Inequality,Economic Development,and Democratization

Although multiple theories suggest that economic development and inequality somehow affect democratization, these claims have received only limited empirical support. I contend that much of the confusion stems from the implicit assumption held by the literature that development and inequality affect democratization independently of one another. In this paper, I argue that the effect of income distribution on democratization is in fact contingent on the income level: in middle-income countries inequality fosters democratization; in rich countries, however, it harms democratization. Using a data set covering almost all autocracies between 1960 and 2007, I find evidence consistent with my hypothesis.     

Women in Contemporary Democratization

Over the past two decades authoritarian regimes in many parts of the developing world, as well as in East/Central Europe, have been replaced by democracies. This paper looks at the issue of democratization from a gender perspective. While many of the problems afflicting the new democracies, such as the elitist character of political parties, and the failure of the state to guarantee civil and political rights or make a significant dent in poverty affect all citizens, they are manifested and experienced in gender-specific ways. Women's persistent exclusion from formal politics, in particular, raises a number of specific questions about how to reform democratic institutions since these institutions are not automatically gender-equitable.     

Democratization in East Asia in the late 1980s: Taiwan breakthrough,Hong Kong frustration

Political history took an unexpected turn in East Asia in the late 1980s. The booming movement in Hong Kong had gone downhill and suffered defeat, while the authoritarian Taiwan state actively sponsored genuine democratic reforms. What then explains the Taiwan democratic breakthrough and the Hong Kong democratic frustration? This article argues that conventional explanations offered in the modernization, the dependency, and the class literature—such as culture, liberal colonialism, wealth, new middle class, bureaucratic-authoritarian state, crises, and absence of conservative class coalition—are unable to account for the divergent paths of democratic development in Taiwan and Hong Kong. As an alternative, this article presents a model that highlights the importance of conjuncture factors. It is argued that since Taiwan and Hong Kong have shared similar structural conditions, researchers have to bring in conjuncture factors such as the historical event of Chinese unification, the capacity of the political agency to promote democratic reforms, and the strategy of protest in order to explain the Taiwan breakthrough and the Hong Kong frustration.     

Democratization without Development: Benin 1989–2009

In contrast to a widely held view that sees Benin’s democratic transition in 1989 primarily as the fall-out of global tendencies, this paper focuses specifically on the internal causes of this historical event, which it locates in the context of the history of Dahomey/Benin since 1960 and the country’s political economy. It argues that, while the Renouveau Démocratique doubtlessly represented a significant step towards democracy, it did little to change the country’s deep-rooted political-economic structures. Since Dahomey gained independence in 1960, it has been a structurally deficient rent-based economy. None of the regime changes of the past 50 years—independence in 1960, the adoption of Marxist-Leninism in 1974 or the Renouveau Démocratique of 1989/90—have succeeded in changing anything in relation to this fundamental fact. Thus, the crisis of 1989 was primarily a crisis of a particular pattern of political-economic regulation. None of the regime changes of the last 50 years, however, succeeded in resolving the country’s basic development problem, i.e. how to transform a structurally deficient rent-based economy into a productive one. Likewise, throughout the entire period from 1960 to 2009, basic elements of the political culture of the country remained unchanged. Neopatrimonialism, personalization, authoritarianism, regionalism and generationalism became, at best, more subtly differentiated as a result of the democratic renewal. To this extent, the Beninese democratic renewal of 1989/90 highlights the problematic connection between democracy and economic development.     

Democratization and bureaucratic restructuring in Taiwan

Taiwan has been moving toward democracy, with a dramatic transition taking place in the past decade. Critical to this transition is a restructuring of the relationship between the state bureaucracy and society. This study focuses on democratization's effect on Taiwan's bureaucracy. In particular, it seeks to examine such aspects of bureaucratic transformation as bureaucratic decisionmaking, legislative-bureaucratic politics, interest group-bureaucratic relations, the expansion of local autonomy, and civil service reform. This study finds that the bureaucratic state is facing a great challenge from political, legislative, and societal forces. The old type of insulated bureaucratic planning and decision making is no longer possible, the bureaucracy is losing its KMT patrons, and bureaucrats are finding themselves answerable to political pressure, legislative oversight, and interest group lobbying. While the bureaucracy has lost its previous level of discretion in terms of macro-management and the formulation of developmental policies, the bureaucratic state has not withered away. Qingshan Tan is Associate Professor of Chinese and East Asian politics and Director of the International Relations Program in the Department of Political Science at Cleveland State University. His recent publications are on issues of democratization in Taiwan and China.     

Feminists and Technocrats in the Democratization of Latin America: A Prolegomenon

Women's movements made important contributions to ending the period of authoritarian rule in Latin America, but their participation in the reconstruction of democratic politics has been more limited than expected. This paper argues that the enormous influence exerted by technocratic elites in the democratization process in Latin America has represented an obstacle to the improvement of women's status in the region. Gender-biased assumptions and practices have been only partially addressed, in part because the policy-making process is under the control of economists, a professional group with a particularly unfriendly stand towards gendered analysis. It is suggested that reforms within economics may help in the task of making democracy more responsive to the demands of women.     

俄罗斯民主进程中的市民社会

苏联解体之后,俄罗斯由中央集权的政治制度转向自由民主制,市民社会得到了很大的发展,这为民主政治的发展奠定了一定的社会基础.但由于市民社会的发展受到多方面因素的制约,其力量还是比较弱小的.没有强大的市民社会基础,俄罗斯民主进程不可避免地会出现一些波折.     

Democratization and Political Change as Threats to Collective Sentiments: Testing Durkheim in Russia

Durkheim argued that acute political crises result in increased homicide rates because they pose a threat to sentiments about the collective. Though crucial to Durkheim's work on homicide, this idea remains untested. The authors took advantage of the natural experiment of the collapse of the Soviet Union to examine this hypothesis. Using data from Russian regions (N = 78) and controlling for measures of anomie and other covariates, the authors estimated the association between political change and change in homicide rates between 1991 and 2000. Results indicated that regions exhibiting less support for the Communist Party in 2000 (and thus greater change in political ideals because the Party had previously exercised complete control) were regions with greater increases in homicide rates. Thus, while democratization may be a positive development relative to the Communist juggernaut of the past, it appears that the swift political change in Russia is partially responsible for the higher rates of violence there following the collapse of the Soviet Union.