Ideological radicalism and democratic experience in new democracies

In comparing publics’ ideological self-placements between established and new democracies, it has been observed that there is a higher proportion of citizens who express radical views in the latter countries. This is likely due to sharp differences with regard to evaluations of past authoritarian rule, the legitimacy of the new regime, or new institutional arrangements governing the distribution of power when countries embark on democratic transition. Studies on the attitudinal aspect of democratic consolidation lead one to expect a decrease in extreme views in new democracies with the passage of time, as questions of regime principles and institutions are settled, and citizens come to accept democracy as the “only game in town”. The present article investigates whether this proposition is applicable to “Third Wave” new democracies in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and East Asia by examining longitudinal public opinion data from 23 countries. In addition to the length of democratic regimes, We also analyse the impact of economic performance, quality of governance, and electoral systems on the proportion of radical citizens. Results show that while longer democratic experience does contribute to reducing extremist leanings, factors such as the level of corruption, rule of law, and plurality electoral rules play a more substantive role.     

Assessing the shifting qualities of democratic citizenship: The case of South Korea

The consolidation of nascent democratic rule requires ordinary citizens to have certain basic qualities of democratic citizenship. To understand these qualities, this study proposes and explicates the notion of citizen sophistication with regard to democratic politics in South Korea, a country widely regarded as one of the most successful new democracies. Analysis of the Korea Democracy Barometer surveys, 1996–2001, reveals that the proposed notion of sophistication about democratic politics can serve as a useful new tool for evaluating and monitoring the shifting qualities of democratic citizenship in newly democratizing countries. The same analysis also shows that Korea faces a gross deficiency and notable decline in the cognitive, affective and behavioural qualities of democratic citizenship. These findings seem to indicate that the challenge of promoting mass sophistication about democratic politics may constitute the most intractable task of democratization.     

Mapping deviant democracy

A number of countries have emerged as stable, electoral democracies despite low levels of modernization, lack of democratic neighbouring countries and other factors consistently related to democratic stability in the literature. The study of these deviant democracies is a promising new research field but it is afflicted by the lack of a consensus as to which democracies are actually deviant. The present article attempts to solve this problem by carrying out a comprehensive mapping of deviant democracies. It reviews the literature to provide an overview of the cases most often identified as deviant democracies and uses a large-N analysis of 159 countries covering the time period 1993–2008 to systematically map deviant democracies. The analysis points to 12 cases that merit further attention. These are the Central African Republic, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Malawi, Mali, Mauritius, Mongolia, Niger, Senegal, Trinidad and Tobago, and Turkey.     

Intelligence reform in new democracies: factors supporting or arresting progress

This article examines an important (and most problematic) component of the democratic civil–military relations (CMR) concept (understood in terms of democratic control, effectiveness, and efficiency of the armed forces, police forces, and intelligence agencies). It focuses (1) on the democratization of intelligence, that is finding a proper balance between intelligence effectiveness and transparency, and (2) on what particular factors support or arrest progress in the democratization of intelligence. The article provides supporting examples from Brazil and Romania, two developing democracies that have been undergoing major reforms of their intelligence systems for almost 20 years, in terms of both transparency and effectiveness.     

How well ordinary citizens understand democracy: the case of the South Korean electorate

How do mass citizens understand democracy? Are they capable of distinguishing it from its non-democratic alternatives? Does their understanding about democracy matter? To reveal the contours of cultural democratization in South Korea, this article addresses these questions largely overlooked in earlier survey-based studies. Analyses of the 2010 Korea Barometer survey indicate that all segments of the Korean electorate, including the young and the college-educated, are neither accurately nor fully informed about what distinguishes a democratic regime from its non-democratic alternatives. Moreover, the study provides strong evidence of democratic learning in that an increase in democratic knowledge leads to committed support for democracy. The findings together imply an urgent need to improve the quality of civic education for the development of democratic political culture in Korea and new democracies.     

Two-Level Security Management and the Prospects for New Democracies: A Simulation Analysis

Most new democracies face serious internal, ethnic/separatist conflicts; in addition, some face international threats. The literature on the growth of democracy in the global system and its impact on world politics does not fully account for the dual threats all states must address in managing their security. Based on theoretical work by Starr (1994) which describes the "common logic" of conflict processes in war and revolution, we outline a model of how states respond to security threats from both external and internal sources. Using computer simulation, we analyze the model and evaluate the relative importance for state security of factors such as system size, numbers of democracies in the system, extraction/allocation strategy pursued by new democracies, and government legitimacy level. Our results show that new democracies thrive in systems that are predominantly democratic. Also, ally support can provide crucial resources for new democracies facing internal threats. Finally, "endangered" democracies can recover security by attempting to buy off domestic threats rather than deter them, and by improving legitimacy.     

Is successful democracy promotion possible? The conceptual problem

There is a standard academic consensus that semi-presidentialism is perilous for new democracies. In particular, this is because semi-presidential countries run the risk of experiencing difficult periods of ‘cohabitation’ between a president and a prime minister who are opposed to each other, and because they may also experience periods of divided minority government that encourage the president to rule by decree and subvert the rule of law. This article examines the evidence to support these two arguments. It finds very few cases of cohabitation in young democracies and only one case where cohabitation has led directly to democratic collapse. By contrast, it finds more cases of divided minority government and more cases where divided minority government has been associated with democratic failure. However, the article also finds that young democracies have survived divided minority government. The conclusion is that, to date, there is insufficient evidence to support the long-standing and highly intuitive argument that cohabitation is dangerous for new democracies. There is more evidence to support the much newer argument about the dangers of divided minority government. Even so, more work is needed in this area before we can conclude that semi-presidentialism is inherently perilous.     

Three waves of semi-presidential studies

This article reviews the scholarship on semi-presidentialism since the early 1990s. We identify three waves of semi-presidential studies. The first wave focused on the concept of semi-presidentialism, how it should be defined, and what countries should be classified as semi-presidential. The second wave examined the effect of semi-presidential institutions on newly democratized countries. Does semi-presidentialism help or hinder the process of democratic consolidation? The third wave examines the effect of semi-presidential institutions on both recent and consolidated democracies. Third-wave studies have been characterized by three questions: to what extent does the direct election of the president make a difference to outcomes; to what extent does variation in presidential power make a difference; and what other factors interact with presidential power to help to bring about differential outcomes? The article argues that the concept of semi-presidentialism remains taxonomically valid, but that the empirical scholarship on countries with semi-presidential institutions needs to respond to broader developments within the discipline if it is to remain relevant.     

New version of the Kirkpatrick doctrine in the post-Soviet space

A growing number of political scientists notice worrying deficiencies of new democracies in Georgia and Ukraine. Looking for possible reasons they usually focus on internal factors. However, external factors may have also played their part. This article draws attention to the US foreign policy which, it is argued, did not further democratic consolidation goals in post-revolutionary Georgia and Ukraine. The Bush administration's policy towards these two countries is described as a manifestation of a new version of the Kirkpatrick doctrine which instructed US foreign-policy makers to choose the lesser evil of the two: unconsolidated, yet pro-American, democracies in the post-Soviet space.     

Democracy and innovation: from institutions to agency and leadership

Democracies are, by definition, marked by a strong normative commitment to innovation and change, and all democratic regimes must seek to generate innovations both to keep their fundamental promise and to secure their own survival. In response to the latent crisis of representative democracy, recent political research has devoted eager attention to innovating democratic institutions, yet with conspicuously little regard for the likely effects of such reform proposals on the innovation-related performance and innovation capacity of democratic regimes. Indeed, some reform proposals, if implemented, would appear to reduce rather than increase the innovation capacity of representative democracies. Innovation-focused leadership may be able to fill that gap and provide what even the best institutions alone are unable to accomplish. In contrast to recent research on leadership and innovation in the public sector, which tends to centre on forms of collaborative leadership within networks, this article emphasizes the importance of individual leaders, and more specifically of political chief executives whose status and position in the governance process have been significantly enhanced by a combination of different factors. However, while leadership might be the key to democratic political innovation, innovative leadership and institutional engineering remain closely related to one another.     

When Democracies Go to War: Public Debate and the French Decision on War in 1999 and 2003

On what grounds do democratic states wage war? Public opinion is often considered as being of crucial importance in the decision to go to war. This article analyses two debates over war in France. It finds that democracies debate war within a limited range of arguments from which classical reasons for war such as the geostrategic one are absent. However, within the limited range of arguments, public support for decisions to go to war seems to depend significantly on the convergence of all public opinion actors over the interpretation of the crisis situation. The high politics nature of crisis situations gives the political leadership strong leverage in the shaping of thick discourses. The control function of public opinion is then diminished and a de facto prerogative of the government established even though justifications remain restricted to a limited number of arguments. Thick discourses of justification seem to be framed predominantly by arguments of just war.     

The Nexus of Market Society, Liberal Preferences, and Democratic Peace: Interdisciplinary Theory and Evidence

Drawing on literature from Anthropology, Economics, Political Science and Sociology, an interdisciplinary theory is presented that links the rise of contractual forms of exchange with in a society with the proliferation of liberal values, democratic legitimacy, and peace among democratic nations. The theory accommodates old facts and yields a large number of new and testable ones, including the fact that the peace among democracies is limited to market-oriented states, and that market democracies—but not the other democracies—perceive common interests. Previous research confirms the first hypothesis; examination herein of UN roll call votes confirms the latter: the market democracies agree on global issues. The theory and evidence demonstrate that (a) the peace among democratic states may be a function of common interests derived from common economic structure; (b) all of the empirical research into the democratic peace is underspecified, as no study has considered an interaction of democracy with economic structure; (c) interests can be treated endogenously in social research; and (d) several of the premier puzzles in global politics are causally related—including the peace among democracies and the association of democratic stability and liberal political culture with market-oriented economic development.     

“Democracy as Civilisation”

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, democracy has come to embody the very idea of legitimate statehood in international politics. It has done so largely through defining a new standard of civilisation, in which “democraticness” determines the limits of international society and helps to construct relations with non-democracies “beyond the pale”. Like the “classical” standard, this new version again reflects a considerable interest in the socio-political organisation of states. Central in this shift back to a more “anti-pluralist” international society has been the democratic peace thesis, which emphasises how the internal (democratic) characteristics of states influence their external behaviour. Against more optimistic interpretations, it is argued that the democratic peace is a distinctly Janus-faced creature: promoting peace between democracies, while potentially encouraging war against non-democratic others. Within the democratic peace, non-democracies become not just behaviourally threatening but also ontologically threatening. Non-democracies are a danger because of what they are (or are not). In sum, the argument presented is that democracy, positioned as the most legitimate form of domestic governance in international society, has become caught up and used in global structures of domination, hierarchy and violence. Thus, the role of “democracy” in international politics is much more complicated, and, at least in its current guise, less progressive than often portrayed.     

Beyond the fallacy of coup-ism: conceptualizing civilian control of the military in emerging democracies

It is consensus in the democratization literature that civilian control of the military is a necessary ingredient for democracy and democratic consolidation. However, there is considerable disagreement on what civilian control of the military exactly entails and there is a lack of solid theoretical arguments for how weak or absent civilian control affects democratic governance. Furthermore, a considerable portion of the research literature is captured by the fallacy of coup-ism, ignoring the many other forms in which military officers can constrain the authority of democratically elected political leaders to make political decisions and get them implemented. This article addresses these lacunae by providing a new conceptual framework for the analysis of civil–military relations in emerging democracies. From democracy theory it derives a definition of civilian control as a certain distribution of decision-making power between civilian leaders and military officers. Based on this definition, the authors develop a five-dimensional concept of civilian control, discuss the effects of weakly institutionalized civilian control on the quality of democracy and address the chances for democratic consolidation.     

Perils of parliamentarism? Political systems and the stability of democracy revisited

Parliamentary systems are generally regarded as superior to presidential ones in democratic sustenance. This article contributes to the debate on the relationship between systems of government and the survival of democracy by bringing in a new perspective and analysing the experiences of 131 democracies during 1960–2006. We argue that systems of government do matter, but their effects are indirect; they exert their influence through societies' prior democratic records. Confirming the conventional argument, our data analysis shows that uninterrupted parliamentary democracies face significantly lower risks of a first breakdown than their presidential counterparts. Contrary to the common understanding, however, we find that the risk of a democratic breakdown can be higher for parliamentary regimes than for presidential regimes among the countries whose democracy has collapsed in the past. Furthermore, the risk of a previously failed democracy falling again grows as (the risk of) government crises increase(s). Hence our study questions the common belief that parliamentary systems are categorically more conducive to democratic stability than presidential ones.     

Book reviews

Liberal democratic governments may differ in both their kind and degree of democracy. However, the literature too often conflates this distinction, hindering our ability to understand what kinds of governing structures are more democratic. To clarify this issue, the article examines two prominent contemporary models of democracy: developmental liberal democracy (DLD) and protective liberal democracy (PLD). While the former takes a ‘thicker’ approach to governance than the latter, conventional wisdom holds that these systems differ only in kind rather than degree. The article tests this assumption through an empirical comparison of electoral, legislative, and information-regulating institutions in two representative cases: Sweden and the United States. The empirical findings lead us to the conclusion that developmental liberal democracies represent not only a different kind, but also a deeper degree of democracy than protective liberal democracies. The implications for democracy promotion appear substantial.     

De-idealizing the democratic civil peace: on the political economy of democratic stabilization and pacification in Argentina and Ecuador

In the liberal concept of a ‘democratic civil peace’, an idealistic understanding of democratic stabilization and pacification prevails: democracy is seen to guarantee political stability and social peace by offering comprehensive representation and participation in political decisions while producing outcomes broadly in accordance with the common interest of society. This contrasts with the procedural quality and the material achievements of most, if not all, really existing democracies. South America is paradigmatic. Here, the legitimation of liberal democracy through both procedure and performance is weak and yet ‘third wave democracies’ have managed to survive even harsh economic and political crises. The article presents a conceptual framework to analyse historically specific patterns of democratic stabilization and pacification. Analyses of the processes of socio-political destabilization and re-stabilization in Argentina and Ecuador since the late 1990s show how a ‘de-idealized’ perspective on the democratic civil peace helps explain the viability of democratic regimes that systematically deviate from the ideal-type conditions for democratic survival that have been proposed in the literature.     

Democratic Synergy and Victory in War, 1816–1992

This study investigates the question of why democracies are more likely to win wars than non-democracies. I argue that due to the transparency of the polities, and the stability of their preferences, once determined, democracies are better able to cooperate with their partners in the conduct of wars, and thereby are more likely to win wars. In support of my argument, the main findings in this study show that, other things being equal, the larger the number of democratic partners a state has, the more likely it is to win; moreover, democratic states are more likely to have democratic partners during wars. These results are in contrast with those in current literature about the high likelihood of prevailing by democracies in wars, which emphasize, on the one hand, the superior capacity of democratic states to strengthen military capabilities and, on the other hand, to select wars in which they have a high chance of winning.     

An Experimental Test of Selectorate Theory

This article uses a laboratory experiment to test one of the main predictions of selectorate theory, that is, that democratic leaders invest more resources in public goods than autocratic leaders. The results of the experiment confirm this prediction and further show citizens are better off on average under democratic institutions than autocratic institutions. Meanwhile, autocratic leaders receive higher payoffs than democratic leaders. Additionally, this article attempts to bring domestic politics into international relations experimentation with a focus on how communication may allow democracies to organize more efficiently for war than autocracies. A game theoretical model shows democracies have the potential to organize optimally and use their citizens’ skills to their full advantage while autocracies do not. The results of the experiment reveal some evidence that democracies organize more efficiently than autocracies, but that this increased efficiency did not produce a higher percentage of conflict wins.