3 and 4). Much of what we say in these sections applies to all forms of extremism – whether religious, social, scientific, cultural or political. We focus on the last.

Political extremism becomes a socially relevant phenomenon when it involves the mobilization of individuals and the formation of groups that pursue objectives and make use of means that impose external costs deemed to be unacceptable.

Political extremism is a complex and difficult subject. Indeed, the very concept “extremist” sometimes makes people uncomfortable. Is not extremism always relative to some set of values, whose rightness is open to debate? As citizens of democratic countries, we often find extremism inside our polities distressing. On the other hand, when extremism occurs in non-democratic settings it often appears to many of us as liberating. Thus, we are often forced to distinguish between the “decent” extremism of those “fighting for political liberation” and the “indecent political brutality” of domestic extremists. And even when we are sympathetic to the aims of the latter, we are often led to wonder why human rationality is unable to eliminate the social waste implicit in the violence and disruption often associated with extremist activities.

As is widely acknowledged, we owe our political liberties today to some extremists of the past and too much conformity is a danger to our intellectual life and to social progress. At the same time, the conformity often observed within extremist movements is sometimes even more remarkable and disconcerting than the conformity within the wider society to which such movements sometimes set themselves up in opposition. Thus, another contraposition is that, in some ways, extremism and conformity are opposites; in other ways they are simply different aspects of the same phenomenon.