The public sphere and local democracy

After summarizing some of the main criticisms of liberal democracy, this article examines proposals to overcome the malaise through the development of a strong public sphere or public spheres and/or the re‐invigoration of democracy at the local or municipal level. In particular attention will focus on the democratic potential at the local level of ‘citizens’ juries’.     

Media and subnational democracy: the case of Bahia,Brazil

It is a well-known fact that the transition to and consolidation of democracy in Latin America have been problematic, especially at the subnational level. It is also commonplace to equate an independent media system with a strong democracy. While each of these fields has witnessed important developments in the last decade or so, there have been sparse attempts to draw the theoretical links between them. In this article, I argue that there are important insights to be gained from such an endeavour. Bahia, a state in north-eastern Brazil, is an ideal case study to bring these perspectives together. This study offers fresh insights on state–society relations at the subnational level and on the contemporary interaction between the public and the private spheres in Latin America. Last but not least, it will also provide a better grasp on the challenges democratization faces at the subnational level and the role of the media in them.     

Afghanistan's parliamentary election: towards the path of democracy

The parliamentary election in Afghanistan in September 2005, seen as the last step towards the establishment of a broad-based government based on democracy, depicts the overall political situation and power struggle among the involved parties, mainly the Islamic parties, the international community (mainly the USA) and the administration of President Karzai, all with different agendas. The immediate winners of the election were the Islamic parties, who not only used their wealth and power but also the ‘ethic card’. But they also had backing from the Afghan government and the Americans. This paper investigates what this election mean to different parties active in Afganistan's politics; the people of Afghanistan, its government and the USA. Will this election lead to the establishment of a democratic society or enhance the power of Islamic extremists and warlords?     

Attitudes towards gender equality and perception of democracy in the Arab world

This article analyses the relationship between support of democracy and attitudes to human rights, in particular, support for gender equality, in the countries covered by the first wave of the Arab Barometer project. We use cluster analysis and negative binomial regression modelling to show that, unlike in most countries of the world, correlation between support of democracy and gender equality is very low in the Arab countries. There is a group of people in the region who support both democracy and gender equality, but they are a small group (about 17% of the population) of elderly and middle-aged people characterized by higher education and social status. A substantial number of poorly educated males express support for democracy but not for gender equality. Many people, especially young males aged 25–35 in 2007, are against both gender equality and democracy. Younger people tend to be both better educated and more conservative, those belonging to the 25–34 age group being the most patriarchal in their gender attitudes. Yet, controlling for age, education does have a positive effect on gender equality attitudes. Nevertheless, this phenomenon may reflect two simultaneous processes going on in the Middle East. On the one hand, people are getting more educated, urbanized, etc., which means the continuation of modernization. On the other hand, the fact that older people are the most liberal age group may point to a certain retrogression of social values in the younger generations.     

Elitist democracy and China's democratization: A gradualist approach towards democratic transition by a group of Chinese intellectuals

This article examines how a group of Chinese intellectuals experimented with the western concept of elitist democracy in a Chinese context in the late 1980s. Drawing insights from western theories on political development and political culture, they argued that China's lack of a civic culture meant an elitist democracy would be an historically necessary and inevitable stage during the process of democratization. To implement elitist democracy in China, the existing political institutions should be made more open to experts, technocrats and intellectuals. This political proposal was advanced, involuntarily, during the Tiananmen Movement of Spring 1989, but eventually suffered a great setback. Nevertheless, the article maintains that elitist democracy remains relevant to China's democratization in the future.     

The European public sphere and the debate about humanitarian military interventions

Studies on the democratic control and legitimacy of Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) have thus far mostly focused on formal institutions. However, a comprehensive analysis requires including the ‘sociocultural infrastructure’ in which such formal institutions are embedded. Students of democracy have argued that the public sphere is a crucial dimension, if not a precondition for all mechanisms of democratic control in general. This paper investigates whether and in which ways Europeans participated in transnational European communication on humanitarian military interventions (1990–2005/2006). The paper analyzes a full sample of 108,677 newspaper articles published in leading newspapers of six EU member states, and the US as a comparative case. It demonstrates that the ‘national’ arenas of political communication are intertwined and allow ordinary citizens to make up their minds about common European issues in the highly controversial and normatively sensitive realm of humanitarian military interventions.     

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.     

Bringing direct democracy back in: toward a three-dimensional measure of democracy

Most procedural definitions and measurements of democracy are missing one crucial component: direct popular decision-making. This is an important gap that does not allow users of data to ascertain some important variation among democracies. Thus, I propose a new measure that is strongly anchored in a procedural definition of democracy but includes this missing dimension. The proposed measure is well rooted in the literature and introduces a dimension whereby citizens may become the masters of their political fate at any time and without the consent of elected authorities, while avoiding the inclusion of extraneous attributes that are not highlighted in democratic theory. Tests of the validity of the new indicator, using Latin American cases, show that there is enough room for its inclusion without the typical collinearity problems this literature faces. This indicator is not only sound, but it is empirically appealing as it performs better than others when testing relevant hypotheses.     

On-line public relations: towards an integrated theoretical model

Abstract

Much has been said about the so-called information superhighway. Organisations are realising that a whole new world can be created on-line: more and more organisations, and individuals, are entering this superhighway at an incredible rate. Ironically, most people do not have a clue what the information superhighway really is, which is, for example, evident in the 1993 advertisement of the telecommunication giant, Pacific Bell, which claimed that: ‘While others talk about the information superhighway, we're actually building it’, but only launched their consumer Internet access service in 1996. In spite of widespread ignorance, the exponential growth of the Internet provides public relations practitioners with constantly expanding on-line public relations resources and the opportunity to use these online systems to create or enhance the images of organisations in the market place.

Without theory, the field of on-line public relations has no framework for understanding, organising and integrating the many activities and purposes of online public relations. Therefore online public relations needs a body of knowledge grounded in theory. It is clear that the shift is away from mass communication towards dialogical or interactional communication. In order to understand the theory of on-line public relations, it is important to systemise it in terms of a theoretical aporoach. This leads to the main aim of this article, which is to propose a theoretical model, the Or,-line Public Relations (OPR) model, to provide a suitable framework for explaining the on-line public relations process, and if applied in the development of on-line public relations plans or strategies, it can maintain its utility as a framework for the analysis thereof.

Based on a qualitative approach, this article attempts to theoretically explore, describe, interpret and conceptualise the concept on-line public relations, with specific reference to the development of on-line public relations in South Africa, the shift from traditional paradigms to new on-line trends and the integration of on-line public relations with other communication processes. Particular reference is made to the theoretical foundations of on-line public relations, and it is argued that at the root of on-line public relations, as a framework for explaining it, lies the need for an integrated theoretical approach. In the last section, a new OPR model is proposed, and a brief discussion of the elements of the model, the conceptual foundation of on-line information and information overload is presented.     

Police demilitarisation: cops,soldiers and democracy

Arthur Costa is a PhD candidate at the University of Brasilia, Brazil. His forthcoming book is entitled Transição e Tutela: Militares e Políticos na Nova República. Mateus Medeiros was Co-ordinator of the Office for Human Rights of the City of Belo Horizonte and a lecturer in legal philosophy at the Federal University of Ouro Preto, Brazil. He is now a legislative analyst at the Human Rights Commission, Brazilian Chamber of Deputies.¹     

Transnational citizenship: problems of definition,culture and democracy

There is widespread disagreement over whether transnational citizenship provides defensible extensions of, or meaningful complements to, national citizenship. A significant strand of criticism relies upon empirical arguments about political motivation and the consequences of transnationalism. This paper addresses two questions arising from empirical arguments relating to the nation state and democracy. Do the alleged cultural requirements for effective political action provide an insuperable barrier to transnational citizenship? Does transnational citizenship necessarily require a commitment to transnational democracy? I argue that these largely empirical criticisms do not succeed in casting doubt upon the normative plausibility or practical viability of transnational projects. On the first question, I point to a growing transnational political culture that serves to motivate transnational citizens. On the second question, I argue for a legitimate category of transnational citizenship that, although inspired by cosmopolitan morality, is different from it, and that does not require transnational democracy.     

Modernization,ethnic fractionalization,and democracy

In recent years, a number of studies have examined the relationship between ethnic fractionalization and democracy – so far with inconclusive results. We argue that the lacking robustness of existing findings is due to a theoretical and empirical misspecification of how ethnic fractionalization may influence the level of democracy. Ethnic fractionalization does have an impact on the regime form because it moderates the well-established positive effect of modernization on democracy. In other words, at low levels of ethnic fractionalization, modernization has a strong positive effect on democratization, but with increasing levels of ethnic fractionalization, the positive effect of modernization decreases. This relationship is documented empirically by using data on 167 countries since 1972.     

Informal institutions,forms of state and democracy: the Turkish deep state

Democratization studies have proven that the main difference between autocracy and democracy is, counter-intuitively, not the basic regime structure, but rather, the function and validity of democratic formal institutions defined as rules and norms.1 For the institutionalist turn in democratization studies, see O'Donnell, ‘Delegative Democracy’; O'Donnell, ‘Another Institutionalization’; O'Donnell, ‘Polyarchies’; Lauth, ‘Informal Institutions’; Merkel and Croissant, ‘Formale und informale Institutionen’; Weyland, ‘Limitations’; Helmke and Levitsky, Informal Institutions. View all notes In ‘defective democracies’,2 Merkel, ‘Embedded and Defective’. View all notes or in the grey zone between authoritarian regimes and consolidated democracies, formal institutions disguise specific informal institutions which are usually ‘the actual rules that are being followed’.3 O'Donnell, ‘Illusions About Consolidation’, 10. View all notes Moreover, scholars have investigated the issue of stateness: ‘without a state, no modern democracy is possible’.4 Linz and Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition, 17. View all notes This article sheds light on this grey zone, particularly, on the type of state whose coercive state apparatus is autonomous. Its autonomy results primarily from the interplay between formal and informal institutions in post-transitional settings where ‘perverse institutionalization’5 Valenzuela, ‘Democratic Consolidation’, 62. View all notes creates and fosters undemocratic informal rules and/or enshrines them as formal codes. If the military autonomy reaches a threshold ranging from high to very high, constitutional institutions become Janus-faced and can enforce a sui generis repertoire of undemocratic informal institutions. Thus, the state exerts formal and informal ‘domination’,6 Weber, Economy and Society. View all notes Herrschaft in a Weberian sense. This modality of dual domination is what I call ‘deep state’.     

Law,interrupted: on legislative disruption and deliberative democracy

This commentary piece teases out a theme that runs through the articles collected in this special issue: the relationship between legislative disruption and deliberative democracy. The practice of legislative disruption appears to go against the normative aspirations of deliberative democracy, but our discussion identifies several respects in which this mode of engagement can function to reinstate a deliberative environment in certain contexts. Drawing on the articles in this special issue, our analysis also brings to the fore certain inadequacies in deliberative democracy as a framework for evaluating legislative disruption.     

Participation,education, and pluralism: towards a new extension ethic

The concern driving current debate on agricultural extension is increasingly that of how to help farmers learn how to deal with the complex world around them responsibly and profitably, in such a way that the extension worker is ancillary. This article seeks to deconstruct and provide a more reasoned assessment of agricultural extension services through a reflection on development paradigms, adult education, individual empowerment, and institutional pluralism. By calling into question the underlying ethical dimensions of agricultural extension, it is possible to develop an alternative paradigm and thereby generate new insights into it. The article concludes that the raison d'être of agricultural extension today must be to create an ethical basis which ensures that extension practices are more inclusive and thus responsive to the needs of farmers and other rural populations, integrating individual expectations into the wider socio-economic, cultural, political, and geographical environment.     

Introduction: negotiating the promotion of democracy

ABSTRACT

This article makes the case for why we should turn to studying democracy promotion negotiation, outlines the research questions guiding this special issue, identifies overarching findings and summarizes the individual contributions. After outlining the rationale for more attention to the issue of negotiation, which we understand as a specific form of interaction between external and local actors in democracy promotion, we outline three basic assumptions informing our research: (1) Democracy promotion is an international practice that is necessarily accompanied by processes of negotiation. (2) These negotiation processes, in turn, have an impact upon the practice and outcome of democracy promotion. (3) For external democracy promotion to be mutually owned and effective, genuine negotiations between ‘promoters’ and ‘local actors’ are indispensable; the term ‘genuine’ here being understood as including a substantial exchange on diverging values and interests. The article, then, introduces the three research questions for this agenda, concerning the issues on the negotiation table, the parameters shaping negotiation processes, and the results of democracy promotion negotiation. We conclude by presenting an overview of the overarching findings of the special issue as well as with brief summaries of the individual contributions.