Democratic Deepening in Third Wave Democracies: Experiments with Participation in Mexico City

After the initial transition to democratic rule the question of how to improve the quality of democracy has become the key challenge facing Third Wave democracies. In the debate about the promotion of more responsive government, institutional reforms to increase direct participation of citizens in policy-making have been put on the agenda. The Federal District of Mexico City constitutes a particularly intriguing case in this debate. This article explores how political participation developed in Mexico City between 1997 and 2003 and what effects this has had on democratic deepening. It develops an ideal-type conceptual framework of citizen participation that outlines the conditions under which participation contributes to democratic deepening. Overall, the case of Mexico City highlights how the promotion of participation can fail to make the aspired contribution to democratic deepening and might even have negative effects on the quality of democracy.     

The failure of immigration reform in Germany

After many years without substantial activity in immigration policy, the German Red–Green government which came to power in 1998 introduced an American-style Green Card and a new citizenship law. From these beginnings, the immigration reform campaign captured the public imagination, and for two years a broad spectrum of figures from German public life took part in a lively debate on the issue. A law was eventually adopted by parliament and promulgated in spring 2002, but – in the wake of a voting scandal in the Bundesrat – it was struck down by the Federal Constitutional Court weeks before its scheduled entry into force. This report recounts the story of the now defunct immigration law and seeks to shed valuable light on German politics by analysing what the key differences were that divided the main political parties.     

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.     

Taxation and the Unequal Reach of the State: Mapping State Capacity in Ecuador

Even though the unequal reach of the state has become an important concern in the literature on developing democracies in Latin America, empirical measures of intracountry variation in state capacity are scarce. So far, attempts to develop valid measures of the reach of the state have often been hampered by inadequate data. Leveraging insights from national‐level scholarship, this article proposes a tax‐based measure to capture such intracountry variation. Drawing on a comprehensive data set of municipal finance and estimates of economic activity derived from nighttime lights, it maps state capacity in Ecuador. The article validates the measure on the basis of survey data collected by the Latin American Public Opinion Project. A multilevel analysis demonstrates that citizens tend to be more satisfied with the services provided by the state in municipalities with higher state capacity, which strengthens confidence that the measure picks up relevant differences.