Democracy Gap Research Articles

Is the U.S. Supreme Court Facing a Crisis of Democratic Legitimacy? A Review Article

Abstract Kevin McMahon's A Supreme Court Unlike Any Other examines the extent to which the current Supreme Court—and its conservative supermajority—departs from earlier courts in the extent to which it suffers from a “democracy gap.” McMahon persuasively argues that the current Court is different for two reasons. First, most of the justices in the conservative majority were appointed by presidents who did not win the popular vote and/or were confirmed by senators who represented fewer voters than the senators who opposed them. Second, the homogenization of nominee experience and background has created a “judicial aristocracy” in which the justices are experientially far removed from the elected branches. One puzzle this account raises is why this democracy gap took so long to emerge, given the institutional design of the Court. But given the current polarized state of American politics, the same forces that brought us to the reality of the conservative supermajority are unlikely to abate for quite some time.

Fair Elections, Representation, and the win-loss Satisfaction with Democracy gap

ABSTRACT A substantial literature on public democratic satisfaction argues that system satisfaction is based on how the election transpires and the policy outcomes citizens anticipate from the electoral results. In a functioning democracy, citizens elect a government in fair elections and the election outcomes reflect the electorate’s views. Winners of both national and regional elections are regularly found to be more satisfied with their democracy than losers. This study shows that the perceived fairness and representativeness of the electoral results moderate this disparity by narrowing the satisfaction gap between electoral winners and electoral losers; this effect is concentrated in the evaluation of national elections. While respondents are more satisfied with their national and regional democracies when they run free and fair elections, perceived electoral fairness and outcome representativeness only moderate electoral outcomes’ effects at the national level. By manipulating the public’s reserve of democratic satisfaction, public perception of the elections’ fairness and responsiveness can undermine or support democratic opinion.

The LIO's growing democracy gap: an endogenous source of polity contestation.

The Liberal International Order (LIO) is under pressure from various angles. To account for this phenomenon, a recent trend is to focus on endogenous sources of contestation—institutional properties of the order that create negative feedback effects. In this article, we seize on and extend an endogenous explanation centring on the LIO’s political structure and institutional design. While existing research stipulates a connection between the rising authority of liberal international organisations (IOs) and their increasing politicisation, we still lack a clear understanding of the reasons behind the growing rejection of the order at the level of mass publics. We argue that the LIO’s institutional setup contains a widening ‘democracy gap’ denoting a disconnect between the participatory legitimation requirements for the exercise of political authority and the technocratic legitimation rationale characterising IOs. By creating a justification deficit, the democracy gap incites growing political dissatisfaction and, by implying a responsiveness deficit, it turns policy contestation into outright polity contestation. We probe the plausibility of our theoretical argument in case studies of the EU and the international regimes on trade and human rights, and subsequently discuss the analytical and normative implications of our argument.

Top heavy: beyond the Global North and the justification for global administrative law

Global administrative law scholars have argued that global administrative law’s principles and normativity can bring about legitimacy to global governance institutions, and subsequently benefit the people of the Global South. I challenge these recent arguments that suggest global administrative law has managed to incorporate the concerns of the Third World. I caution international lawyers’ attempts to theorize global governance as administration to fill the democracy gap within the global space. My arguments are premised on the history of domestic administrative law and its uses to facilitate the settler colonial project in places like North America. I first examine the two animating claims within global administrative law and then focus, based on taxonomies available within the current literature, on procedural administrative law. The procedural argument has been developed by American legal scholars who want to deploy their common law based notions of administrative law within the global space. Based on this analysis, I develop and deploy a case study from the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda as illustration of judicial review within an international criminal institution set up by the UN Security Council. In the final section, I challenge global administrative lawyers’ arguments that global administrative law can be a tool of emancipation for the people of the Global South based on the ICTR case study.

Implementing decisions of the WTO Dispute Settlement in Brazil: is there a place for transparency and participation?

This paper aims to discuss the democracy gap in the implementation process of decisions of the World Trade Organization Dispute Settlement System in Brazil and possible measures to increase its transparency and accountability. Although the selection of the implementation measure is a sensible political choice that impacts a wide spectrum of different interest groups in diverse manners, government shall give publicity and transparency to the selecting process, making possible for interest groups and agents to present their arguments regarding the possible implementation paths and connecting state governance structures to stakeholders, and allowing the collective and legitimate construction of public interest.

Religious Regulation and the Muslim Democracy Gap

AbstractThis article argues that high levels of government regulation of religion help to explain the “democracy gap” in majority Muslim countries. Controlling for previously hypothesized determinants of democracy, it finds that as levels of regulation increase, levels of democracy decline. Examination of specific types of religious regulation in Muslim-majority countries uncovers a pattern of repression of religious expression that may be used to mobilize citizens politically. These regulations are targeted more often at Muslims who seek independence from state-controlled religion or who wish to challenge authoritarian governments, rather than at non-Muslim minorities or at religious worship more generally. Thus, authoritarian and semi-authoritarian regimes in Muslim-majority states successfully use policies toward religion to restrict political competition and inhibit democratic transition.

Of Loaded Weapons and the AUMF: The Case for a Provisional Approach to the Guantanamo Habeas Suits

This Article argues the Guantanamo habeas rulings that have followed the Supreme Court’s decision in Boumediene v. Bush should be afforded only the most provisional status as legal precedent. The recent case law hinges on an interpretation of the AUMF that the word “force” includes the power to detain, but I argue that this interpretation has been a product of judicial crisis management born of necessity. Judges have been filling a policy void from both political branches on preventive detention. They have improvised a system for separating out those who truly ought to be released from those who might pose a threat, but, absent any interventions by Congress, the rulings so far should serve as no more than provisional means for dealing with this particular group of detainees. A provisional approach to the rulings’ interpretation of the AUMF is appropriate because Congress did not discuss any issues related to detention at the time of the AUMF’s passage and never has voted upon the matter since; higher courts have left trial courts with almost no guidance on the matter; and the executive branch under the Obama administration has shown no broader desire to make preventive detention the law of the land.My argument proceeds in five Parts. Part I briefly describes the substance of the habeas rulings, their broad areas of consensus, and the disconnect that this emerging consensus has produced when compared to public discourse over detention in Guantanamo. Part II discusses the “democracy gap” in our current detention policy, arguing that the AUMF was never understood as an authorization for long-term detention at the time of its passage and was never discussed as such. It also argues that subsequent legislation, including the 2006 and 2009 Military Commissions Acts and the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act, should not be seen as congressional ratifications of detention policy. Part III explores the gaps that the dynamic between the Supreme Court and Congress has produced, the Court having insisted on some level of legal process but refusing to set any concrete guidelines, and Congress failing to pass any serious policy resolutions. Part IV turns to examine the executive branch, arguing that the Obama administration has delegated detention law to the courts as its least bad option for “unwinding” the situation it inherited. It examines the administration’s legal position with regard to detention and argues that this position, while similar on the surface to that of the Bush administration, should also be viewed as provisional and backward looking. Part V stakes out the case for a provisional approach and describes the contours that such an approach would take, including how and to whom this line of cases should be limited.

Muslim Exceptionalism? Measuring the “Democracy Gap”

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Debate: The Reality of Muslim Exceptionalism

Abstract: Alfred Stepan’s contention that the “democracy gap” in the Arab world is due not to religion but to other influences is provocative but not persuasive. Almost all Muslim-majority states score low on surveys of freedom. Several of the more populous states listed as Muslim-majority states of a democratic tendency are dubious candidates for that rubric. Both mainstream and radical Islamic clerics contend that the faith is incompatible with democracy. Various pressures may lead to change, as happened in Christian Europe, but one way or another Islamic beliefs will need to be reconciled with democracy, in Arab and non-Arab Muslim countries.

The Cultural-Economic Syndrome: Impediments to Democracy in the Middle East

AbstractCompared to other world regions, the Middle East is exceptional in its resistance to democratization. Whereas a cultural explanation for this democracy gap refers to historical legacies, especially to the dominant role of Islam, an economic explanation emphasizes oil wealth as the main barrier to democracy. According to various quantitative studies, both claims seem to be valid. Nevertheless, none of the explanations is uncontested, as there are always examples that demonstrate the opposite. This paper argues that it is exactly the combination of culture and economic structure that makes democracy in the Middle East unlikely. Both factors mutually reinforce each other on the macro, meso and micro level and thus constitute a cultural-economic syndrome with a strong negative impact on democratic performance. Regression analyses demonstrate the significance of this interaction effect: If the cultural-economic syndrome of Islam and oil wealth is present in a country, its negative impact on democratic performance becomes even stronger than the sum of the additive effects of Islam and oil wealth.

Muslim Countries and the Democracy Gap

As the year 2001 drew to a close, the international community confronted a widespread terrorist threat emanating from a fanatical global revolutionary movement. While one terror base, the Taliban's Afghanistan, appeared about to be eliminated, the international community faced a troubling future in which dispersed political fanatics and movements will seek to export terror into stable states and to topple politically weak Middle Eastern governments in order to foment international Islamist revolution.

Youth Civic Development: Implications of Research for Social Policy and Programs

Youth Civic Development: Implications of Research for Social Policy and Programs

Constitution‐making and Citizenship Practice – Bridging the Democracy Gap in the EU?

The article identifies the democracy gap as the tension in the European Union (EU) between demands for participatory constitutionalism and the limited capacity of constitutional engineering to meet them. It works with the concept of citizenship practice as the process that establishes the institutionalized terms of citizenship within a polity. The article argues that conventional views of constitutionalism have not accounted for a process that will bridge this gap; and uses the case of citizenship and constitutionalism to illustrate the paradox that, while there is a widespread consensus in favour of liberal democratic constitutional objectives and principles, constitutional agreements have faced significant opposition.