Policy and Complex Systems
national origin , age , sexual identity and preference , and so on ( Tilly , 2007 ). Another symptom of weak or no democracy is little or no state protections in practice and action against arbitrary and capricious state actions such as being jailed with no description of the charges ( Tilly , 2007 ). Facilitating policy outputs and outcomes that could favor greater procedural democratic elements include competitive and fair multiparty elections with universal suffrage ( Levitsky & Way , 2013 ). Other elements include little or no violation of civil liberties such as free speech , press , or the right to association or state institutions that limit an opposition party or candidate to compete fairly in elections ( Levitsky & Way , 2013 ).
Inequality and Democracy
With respect to social and economic inequality in a policy system , characteristics of less democracy are governments whose policies favor powerful interests and the wealthy class of citizens with respect to economic issues related to manufacture , production , and distribution of goods and services that enrich and further enrich the wealthy . In the U . S ., for instance , reflecting a trend of less democracy , income and wealth inequality has risen sharply with upper income households in 2014 receiving 49 % of aggregate income up from 29 % in 1970 ( PewResearchCenter , 2015 ; Geewax , 2015 ). State policies , in essence , protect economic privilege through political means including formal and informal requirements and informal non-written actions . According to Tilly ( 2007 ), other features of how the rich and powerful in a less than optimal democratic fashioned are bolstered include state actions that opt out of democratic options , beneficial relations with the state that support unequal relations between classes , elites , and groups , and actions by the state that enhance economic largess for the wealthy at the expense of other groups .
Social forces that counter inequality include social movements and revolutionary movements ( Tilly , 2007 ). These outside the halls-of-power advocacy movements ordinarily pressure insider political institutions to enact policy that create significant reform or in the case of political revolutionary movements to radically change and overhaul societal political institutions and public policies ( Tilly , 2007 ). Social movements by their very definition are broad based mass and grassroots movements that seek significant reform of a political system such as the enactment of federal civil rights laws in the U . S . ( Tilly , 2007 ). These movements may be on the political left , center , or right . Recently , contention theorists have argued that social movements are the result of specific periods of contradictory policy demands in which government is central to resolve the conflict ( Buechler , 2011 ; McAdam et al ., 2001 ). This approach is state-centered and has been criticized for ignoring or downplaying nonstate oriented forms of social movement action such as protests that focus on changing public opinion or other non-state institutions and actions ( Dyke et al ., 2004 ; Buechler , 2011 ). Other criticisms of contention politics is that it centers on state resolution of conflicts when social movement research has focused on others such as social movement organizational development , non-state networks of organizing , and ideological considerations such as forms of feminism or economic and social class ( Buechler , 2011 ). As a result , some social movement scholars have called for a multi-faceted approach to study social movements based on all these above factors including organizing in cyberspace ( Buechler , 2011 ; Castells , 2012 ). Ultimately , what social movements seek is much greater access and control of
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