Liberal Democratic Institutions Research Articles

The Cost of Neoliberalism: How Economic Policies Are Undermining Democracy

ABSTRACT The relationship between neoliberalism and democracy has been a topic of debate among scholars for decades. Neoliberalism, an economic and political ideology emphasizing free markets, deregulation, and privatization, has gained global influence but has also been criticized for undermining liberal democratic institutions. In this article, I offer a critical perspective on the emergence of authoritarian neoliberalism and its impact on democratic governance in the twenty-first century. By examining the growing concentration of wealth and power in the age of global capitalism, the erosion of public trust in the state and other social institutions, and the privatization of essential services, it sheds light on the challenges posed by neoliberalism and the need for policies that rebalance economic and political power.

In Defense of Liberal Democracy: Exploring Motivations for Protesting against Democratic Backsliding

When incumbent east central European ethnopopulist politicians attack liberal democratic institutions, how does the experience of living through Communism motivate people to protest in defense of liberal democracy? I argue that a critical subset of people in the generation who lived through Communism is extremely active in protests in defense of liberal democratic institutions. A memory of living with authoritarianism and struggling to establish democracy seems to motivate the older generation to actively safeguard these institutions by generating fear of a return to the past. I expect the older generation to be particularly active at protests in defense of democracy when incumbent ethnopopulists engage in democratic backsliding. I explicitly test these hypotheses by analyzing 82 interviews I conducted with people who protested in defense of liberal democratic institutions in nine different Polish towns and cities in 2019, 2021, and 2022. I couple these interviews with data from an original online protester survey and from the European Social Survey.

Why do some populist presidents erode liberal democratic institutions more than others in Latin America?

ABSTRACT This paper contributes to the current literature on the relationship between populist rule and liberal democracy by conducting quantitative research with a time-series cross-sectional dataset covering 18 Latin American countries from 1991 to 2017. The findings reveal an overall negative correlation between populist rule and the quality of liberal democratic institutions, highlighting their inherent incompatibility. Nevertheless, this paper argues that several factors influence the governing populists' ability to erode liberal democracy. Specifically, it is observed that the negative impact of populist rule on the quality of liberal democratic institutions is amplified in the presence of higher levels of natural resource rents and lower levels of industrial employment and financial development. Moreover, it is found that the impact of these moderating variables on the relationship between populist rule and liberal democracy is contingent upon the ideological orientation of governing populists.

Realism against delegitimation

ABSTRACT Political realists exercise ideology critique to emancipate citizens from problematic beliefs concerning the legitimacy of their social order. They seek to unveil hidden conflict within apparent harmony. However, realists have so far neglected the opposite case in which erroneous beliefs delegitimise a social order, thus contributing to unrest and resentment. As a prototypical case for delegitimation, I will discuss the ‘big lie’ narrative that surrounds the 2020 presidential election in the United States. As I will argue, realist ideology critique is currently underequipped to deal with these cases. To address this shortcoming, I propose a modification to the critical realist methodology. I will argue that realists should focus on unveiling self-serving, rather than merely self-justifying, political narratives. In line with a more practice-oriented approach to ideology critique, I will further sketch some implications for liberal democratic institutions that follow from taking delegitimation seriously.

The place of dichotomous structures in the thought system of János Kornai

AbstractThe most significant concept of János Kornai's oeuvre is the shortage economy theory as it was presented in Anti-equilibrium more than fifty years ago. According to this, modern economies are never in equilibrium. On the markets of goods and services, the aggregate demand is either significantly higher or significantly lower than the aggregate supply. This dichotomous model is discussed in the first part of the paper.After the collapse of the communist system in 1989/90, shortages disappeared everywhere unexpectedly quickly. But it was also an unexpected development that the institutions of liberal democracy have not developed in several countries and/or collapsed after a short period. Regarding Hungary, Kornai issued an alarm signal at the turn of 2010/2011. He was the first who said that the Orbán regime had turned the country into an autocracy in barely a year. The second part of the paper examines whether Kornai's assertion, shared by many transition-economy specialist, that there are only two political systems (democracies and autocracies) is adequate for the entire range of post-socialist countries. The author's answer to this question is negative.

US Higher education and fossil fuels: the limits of liberalism in university climate action

ABSTRACT US universities have positioned themselves in recent years as sites of progressive green action, cutting-edge research, and student-driven change. These universities have even been exported to wealthy oil-dependent states in the Arabian Peninsula under the guise of developing their societies away from fossil fuels through liberal education. These countries, however, have developed their national strategies within imperial relationships with Great Britain and then the United States, in part to uphold the prosperity of the West and its development of liberal democratic ideologies and institutions, of which higher education has played a central part. Drawing on research within US branch campuses in Qatar, and focusing specifically on Texas A&M Qatar, an engineering school that is a site of what we call ‘petro-education’, we trace how these US universities reproduce the fossil fuel industry’s operations. Bringing this research in conversation with scholarship that challenges the liberal mythologies of US higher education, we argue that US universities largely remain embedded in a broader agenda to reconcile the climate crisis with what appears to be a greener capitalism that extends fossil fuel extraction into the future.

Democracy's Devout Defenders

Abstract: This article examines church activism for liberal democracy in sub-Saharan Africa in recent decades. The article seeks to explain churches' high levels of activism compared to a) other civil society organizations, specifically trade unions, and b) churches' varied commitments to democratic activism. The argument emphasizes the protections liberal-democratic institutions offer churches to spread their ideas without being curtailed by an all-powerful ruler. The extent to which churches need these protections depends on the degree to which their activities are vulnerable to appropriation by the state, with churches that have historically invested in schools as a method of evangelization being those most likely to advocate for liberal democracy.

In Search of a New Model of Political Governance in Southeast Asia; Democracy's Decline, Populism's Rise, and Globalization's Retreat

This article examines the challenges facing democracy in Southeast Asia, including the decline of the liberal democratic model, the rise of populism, and the retreat of globalization. It identifies five key trends that have led to the deterioration of the democratic ethos in the region and highlight the emergence of strong populist leaders who promise change through radical reforms. The article argues that it is necessary to explore the emergence of new political governance models that are uniquely Asian and lie outside the perceived colonial shadows of North America and Western Europe. This study focuses on four emerging market countries in Southeast Asia. It uses qualitative research methods to examine how these countries are coping with the decline of liberal democratic principles and institutions in the region. The study aims to provide an overview of the possible outcomes of new political governance models as the area moves forward. The review highlights that while the decline of liberal democratic principles and institutions in Southeast Asia has hurt social and economic progress in the region, emerging market countries in the region have taken steps to address the decline by strengthening democratic institutions, increasing investment and trade, and strengthening vital economic sectors such as tourism and information technology. In addition, the review also discusses the potential for a new political governance model to emerge that is distinctly Asian and in keeping with the culture and history of each country in the region.
 Keywords: globalization, political governance model, democratic decline, representative democracy. How

Mill and Acton on liberty, nationality and multinational states

AbstractMill's System of Logic (1843) indicates that the definition of ‘nationality’ he offered in Considerations on Representative Government (1861) is not a throwaway comment but a carefully considered causal hypothesis tailored to his politico‐ethological research programme. This matters because Lord Acton's critique of Mill's claim that free institutions are almost impossible in multinational states ignored the definition, thereby obscuring subsequent scholars' vision of the conceptual dimension of this famous dispute. Although Mill struggled in his politico‐ethological endeavour, he was sufficiently confident to judge that, if nationalities seek self‐determination through exclusive control of the state, liberal democratic institutions would be unlikely to emerge in multinational states, let alone survive and prosper. Since Acton's critique presupposed an undemocratic conception of free institutions and a far weaker notion of national self‐determination, it failed to contradict that judgement. Indeed, once their conceptual disagreements are clarified, Acton's empirical analysis can be seen to support it.

The Role of Multidimensional Library Neutrality in Advancing Social Justice: Adapting Theoretical Foundations from Political Science and Urban Planning

There is an ongoing, polarizing debate in the library profession and scholarship regarding the perceived incompatibility between library neutrality (embedded in the profession through the American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights), and social justice goals. This article asserts that the growing antipathy on the part of some library practitioners and scholars towards neutrality and intellectual freedom is owed at least in part to the profession and scholarship having never articulated an adequate definition of what is meant by neutrality. As a result, the profession lacks a theoretical framework situating the library and library staff as political actors within a multicultural and largely urban society. We argue that such a framework may be drawn from the literatures of political science and urban planning. By positioning libraries and library workers within the context of liberal-democratic institutions – as is the case for urban planners in their theoretical literature – LIS theory can find more durable foundations for its core values. Stressing planning’s commitments to the participation of multiple publics, to dialogue, mediation and to consensus-building through liberal institutions, we develop a multidimensional understanding of neutrality premised on values, stakeholders, processes and goals which we then apply to these planning modes. Finally, we propose a model of “Communicative Librarianship” as best exemplifying these four dimensions of neutrality and their attendant democratic commitments.

Features of Kazakhstan’s Democratic Tranzit Model: Conceptual and Methodological Analysis

A typologically significant characteristic of the Kazakhstan model of democratic transit is the creation in Kazakhstan of a system of “super-presidential” public, in which the constitutional and legal status, functions and powers of all branches of government act as a transformed form of implementation of the principles of identitarian democracy. One of the most relevant descriptions of the features of this form is Guillermo O’Donnell’s concept of deliberative democracy. According to G. According to O’Donnell, delegative democracies are based on the premise that election to the presidency gives the winner the right to govern without resorting to the mediation of representative institutions of power. After all, the president is elected in order to be the personified embodiment of the nation, to determine and protect its interests with authority, assuming full responsibility for the fate of the country and the people. Other political institutions, for example, parties with their factionalism and permanent conflicts, are often only hindrances in the implementation of this mission. This feature of the legitimization of the political regime becomes the ideological basis for substantiating the compatibility of liberal democratic institutions with the process of personification of a political system built for a specific person.

Democracy for the Few

A review and application of Degenerations of Democracy, by Craig Calhoun, Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, and Charles Taylor (hereafter, CGT); Liberalism and Its Discontents, by Francis Fukuyama; and How Democracies Live, by Stein Ringen. A strengthened liberal democratic culture is essential for the health and vitality of democracy. This culture is made up of three components: a cluster of liberal values (rule of law, freedom, equality, and reason), a democratic governing system grounded in popular sovereignty, and a collective experience of shared respect for liberal values and democratic institutions. Has this culture lost its strength? Is the collective experience and belief in democratic legitimacy disappearing? Are liberal values increasingly contested? All of the theorists under review address these questions. And for all, the answer is “yes, but….” They make strikingly similar arguments about the sources of this culture’s strength, the causes of its current weakness, and how it can be strengthened. The general thrust of these books is this: a strong liberal democracy rests on three cultural foundations: the strength of social bonds, the level of deliberative civil discourse, and the level of economic equality. The main challenge to this threefold foundation’s strength is neoliberalism, which all authors agree has led to liberal democracy’s decline. I draw on this argument as a guide to assess the strength of liberal democracy in a small population living in rural Alpine County, California. I find that although it is relatively small and isolated, the drivers of democratic decline have found their way into this tiny community. Some aspects of liberal democratic culture have remained strong (voter turnout and volunteerism are high, and many citizens serve in elected office and on government committees); others, however, have weak roots that were never cultivated and continue to weaken further (equality, inclusion, open debate). Finally, I suggest that to strengthen liberal democracy, citizens must participate in it and leaders must work for the good of the entire community, not just the few.

Editors’ Note

We are gravely concerned about the perils of regime change in Israel. Academic freedom is premised on liberal democratic institutions and values. Absent checks and balances on the power of the executive, civil liberties, including the right to pursue and disseminate knowledge, are in jeopardy. The journal Israel Studies Review is wholly committed to enabling the free exchange of ideas without fear of punitive repercussions. We will continue to encourage diverse perspectives and voices of scholars from all backgrounds.

Odds on Erasure: The Status of the Novel on the Receding Horizon of Democracy

AbstractLiterary sociology’s recent turn to contemporary publishing has brought renewed attention to Percival Everett’s acclaimed novel, Erasure (2001), which satirizes late twentieth-century media and publishing culture and raises concerns about the status of the literary novel. An episode in which literary-prize jurors cast their votes suggests the novel’s engagement with the discourse of democracy as well. This essay sets Everett’s novel in dialogue with the historian James Kloppenberg’s recent monumental study, Toward Democracy (2016). In contrast to literary sociology, which generally inflects its critical assessments with uncontroversial conceptions of democracy that rarely extend beyond egalitarian pluralism, Kloppenberg presents his work not merely as a history of centuries-long struggles with democratic practices but as a plea that we regard democracy as a conceptual and ethical horizon. Its entailments go far beyond popular sovereignty and participatory action. They include principles of autonomy and equality as well as premises of deliberation, pluralism, and reciprocity. Kloppenberg’s insistence on the relevance of these conditions dovetails with Everett’s narrative of—or implicit demand for—the relevance of aesthetic conditions that give rise to the same autonomous literary art that his fictional protagonist and Everett himself ordinarily write.[Erasure’s realism] makes visible a world populated with liberal democratic institutions that enjoy many degrees of separation from a neoliberal media and publishing world afflicted with unreality hunger.

Democracy and the Novel in the US: An Introduction

Abstract This introduction outlines the rationale and some of the key concerns of this special issue on democracy and the novel in the US. Beginning with George Saunders’s experiment with democratic form in Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), we turn to some points of tension that emerge in taking up the question of US democracy now. As many contributors observe, US liberal democracy was built upon practices of settler colonialism, slavery, racial capitalism, and xenophobia. And yet the danger posed by antidemocratic right-wing movements today makes the question of the relationship between the novel and democracy newly relevant. How, then, does the novel critique the violence of liberal democratic institutions? How do novels imagine alternative democratic possibilities? What do different subgenres of the novel—experimental, literary, speculative, pulp, graphic—offer in their understanding of democracy? And how have novels throughout US history—from the immediate post-Revolutionary period through Reconstruction, modernism, and through the 1960s to the present—treated the specific democratic and antidemocratic currents of their time?Perhaps this belief that novels can give insights into the failures of US liberal democracy even as they may speculate as to what alternative democratic forms will look like is one explanation why so many of our contributions hold out hope for the novel to retain—in one form or another—its long-argued connection to democracy.

Anthropology, Democracy, and Authoritarianism

This article examines the challenges that the right-wing populist governments in Brazil and the Philippines pose to anthropological practices as a way of discussing the responses and responsibilities of anthropologists vis-à-vis situations of growing authoritarianism across the globe. It explores the importance of public and political engagement for the national anthropologies that have developed in Brazil and the Philippines and stresses their complex relationship to recent dictatorial and democratic regimes. It discusses the threats that Jair Bolsonaro’s and Rodrigo Duterte’s governments have brought to the discipline and to the oppressed and marginalized subjects that anthropologists in those countries have typically studied and allied themselves with, as well as the reaction of anthropologists to such threats. Showing that the current Brazilian and Philippine governments combine economic and social neoliberalism with deeply illiberal political practices, the article proposes a fundamental distinction between liberal democracy and neoliberalism to argue that liberal democratic institutions and practices are fundamental conditions for the possibility of a politically engaged and publicly relevant anthropology.

Inherent Tolerance of the Democratic Process

Recent attempts at making sense of toleration as an ideal of political morality have focused on how liberal democratic institutions generate political arrangements that protect people’s freedom to “live their life as they see fit.” We show how these views rely on a one-dimensional interpretation of the liberal democratic political project. In so doing, they underestimate an important “interactive” dimension. This dimension concerns what it means for liberal democracies to realize toleration as a property inherent to their constitutive political processes. We illustrate this claim with reference to the liberal democratic decision-making process. Such a process realizes toleration as forbearance in itself. It does so because it establishes the participants in the process as political agents who recognize their mutual standing to share the political authority to make collectively binding decisions, despite their grounds for reciprocal objection.

Destroying Democracy for the People: The Economic, Social, and Political Consequences of Populist Rule, 1990 to 2017

Abstract The recent populist wave has raised questions about the implications of populism for democracy. Some scholars express optimism that populism may be a source of democratic revitalization, bringing about sweeping changes in accordance with the majority will. More often, populism is viewed as a threat to liberal democracy, combining calls for radical change with disdain for core democratic institutions and norms. We consider the possibility that these outcomes may not be mutually exclusive and develop a conceptual typology for understanding the consequences of populist rule. We then use cross-national panel fixed-effects models to analyze the effects of populist leadership between 1990 and 2017. We first examine whether populists have economic and social effects in line with their core aspirations. Left-wing populists are quite effective at implementing their agenda: they reduce income inequality, regulate markets, and incorporate marginalized groups. Right-wing populists are also fairly impactful: for instance, they raise tariffs, cut taxes, and restrict the rights of women and gay people. However, populists of all stripes are associated with the rapid and severe erosion of liberal democratic institutions. Populists, we conclude, often destroy democracy in the name of the people.

Crowdsourcing infrastructures of green everyday life: how sustainable sharing, swapping and gardening initiatives in Vienna tackle the lack of transformative agency in eco-politics

ABSTRACTEmpirical researchers of environmental alternative action organizations (EAAOs) have called for grounding two eco-political theories: David Schlosberg’s sustainable materialism (SM) and Ingolfur Blühdorn’s simulative politics (SP). In this article, I discuss results of an ethnographic study on a library of things, a cloth swapping initiative, and a community garden in the City of Vienna, Austria. Regarding SM, participants indeed suffer from a lack of substantive eco-political actions by liberal democratic institutions and themselves personally, however they barely convey a new materialist ontology. Regarding SP, participants indeed show an ambivalence towards consumer capitalism and ecological commitments, yet they tend to be highly critical and reflexive on the matter. Both theories are unable to detect that the EAAOs fill an eco-political lacuna in Vienna’s foundational economy: Via positive framing and flexible participation virtually everyone – the crowd – is invited to co-create sustainable routines. As such, they represent rudimentary infrastructures of green everyday life.

THE INFLUENCE OF EUROCOMMUNISM ON THE IDEOLOGY AND POLITICAL PRACTICE OF THE CONTEMPORARY "RADICAL LEFT"

After the dismantling of socialism in the Soviet Union and countries of "people's democracy", left forces used different variations of ideological transformation and reactualization of its program. The most relevant model of adaptation was the preservation of "anti-capitalism" in combination with the desire to use the mechanisms of liberal democracy. Parties that have chosen this path of transformation are referred to as the "radical left" (RLP). While remaining committed to the Marxism, RLPs reject Stalinism, use populist slogans, and are agree for building coalitions with ideological opponents. Most RLPs trace its lineage back to the parties that originated with Eurocommunism or used elements of it in its ideology. Despite the collapse of the Eurocommunist project at the end of the twentieth century, the marginalization of the Communist parties that espoused it and the desire of the modern "radical left" to disassociate itself from its predecessors, they continue to reproduce elements of political practices used by Eurocommunists. By the political practices of Eurocommunism, we understand the strategy of interaction of Eurocommunist parties with the institutions of liberal democracy that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. The article analyzes the influence of the ideological legacy of Eurocommunism on the political strategy of modern European RLPs and provides a description and classification of parties of this spectrum. The aim of the article is to correlate the influence of the ideological legacy of Eurocommunism on modern RLPs and to identify the contradictions arising in the process of implementation of its program.