Opinion formation in foreign policy: the Swiss experience

Applying John Zaller's model of opinion formation to survey data covering 15 years (1981–95) of direct democracy in Switzerland, this paper provides a contribution to the debate about opinion formation in foreign policy. On the one hand, the Swiss experience contradicts the widespread view that citizens are poorly informed about and little interested in foreign affairs. On the other hand, direct democracy often translates into governmental defeats in this field. We address these mixed results and show that opinion formation in foreign policy is not a special case, and differs from that in domestic policy only with respect to the circumstances under which it occurs. In particular, we highlight the unusual type and level of conflict within the elite on foreign policy issues, which translates into distinct patterns of attitudes among the public.     

The quest for inclusion and citizenship in Ghana: challenges and prospects

Ghana's tortuous journey to democracy received a major boost in the year 2006 with the enactments of two human-rights-related pieces of legislation. In this article the author contends, on the one hand, that the recent enactments of an amendment to the law on representation of the people and the persons with disability law in Ghana constituted a noteworthy landmark in the search for inclusive citizenship. On the other hand, the relation between society and the political authority during the processes of the enactments highlighted characteristics of a post-colonial African state. The author explores the antagonisms that surrounded the enactments of these laws. The article concludes that although the Ghanaian experience represents a new wave of re-thinking of rights in Africa, it also underscores the deep-seated issues of contestation and negotiations that unavoidably accompany the expansion of democracy and extension of rights to the excluded and the marginalized.     

Liberal Democracy Series I, 1972–1988: Definition, measurement, and trajectories

The purpose of this paper is to provide the definitional and empirical background to the Liberal Democracy Series I Index of democracy that is available in Bollen (1998) but whose rationale has not been published. More specifically, the paper (1) gives a definition of liberal democracy that has guided the formation of this index, (2) describes measures that correspond to this definition, (3) provides a measurement model that links the indicators of democracy to the latent variables that represent the concept, (4) explains the construction of the Liberal Democracy Series I Index, and (5) compares the Series I democracy measure to two other widely used democracy measures in a latent curve model. The Liberal Democracy Series I Index provides a simple unweighted measure of liberal democracy that minimizes the bias in expert ratings, is highly reliable and highly correlated with the latent liberal democracy variable. The evidenced reviewed here suggests that its measurement properties are superior to the Polity and Vanhanen democracy indices with the exception that it is available for a more limited period of years than these latter two.     

Models of judicial administration and the independence of the judiciary: a comparison of Romanian self‐management and the Czech executive model

The Rule of Law is a necessary condition for economic, social and political development in countries undergoing transition from authoritarianism to democracy. The Rule of Law requires an independent judiciary, one that is impartial and insular. In Eastern Europe democratic transition has produced two models of judicial administration: judicial self‐management and the executive model. Romania is a case of the former, the Czech Republic an instance of the latter. Comparison of the two cases suggests that while political developments are important to the preservation of judicial independence, the consolidation of democracy and the organisation of the judiciary are in a reciprocal relationship. The organisation of the judiciary is necessary for the legislative transparency and oversight of the executive branch which in turn guards against the politicisation of judicial management, with its adverse consequences for the independence of the judiciary and ultimately the Rule of Law. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Post-modernism as the Decadence of the Social Democratic State

In this paper it is argued that the corresponding rise of post-modernism and the triumph of neo-liberalism are not only not accidental, the triumph of neo-liberalism has been facilitated by post-modernism. Post-modernism has been primarily directed not against mainstream modernism, the modernism of Hobbes, Smith, Darwin and social Darwinism, but against the radical modernist quest for justice and emancipation with its roots in German thought. The Social Democratic State, the principles of which, it is here argued, were articulated by Hegel, was a partial triumph of this radical modernism, realising a higher level of reciprocal recognition and overcoming much of the brutality of the Liberal State. Post-modernism is shown to be a manifestation of the decadence of the Social Democratic State, characterised by the disintegration of cognitive and ethical developments which have been the condition for people to form communities based on reciprocal recognition. In this regard it parallels the decadence which took place in ancient Rome, for similar reasons: both the Roman Empire and the social democratic state reduced people to passive recipients of the benefits of their societies. The implications of this are twofold. If social democracy is to be revived, it will require a struggle for 'strong' democracy; that is, for a major role for participatory democracy. On the other hand if people opt for the creation of confederations of genuinely democratic communities to replace the state, this will not be achieved by post-modern decadence but through the developments of cognitive forms and communities through which the recognition of people as free agents is institutionalised.     

Accountability: Is Westminster the Problem?

The outcome of the Symposium reported in AJPA 58(1) is said by the convenors to be that there are many different kinds of accountability and that there may be clashes between them. This paper suggests one possible reason is that the Westminster label hides the potential tensions between the increasing demands for accountability, more responsiveness and responsibility, the new public management and the institutional framework. Everyone wishes to cover perceived unmet demands and expectations, providing we remain with basic Westminster as our starting point. The paper suggests that commitment to what we call Westminster is the problem. It restricts understanding of the reality of Australian governance because it is not an uncontested term. Westminster is made to mean whatever the normative stance of the commentator requires. The paper argues that it is an opportune time to answer some basic questions about responsible parliamentary democracy in Australia.     

Can the market help the forum? Negotiating the commercialization of deliberative democracy

Deliberative ideals have become commercial goods bought and sold in an expanding consultancy market. In this market, demand is generated by government and advocacy groups seeking innovative ways to engage with the public. On the supply side are a growing number of commercial organizations selling deliberative goods and services such as process design, facilitation and evaluation. This paper characterizes the nature of this deliberative market, and considers its implications for democracy and contemporary governance. An analysis of deliberative consultants finds that their professional world is more akin to a ‘community of practice’ rather than a marketplace. But the development of this community of deliberative practitioners could go in opposing directions. On the one hand consultants could become the entrepreneurs of deliberative democracy, promoting and demonstrating its benefits for policy making. On the other hand, if the motivations for deepening democracy are fully replaced by business imperatives and competition, then the deliberative project would be severely undermined. Rather than predict the future, the paper identifies some of the opportunities and challenges for democratic governance as elements of deliberative democracy are commodified.

Membership ballots and the value of intra-party democracy

On the face of it, membership ballots present a clear case in which intra-party democracy comes into collision with core principles of representative democracy: they weaken the autonomy of representatives, and undermine the authority of the voters. In this article, I investigate whether this is correct, and whether membership ballots are, therefore, democratically illegitimate, using the controversial 2013 Mitgliederentscheid in the German Social Democratic party as a critical case. I argue that there is nothing democratically suspect about membership ballots and mount a defence of intra-party democracy as intrinsically valuable, appealing to a principle of equal respect for persons as autonomous agents. It turns out that endorsing this principle has two possible implications: that the content of the ballot must be open to deliberation, and that these deliberations should be rendered open to non-members. I discuss these implications and offer some institutional design guidelines.     

Context matters: Economics,politics and satisfaction with democracy

Economic and political considerations are important in determining citizens' level of satisfaction with their democratic system, but research analyzing which criteria prevail in which contexts is still limited. We examine under what conditions citizens chiefly rely on economic or political considerations in assessing their level of satisfaction with democracy. Using the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems dataset covering 72 elections in 45 unique countries (1996–2016), we show that the relative weight of economic and political criteria in citizens' evaluation of their democratic regime is a function of their nation's affluence. On the one hand, citizens in poorer countries mostly rely on the economy to assess their level of satisfaction with democracy. On the other hand, political considerations are crucial in citizens' evaluations of richer societies. Our results entail strong implications to understand why citizens' recipes for satisfaction for democracy vary across time and space.     

Representation and Democracy: Uneasy Alliance

The concept of 'representation' is puzzling not because it lacks a central definition, but because that definition implies a paradox (being present and yet not present) and is too general to help reconcile the word's many senses with their sometimes conflicting implications.
Representation has a problematic relationship with democracy, with which it is often thoughtlessly equated. The two ideas have different, even conflicting, origins. Democracy came from ancient Greece and was won through struggle, from below. Greek democracy was participatory and bore no relationship to representation. Representation dates – at least as a political concept and practice – from the late medieval period, when it was imposed as a duty by the monarch. Only in the English Civil War and then in the eighteenth-century democratic revolutions did the two concepts become linked.
Democrats saw representation – with an extended suffrage – as making possible large-scale democracy. Conservatives instead saw it as a tool for staving off democracy. Rousseau also contrasted the two concepts, but favoured democratic self-government.
He was prescient in seeing representation as a threat to democracy. Representative government has become a new form of oligarchy, with ordinary people excluded from public life. This is not inevitable. Representation does make large-scale democracy possible, where it is based in participatory democratic politics at the local level.
Three obstacles block access to this possibility today: the scope of public problems and private power; money, or rather wealth; and ideas and their shaping, in an age of electronic media.     

Liberalism,socialism and democracy: variations on a governmental theme

Liberalism is commonly understood as a political doctrine or ideology concerned with the maximization of individual liberty. However, following Foucault's work on governmentality, a different usage has been suggested, based on the idea of a liberal mode of government. I argue that the differences between these accounts of liberalism derive from a fundamental ambiguity in the liberal project, as a result of which the figure of a community of autonomous individuals appears on the one hand as given reality, serving to identify the character and the limits of legitimate government, while on the other it appears as yet to be realized positivity, serving to define the objective for a variety of governmental projects.

This paper examines the implications of that ambiguity for the understanding first of liberalism as doctrine and second of its relationship to other contemporary doctrines - democracy, socialism and the neo-liberalism in particular. Since the figure of the community of autonomous persons considered as given reality tends to dominate standard characterizations of liberalism as doctrine of government, it also plays an important part in the contrasting characterizations of democracy and socialism. We should expect the view of such a community as artefact to produce a rather different picture.     

From Majoritarian Democracy to Vertical Separation of Powers: Sweden and the European Union

The key problem in constitutional politics in the established democracies may be said to pertain to finding the right balance between majoritarian democracy, constitutionalism and effective decision making. From that perspective this essay examines the Swedish polity before and after the accession to the European Union in 1995. From 1917 onwards majoritarian democracy and parliamentarism were the praxis of the Swedish polity. But this mode of goverment was not written into the 1809 Instrument of Government, which was characterised by the separation of powers between the king and the parliament. It was first in the new Instrument of Government, adopted in 1973–74, that the praxis of majoritarian democracy and parliamentarism was codified. But in the 1990s a new form of dualism was introduced into the Swedish polity as a result of the country's accession to the European Union. On the one hand, there is an Instrument of Government characterised by the principle of majoritarian democratic rule. On the other, accession to the EU involves a vertical separation of powers on a major scale. Two conflicting fundamental elements, majoritarian democracy and vertical separation of powers, are currently incorporated in the Swedish polity.     

The Difficult Art of Classifying Regimes: The Case of Paraguay

This article deals with the difficult art of classifying political regimes. Such classifications are important since they lay the ground for a central field of research in political science, namely the causes and consequences of regime changes. The article focuses on Paraguay. which has experienced a process of transition from authoritarian to democratic rule over the past five years. Four criteria of democracy are used to evaluate the state of democracy in this country in early 1994: competitive elections and universal suffrage. broad and autonomous political participation. political freedoms and accountability of elected organs. The investigation of the Paraguayan case highlights the problems involved in using a dichotomous regime variable in empirical research. Paraguay is a democracy when it comes to freedom of speech, but hardly in term of the political situation in the countryside. It also demonstrates that the widely used Schumpeterian definition of democracy is risky in the sense that it may conceal more than it reveals about the regime under study. Finally, the article sheds light on the need for in-depth case studies for the classification of political regimes.     

Strategic or Principled? The Engagement of Civil Society Organizations with the EU

This article links the literature on the Europeanization of civil society organizations (CSOs) with the literature on the contribution CSOs can make to democracy in the EU. To do so, it asks which are the pull factors that support CSOs’ Europeanization: are they mostly strategic and linked to where law-making and the money are? Or are they likewise linked to a desire to contribute to EU democracy? To explore this question, the article looks at agricultural, environmental and anti-poverty groups and combines fresh qualitative with quantitative data. The findings suggest that we need to distinguish strategic Europeanization, on the one hand, from the identification with supranational democracy, on the other. They also show that the most Europeanized organizations need not be the most interested in EU democracy, whereas organizations with a comparatively low degree of Europeanization can still be interested in EU democracy.     

New evidence on the relationship between democracy and economic growth

It is often maintained that democracy is a luxury which comes at a price in terms of subsequent slower increases in national living standards. However, various recent cross-section studies on economic growth have found evidence that lack of civil and political liberties is negatively correlated with economic growth. Using a new measure of democracy, which is based upon the number of years that a country can be regarded as a democracy, the robustness of this relationship is examined. Both direct and indirect effects of lack of democratic liberties are analysed. Our main conclusion is that the relationship between democracy and economic growth is not rubust.     

Delegation and accountability in parliamentary democracies

Abstract. Parliamentary democracy has been widely embraced by politicians and especially by the scholarly community but remains less widely understood. In this essay, I identify the institutional features that define parliamentary democracy and suggest how they can be understood as delegation relationships. I propose two definitions: one minimal and one maximal (or ideal–typical). In the latter sense, parliamentary democracy is a particular regime of delegation and accountability that can be understood with the help of agency theory, which allows us to identify the conditions under which democratic agency problems may occur. Parliamentarism is simple, indirect, and relies on lessons gradually acquired in the past. Compared to presidentialism, parliamentarism has certain advantages, such as decisional efficiency and the inducements it creates toward effort. On the other hand, parliamentarism also implies disadvantages such as ineffective accountability and a lack of transparency, which may cause informational inefficiencies. And whereas parliamentarism may be particularly suitable for problems of adverse selection, it is a less certain cure for moral hazard. In contemporary advanced societies, parliamentarism is facing the challenges of decaying screening devices and diverted accountabilities.     

治民·治政·治党--中国政治发展战略解析

中国经济发展的成就举世瞩目,但政治发展却鲜为世人所乐道。这一方面是因为政治改革还在探索之中,政治发展思路还需要有一个逐步清晰和明确的过程;另一方面也是因为对于政治发展的理解和评价历来有所不同。在一般的政治研究中,建立在西方经验模式的基础上,民主化被认为是判断政治发展的主要标准。本文认为,仅仅用“民主”指标来衡量中国政治发展有失公允,而“治理”理论却可能为解释中国政治发展提供一种新的视角;在“治理”概念下,“治民”、“治政”和“治党”可以用来说明一种日渐清晰的中国政治发展战略思路。     

Rancière and revolution

This paper explores what role Rancière's work can play in the struggle for a more democratic world. It highlights the strength of Rancière's conception of democracy, which clearly identifies democracy as a popular disruption of the prevailing police order. This order claims to have assigned a proper role to all parts of society. Democracy for Rancière is when an element emerges that has not been taken account of and demonstrates the police order's claim to be false. Among the many benefits of this way of understanding democracy, it upsets any easy association between hegemony and democracy – as in Laclau & Mouffe – and it refuses utterly the ideological fusing of democracy, capitalism, and the state offered by the liberal-democratic-capitalist consensus. However, Rancière's approach also introduces significant limits on democracy because it denies that democracy can ever do more than disrupt the prevailing order. It does not allow for the possibility that democracy can grow and spread to the point that it becomes pervasive in the polity. This paper uses the case of the Egyptian uprising to show how this limitation closes off important political possibilities. The paper argues that Deleuze & Guattari's theorisation of revolution, when used carefully, is a necessary corrective to Rancière's too-restricted concept of democracy     

Public Spheres on the Internet: Anarchic or Government-Sponsored – A Comparison

This article discusses whether the internet can contribute to strengthening democracy by creating new public spheres online. The focus is whether government-sponsored initiatives are more successful than private 'anarchic' ones in shaping conditions for democratic dialogue. Two cases are examined and it is concluded that the government-sponsored case in general is most successful in achieving democratic ideals of openness, respect, argumentation, enlightenment and deliberation. Three factors are crucial for the success of the former case: rules and moderation, a geographical affiliation and the presence of politicians. On the other hand, it is clear that political debate online is still an exclusive activity reserved mainly for the well educated and politically active. The internet's often-claimed potential for mobilising new groups cannot be confirmed. Rather, the chosen few have got yet another opportunity to discuss and influence the political process.     

Liberal Justifications for Local Government in Britain: The Triumph of Expediency over Ethics

It is shown in this article how theories justifying local government in Britain are largely based on the expedience of providing administrative efficiency or stable democracy for the central state rather than ethical grounds that justify local government as an independent entity in its own right. The article critically reviews the development of theories justifying local government within Britain and argues that it is possible on the basis of Mill's arguments within On Liberty to establish a strong ethical justification for local government. It is shown how Mill did not develop this line of thought but established substantive arguments concerning the value of local government for securing a stable liberal democracy and how successive mainstream theorists have modified but not substantially departed from this approach.