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Book Review: Susanna Trnka and Catherine Trundle (eds), Competing Responsibilities: The Ethics and Politics of Contemporary Life

have written, some include vote barriers, veto power to non-elected political figures, in which the authoritarian elites are overrepresented. In other words, an elite-biased democracy has opened the access to freedom of speech, religious freedom, for example, but it has limited the most important decisions for a smaller group, the political and economic elites outgoing authoritarian regime, and one of the examples shown by the authors is Chile (Chapter 7). The second is a passage for popular democracies, and this occurs when external circumstances catch incumbent authoritarian elites off guard and, under duress, they concede institutional control and rulemaking to a coalition of outsider economic elites – shut out of power and influence under authoritarianism – and the masses; Switzerland is one of the examples shown by the authors (Chapter 6). The difference between these two types of democracy forged by the authors is crucial for delimiting a possibility or not to the masses’ satisfaction in their government performance. One of the authors’ findings points out that in elite-biased democracies, the citizens may be free from some of the worst abuses of authoritarianism, such as blanket censorship and outright repression, but they are not important players in determining public policy. Which make the authors believe that authoritative elites do not have a preference for either a democracy or authoritarian regime, but for a regime where their interests are satisfied. Albertus and Menaldo finish the book stating that a democracy as a people’s government and government for people is a false hope. Actually, what exist are models where the decisions pass through the authoritarian elites and where the democracies, even though incomplete, are better than dictatorial governments because ‘Democracy allows for greater popular representation, even if it is incomplete, and competition, even if constrained. It typically frees citizens from the threat of arbitrary or trumped-up detention and allows them to speak their minds’ (p. 283). Authoritarianism and the Elite Origins of Democracy is a book that demonstrates the power of authoritarian elites, in particular, their preservation power of their own interests in democratic institutional arrangements as a constitution, thereby preventing the influences of the society’s groups on enforcing their participation prerogatives in decisionmaking for the masses, which very often create authoritarian democracies, explaining the recent authoritative turn to several democracies.