A new turn to authoritarian Rule in Russia?

Many observers have pointed to the increasingly authoritarian nature of President Putin's regime in Russia. This apparent turn away from democracy has generally been attributed either to Russian political culture or to the security background of Putin himself and many of those he has brought to office. However, analysis of the democratization literature suggests that the sources of Russia's authoritarianism may lie in the nature of the initial transition from Soviet rule, and in particular the way in which elites were able to act with significant independence from civil society forces because of the weakness of such forces. This weakness enabled successive elites led by Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin to construct a political system in which popularly based involvement and participation were severely restricted. In this sense, Putin is merely building on what went before, not changing the regime's basic trajectory.     

Who wins the most when everybody wins? Predicting candidate performance in an authoritarian election

ABSTRACT

What explains the variation in vote shares received by candidates in single-party authoritarian elections where everybody wins? The scholarly literature has often ignored institutional variations, treated all authoritarian elections as similar, and explained the variation of vote shares as a consequence of clientelism, coercion or electoral fraud. We employ a unique data set for Cuba’s 2013 National Assembly election to show an alternative answer: even in authoritarian regimes, institutional settings shape voters’ behaviour and candidates’ strategies. When the number of candidates on the ballot equals the number of parliamentary seats and yet voters can express some preference among multiple candidates, valence can become a predictor of candidate performance. Voters reward high-quality politicians, but not incumbents or Communist Party members, while candidates have no incentives to actively distinguish themselves and converge toward the general support of the single united slate.     

Does civil war breed authoritarian values? An empirical study of Bosnia-Herzegovina,Kosovo and Croatia

This article analyses how armed conflict affects individual support for liberal values. It is commonly assumed that the consolidation of democracy depends on individual values such as tolerance as well as aspirations of civil and political liberty. For post-conflict societies, consolidating democracy is also a means of reducing the risk of recurring violent conflict. However, democracy has proven to be especially hard to achieve and consolidate in ethnically divided societies. While previous research has centred mainly on institutions and political elites, I expand the focus to also include ordinary citizens. Using survey data from post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo and Croatia, I examine the effect of exposure to violence on a scale of authoritarian values. While the effects are small, the results show that war-related violence in some cases leads people to embrace authoritarian values.     

Is democracy the only game in town? Tension between immigrants' democratic desires and authoritarian imprints

This article borrows from the literature on transitional democracies to examine levels of support for democracy and non-democratic alternatives among immigrants travelling from partly and non-democratic countries to Canada. It evaluates how immigrants who grew up under authoritarian rule come to adapt to democracy. The findings indicate that immigrants from partly and non-democratic countries experience tensions in their adaptation to democracy, expressing strong democratic desires but also manifesting what could be interpreted as lasting imprints of their socialization under authoritarian rule. Immigrants from partly and non-democratic countries exhibit strong support for democracy (they almost all believe it is a good form of government, the best one, and understand democracy in broadly similar terms as the rest of the population). Yet, if democracy is the main game in town for the immigrants, it is not the only one; immigrants from partly and non-democratic countries are significantly more likely than people socialized in a democratic political system to support other forms of governments that are non-democratic. The article thus argues for the lasting impact of authoritarianism on people's democratic outlooks despite the presence of strong democratic desires.     

The external-domestic interplay in democracy promotion: a case study on public administration reform in Croatia

In this contribution we conceptualize the under-investigated interplay between external and domestic actors in democracy promotion. We first propose a typology of the instruments and means used both by external and domestic actors to influence reform outputs and then trace these instruments' effects on outcomes, thereby expanding the existing concepts of domestic agency. Although democracy promotion continues to be a rather asymmetric relationship between the “donors” and “receivers” of aid and advice, domestic actors employ a wide array of instruments to manage external demands for reform, including diplomacy, take-over, slowdown, modification, resistance, and emancipation. The article draws on a case study of European Union democracy promotion within two reform initiatives in the field of Public Administration Reform (PAR) in Croatia.     

Conceptualizing and measuring subnational democracy across Indian states

India is often credited for its success as the world’s largest democracy, but variation in subnational democracy across its states has not been systematically incorporated into scholarship on subnational regimes. This paper develops a conceptualization of subnational democracy based on four constitutive dimensions – turnover, contestation, autonomy and clean elections – and introduces a comprehensive dataset to measure each of the dimensions between 1985 and 2013. The inclusion of India – an older parliamentary democracy with a centralized federal system – broadens the universe of cases for the study of subnational regimes, and reveals variation across constitutive dimensions that has not yet been theorized. The paper shows that threats to subnational democracy come from multiple directions, including the central government and non-state armed actors, that subnational variation persists even decades after a transition at the national-level, and that subnational democracy declines in some states in spite of the national democratic track record.     

Dynamics of Legitimation in Regional Organisations: The OAS and Non State Actors

ABSTRACT

Legitimation has been conceived mostly as an exercise in justification by international/regional organisations needing to convince audiences of the rightfulness of their behaviour. What we could call the external dimension of legitimation. The internal dimension, what happens between an organisation and its stakeholders, remains understudied. Analysing internal legitimation practices becomes important in the context of the opening-up of international organisations. Aside from the EU, however, evidence is still lacking as to the nature and extent of this opening-up, and the role of non-state actors (NSAs) in this context. The article seeks to fill part of this void using the OAS as a case study. It examines actors' practices during three central moments in the legitimation process. At each stage, OAS' legitimation-seeking practices and NSAs' legitimation/de-legitimation practices are analysed. The study reveals that NSAs have responded positively to the opening-up by the OAS despite tensions among member States.     

The noble west and the dirty rest? Western democracy promoters and illiberal regional powers

This conclusion summarizes the major findings of this special issue and discusses their implications for research on democratization and international democracy promotion. First, I compare the interactions between EU and US democracy promotion and the responses of non-democratic regional powers. In the cases in which Russia, Saudi Arabia, and China chose to pursue a countervailing strategy, I match the reactions of the US and the EU and explore how the combined (inter-)actions of democratic and non-democratic actors have affected efforts at democracy promotion in the target countries. The second part discusses the theoretical implications of these findings and identifies challenges for theory-building. I argue that the literature still has to come to terms with a counter-intuitive finding of this special issue, namely that non-democratic actors can promote democratic change by unintentionally empowering liberal reform coalitions as much as democracy promoters can unwittingly enhance autocracy by stabilizing illiberal incumbent regimes. I conclude with some policy considerations.     

International Integration and Democratization: An Event History Analysis

This article examines the relationships between transitions to and from democracy and membership in major intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), ratification of key human-rights treaties, and integration into the global economy while controlling for a variety of domestic factors. The findings show that for the most part, participation in the major IGOs and the United Nations' human-rights regime has made little difference to the chances that countries would attempt or sustain democracy. Participation in regional human-rights treaties in Africa and the Americas is linked to better prospects for democracy, but this association appears to stem from regional trends of which those pacts are emblematic, rather than mechanisms specific to the pacts themselves. Finally, entanglement in the global economy – as indicated by thicker trade flows and membership in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and then World Trade Organization (WTO) – seems to have had a stronger effect on the prospects for democracy than these other forms of international integration, but not always in the beneficent direction posited by liberal theorists. While participation in the GATT/WTO is associated with better prospects for the establishment and persistence of democracy, foreign trade itself is linked to the persistence of domestic political regimes of either stripe, democratic and non-democratic.     

India as a democracy promoter? New Delhi's involvement in Nepal's return to democracy

According to the theory of ‘democratic peace’, India, as the largest democracy in the world and as South Asia's predominant regional power, should be expected to promote democracy in neighbouring countries. However, New Delhi lacks any kind of official democracy-promotion policy, and its past record on democracy promotion efforts in the region is mixed at best. Against this background, the article analyses the substantial role India has come to play in the peace and democratization process in Nepal in the years 2005–2008, asking whether this constitutes a departure from New Delhi's traditional policy of non-interference in its neighbours' internal affairs and a move towards a more assertive approach to democracy promotion. However, the analysis shows that India's involvement in Nepal was the product of short-term stability concerns rather than being an indicator of a long-term change in strategy with the intention of becoming an active player in international democracy promotion.     

Regional Integration and Democratic Consolidation in the Southern Cone of Latin America

Regional integration has been a significant factor shaping the consolidation processes of southern cone democratizing states. Regional integration strategies have allowed transitional regimes across the southern cone to neutralize threats of democratic reversals by military leaders, effectively undermining the long-standing geostrategic rationales used by foreign policy and military elites to justify military intervention in domestic politics. The dramatic rise of interstate co-operation has accelerated and ensured the consolidation of democracy across the region through regional trade blocs, the development of an embedded regional commitment to democracy, and a 'defence of democracy' regime. At the same time, democratization has enhanced regional economic and security integration strategies, through increased domestic transparency, the impact of pro-democratic ideational forces and the externalization of democratic principles. 'Structurational' analysis of the processes of democratic consolidation in Brazil and Argentina is used to demonstrate the influence of economic integration and the emergent regional security regime on democratic consolidation, as well as the role democratization played in facilitating these developments in regional integration.     

The negotiation burden of institutional interactions: non-state organizations and the international negotiations on forests

The participation of non-state actors in international politics has been investigated since the creation of international institutions. Yet, the rules, principles and norms of global governance are no longer discussed in single isolated institutions. Rather, with the proliferation of international regimes and organizations, international issues are now negotiated in a context of institutional interactions known as ‘regime complexes’. This poses new questions, in particular on the negotiation burden that these new processes place on international actors. To answer this question, this contribution compares non-state participation in both contexts (single regimes and regime complexes), using the international forest negotiations as a case study. It uses quantitative methods to measure the negotiation burden of single regimes and compare it with the negotiation burden of regime complexes. The negotiation burden of single regimes is found to be insignificant, political interest being the major motivation for participation, while the negotiation burden of regime complexes is found to be real, demanding a certain type of material and organizational resources in order for non-state actors to participate. Yet a certain diversity of non-state representation is maintained within regime complexes, non-governmental organizations being dominant with respect to business groups.     

Local actors in the driver's seat: Transatlantic democracy promotion under regime competition in the Arab world

In studies of political transition, scholars started to explore the effect of competition between foreign policies of antipodal regimes on the political trajectories of transition countries, notably between traditional Western donors such as the European Union and the United States of America and regional authoritarian powers such as Saudi Arabia. Drawing on existing accounts, this article studies the conditions under which external actors can effectively steer local elite towards democratic reforms despite illiberal regional powers’ potential counteractions. We argue that the reform-oriented political elites in the recipient country are the ultimate judges in this competition for influence. If democracy promotion is credible, they will decide in favour of democratization, but only if the expected costs and benefits of democratic engagement resist solicitation by authoritarian powers. A study of post-Arab Spring democracy promotion in Tunisia supports the pivotal role of the external donors’ credibility in times of complex donor constellations.     

Democracy promotion and China: blocker or bystander?

The increasingly prosperous, mighty, and assertive China is arguably the most powerful country blocking democracy today. In addition to withholding democratic rights of one-fifth of the world's population, authoritarian China represents an alternative development model that has gained significant traction. China thus constitutes a challenge to democracy promoters. But does Beijing also countervail democracy promotion by the European Union and the United States? After a summary of the party-state's response to democracy promotion at home, we test the hypothesis that geostrategic interests or a perceived risk of regime survival will lead the People's Republic to countervail democracy promotion outside its own borders. We do so by focusing on the most likely cases in China's near-abroad: Myanmar and Hong Kong. Our analysis of Myanmar suggests that Beijing remains focused on securing economic and security interests irrespective of regime type when regime survival at home is not at risk. The case of Hong Kong, on the other hand, allows us to identify the tactics used by Beijing when there is a significant risk of democratic spillover. This case also demonstrates that the People's Republic of China is able to stifle United States and European Union democracy support when it wishes to do so.