TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY DEMOCRACY
What we now call democracy burst forth only when the decision load suddenly swelled beyond the capacity of the old elite to handle it. The arrival of the Second Wave, bringing expanded trade, a greater division of labor, and a leap to a whole new level of complexity insociety, caused the same kind of decision implosion in its time that the Third Wave is causing today.
As a result, the decisional capabilities of the old ruling groups were overwhelmed, and new elites and sub-elites had to be recruited tocope with the decision load. Revolutionary new political institutions had to be designed for that purpose.
As industrial society developed, becoming ever more complex, its integrating elites, the “technicians of power,” were in their turn continually compelled to recruit new blood to help them carry the expanding decision load. It was this invisible but inexorable process that drew the middle class more and more into the political arena. It was this expanded need for decision-making that led to an ever-wider franchise and created more niches to be filled from below.
Many of the bitterest political battles in Second Wave countries—the struggle of American Blacks for integration, of British trade unionists for equal educational opportunity, of women for their political rights, the hidden class warfare in Poland or the Soviet Union—concerned the distribution of these new slots in the elite structures.
At any given time, however, there was a definite limit to how many additional people could be absorbed into the governing elites. And this limit was essentially fixed by the size of the decision load.
Despite the Second Wave society’s meritocratic pretensions, therefore, whole subpopulations were screened out on racist, sexist, and similar grounds. Periodically, whenever the society jumped to a new level of complexity and the decision load swelled, the excluded groups, sensing the new opportunities, would intensify their demand for equal rights, the elites would open the doors a bit wider, and the society would experience what seemed like a wave of further democratization.
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