Democracy Failed Research Articles

:Why Democracy Failed: The Agrarian Origins of the Spanish Civil War

:<i>Why Democracy Failed: The Agrarian Origins of the Spanish Civil War</i>

Girls (and Boys) Debating Democracy in Aoi sanmyaku

Histories of democracy in modern Japan often position ‘democracy’ itself as an elite, introduced, inorganic facet of post-defeat Japan’s reconstruction by outside influences. However, analysis of discourses and texts prior to this revisionist narrative reveal a much more complex and continuous intellectual history at play. Ishizaka Yōjirō’s (1900–1986) run-away hit Aoi sanmyaku (Blue mountain range, 1947) was a timely and highly influential serialised work in The Asahi Shimbun, which was quickly republished as a novel and then adapted into a massively successful film in 1949. In this discussion the work both uses and challenges a feudalism versus democracy binary, and reveals strong intellectual continuities between prewar and post-war thinking regarding modernity. The work also challenges the positioning of relationships between school-age male and female students as a symbol of democracy and modernism in this era. Through Ishizaka’s use of debate and humour, this work is not an account of the failings of democracy, or its success, but rather an exploration of the tensions that emerge with attempts to implement these discourses.

Why Some ‘Third-Wave’ Democracies Fail

Aside from being a classic, impressive example of empirical, political science research, Stephen Haggard and Robert Kaufman’s Dictators and Democrats: Masses, Elites and Regime Change is important ...

Book review: Has Democracy Failed Women? and The Persistence of Gender Inequality

Book review: Has Democracy Failed Women? and The Persistence of Gender Inequality

When Democracy Failed: Can Political Communication Research Contribute to Civil Recovery?

Democracy is the 18th-century Enlightenment project that is still under construction and under constant threat. We should not assume that its progress is inevitable and permanent. During the past s...

The Genesis of Secular Politics in Medieval Philosophy: The King of Averroes and the Emperor of Dante

In contemporary political discourse, the "clash of civilizations" rhetoric often undergirds philosophical analyses of "democracy" both at home and abroad. This is nowhere better articulated than in Jacques Derrida's Rogues, in which he describes Islam as the only religious or theocratic culture that would "inspire and declare any resistance to democracy" (Derrida 2005, 29). Curiously, Derrida attributes the failings of democracy in Islam to the lack of reference to Aristotle's Politics in the writings of the medieval Muslim philosophers. This paper aims to analyze this gross misconception of Islamic philosophy and illuminate the thoroughgoing influence the Muslim philosophers had on their Christian successors, those who are so often credited as foundations of Western political philosophy. In so doing, I compare the ideal states presented by Averroes and Dante – in which Aristotelian influence is intimately interlaced – and offer an analysis thereof as heralds of what we might call the secularization of the political, inspiring those democratic values that Derrida believes to be absent in the rich philosophy of the Middle Ages.

Back to the future: revival, relevance and route of an anarchist/syndicalist approach for twenty-first-century left, labour and national liberation movements

ABSTRACTThe failings of classical Marxism, social democracy and anti-imperialist nationalism point to the need for a radical left politics at a distance from the state. This paper examines the impact, revival and promise of the anarchist/syndicalist tradition, a rich, continuous praxis in labour, left, anti-imperialist, anti-racist and egalitarian movements, worldwide, since the 1860s. Outlining its core ideas – anti-hierarchy, anti-capitalism, anti-statism, opposition to social and economic inequality, internationalist class-based mobilisation – and critique of mainstream Marxism and nationalism, it highlights the arguments there is a basic incompatibility between state rule, and bottom-up, egalitarian, democratic, socialist relationships. The anarchist/syndicalist project cannot be reduced to an organising style, protest politics or spontaneism: for it, transition to a just, self-managed society requires organised popular capacity for a revolutionary rupture, developed through prefigurative, class-based, democratic organs of counter-power, including syndicalist unions aiming at collectivised property, and revolutionary counter-culture. Success needs formal organisation, unified strategy and anarchist / syndicalist political organisations.

Book Review: Political Theory: Theorising Democide: Why and How Democracies Fail

Book Review: Political Theory: Theorising Democide: Why and How Democracies Fail

The ARAB Spring’s Constitutional Indigestion: Has Democracy Failed in the Middle East?

In 2013, 3 years after the advent of the ‘Arab Spring’, there is still no single unifying political reform narrative in the Arab World. The unprecedented opportunity for reform and state building appears to have stalled with Islamist movements more concerned with questions of Islamic identity and religious ethics rather than constitutionalism. Incoming governments have lapsed back to the use of police power to curb dissent and protest thus raising the crucial questions: Have post-revolution events proven that the Middle East is incompatible with democracy? Is entrenching democracy in the Middle East failing?

Violence, Policing, and Citizen (In)Security

Violence, Policing, and Citizen (In)Security Michelle D. Bonner (bio) Violent Democracies in Latin America. Edited by Enrique Desmond Arias and Daniel M. Goldstein. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Pp. vii + 324 $89.95 cloth. $24.95 paper. ISBN: 9780822346388. Fear and Crime in Latin America: Redefining State-Society Relations. By Lucía Dammert. New York: Routledge, 2012. Pp. xv + 179. $130.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780415522113. Outlawed: Between Security and Rights in a Bolivian City. By Daniel M. Goldstein. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. Pp. xi + 327. $89.95 cloth. $24.95 paper. ISBN: 9780822353119. Seguridad: Crime, Police Power, and Democracy in Argentina. By Guillermina Seri. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2012. Pp. ix + 228. $130.00 cloth. ISBN: 9781441145789. Policing Democracy: Overcoming Obstacles to Citizen Security in Latin America. By Mark Ungar. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011. Pp. xxiv + 389. $60.00 cloth. $30.00 paper. ISBN: 9780801898587. The authoritarian regimes that governed Latin America from the mid-1960s to the late 1980s were often violent, and governments justified their violence through the National Security Doctrine.1 Postauthoritarian Latin America remains violent but in a different way. Insecurity is now one of the most pressing issues on the public agenda. In most countries, levels of crime are worrisome. For example, the crime rate in Honduras—including homicide, assault, kidnapping, rape, theft, attempted robbery and theft, and drug offenses—was the highest in the world in 2009 (Ungar, 50, 106). In most countries, police remain violent, corrupt, and ineffective. Police reform is elusive or temporary. Nonstate actors such as paramilitaries, vigilantes, and private security have stepped in to provide “security” and in the process contribute to greater insecurity. In response, many national and international actors have adopted the term “citizen security” as a way of reconciling the idea of security with democracy and distancing it from the authoritarian past. The relationship between security and democracy is an uneasy one that begs for conceptual clarity and a better understanding of the conflicting demands [End Page 261] from citizens for both greater rights and iron-fist policing. Over the last decade a new and growing area of scholarship on policing, violence, and security has taken on this challenge. Given the magnitude of the problem, it is not surprising that scholars have come at the issue in multiple ways. Some have chosen to focus on a particular issue, such as violence, crime, or policing, and aim to define it and understand its forms, causes, and possible solutions. Other scholars have taken a more institutional approach, assessing the structure of the police or criminal justice institutions, analyzing attempts at reform, and proposing better methods for reform. Both approaches (institutional and noninstitutional) and all four areas of study (violence, crime, policing, and criminal justice institutions) are interconnected and necessary if we are to achieve a better understanding of the current form of democracy that has emerged in the region and find the best path forward. The five books under review here make important contributions to this literature. While only one of the reviewed books takes an institutional perspective, they all force us to ask similar key questions: What do we mean by security? What is the relationship between rights and security? What role do the police play in security? And, most provocatively, what is the relationship between security, neoliberalism, and democracy? These questions are threads that join the volumes together, yet each book also tackles its own question and provides a unique contribution to the field of inquiry. Violence and Democracy Like most of the books reviewed here, in Violent Democracies in Latin America, editors Enrique Desmond Arias and Daniel M. Goldstein argue that if we are to understand violence in the region and its relationship to democracy, we cannot limit our analyses to state institutions. They argue that such analyses point to either the failings of democracy in Latin America, exemplified by modifying the term with adjectives (e.g., illiberal, disjunctive, or delegative democracy), or to the false assumption that the region is on a natural evolutionary path in which institutions will lead the way to less violence and greater democracy. Instead, Arias...

The Mediation of Insurrectionary Symbolic Damage

In this article, the intricate relationship between the logic of damage as an act of political communication and its mediation is addressed. The mediation of protest by mainstream media is often deemed to be one-sided, biased in favor of the establishment and predominantly antiprotest, focusing on the spectacular crowding out real debate on the issues. A content analysis of the 2010 U.K. student protests as reported by four U.K. newspapers found this to be only partially true. The use of symbolic damage tactics by the protesters did not squeeze out attention for the issues, rather it increased media attention and coverage considerably. Militant voices were more quoted and given more space in articles than moderate voices. In all newspapers there was a degree of understanding for the anger of the students, but the use of symbolic damage tactics did produce much negative exposure. The use of symbolic damage tactics not only relates to a mainstream media opportunity structure, creating spectacle and drama, but also potentially produces division, negative representation, and delegitimization. Finally, the use of insurrectionary symbolic damage is a reminder of the failings of representative democracy in how it deals with political conflicts.

Administrators as Deliberative Representatives: A Revised Public Service Role

We suggest a role for public administrators as deliberative representatives. The goal is to apply a re-conceptualization of representation within the context of public administration based on a literature review on the following concepts: 1) representative democracy, (2) representative bureaucracy, and (3) deliberative democracy. We find that dominant models of representative democracy are ill suited for ensuring the true interests of citizens and communities are met and that representative bureaucracy is not satisfactory to address the failings of representative democracy. Finding promise in deliberative democracy models, we consider how the re-conceptualization of representation for the administrative role might shape the advancement of public participation in order to enhance the quality of representation. Specifically, a fourth construction is defined to add to the list of three above: deliberative representation.

When Democracies Fail

Despite democracy's universal appeal, democracies have frequently suffered from debilitating crises, often of their own making. Sometimes, they have even self-destructed. Why is this the case and how might we respond to democracies that fail? In this article, I review five recent works which provide new answers as well as new provocations to these questions. In particular, I argue that there are three interrelated categories of reasons and responses prevalent in the literature on democratic failure. The first category intimates that democracies fail for reasons that have to do with unresolved institutional, socio-economic or political problems and that, as such, the best response is to seek to remove these impediments to democratic consolidation. The second category of literature, however, argues that there are certain conditions and characteristics intrinsic to democracy that make it prone to fail and self-destruct. Democracies that seek to guard against this possibility are those that are paradoxically the least democratic. This leads to the third category: studies that acknowledge democracy's inherent weaknesses and seek to overcome them through a call for anti-democratic alternatives. Foregrounding these categories is, I argue, crucial not only for improving our understanding of how and why democracies decline and then perish. It also provides us with a better glimpse into the very nature of democracy itself.

The Neil Harris Effect

The Neil Harris Effect Andrea L. Volpe (bio) Neil Harris . The Artist in American Society: The Formative Years, 1790-1860. New York: Braziller, 1966; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. vii + 432 pp. Illustrations, bibliographic essay, notes, and index. $32.00. In 1994, when the Russian émigré painters Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid researched the type of painting that most appealed to Americans, they discovered preferences for outdoor scenes of nonreligious imagery, historical figures, groupings of people and wild animals, rendered with "expressive brush strokes" preferably in blue, and about the size of a dishwasher. They then made a series of paintings that fit the bill. One canvas, reminiscent of a Hudson Valley landscape, features a contemporary family, George Washington, and a small gathering of deer. Twentieth-century Americans were remarkably sensible about choosing art, preferring the work of a dead artist over a living one: "it's worth more if he's dead," reasoned one respondent.1 The irony of such ideas would not have been lost on early American painters. Henry Inman complained that customers would not commission landscapes unless he used them as the backdrop for a portrait; Samuel F. B. Morse loathed negotiating with the "avaricious devotees of Mammon" (p. 65). The exceptionalist explanation is that such attitudes are essentially American, which either implies praise for an inherent American practicality and refusal of sophisticated, effeminate, and European notions of culture, or an indictment of the cultural failings of democracy. The Artist in American Society rejects exceptionalism for functionalism. There was no art for art's sake in America, Harris contends, because of colonial conditions that made for spare cultural institutions and, in the post-Revolutionary era, a strong political culture. Harris argues that even as American culture developed institutions in support of the arts, particularly patrons and academies, critics and commentators repeatedly called for art to be put in the service of national, moral and pedagogical goals; while those goals might change, artists largely complied. The book, which began as a dissertation under Oscar Handlin at Harvard, took up questions of American art just as the subject was gaining scholarly legitimacy.2 Harris did not apologize for the aesthetic failings of American art (he had little concern with connoisseurship), but [End Page 636] instead framed the book as "an inquiry into the relationship between a community's values and its culture" (p. x). Topically, it has a far reach: painters, sculptors, and the public architecture of the early republic; nineteenth-century landscape architecture and reform; art patronage; and the cultural authority of critics and of art itself. Simultaneously, it poses an overarching dynamic for American cultural formation by which radical impulses and conservative control always find their center. The book deserves rereading because its ambitious scope sets out the topics that still define nineteenth-century cultural history: the relationship between European and American culture; the visual programs of American art and their explicit or implicit links to nationalism; the place of the market and the influence of industrialization on art patronage; and the development of American cultural institutions. It is the fulcrum between the work of American art historians (including Jules Prown, Lloyd Goodrich, Mathew Baigell, James Flexner, Nicholas Civosky, John Wilmerding and Barbara Novak) and intellectual and cultural historians, particularly Warren Susman, Alan Trachtenberg, Ann Douglas, and John R. Stilgoe.3 Some elements of the book's sweep have weathered less well than others, but assessing them is the measure of where cultural history now stands. The book's governing concept of culture is a consensus one; what is meant by nationalism and the national in art is not as analytically focused as it could be (but yet anticipates its importance to the field); the cultural, social, and economic formation of American culture are entirely overshadowed in favor of European influence; neither what is meant by culture nor what is meant by politics are conceptualized with as much contest and friction as they are by contemporary cultural historians working with more or less Marxist-inspired versions of these terms. But reading backward, the book foreshadows nearly every topic of nineteenth-century cultural history, punctuated by Roger Stein's contemporary John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought...

Why Market Reform Succeeded and Democracy Failed in Russia

Postcommunist transformation has led to quite different results. The starkest example is Russia, which has become a thriving market economy with an average real growth of 7 percent a year for a decade from 1999 to 2008, but Freedom House (2008) ranks it as a free or authoritarian state. In this article, I define what I mean by saying that Russia is a market economy but not democratic. To clarify how this happened, I shall compare democracy to policymaking with regard to a market economy in the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which I consider to have undergone a revolution. Finally, I shall consider the contradiction that has arisen between an increasingly authoritarian state and an ever wealthier market economy. My argument is that this contradiction is too great to last for long.

Russia's Capitalist Revolution: Why Market Reform Succeeded and Democracy Failed

Russia's Capitalist Revolution: Why Market Reform Succeeded and Democracy Failed

Russia's Capitalist Revolution: Why Market Reform Succeeded and Democracy Failed. By Anders Åslund. Washington, D.C.: Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2007. xxii, 356 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Chronology. Index. Figures. Tables. $26.95, paper.

Russia's Capitalist Revolution: Why Market Reform Succeeded and Democracy Failed. By Anders Åslund. Washington, D.C.: Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2007. xxii, 356 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Chronology. Index. Figures. Tables. $26.95, paper.

Russia's Capitalist Revolution: Why Market Reform Succeeded and Democracy Failed. By ANDERS ÅSLUND

Russia's Capitalist Revolution: Why Market Reform Succeeded and Democracy Failed. By ANDERS ÅSLUND

Poverty, Inequality, and Democracy: Why Democracies Fail

Abstract: Based on a new data set of democratizations occurring between 1960 and 2004, this paper explores the reasons for reversals in young democracies. Adverse initial conditions including poverty, inequality, and ethnic fragmentation are associated with the failure of democracy, but the relationship is not deterministic. Likewise, numerous young democracies have survived in spite of disastrous economic performance. Political institutions play a key role in preventing a return to authoritarianism, but the effectiveness of constraints on executive power appears more important than whether the regime is parliamentary or presidential in structure. These findings suggest a need for greater coordination between democracy promotion assistance and aid intended to foster economic development.

Russia's Capitalist Revolution: Why Market Reform Succeeded and Democracy Failed. Anders Åslund

(2008). Russia's Capitalist Revolution: Why Market Reform Succeeded and Democracy Failed. Anders Aslund. Eurasian Geography and Economics: Vol. 49, No. 5, pp. 623-627.