At the levels of rhetoric and ideology, as well as that of the simplest analysis,
electoral democracy dominates the discussion of political participation. During
the 1980s in Central America, the election of civilian presidents and legislators
in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and in 1990, in Nicaragua was a
significant phenomenon in which citizens of those countries acted importantly
in their respective public lives. At the same time, it is worth remembering that
elections were held in the latest part of the nineteenth and earliest part of the
twentieth centuries in which the enfranchised portion of the population in-
cluded a tiny elite minority. One must also recall that throughout the decades
from the 1930s to the 1970s the most memorable feature of the elections that
were held was not participation but rather fraud. It is worth noting, too, that
the ideological champion of elections, the United States, supported many
fraudulently elected regimes, helped violently to overthrow the fairly elected
government in Guatemala in 1954, and dissuaded the major opposition candi-
date for president from participating in the 1984 elections in Nicaragua.

In the formation of a state, much more is involved in citizenship and
participation in the public life of the state than elections. During the upheavals
from 1989 to 1991 in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, the activities of
ordinary citizens in the streets and through informal roles of debating, demon-
strating, resisting authority, and placing their bodies between tanks and leaders
or parliament buildings are clear models of highly significant participation
outside of elections. When citizens march in a demonstration to protest the
perpetration of fraud in an election, their participation transcends their activi-
ties as voters. Elections are a mechanism for selecting governments responsive

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