Doing more with less: the Justice and Development Party (AKP), Turkish elections,and the uncertain future of Turkish politics

The outcome of Turkey's June 2011 elections temporarily quelled – though by no means entirely put to rest – growing concern over the creeping autocratic tendencies of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). To ensure that democracy remains durable, the AKP must now clearly demonstrate that it is willing to shun heavy-handed tactics and instead engage the opposition in a genuine dialog regarding important matters of constitutional change, especially those related to individual rights and identity issues. A slide toward autocracy has been an all-too-common pitfall in Turkish politics over the years. Should it so choose, the AKP is well poised to break the cycle at this critical juncture in Turkish politics.     

Electoral Violence in Africa Revisited

This article addresses the still unsettled question of the incidence of violent election periods in Africa. It uses two new datasets, which report episodes of social conflict in the region for 1990–2011, and elections worldwide from 1960 to 2010. When combined, these data suggest that onsets of electoral violence peak around major election days in Africa as a whole, but with wide national variability in the volume of new episodes. Depending on the time span and type of social conflict, from one-quarter to three-quarters of the elections for national leadership have been without incident. The article also investigates the timing of electoral violence and the extent to which there is an experience curve effect, whereby subsequent elections have fewer onsets of social conflict. The data indicate that two-thirds to three-quarters of elections are free of onsets of social conflict, but that the proportion does not change much with experience. Overall, there appear to be reasonable grounds for optimism about peaceful elections in many African countries.     

Democracy and the politics of power alternation in Africa

Namibia's Nujoma, Zambia's Chiluba, Algeria's Bouteflika, Togo's Eyadema, Cameroon's Biya, Nigeria's Obasanjo, Niger's Tandja and Uganda's Museveni have all to varying degrees attempted to subvert the democratization process in their respective countries. These however are only a small selection of an increasingly similar pattern of action by incumbents in Africa. What is most troubling to democratic transitionists is a concerted effort by these leaders to curtail their fledgling democracies in the name of their continued ‘service’ to the people. This paper seeks to examine what has enabled an increasing number of African leaders to negate power alternation in favour of open-ended tenures otherwise ‘presidential careerism’. The article argues that while most of these states have been cited for embarking on some semblance of democratic rule, their rulers have utilized their weak democratic institutional structures, co-opted the elite and rallied the ‘mob’ to commit democracy ‘infanticide’.     

Digging up Spain's past: consequences of truth and reconciliation

Over the last decade the issue of transitional justice has attracted considerable media and academic attention. Diverse countries including such high profile cases as Chile, South Africa and the former East Germany have attempted to grapple with the complex question of how to respond to human rights abuses committed under a previous regime. Transitional justice generally surfaces as an issue during democratic transition. It is less common for this issue of past human rights abuses to be raised when democratic transition has been completed and democracy is fully consolidated. The subject of this article, however, is Spain, where the human rights abuses committed during the 1936–39 civil war, and the long Francoist dictatorship that followed, have only recently come to the fore, a full quarter of a century after the transition to democracy. The article argues that the current struggle to recover the bodies of the disappeared, and their historical memory, represents a significant case which not only provides new insights into the particular democratization process in Spain but also provides more general lessons for other countries grappling with similar problems.     

Public support for democracy in hong kong

Hong Kong witnessed a large-scale public rally and extensive support for democracy in mid-2003. This article explains the support by means of variables extracted from cultural, instrumental and sociological approaches. Drawn from the cultural approach, ‘post-materialistic activism’ and low levels of ‘respect for authority’ are found to be most powerful in explaining mass support, among all explanatory variables. Since culture seldom changes overnight, popular support for democracy may be sustained in the short and medium term. The calculation of the economic consequences for democracy, a variable drawn from the instrumental approach, has no effect on mass support. Thus, any attempt to suppress popular demand for democracy by offering economic sweeteners alone may prove futile. The most important instrumental factor among the public is ‘their confidence in political parties’. Whether pan-democratic parties can elevate such confidence becomes pivotal to boosting and sustaining this support. The lack of relatively stronger support among the younger and more educated stratum of people in Hong Kong does not bode well for prospects of increased mass support in the future. Finally, the article offers a small footnote on the implications for the ‘Asian values’ debate.     

Democratization without a State: Democratic Regime-building in Kosovo

This article examines the relationship between democratization and the state with reference to recent political developments in the non-state entity of Kosovo. Existing analyses of the role of the state in democratic transitions provide critical insights into the politics of democratization, but have suffered from a lack of consensus regarding the concept of the state itself. This study distinguishes three separate dimensions of statehood – recognition, capacity and cohesion – and argues that each has separate implications for transition politics. Analysis of democratic political development in Kosovo suggests two conclusions: first, that international recognition of statehood should not be viewed as a prerequisite for democratization, and second, that problems of state capacity or state cohesion present far more fundamental challenges to successful democratic regime change.     

State-sponsored development,oil and democratization

This study seeks to examine the relationship between natural resource revenues, most notably oil-generated wealth, and democratization. I show that the prevalent theoretical framework fails to explain the variation in rentier states' level of democracy. The empirical evidence from the fixed-effects regression models for the 1972–1999 period poses a challenge to the currently prevalent ‘resource curse’ hypothesis and suggests the possibility of a positive relationship between oil wealth and democratization.     

Does substantive democratization create more committed democrats? Surprising evidence from Africa

A growing body of evidence holds that citizens support democracy when they believe the regime has provided individual freedoms and political rights. Put simply, citizens develop legitimacy attitudes by learning about democracy. These findings, however, are based on citizens' evaluations of the procedural elements of democracy. Democratization also entails substantive reforms that likely impact legitimacy attitudes. This article provides the first test of how the success – and failure – of substantive democratization shapes legitimacy attitudes. Using data from the second round of Afrobarometer surveys, I find surprising results. Citizens who judge the regime to be more successful in substantive democratization are actually less likely to be committed democrats. I conclude with possible explanations of these surprising findings and reflect on the challenges for both future research and for the new democracies facing this situation.     

War and Democratization: Legality,Legitimacy and Effectiveness

Promotion of democracy in post-war and post-conflict societies became a hot topic during the 1990s. External actors linked their peace-building efforts to the promotion of democracy. Four modes of promotion of democracy by external actors can be distinguished: first, enforcing democratization by enduring post-war occupation (mode 1); second, restoring an elected government by military intervention (mode 2); third, intervening in on-going massacres and civil war with military forces (‘humanitarian intervention’) and thereby curbing the national sovereignty of those countries (mode 3); and fourth, forcing democracy on rogue states by ‘democratic intervention’, in other words, democracy through war (mode 4). In this special issue we consider the legality, legitimacy, and effectiveness of the four modes where the international community of states not only felt impelled to engage in military humanitarian or peace-building missions but also in long-term state- and democracy-building. All cases analysed here suggest that embedding democratization in post-war and post-conflict societies entails a comprehensive agenda of political, social, and economic methods of peace-building. If external actors withdraw before the roots of democracy are deep enough and before democratic institutions are strong enough to stand alone, then the entire endeavour may fail.     

Democratization and Transitional Justice

Any country which attempts to establish accountability for past abuses of human rights during the process of democratization faces political, judicial, and ethical problems. With regard to politics, the question of which transitional justice measures are appropriate, functional, and feasible has to be decided for every individual case. A judicial approach has to decide which judicial standards to apply and how to justify prosecution. Finally, the ethical dilemmas of dealing with historical injustices have to be understood. There are no ready-made concepts to define guilt and justice. In many cases it is even difficult to tell the victims from the perpetrators. This study examines the different strategies subsumed under the term ‘transitional justice’ used by emerging democracies to deal with a legacy of human rights abuses. It explores the problems and challenges posed by different mechanisms of reconciliation and societal reintegration. While existing analyses of the contribution that transitional justice measures make to the process of social re-integration stress the importance of consensus among citizens and social groups for the emergence of trust and solidarity, this study suggests also thinking about how conflicts over competing ‘truths’ can help to build social capital and reconciliation. Noting a global diffusion of international legal norms, which means at least formal universal acceptance of basic rights and judicial procedures, it is argued that international justice cannot be a substitute for transitional justice measures taken by the domestic regime itself.