More ‘Europe’, less Democracy? European integration does not erode satisfaction with democracy

The process of European integration, through institutions such as the European Union, the Eurozone, or Schengen, implies a shift in political decision-making away from the national governments and towards international institutions. This gradual shift in the balance of power, furthermore, is increasingly debated by citizens. As a result, European integration might lead to an erosion of satisfaction with democracy in European countries. By means of a longitudinal analysis of the determinants of satisfaction with democracy in European countries, we test this expectation. We find no indication that the shift in the balance of power, and the trend towards more European integration indeed have eroded satisfaction with the functioning of (national) democracy.     

A Two-edged Sword: The Differential Effect of Religious Belief and Religious Social Context on Attitudes towards Democracy

Different components of the religious experience have differing effects on attitudes towards democracy. Using heteroskedastic maximum likelihood models and data from the fourth wave of the World Values Survey for 45 democratic countries, we show that as a personal belief system, religiosity contrasts with democratic principles, generating opposition to democracy while increasing ambivalence towards democratic principles among religious people. Nevertheless, at the group level, religion also serves as a social institution which increases the homogeneity of one??s social network, leading to lower ambivalence, and makes for an active minority group which benefits from the democratic framework, consequently increasing support overall for a democratic regime. This double-edged sword effect explains the mixed results currently found in the literature on religiosity and democracy, and clearly illustrates the multidimensionality of religiosity.     

Role conflict and the limits of state identity: the case of Indonesia in democracy promotion

This paper aims to analyse why Indonesia projects democracy as a state identity by taking on the role of democracy promoter? This paper argues that Indonesia's aspiring role as a democracy promoter is not a manifestation of a firm and coherent democratic political culture, which is more likely to be a permanent feature of states. Thus, rather than seeing it as firmly established state identity, instead, Indonesia's democratic identity should be seen as role conception articulated by foreign policy elites in its quest for international prestige. Its role as a democracy promoter has enabled Indonesia to enhance its other roles conceptions such as a regional leader in Southeast Asia as well as a bridge-builder at the global level. However, this paper further argues that Indonesia's role as a democracy promoter has also been hindered due to the inter-role conflicts arising from its enactment of multiple roles. As a result, Indonesia's enactment of the role as democracy promoter has relatively less impactful towards democratization in the region. To substantiate this argument, the paper examines Indonesia's strategies in promoting democracy and human rights in three case studies, namely Indonesia's role in mainstreaming human rights in ASEAN, Indonesia's democracy promotion through the Bali Democracy Forum, and Indonesia's engagement towards democratization in Myanmar.     

Explaining cross‐national variation in the relationship between priority congruence and satisfaction with democracy

Previous research has shown that citizens tend to be more satisfied with the functioning of democracy when their ideological positions are more proximate to representatives'. This article argues that congruence in policy priorities between citizens and political elites should have a similar effect: citizens whose concerns are shared by elites should perceive them to be more attentive and responsive to public concerns and societal needs. Yet, the relationship might vary with differences in expectations towards democracy and representation. Specifically, it should be stronger in more democratic countries and older democracies. The hypotheses are empirically tested in a multilevel regression framework, where voter survey data from the 2009 European Election Study is linked with candidate survey data. The results indicate that citizens are indeed more satisfied with democracy if elites share their concerns, and the effect increases with democratic experience.     

Technocratic attitudes: a citizens’ perspective of expert decision-making

Despite repeated appointments of technocratic governments in Europe and increasing interest in technocracy, there is little knowledge regarding citizens’ attitudes towards technocracy and the idea of governance by unelected experts. This article revisits normative debates and hypothesises that technocracy and democracy stand in a negative relationship in the eyes of European citizens. It tests this alongside a series of hypotheses on technocratic attitudes combining country-level institutional characteristics with individual survey data. While findings confirm that individual beliefs about the merits of democracy influence technocratic attitudes, two additional important factors are also identified: first, levels of trust in current representative political institutions also motivate technocratic preferences; second, historical legacies, in terms of past party-based authoritarian regime experience, can explain significant cross-national variation. The implications of the findings are discussed in the broader context of citizen orientations towards government, elitism and the mounting challenges facing representative democracy.     

Populistische Demokratiekonzeptionen und die Wahl der AfD: Evidenz aus einer Panelstudie

This contribution studies the effect of populist conceptions of democracy on voting for populist parties drawing on the case of the “Alternative für Deutschland” (AfD). Building on dominant definitions of populism, we conceptualize a populist orientation towards democracy via three elements–the privilege of the majority will over minority rights, the demand for absolute responsiveness from representatives to the majority will and negative views of political pluralism–and propose a corresponding measurement model. Our empirical analysis shows that such populist conceptions of democracy are particularly strong among AfD supporters. Moreover, they exhibit significant and substantial effects on voting intentions for the AfD in multivariate analyses and, leveraging the panel structure of the data, are able to predict changes in party preferences towards the AfD over time.     

西方国家社会党党内民主思想探析

在过去的一个多世纪里,西方各国社会党对党内民主进行了不同程度的理论探索,并在此指导下进行了一系列的实践活动,取得了较为明显的效果。梳理和分析西方社会党党内民主思想不仅有助于我们正本清源,正确认识其本质,对社会主义国家执政党的党内民主建设也有一定借鉴意义。     

Best Laid Plans … The Institutionalisation of Public Deliberation in Scotland

Despite increasing support for participatory and deliberative principles amongst academics, practitioners and parliamentarians alike, efforts to infuse political systems with more inclusive and consensual forms of debate often founder. This article explores this conundrum by examining institutional reforms through the lens of deliberative democracy. More specifically, we scrutinise attempts to institutionalise forms of civic deliberation within the Scottish political system via the Scottish Civic Forum and the Scottish Parliament's committee system. Our analysis tells the story of how these two types of institutional reform, both designed to facilitate the move towards a more participatory and deliberative model of democracy in Scotland, have fared over a ten‐year period. In turn, this analysis allows us to comment on the ways in which deliberative and parliamentary democracy may be integrated.     

Transparency and accountability: principles and rules for the construction of publicity

Western countries have experienced a growing demand for accountability as a key element to the democratization of the State. This demand has given rise to an advocacy towards a transparency of State institutions and its subsequent public policies. This advocacy, in turn, aims to make governments accountable before the public. The goal of this article is to establish a critical perspective towards what we call transparency policy in favor of what we call publicity policy. The latter provides a normative argument for the concept of accountability aimed towards a deeper democracy and stronger public management processes. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Postmodernists,pragmatists and the justification of democracy

According to current wisdom, we have entered a new ‘age of democracy’. The new global popularity of the democratic ideal appears likely to pose new challenges to democratic theory, adding yet more formulations and nuances to existing categories. Just as some key questions about democracy–such as ‘why is it a good (or the best) political system?’ and 'precisely what does it demand of us, and owe to us, as citizens?' – become daily more urgent, some worry about the RESOurces of political theory to cope with them, given the apparent shift towards scepticism and a suspicion of large-scale, encompassing claims about politics. This article focuses of four arguments from postmodernist and pragmatist writers who have given democracy a prominent part in their work. It asks whether the writers examined provide convincing justifications for the democratic ideal.     

Democracy and development: A theoretical framework

A simple framework is set up to discuss the relationship between democracy, material welfare, and development. Democracy is regarded both as a good in its own right, and as an input in the production of material welfare. The optimum level of democracy is then related to the level of development. At the optimum point, the marginal cost of democracy in terms of foregone output is positive, and growth is a decreasing function of the level of democracy. Deviations from the optimum path are described as either repressive or populist. Democratization is not unambiguously an optimal response to exogenous shocks.     

Multiparty politics in Argentina? Electoral rules and changing patterns

This article attempts to illuminate some institutional features of the past and the current electoral systems of Argentina and the problematic relationship between these characteristics and the trend of changes that the party system has been experiencing since the return of democracy in 1983. The focus is on the dangers of political stalemate that might have developed if the institutional arrangements implemented at the end of the military rule had not been reformed subsequently. The study has two objectives: (a) to demonstrate that there is a trend towards an increasing fractionalization of the Argentine party system; and (b) to show that the combination of an electoral college with a majority requirement, proportional representation to allocate presidential electors, malapportionment among districts, and this increasing process of pluralization in most provinces (where presidential elections were decided because of electoral college complexities) threatened the stability of democracy.     

Direct Democracy and its Critics: Support for Direct Democracy and ‘Stealth’ Democracy in Finland

In this article support for direct democracy and for stealth democracy in Finland is analysed. Stealth democracy represents a step towards a democracy in which there would be even less citizen involvement than in the representative form of today's democracy. The authors found that both options gained significant support among the Finnish electorate. Additionally, they found that it is mostly the same variables that contribute to the probability of citizens being supporters of either direct democracy or stealth democracy. It is the people with less education, who do not know much about politics and who feel that the current system does not respond to citizens' needs, that want change. The direction of change appears to be a matter of secondary interest. Political ideology affects which of the two options respondents favour. Right-wing citizens are more likely to favour stealth democracy. Citizens leaning to the left are more interested in direct democracy.     

The Struggle for Local Government: Indian Democracy's New Phase

The 73^rd Constitutional Amendment of 1993 giving local governmenta constitutional status introduced new institutions into theworking of Indian democracy through several significant innovations,such as reservations of seats for marginal groups, women, Dalits,and Adivasis; creation of a decentralized planning mechanism;establishment of state election commissions to oversee localelections and state finance commissions to prepare a blueprintfor sharing of state revenues; and institutionalization of thevillage assembly (gram sabha). This article examines the implicationsof these innovations for local government and vulnerable groupsin the context of Indian democracy. It does so within the largerdebate on the capability of political institutions to produceoutcomes and so a new political culture.     

Schools of democracy? Disentangling the relationship between civic participation and political action in 17 European countries

Since Tocqueville's seminal writings, voluntary associations have been proclaimed to be schools of democracy. According to this claim, which regained popularity during the 1990s, involvement in voluntary associations stimulates political action. By participating in these associations, members are socialised to become politically active. Supposedly, having face‐to‐face contact with other members induces civic mindedness – the propensity to think and care more about the wider world. Participating in shared activities, organising meetings and events, and cooperating with other members are claimed to induce civic skills and political efficacy. Over the years, many authors have elaborated on these ideas. This article offers a systematic examination of the neo‐Tocquevillian approach, putting the theoretical ideas to an empirical test. It offers a critical overview of the literature on the beneficial role of voluntary associations and dissects it into five testable claims. Subsequently, these claims are tested by cross‐sectional, hierarchical analyses of 17 European countries. The authors conclude that the neo‐Tocquevillian theory faces serious lack of empirical support. In line with the expectations, they find a strong, positive correlation between associational involvement and political action. Moreover, this correlation is positive in all countries under study. However, more informative hypotheses on this correlation are falsified. First, the correlation is stronger for interest and activist organisations than for leisure organisations. Second, passive (or ‘checkbook’) members show much higher levels of political action than non‐involved, whereas the additional effects of active participation are marginal. Third, the correlation between associational involvement and political action is not explained by civic skills and civic mindedness. In sum, the authors find no evidence for a direct, causal relation between associational involvement and political action. The socialisation mechanism plays a marginal role at best. Rather, this article's findings imply that selection effects account for a large part of the correlation between associational involvement and political action. The conclusion reached therefore is that voluntary associations are not the schools of democracy they are proclaimed to be, but rather pools of democracy.     

The impact of party organisational changes on democracy

This article explores post-World War II developments in the organisation of political parties and the impact this has had on democracy in Western Europe. Adopting three models of democracy as analytical tools we discuss the consequences of, for example, declining membership figures and power on parties' ability to sustain competitive, participatory and deliberative aspects of representative democracy. We find that while there is evidence of a trend towards the competitive model, it is not uniform and the relationship is less clear-cut than previously suggested. The article shows that by making normative assumptions explicit, analyses of party change become more accurate, fruitful and, paradoxically, less biased. Because our conclusions are contingent at times on questionable assumptions about empirical relationships, we urge further research on a number of party organisational matters.     

Social Upheaval and Transformation of Elite Structures: The Case of Finland

The purpose of this study is to ascertain how certain important changes in Finnish society in the 1990s altered the national elite structures and affected democracy. We examine how the patterns of recruitment, interaction and cohesiveness among the elites changed in the period 1991–2001. The data for the study were drawn mainly from postal surveys conducted among the elites and a sample of the population in 1991 and 2001. The first research task was to establish how recruitment to various elites has altered in terms of social stratification and education. The second was to analyse changes in patterns of interaction between various elites as far as physical contacts and attitudes were concerned. The third was to study the relationship between the elites and the general population on the basis of attitudinal affinity. The conclusions were based on theoretical models characterising various elite structures and their interconnections with democracy. The concept of a responsive elite is developed on the grounds of the theory of democratic elitism. The changes in the Finnish elite structure have meant a passage towards an inclusive structure compatible with democracy rather than towards an exclusive elite configuration. Finnish elites have become more open and more diverse.     

Norway: Madisonianism Reborn

This article discusses citizen control in Norwegian parliamentary democracy, and specifically the changes that have recently taken place. Around 1960 Norway had reached a constitutional form that, apart from the consequences of proportional representation, looked much like a Westminster system. From that point on, however, Norwegian democracy has generally moved away from this model. A series of minority governments has given rise to parliamentary reassertion. The Norwegian party system has fragmented, and the individual parties have atrophied as mass membership organizations. A wave of corporatism and later a heightened assertiveness on the part of the judiciary have helped to contain parliamentary power. Two critical European Union membership referendums in 1972 and 1994 have firmly established the role of direct democracy in critical political decisions. And despite the results of these two popular consultations, international constraints have become ever more significant. Compared with most others in Europe, however, Norway is a relatively unconstrained polity. There are few important ways in which the citizenry is partitioned into multiple democratic principals, and the country is a reasonable fit to the parliamentary ideal type of an unfettered hierarchy controlled by the median voter. At the same time, the trend is unmistakably one towards greater policy‐making complexity and increasing constraints on policy makers. Norway's reluctant but seemingly inevitable incorporation into a larger Europe is the greatest and most decisive of these constraints, but it is not the only one. Judicial institutions are likely to play an increasingly important political role, and direct democracy perhaps likewise. And although central bank independence has met with greater scepticism than in most other European countries, it is not likely to be reversed. All in all, it seems that Norwegian parliamentary governance is becoming at least a little more Madisonian and a little less Westminsterian.     

If Money Talks,What Does it Say? Corruption and Business Financing of Political Parties

Do parties with different ideological origins adjust their policies in response to the binding commitments that derive from the European integration process? This paper examines whether party platforms have adapted to the ideological content of EU treaty provisions – based on ‘neoliberalism’ and ‘regulated capitalism’ – across a range of policy areas The analysis builds on existing research which has examined how party families respond to the challenges and opportunities of the integration process. This is the first study that focuses on long-term party policy adjustment across different policy areas by examining whether there has been a shift away from core ideological goals towards the direction of EU policy. The main finding is that there has generally been a shift towards the direction of EU policy across all party families in both member and non-member states. The findings have implications for the quality of representation and functioning of democracy in the member states since the deepening of the European integration process reduces ideologically distinct policy alternatives across party families and can hinder policy innovation     

How representative are referendums? Evidence from 20 years of Swiss referendums

Direct democracy allows citizens to reverse decisions made by legislatures and even initiate new laws which parliaments are unwilling to pass, thereby, as its proponents argue, leading to more representative policies than would have obtained under a purely representative democracy. Yet, turnout in referendums is usually lower than in parliamentary elections and tends to be skewed towards citizens of high socio-economic status. Consequently, critics of direct democracy argue that referendum outcomes may not be representative of the preferences of the population at large. We test this assertion using a compilation of post-referendum surveys encompassing 148 national referendums held in Switzerland between 1981 and 1999. Uniquely, these surveys also asked non-voters about their opinion on the referendum's subject. Comparing opinion majorities in the surveys against actual referendum outcomes we show that representativeness increases slightly in turnout as well as over time. However, we find only few cases where the outcome would have been more representative even under full turnout vis-a vis a counterfactual representative outcome. Thus, our results are in line with research on the turnout effect in elections: Higher turnout would not radically change the outcome of votes. On balance we find more cases where referendums provided more representative outcomes than cases where the outcome was unrepresentative vis-a-vis representative democracy. Hence, we conclude that, overall, direct democracy seems to improve representation in Switzerland.