Democratic agency in the local political sphere. Reflections on inclusion in Bolivia

Numerous arguments have been advanced in the academic and policy literature as concerns the democratizing potential of decentralization reforms in third-wave developing and transition countries; numerous also have been the case studies signalling the short-comings of these reforms. In addition, analysis of local political participation has become an important dimension of studies of democratization. Taking the case of Bolivia as an example, this article addresses an issue which has been generally overlooked in this literature, that is the process of constitution of local political agents. Where do political agents come from in the context of democratization of local politics? Additionally, this article raises questions regarding the relationship between greater inclusion and deepening democracy in the local political sphere.     

Increasing Participation in Democratic Institutions Through Decentralization: Empowering Women and Scheduled Castes and Tribes Through Panchayat Raj in Rural India

In the past decade good governance and decentralization have become two of the main development pillars, relied on by both international development agencies and the authorities in developing countries in the quest for successful development. In India steps have been taken to increase the participation of the weaker sections of society in new arrangements for decentralized local decision-making through rules of reservation. This article discloses the potential and the pitfalls of increasing participation through decentralization by analyzing the Indian Panchayat Raj system. It is shown how technocratic regulations are not sufficient to ensure genuine empowerment for all in democratic decision-making. The question whether decentralization can be justified as one of the main means to development remains to be resolved.     

Popular perceptions of political regimes in East and Southeast Asia

Political regimes in East and Southeast Asia run the full spectrum from liberal democracy through various hybrid democratic-authoritarian types and on to full-blown authoritarianism and totalitarianism. While political scientists have invested much effort and ingenuity in creating typologies of regimes to better understand the empirical diversity of political structures and processes, much less attention has been paid to what the citizens think. How do people in East and Southeast Asian countries perceive their own institutions and performance of governance? This article uses public opinion data derived from the AsiaBarometer 2006 and 2007 Surveys of 12 East and Southeast Asian countries to map what citizens actually think about their structures, processes, and outcomes of governance and compare these with the regime classifications of political scientists. The results revealed universal commitment to elections but disillusionment with political practice, positive estimations of the institutions of governance in Southeast Asia but much less enthusiasm in East Asia, and a preference for moderate opinions. There is no clear overall correlation between regime type and popular perception.     

National democratization theory and global governance: civil society and the liberalization of the Asian Development Bank

Contributing to a growing literature on democracy beyond the nation-state, this article draws on aspects of national democratization theory in order to analyse empirical processes of democracy. By combining insights from transition theory and the theory of political opportunity structures, the article examines the case of the Asian Development Bank (ADB). While the ADB for a long time has been described as a closed, unresponsive and unaccountable international organization, a recent evaluation praised the Bank for its good practices concerning transparency, participation and accountability. The article uses the analytical framework to highlight the interaction between hard-liners and soft-liners within the ADB and explores the role of different transnational civil society actors in the processes that seem to have strengthened the democratic credentials of the ADB. While finding significant divisions within the ADB as well as amongst civil society actors targeting the bank, overall the article argues that transnational civil society actors, interacting with soft-liners within the ADB, have contributed to the implementation of reforms, which in turn create political opportunities for further civil society activism. The reform processes, however, are best described as processes of liberalization – rather than democratization.     

Information Campaigns and (Under)Privileged Citizens: An Experiment on the Differential Effects of a Voting Advice Application

Information campaigns are key elements of elections. Past research has established the importance of campaigns in informing and educating citizens, and ultimately strengthening participatory democracy. While the Internet has increased the possibilities to disseminate information campaigns and eased access to political information, it is still debated whether online campaigns are effective in stimulating political interest and participation among the general public. The issue is not only one of access, but also of use of information. The investigation of main effects of campaigns obscures the fact that citizens may not use information in the same way and reap the same political benefits. In this study, I examine the conditional effects of a new type of Web information campaign, Voting Advice Applications (VAAs), on the political engagement and electoral participation of citizens with varying levels of education. By investigating who benefits most from using these apps, I evaluate whether VAAs reinforce patterns of participation or mobilize new people in politics. Building on political behavior research, communication theory, and social psychology, I study the differential effects of VAAs with an innovative randomized field experiment design. The results confirm that VAAs can stimulate the political engagement of the public. However, there is no significant impact on electoral participation. In addition, the evidence shows that VAAs work differently for more or less educated citizens, and that the lower educated users benefit the most from VAAs as they become more interested in the election and more motivated to vote.     

Local democracy and popular participation: Chile and Brazil in comparative perspective

This article examines the factors that facilitate or impede the strengthening of popular participation in local democracy in Latin America through a comparative analysis of the Chilean and Brazilian cases. This comparative analysis illustrates the importance of structural reforms, the institutional configuration of local government and the role of political parties vis-à-vis civil society in either enhancing or impeding popular participation in local democracy. In short, it argues that popular participation will be strong and effective where structural reforms expand the resource base and policymaking authority of local leaders, local institutions strengthen accountability and facilitate citizen input in decision-making, and political parties attempt to organize and mobilize groups and constituents at the grass-roots. Where these conditions do not hold, the reverse will be true. These conclusions are drawn from analysis of the development of popular participation and local democracy in Porto Alegre, Brazil (a positive example) and Santiago, Chile (a negative example).     

‘The unfinished business of democratization’: struggles for services and accountability in South African cities

At the end of July 2009, South African cities became the terrain of violent protests. Several reasons lay behind the social unrest, but protesters were particularly vocal in demanding basic services and houses, reminding the newly elected president of his electoral promises of delivering to the poor. This article analyses two of the most prominent post-apartheid social movements that in the past decade have been confronting the state on issues of services and accountability. These struggles reveal the limits of the unfinished democratization and the dysfunction that characterizes policy and decision-making processes at the local level. These movements are contributing through their existence and actions to the deepening of democracy by creating new spaces for political confrontation and participation that can influence local governance and enhance development.     

Schools of democracy: how trade union membership impacts political participation in Africa’s emerging democracies

Trade unions in Africa have become increasingly vocal in calling attention to the widening socio-economic inequalities that have accompanied global market integration across the continent. This article argues that, in their quest to challenge neoliberal policies, labour movements have contributed to processes of democratization in Africa by acting as instruments of political socialization for their members. Using survey data from respondents in 18 African countries, this article demonstrates an empirical relationship between trade union membership and political participation. The article finds that membership in a labour organization increases one’s propensity to participate in a range of political activities. Specifically, labour movements encourage participation by forging “participatory spillover effects”, which mobilize unionists across different arenas of the political landscape. Finally, the article finds that the effect of union membership on political participation is stronger in countries where unions maintain independence from ruling parties. This research contributes to literature on political participation across Africa and furthers our understanding of the role of labour movements in bottom-up processes of democratization on the continent.     

Evaluating Democratic Governance: A Bottom-up Approach to European Union Enlargement

To be admitted to the European Union (EU), an applicant country is expected to meet five conditions for democratic governance set out in the EU's Copenhagen criteria. The first section compares the EU's criteria with alternative criteria of democracy and of governance. Secondly, the article uses New Europe Barometer sample surveys to demonstrate how the bottom-up evaluation of governance by a country's citizens can complement top-down evaluations by external institutions. Evaluations by citizens of Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania, and Ukraine are compared with those of citizens in eight post-communist countries admitted to the EU in 2004. Factor analysis demonstrates that, unlike democracy indexes, democratic governance is a multi-dimensional concept. Citizens characterize their system of democratic governance as acceptable on some criteria but not on others. Taken singly, each Copenhagen criterion can be a tool for diagnosing an area of weakness in democratic governance. However, political pressures lead policymakers to lower demands for improving governance as a deadline approach for deciding whether or not to admit an applicant country to the European Union.     

South African election posters: Reflecting the maturing of a democracy?

Abstract

The South African democracy has survived three national and provincial elections and three local elections, since 1994. In comparison to other young democracies in Africa, South Africa has experienced a relatively stable transition to democracy. However, the ruling ANC has not been under pressure from opposition parties. Although this has helped pave the way, a dominant governing party does not necessarily encourage the growth of a mature, democratic political culture. The assumption of this article is that political parties in developing societies have a normative obligation to do more than canvas votes during election campaigns. Political parties should also be instrumental in fostering a democratic political culture by communicating democratic values, encouraging participation in the democracy and enabling voters to make an informed electoral choice. Although political posters contribute mainly to image building, the reinforcement of party support, and the visibility of the party, posters are the agenda setters or headlines of a party's campaign – it is therefore argued that political parties in developing societies also need to design political posters responsively, in order to sustain the democracy. In general it seems that the poster campaigns of parties have matured since 1999, in the sense that there was less emphasis on democratisation issues in the past, and the campaigns conformed more to the norm of Western political campaigning.     

Popular understanding of democracy in contemporary China

By taking the official state ideology into consideration, this article seeks to contribute to the study of public opinion of democracy under non-democratic regimes by analysing both qualitative and quantitative evidence collected in China. An examination of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s discourse on democracy reveals that the CCP endorses popular sovereignty and political participation while denying political contestation. Meanwhile, the concept of democracy can have three distinctive meanings among ordinary Chinese: democracy as freedom, democracy as political participation to ensure government accountability, and democracy as good socio-economic performance. Survey data show that the majority of informed Chinese respondents treat democracy as political participation to ensure government accountability, which indicates that Chinese understanding of democracy has reached to a certain degree of consensus that is closer to universally-shared idea of democracy rather than being culturally distinctive.     

‘But you can't compare Malawi and Ireland!’ – shifting boundaries in a globalised world

Although global influences – in the form of international finance coupled with discourses of partnership, participation, good governance, and democracy – exercise an increasing influence on national and local governance arrangements worldwide, comparative studies across the traditional South/North divide remain extremely rare. Drawing on findings from a comparative study of Malawi's PRSP and Ireland's national Social Partnership process, this article demonstrates that a shifting of conceptual boundaries beyond traditionally delineated geographic borders is not just valid but essential, in that it helps to reveal new perspectives on the politics underlying globalised development processes and the transformative potential of those processes.     

What does democracy mean? Activist views and practices in Athens,Cairo, London and Moscow

We shed light on the discontent with and the appeal of democracy by interviewing some of the most committed critical citizens: core activists in street protests. Based on interviews in Athens, Cairo, London, and Moscow, we found that they rejected representative democracy as insufficient, and believed democracy to entail having a voice and a responsibility to participate intensively in political decision-making. Activists saw themselves as engaged in prefigurative politics by fostering democratic practices within the movement and, ultimately, in society, but also raised concerns about internal power dynamics reproducing existing inequalities and exclusions. The insistence by activists that citizens have both a right and a duty to participate should be taken more seriously by political scientists and policymakers, not just as a threat to democracy and democratization, but as an opportunity. However, contemporary social movements are not straightforward sites of prefiguration, but sites of struggle between experimental and traditional forms of organizing, between inclusive aspirations and exclusive tendencies.     

Civil society and the European common security and defence policy

The involvement of civil society organizations (CSOs) is widely regarded by students of the EU's domestic policy fields as enhancing transparency and accountability and, more generally, the democratic quality of political processes. This article explores the contribution of CSOs to the EU's Common Security and Defence Policy and assesses whether a democracy-enhancing effect of their involvement can also be demonstrated for this policy field. We analyse the contribution of CSOs based on two common models of democracy: the intergovernmental and the supranational model of democracy. We find that CSOs are indeed quite actively involved in the EU's security policy. With regard to their democracy-enhancing effects, however, our findings are rather mixed. While the engagement of CSOs does provide a remedy for the democratic deficits associated with intergovernmental decision-making, these organizations do not fully meet the demands posed by supranational governance.     

Jump-Starting Democracy: Adult Civic Education and Democratic Participation in Three Countries

In countries emerging from authoritarianism into democracy, citizens have little preparation for participating in the new political dispensations they face. Adult civic education promises a way to jump-start the lifelong socialization experience that their counterparts in the long-established democracies enjoy. But do these brief crash-courses in democracy really have any impact? Recent surveys of civic education efforts sponsored by the United States Agency for International Development in the Dominican Republic, Poland and South Africa find that those taking part in the programmes do participate significantly more in local level politics and, to a somewhat lesser extent, in politics more generally as well. There is also evidence that non-elites can benefit more from such programmes and begin to close the participation gap that separates them from traditional elites. The overall gains in participation are, however, modest. But given that political participation in absolute terms has been quite low in both old and new democracies, it can be argued that even modest gains are important and make investment in civic education worthwhile.     

Responding to democratic decay and crises of governance: The European Union and the convention of Cotonou

The co-operation framework adopted in 2000 between the European Union and 77 countries in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific (ACP) identifies political dialogue and governance conditionality as the core strategies for promoting democracy and anchoring the rule of law in developing countries. However, the mechanisms for suspending aid on political grounds, originally introduced in 1995, remain largely understudied and unevaluated. This article sets out to review the policies and strategies of the European Community aimed at responding to the crises of governance and preventing conflict. It explores the difficult combination of democracy assistance and governance conditionality to prevent democratic regression in politically fragile countries by reviewing the European Community's response to crises of governance in Niger, Haiti, Côte d'Ivoire and Fiji. It argues that, although offering appropriate responses to abrupt interruptions in democratization processes, traditional forms of political conditionality have proved largely inadequate for responding to the gradual corrosion of governance and the decay of democracy. Furthermore, conducting structured political dialogue puts further demands on the management of aid, as it converts foreign aid into a highly political endeavour. This article concludes with a set of proposals for enhancing the political coherence of EC political dialogue and governance conditionality.     

Political culture in Turkey: Connections among attitudes toward democracy,the military and Islam

Against the background of Turkey's continuing but unconsolidated democratic transition, this article examines the nature and determinants of attitudes toward democracy held by ordinary Turkish citizens. Using data from the World Values Survey conducted in Turkey in 1997, it seeks to contribute to a growing body of literature concerned with the relationship between political culture and democratization. Although this relationship has not been fully explicated, the authors share the view of those scholars who believe that the existence of democratic attitudes and values among a country's population is no less important than are democratic institutions and procedures for advancing and eventually consolidating a democratic transition. Accordingly, the study seeks to shed light on the following interrelated questions: To what extent does the Turkish population hold attitudes supportive of democracy? What are the most important determinants of popular support for democracy? What factors account for any observed variance in relevant political attitudes? What is the relationship between attitudes toward the military and attitudes toward democracy and governance? What is the relationship between personal religious attachments and attitudes toward democracy and governance?     

Democratization and decline of trust in public institutions in Hong Kong

The article examines the considerable literature on the relationship between sustainable development and democracy beginning with an exploration of the concepts. Various models have been put forward to describe this relationship and these can be viewed as various pathologies of development that may trap the unwary. Participation and empowerment are seen as a key to sustainable development by many authors, although there are widely differing interpretations of what this should mean. The search for people's empowerment has centred on moves towards decentralization and the strengthening of civil society. Decentralization has proved extremely difficult to implement in practice and having civil society act as a balancing mechanism to the power of the political elite has often proved to be no less illusory. Political participation is no guarantee of sustainable development as local and national elites will inevitably try to hijack the process. Whilst there is no strict correlation between democracy and sustainable development some items in the democratic package are capable of being prioritized and can help build sustainable development, in particular transparency in the management of resources, protecting human rights and encouraging social participation.     

Playing by the rules of the game: partisan use of recall referendums in Colombia

As a bottom-up mechanism of direct democracy, recall can be triggered by citizens to remove elected officials through a vote, which is expected to increase accountability. Contradicting this hope, previous research has suggested that intensive use of recall referendums became an instrument of party competition. However, empirical evidence is scant. Thus, focusing on the 107 attempts of activating recall in Colombia during the first half of 2017 this article seeks to understand if recall activations are more likely to reinforce democratic governance (by giving an institutional solution to exceptional problems of legitimacy) or are more likely to erode it (by becoming a weapon to escalate the partisan competition beyond regular elections). We created a dataset to identify who started the recall – partisan, mixed or civil society actors – and for what reasons. Then, we examined to what extent the effective number of parties in the council, the majority reached in the previous election, or the size of the municipality have an effect on the likelihood of recall attempts. The study finds that in Colombia, political leaders (and not specific parties) are the main actors promoting recall.     

Comparing regional organisations in global multilateral institutions: ASEAN, the EU and the UN

Structural change brought about by the end of the Cold War and accelerated globalisation have transformed the global environment. A global governance complex is emerging, characterised by an ever-greater functional and regulatory role for multilateral organisations such as the United Nations (UN) and its associated agencies. The evolving global governance framework has created opportunities for regional organisations to participate as actors within the UN (and other multilateral institutions). This article compares the European Union (EU) and Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) as actors within the UN network. It begins by extrapolating framework conditions for the emergence of EU and ASEAN actorness from the literature. The core argument of this article is that EU and ASEAN actorness is evolving in two succinct stages: Changes in the global environment create opportunities for the participation of regional organisations in global governance institutions, exposing representation and cohesion problems at the regional level. In response, ASEAN and the EU have initiated processes of institutional adaptation.