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Associative Principles and Democratic Reform 23

corporations, and if the great bulk of other social affairs are controlled by State bureaucracies. The space for real democratic govemment is then smali, and ‘civil society’ becomes vestigial, confined to marginal groups and peripheral areas of social life with little influence over the real decision-makers. If the dominant bureaucratic institutions persist unreformed, then the role of de-mocracy is reduced in the case of companies to shareholders (at least nominally) electing directors and, in the case of the State, to individual citizens electing representatives who have formal direction of public administrative agencies. The problem here for Bobbio and Dahl is unaccountable bureaucracy and the excessive influence of certain groups, not the form and functions of the liberał democratic State.

Noberto Bobbio in The Futurę of Democracy (1987) contends that democracy has stopped short of the ‘two great blocks of descending and hierarchical power in every complex society, big business and public administration. And as long as these blocks hołd out against the pressures exerted from below, the democratic transformation of society cannot be said to be complete’ (p. 57). For Bobbio the acid test of democracy is not just ‘ “who votes” but “where” they can vote’ (p. 56). The central contention in Robert DahlY A Preface to Economic Democracy (1985) is that effective democracy reąuires both the widespread diffusion of property and the sturdy economic independence of a substantial portion of the citizens. Excessive control of the economy either by the State or by a smali number of private agencies is a threat to the plural society that is the foundation of political democracy. Democracy does not reąuire capitalism, but a market society and a substantial number of autonomous economic units. The concentration of corporate power threatens democracy both because it increases the capacity for influence on government of a smali number of unaccountable private bodies, and because it reduces the independence of the citizens, the majority of whom may be employees of such companies. Dahl’s answer is the development of a worker-owned cooperative sector as a way of checking the unhealthy concentration of corporate control over the economy, and therefore the polity, that has developed in this century.

These are powerful arguments, and they help to make the associationalist case, but both writers stop well short of advocating associationalism. The reason is that both remain committed to a