In our Western-dominated world, the way we think about distribution of power within countries is based on Western nations of democracy and autocracy. At one end, we have absolute monarchies; at the other, we have countries with parliaments, regular elections with universal franchise, an independent judiciary, and strong protections for civil liberties. Whereas absolute monarchy is approximately the same everywhere, a lot of what we think of as liberal democracy is grounded in Western experience, especially voting.
My question is, could there be alternative forms for popular rule, polyarchy, or whatever you call the opposite of absolutism?
Some examples from recent-ish history:
1. In
an article rejecting the association of Asia with despotism, Kim Dae-jung notes that Europe figured out democratic voting first, but that other aspect of modern liberal democracy, including a civil service with merit-based promotion, rule of law, and the concept (if not the practice) that the people have the right to overthrow bad governments goes back to Imperial China. In a Chinese-dominated TL, is it plausible that many states would be polyarchic without voting? For example, there could be strong separation of powers between a variety of bureaucracies - the courts, the civil service, the military - with strong freedom of speech protections, without any voting.
2. Modern liberal democracy was developed in places in which there was very little diversity among the politically empowered population: 17c England, late-18c America, 18-19c France. Diverse countries have gone in a somewhat different direction with power sharing, as in modern Belgium and Switzerland, or the Dutch consociational model; additionally, Israel and India, which otherwise have an English-style judiciary, do not have juries. Conceivably, a polyarchy that developed in a diverse place would've placed more emphasis on group rights and collective rights. We see an element of that in standard lists of civil liberties with freedom of religion, which is a collective right: Judaism, Lutheranism, etc., are defined collectively, and there exist political conflicts, resolved collectively, on issues like circumcision or Scientology. We also see this emphasis on collective rights in the activism of black Americans and Muslim Europeans.
3. Owing to the experience of territorial nation-states and the humiliations of the Scramble of China, we think of extraterritoriality as an imposition rather than a right. But potentially, a timeline in which polyarchy emerged out of a highly mobile merchant class (for example, medieval and Early Modern Jews) would view polities as non-territorial, and might consider extraterritoriality a fundamental right for migrants of all classes.
4. Democracies have direct voting, for political parties or individual candidates. But we do see occasional exceptions with indirect voting: in the US, the most important modern example is the Iowa caucuses, in which at each stage people elect representatives to the next stage of the caucuses, and there are 3 or 4 stages before you get to the selection of the state's delegates. I imagine that in highly local, highly clannish societies, voting could emerge along the same principle: you choose your clan's representatives, and then the clan chooses the local village or town representatives, and then the village or town representatives choose the county representatives, and so on.