The Democratic Impact of International Organizations

Abstract

Democracy from Above: Regional Organization and Democratization. By Jon C. Pevehouse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 262 pp., $75.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-521-84482-7), $29.99 paper (ISBN: 0-521-60658-6). In Democracy from Above , Jon C. Pevehouse looks at the impact of regional international organizations (IOs) on the domestic processes involved in the transition to and consolidation of democracy. Taking as its point of departure the observation that international factors have traditionally been neglected in democratization studies, this book is an impressive attempt to bridge insights from international relations and comparative politics in a theoretically and methodologically rigorous manner, using numerous empirical examples. Democracy from Above demonstrates Pevehouse's awareness of several ongoing debates within international relations and political science as well as his ability to discuss critically this vast body of literature. The book is situated in part within the literature on international regimes and international cooperation. In this respect, Pevehouse's approach is unabashedly neoliberal. Indeed, the book includes a critique of the realist and neorealist rejection of the role and autonomy of IOs (pp. 51–56) and hence of their capacity to exert pressure on states to democratize. Of course, Democracy from Above also speaks to the vast literature on comparative democratization. In this context, it criticizes to the so-called actor-oriented approach, which emphasizes the role of individuals and of unanticipated, singular occurrences—or path dependence—in democratization processes (for example, Karl 1990; Karl and Schmitter 1991). Pevehouse …