Many of the world’s emerging democracies are experiencing a similar disjunction: Although their political institutions democratize with considerable success, the civil component of citizenship remains impaired as citizens suffer systematic violations of their rights. In such uncivil democracies, violence, injustice, and impunity are norms. As a result, the institutions of law and justice lose legitimacy, the principle of legality is obstructed, and the realization of democratic citizenship remains limited. Narrowly political definitions of democracy miss these dilemmas. In this essay, we consider the disjunctive development of democracy such problems entail. We focus on the case of Brazil to emphasize both the lived consequences of these problems and their theoretical significance for understanding democratic change.

Our broader aim in this essay is to argue that democracy cannot stand alone, either conceptually or actually, as a kind of political regime or political method in the context of social and cultural conditions hostile to democratic citizenship. Rather, we stress that democracy is as much a qualification of society as it is of politics. This is not to adopt a maximal definition of democracy or to make a particular political culture its precondition. It is rather to insist that the extension of democracy to the social sphere is as central to the concept as its extension to the political and that both of these colonizations (of society by the state and the state by society, to summarize the process in this way) constitute the contemporary and enabling form of democratic development.