Page 21 - SCANDAL AND DEMOCRACY

6 Introduction

need arise to build, or rebuild, a society that combines a critical component of uncer-
tainty with the complementary promise of indeterminacy.
At the start of democratic transition, when electoral outcomes are no longer pre-
ordained, new players have a chance to compete. But fears that the first open contest
might also be the last can trigger a frenzy of power grabbing that can lead right back
to authoritarianism. Conversely, faith in the indeterminacy of current rounds—that
is, assurance that there will always be another chance to compete—can stave off this
inclination to reversal.
Even without a downward spiral of power grabbing, the fear that there will not be a
chance to play again may seem to justify the impulse to cheat and weaken commitments
to the norms of fair play. Cheating in the first round is likely to distort the electoral pro-
cess in future rounds. By contrast, belief that there will be future open contests encour-
ages players to focus not simply on winning but on guarding the process to improve
their odds in the next round should they lose the first. In short, the promise of ongoing
rounds gives players reason to invest in the integrity of the process—specifically, the
practices and rules of the game that will maintain a level playing field for future con-
tests. Through building this faith in indeterminacy and increasing investment in a fair
process, the uncertainty of democratic contestation becomes institutionalized.
More broadly, the institutionalization of uncertainty is the process by which the
unpredictability of democratic contests comes to be tolerated and eventually expected
by a polity accustomed to outcomes decided in advance by political patronage or exec-
utive caprice. As Indonesia’s experience demonstrates, a nation’s media can play a
critical role—first, as actors self-consciously promoting reforms, transparency, and
democratic values (including the norms of fair play) and second, as vehicles for the
display of uncertainty, that is, democracy’s inherent unpredictability and the facts,
opinions, and partisan battles that sustain it. These are the battles that play out in
the secondary contests between elections: political, as well as economic and judicial.
When we apply Przeworski’s concept to actual democratic transitions, the abstrac-
tion of uncertainty needs to be integrated into an unfolding political process. Viewed
at the moment of authoritarianism’s collapse, amid the tumult of mass demonstra-
tions and fallen dictators, democratic change seems primarily a conjuncture of regime
incapacity and mass mobilization. Yet viewed analytically, a political transition and the
subsequent struggle to prevent authoritarian reversal require mechanisms to break
up elite collusion and promote the free interplay of competing forces whose sum is
uncertainty. By both providing information and, at times, promoting political scandal,
the media engender division among competing elites, delegitimate collusive pacts,
and inspire public mobilization that can maintain a process that moves forward, by
fits and starts, toward democratic consolidation.
Not only does Przeworski’s conceptual model effectively encompass Indonesia’s
two-decade struggle for democracy, it also illuminates key aspects of parallel pro-
cesses that have roiled four continents since the end of the Cold War. Its application
to the progression of specific democratic transitions produces a paradigm that places
the media at the fulcrum of change. Most of the regime changes that mark democ-
ratization’s “third wave” were pacted transitions that left large elements of the old
authoritarian coalition in place. Among such elements, members of the media, even
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those once allied with the old order, are potentially leading actors uniquely equipped
to promote the transparency and competitive contestation central to democracy and
thereby ward off authoritarian reversal.