What is democracy? A reconceptualization of the quality of democracy

Works on the quality of democracy propose standards for evaluating politics beyond those encompassed by a minimal definition of democracy. Yet, what is the quality of democracy? This article first reconstructs and assesses current conceptualizations of the quality of democracy. Thereafter, it reconceptualizes the quality of democracy by equating it with democracy pure and simple, positing that democracy is a synthesis of political freedom and political equality, and spelling out the implications of this substantive assumption. The proposal is to broaden the concept of democracy to address two additional spheres: government decision-making – political institutions are democratic inasmuch as a majority of citizens can change the status quo – and the social environment of politics – the social context cannot turn the principles of political freedom and equality into mere formalities. Alternative specifications of democratic standards are considered and reasons for discarding them are provided.     

Democracy and Islam: Implications for Civilizational Conflict and the Democratic Peace

The extent to which democracy and Islam are mutually exclusive is tested empirically with implications for civilizational conflict and the democratic peace. Three measures of democracy are used: a political rights index, an index of liberal democracy, and a measure based on institutionalization. Environmental variables such as sea borders and rainfall that minimize external threat to democratic systems are found to predict better to the more rudimentary political rights index, while cultural variables, including Islam in a negative direction, are more clearly associated with liberal democracy. The measure of democratic institutionalization behaves in a manner intermediate between the two. Divergence of the structures of explanation for these measures suggests that conclusions concerning the likelihood of war between democracies can depend on the specific index of democracy employed. The absence of a significant negative association between Islam and the political rights index under controlled conditions suggests that the probability of civilizational conflict is low.     

Inclusive institutions and stability of transition toward democracy in post-civil war states

This article attempts to bring together research on democratization and democratic consolidation with research on civil war termination. The post-civil war environment is contentious and the transition toward democracy achieved after a civil war is susceptible to failure. The side that wins the democratic elections in a post-war state may use its democratically won power to dismantle the institutions of democracy and repress the opposition. The fear of constant marginalization in the political processes as well as the fear of being repressed might create incentives for the defeated party to return to civil war. By utilizing the expected utility framework, this article suggests that former rivals would support democratic transition if they were confident that inclusive institutions ensured that they could achieve their political interests through the democratic processes. After analysing the data on post-civil war transitions toward democracy (TTD) from 1946–2005, I found that the proportional representation system and the parliamentary system are the most important institutions that help sustain the post-civil war TTD.     

美国与拉美民粹主义的主要区别与左右分野

民粹主义在美国和拉美地区具有不同的发生和发展史。与在拉美不同,民粹主义在美国起源时间较早,但发生频率较低,持续时间较短,彼此关联性不强,影响程度较弱,激进程度较轻。特朗普式的民粹主义在很大程度上体现了美国民粹主义的“拉美化”倾向。民粹主义在美国和拉美有很明显的左右分野,左翼民粹主义在拉美长期占据主流,右翼民粹主义在美国则是主要形式。在与何种类型的左右翼结合、是否与民族主义结盟、集权程度等多个方面,这两个地区的左右翼民粹主义也存在较大差别。目前,美国和拉美的左右翼民粹主义正在同时崛起。特朗普的民粹主义可谓集美国的左右翼民粹,尤其是极右翼民粹主义之大成。民粹主义说到底是民主政治的民粹化,源于大众民主政治的内生问题。美拉民粹主义的重要差异,主要来自两个地区不同的政治文化传统和选举民主机制,以及民主体制不同性质和程度的政治衰败。美拉民粹主义左右分野的背后,实质上是公民的基本权利保障不彰所致。具体而言,是自由议程与平等议程之间的张力以及由此导致的社会主要矛盾的不同。因此,必须认真对待左右翼民粹主义,加强制度建设,提高国家治理能力,同时还应积极参与全球治理。     

The Limits of Electoral Democracy in Ukraine

In the past two years Ukraine has held new elections for both its parliament and president. Some might claim that these elections are evidence of democratic progress. However, elections are only a necessary, not sufficient component of democracy, and to make judgements about democratic consolidation solely on the basis of elections is to fall victim to the fallacy of 'electoralism'. While it is true that Ukraine does possess an electoral democracy, democratic consolidation remains elusive and is susceptible to a variety of problems. These include a weak civil society and weak political parties, regional divisions, unstable political institutions and a lack of the rule of law. By some measures Ukraine may even have regressed from 1994, as an oligarchy has consolidated itself and authoritarian trends are readily discernible.     

What does democracy mean? Activist views and practices in Athens,Cairo, London and Moscow

We shed light on the discontent with and the appeal of democracy by interviewing some of the most committed critical citizens: core activists in street protests. Based on interviews in Athens, Cairo, London, and Moscow, we found that they rejected representative democracy as insufficient, and believed democracy to entail having a voice and a responsibility to participate intensively in political decision-making. Activists saw themselves as engaged in prefigurative politics by fostering democratic practices within the movement and, ultimately, in society, but also raised concerns about internal power dynamics reproducing existing inequalities and exclusions. The insistence by activists that citizens have both a right and a duty to participate should be taken more seriously by political scientists and policymakers, not just as a threat to democracy and democratization, but as an opportunity. However, contemporary social movements are not straightforward sites of prefiguration, but sites of struggle between experimental and traditional forms of organizing, between inclusive aspirations and exclusive tendencies.     

Majoritarian democracy and globalization versus ethnic diversity?

While some types of democracy can sustain ethnic and cultural diversity, others can clearly undermine it. In The Dark Side of Democracy, Michael Mann argues that extreme crimes like genocide and ethnic cleansing tend to occur, or at least be legitimized, within a majoritarian democracy framework. This article broadens Mann's approach in two directions: first, it confirms that majoritarian democracy in plural societies can provide the pre-existing institutional context where conflict, nationalism and exclusion can thrive, eventually degenerating into self-destruction. Second, it focuses on the tendency by some governments to turn to patriotism and populism as sources of legitimacy at a time when the latter appears to be crumbling. In addition, the article questions both the ‘democratic peace’ and the ‘failed democratization’ approaches for their reliance on an ideal type and fixed notion of democracy, arguing that the latter has been weakened by neoliberal globalization, particularly as it interacts with the legacy of pre-existing forms of majoritarianism. The article concludes that these forces need to be studied simultaneously in order to have a broader picture of the contemporary weakening of democratic practices and institutions within some nation-states.     

Democratic Convergence and Free Trade

Even if a democracy were more likely to pursue free trade than an autocracy (an unproven generalization), the simultaneous spread of democracy in the world would not necessarily yield a reduction in protection, but might in fact cause an increase. The reason for this paradoxical outcome is the fact that democratic convergence creates power profiles identical across nations. Similar regimes tend to empower the same classes of producers, with the result that if trade is based on relative comparative advantages, and countries specialize on the basis of factor endowments, democratic convergence (or any type of regime convergence for that matter) empowers as many free traders as protectionists, with negative consequences for trade; only if trade is fueled by scale economies, and countries specialize along product lines, then may political convergence not hurt trade. Empirically, I show that this model helps explain the timing of nineteenth-century European trade liberalization better than existing explanations; it also helps us understand the easiness with which liberalization proceeded in the postwar era; and it casts a new light on the difficulties presently encountered, with democracy spreading at a time when product specialization is on the retreat.     

Political culture in Turkey: Connections among attitudes toward democracy,the military and Islam

Against the background of Turkey's continuing but unconsolidated democratic transition, this article examines the nature and determinants of attitudes toward democracy held by ordinary Turkish citizens. Using data from the World Values Survey conducted in Turkey in 1997, it seeks to contribute to a growing body of literature concerned with the relationship between political culture and democratization. Although this relationship has not been fully explicated, the authors share the view of those scholars who believe that the existence of democratic attitudes and values among a country's population is no less important than are democratic institutions and procedures for advancing and eventually consolidating a democratic transition. Accordingly, the study seeks to shed light on the following interrelated questions: To what extent does the Turkish population hold attitudes supportive of democracy? What are the most important determinants of popular support for democracy? What factors account for any observed variance in relevant political attitudes? What is the relationship between attitudes toward the military and attitudes toward democracy and governance? What is the relationship between personal religious attachments and attitudes toward democracy and governance?     

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 sanctions meet black knight support: revisiting the Belarusian case

Democracy promotion through economic sanctions has become commonplace. Previous studies argue that an important challenge to the effectiveness of democratic sanctions is the contravening support of black knights. However, these studies underestimate conflicting interests between the target and its black knight. In this paper, I propose a bargaining model for understanding how targets obtain support from black knights. The target’s main source of bargaining power is its threat to defect from the black knight and obtain support from an international rival. However, the credibility of this threat decreases with democratic sanctions because they hinder cooperation with a likely source of support, namely the sender. Therefore, targets take steps towards democracy to improve their bargaining position relative to the black knight. To probe my argument, I conduct a deep single case study of EU sanctions against Belarus between 2004 and 2016 with Russia as a black knight. Sanctions should have no effect in this paradigmatic case of black knight support. Yet, there is substantial evidence that democratic sanctions have increased the cost of electoral fraud and state repression in Belarus. This indicates that the conflicting interests of targets and their black knights provide windows of opportunity for democracy promotion.     

Regime change and the convergence of democratic value orientations through socialization. Evidence from reunited Germany

Theories of socialization and political culture claim that public ideas about how a democracy should be shaped will only change slowly after regime changes. Thus, citizens’ value orientations should converge after a replacement of generations and through institutional learning. Pertaining to the development and convergence of individual conceptions of democracy or democratic value orientations, these assumptions have not yet been tested empirically. This article therefore provides an empirical test, drawing on the case of German reunification as a natural experiment. I analyse the development of democratic value orientations based on data from the sixth wave of the European Social Survey using both factor and cohort analysis. The findings provide strong support for the assumptions of socialization theories: More than 20 years after reunification, people who grew up in East Germany still show a higher affiliation to a socialist model of democracy than people socialized in the West, who instead show higher support for a liberal model. However, differences in democratic value orientations are converging for citizens less than 30 years of age across Germany, the first generation socialized entirely in a democratic political system.     

Can America Finance Freedom? Assessing U.S. Democracy Promotion via Economic Statecraft

Recent discourse on U.S. efforts to promote democracy has focused on military activities; especially the strategic and normative perils of democracy promotion at the point of bayonets. This paper explores the United States' use of economic statecraft to foster democratization, with particular attention to democracy incentive and assistance strategies. Incentive approaches attempt to promote democracy from the top-down, by leveraging aid and trade privileges to persuade authoritarian leaders to implement political reform. Assistance approaches aim to induce democratization from the inside , through funding and technical assistance to state institutions, and from the bottom-up , by providing support to civil society and elections. This study finds that while top-down incentive approaches can stimulate democratic change, this strategy tends to work only when aid and trade benefits are conditional; that is, when benefits are withheld until recipient states meet rigorous democratic benchmarks. Washington has historically eschewed democratic conditionality, however, and thus can claim very few aid-induced or trade-induced democratization events. Scant evidence exists to demonstrate that inside approaches—that is, institutional aid—possesses significant capacity to induce democracy. It is the bottom-up approach—empowering the masses to compel democratic change—that has registered the greatest number of democracy promotion successes.     

South African election posters: Reflecting the maturing of a democracy?

Abstract

The South African democracy has survived three national and provincial elections and three local elections, since 1994. In comparison to other young democracies in Africa, South Africa has experienced a relatively stable transition to democracy. However, the ruling ANC has not been under pressure from opposition parties. Although this has helped pave the way, a dominant governing party does not necessarily encourage the growth of a mature, democratic political culture. The assumption of this article is that political parties in developing societies have a normative obligation to do more than canvas votes during election campaigns. Political parties should also be instrumental in fostering a democratic political culture by communicating democratic values, encouraging participation in the democracy and enabling voters to make an informed electoral choice. Although political posters contribute mainly to image building, the reinforcement of party support, and the visibility of the party, posters are the agenda setters or headlines of a party's campaign – it is therefore argued that political parties in developing societies also need to design political posters responsively, in order to sustain the democracy. In general it seems that the poster campaigns of parties have matured since 1999, in the sense that there was less emphasis on democratisation issues in the past, and the campaigns conformed more to the norm of Western political campaigning.     

Foundations of an Authoritarian Populism in an International Context

The rise of populism, and its subsequent challenge to liberal democratic institutions, is an ongoing feature of twenty-first century global politics. The author contends that providing college students with theoretical tools to untangle the relationship between the logic and practices of domestic populist political movements and liberal democratic institutions empowers them to analyze critically those challenges and consider the extent to which populism is indicative of prior institutional failure. The work of Antonio Gramsci and Ernesto Laclau are used to develop a model of populism appropriate for advanced undergraduate international relations students. The cases of the Tea Party, Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, Victor Orbán’s rise in Hungary demonstrate the dynamics of the model and its relevance to the study of international relations and foreign policy.     

Prompting democratic transitions from abroad: International donors and multi‐partyism in Tanzania

It is generally accepted that the international donor community influences the politics of recipient states. In particular, donor calls for political liberalization are seen to have had, and continue to have, effects upon democratization in countries dependent upon international economic assistance. Such democratic contingency tied to aid suggests that the continuation of aid flows, and possibly an increase in aid transfer sums, occurs in response to political liberalization. It also implies the threat of decreases in, or even cessation of, foreign aid should the recipient state fail to implement political reform. This research assesses the role that the donor community plays in recipient states’ transition to democracy, focusing on Tanzania as a case study. Tanzania, a major recipient of foreign aid, underwent fundamental political reform in 1992. This study combines analysis of fluctuations in bilateral aid flows to Tanzania with interpretations of the causal role played by donor pressure from the perspectives of representatives of the donor community as well as from members of Tanzania's political elite. These perspectives are derived from original interviews conducted by the author. The findings indicate no correlation between fluctuations in aid transfers and Tanzania's implementation of multi‐party democracy. Rather, it was the perception among the Tanzanian leadership of a direct linkage between donor aid disbursements and political liberalization that prompted the political transition.