Empowering the vernacular publics

Abstract

The decades following the 1970s witnessed extraordinary political transformations around the world. The ‘vernacular publics’, 1 which consist of marginalised groups, became organised through civil society to challenge the dominance of the elite and to redefine political discourse. As a consequence, many of the previously communist and authoritarian states in Latin America, Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe, and, most recently, the Middle East were forced to open up their political arena and make transitions to democratic forms of governance. 2 Scholars like Huntington (1992) and Linz and Stepan (1996) refer to this process as the ‘third-wave’ of democratisation. This was concerned with the ‘procedural’ 3 forms of democracy and involved a sequence of four fundamental stages: (1) the demise of non-democratic regimes (authoritarian breakdown); (2) the establishment of a procedural minimum of democracy (democratic transition); (3) democratic deepening and consolidation; and (4) the maturing of the democratic political order (see Haynes 2009). Scholars like Carothers (2007) have heavily criticised such sequencialism for the uncritical labelling of countries as ‘democracies’ in a very large number of cases where democratisation actually remains highly problematic.