Democracy without environmental parties: The Israeli experience

Israel is one of the few democracies where no environmental party has emerged. This article addresses the reasons for this conspicuous absence. There are four explanations for the emergence of such parties: economic affluence, environmental degradation, public awareness of environmental problems, and a political setting favouring the establishment of new parties, namely, a proportional electoral system and party funding. In Israel all these conditions are prevalent, but environmental parties have failed to emerge owing to two additional explanations: a successful environmental movement reluctant to turn into a party, and a value system relegating the environment to a low place on the political agenda. The prominence of security, the anti-ecological tradition, and the search for identity has ruled out mobilization for an environmental party.     

Political Meritocracy and Direct Democracy: A Hybrid Experiment

At the turn of the 20th Century when Western power was at its height, Sun Yat‐Sen sought to blend the Confucian tradition of meritocratic governance and Western‐style democracy in his vision for modern China. With the “rise of the rest” in the 21st Century—led by China—perhaps the political imagination is open once again, this time not only to Western ideas flowing East, but Eastern ideas flowing West as well. The political imagination has been pried open anew not only because of the sustained success of non‐Western modernity in places like Singapore and China, but because democracy itself has become so dysfunctional across the West, from its ancient birthplace in Greece to its most advanced outpost in California. That liberal democracy is the best form of governance ever achieved in the long arc of history is no longer self‐evident. Today, democracy, which has been captured by a short‐term, special‐interest political culture, has to prove and improve itself by incorporating elements of meritocracy and the long‐term perspective. If not, political decay beckons. In this section, we evaluate the tradeoeffs and ponder the possibilities of combining a more knowledegable democracy with a more accountable meritocracy.     

Assessing and enhancing the impact of democratic development projects: A practitioner's perspective

As political liberalization expands across the globe, a growing array of Western donor and exchange organizations are seeking to bolster fledgling democracies or to nudge authoritarian regimes toward greater openness. These efforts coincide with intensified academic scrutiny of transitions to democracy. Yet, scholars have paid surprisingly little attention to assessing the impact of these organizations' democratization projects, and development practitioners have had little success in formulating useful criteria and approaches for assessment. Better understanding of how to evaluate these activities could enhance their impact as well as inform political development theory. This article places the assessment problem in context by acknowledging a few of the key debates pertaining to political development and by summarizing the range of foreign assistance organizations and efforts aiming to promote democratization. It then describes why evaluation of these efforts is generally inadequate. Finally, the article presents some initial ideas on how this difficult problem can be addressed. Stephen Golub is an attorney and consultant who has been involved with democratic development work since 1985. The thoughts and impressions presented in this article spring from: his experience with the Asia Foundation from 1985 through 1990 as Program Officer for Law and Government, Philippines Assistant Representative, and consultant for Pakistan law projects and overall foundation directions in law programming; his work as a consultant for the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Philippines in 1991 regarding both law and A.I.D.'s Democracy Initiative, and, in 1993, evaluating legal services programs; research conducted on Philippine nongovernmental legal service groups as a Senior Fulbright Fellow in 1991 and subsequently while based in Manila in 1992 and 1993; and discussions with representatives of other organizations that support democratization projects, such as the Ford Foundation, the Institute of International Education, Germany's Naumann Foundation, and the Netherlands Organization for International Development Cooperation. Of course, the opinions expressed here are solely those of the author, and should not be attributed to any organizations with which he has been associated.     

The limits to military power: Institutions and defense budgeting in democratic Argentina

This article examines the reasons behind the dramatic decline in military budgets in Argentina under democratic rule. These trends were unexpected, given the, political power the armed forces of that country have wielded in the past. Here it is argued that within the democratic state, there were institutional arrangements that enabled civilian decision makers to trim defense expenditures, despite opposition from the military. The two key institutional traits were found to be the concentration of authority and the autonomy of decision-makers from outside pressures. Because budgetmaking was centered within a well-insulated civilian-run ministry, fiscal planners working at the behest of the president were able to design and implement budgets they wanted, over and above the objections of military officers, and without interference from other branches of government. David Pion-Berlin is a Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of several books, includingThrough Corridors of Power: Institutions and Civil-Military Relations in Argentina (Penn State University Press, 1997), and numerous articles on the subjects of Latin American civil-military relations, military regimes, political economy, and political repression.     

Liberal Democracy in Africa: A Socialist-Revisionist Perspective

South Africa's constitution enshrines the right to adequate housing, and policy since 1994 has attempted to address this issue. However, realities of poverty, rapid urbanization and limited resources for local authorities undermine the state's ability to meet housing needs. This article presents a case study from Msunduzi Municipality (formerly Pietermaritzburg) to evaluate state policy in the urban low-cost housing sector, particularly in terms of the needs of female-headed households. While subsidized housing allocation has successfully reached female-headed households, and recent policy documents acknowledge gendered housing needs, the situation on the ground remains problematic. Gender-based social and economic inequalities persist, and new government-subsidized housing suffers problems including inappropriate location, poor housing quality, and inadequate protection of tenure security. Applying a gender lens to housing highlights shortcomings in South African housing policy, while applying a housing lens to examine gender inequality demonstrates limitations to the transformative potential of gender mainstreaming in this sector.     

A deficit of democratic authenticity: Political linkage and the public in Andean polities

The article argues that Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela are political systems suffering from an acute deficit of democratic authenticity, that is, a loss of substance in democratic processes. The deficit in democratic authenticity is a product of malfunctions in the mechanisms of political linkage and multiple barriers that inhibit effective citizen participation in public life. Rather than acceding to minimalist interpretations of democracy that deemphasize the importance, of active citizen participation, the author stresses the importance of maintaining a rigorous normative definition of democracy as the standard by which to assess the state of democractic political development. Catherine M. Conaghan is a Queen’s National Scholar and professor of political studies at Queen’s University. She is the author ofRestructuring Domination: Industrialists and the State in Ecuador (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988) and co-author ofUnsettling Scatecraft: Democracy and Neoliberalism in the Central Andes (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994).     

China: From Democracy Wall to the Shopping Mall and Back

Who would have thought that tainted pet food and toys would threaten to unravel the authoritarian export model of Chinese growth that the brutal Tiananmen crackdown in 1989 was meant to secure?     

Emancipative values and democracy: Response to Hadenius and Teorell

This article demonstrates that Axel Hadenius and Jan Teorell’s attempt to disprove a causal effect of emancipative mass orientations on democracy is flawed in each of its three lines of reasoning. First, contrary to Hadenius and Teorell’s claim that measures of “effective democracy” end up in meaningless confusion of democracy and minor aspects of its quality, we illustrate that additional qualifications of democracy illuminate meaningful differences in the effective practice of democracy. Second, Hadenius and Teorell’s finding that emancipative orientations have no significant effect on subsequent measures of democracy from Freedom House is highly unstable: using only a slightly later measure of the dependent variable, the effect turns out to be highly signficant. Third, we illustrate that these authors’ analytical strategy is irrelevant to the study of democratization because the temporal specification they use misses almost all cases of democratization. We present a more conclusive model of democratization, analyzing how much a country moved toward or away from democracy as the dependent variable. The model shows that emancipative orientations had a strong effect on democratization during the most massive wave of democratization ever—stronger than any indicator of economic development. Finally, we illustrate a reason why this is so: emancipative orientations motivate emancipative social movements that aim at the attainment, sustenance, and extension of democratic freedoms.     

The Effects of Democracy on Economic Growth and Inequality: A review

What effects does political democracy have on such development outcomes as economic growth and socioeconomic equality? Competing theoretical models have been proposed that represent each of the possibilities: democracy as facilitating development, democracy as a hindrance to development, and democracy as bearing no independent relationship to development outcomes. Each of these theoretical models is explicated and, then, the evidence from quantitative, cross-national tests of the effects is reviewed. Overall, the evidence provided by the approximately dozen studies for each outcome yields few robust conclusions with respect to the theoretical models. To guide in the evaluation of the evidence, the studies are in turn distinguished by such design characteristics as sample, period observed, measures used, and form of relationship specified. This procedure, while it does not produce definitive support for any of the models, does assist in interpreting the results of past research as well as generating fertile guidelines for future research.