Onset Of Democracy Research Articles

Political power sharing in post-conflict democracies: investigating effects on vertical and horizontal accountability

ABSTRACT While it may be necessary to secure elite buy-in to peaceful competition, the literature is pessimistic about the long-term effects of a power-sharing settlement on the quality of democracy. Designing institutions to guarantee political inclusion is commonly thought to undermine vertical and horizontal accountability by incentivizing rent-seeking over responsiveness to voters. This study employs data from the Varieties of Democracy project to test arguments about the pernicious institutional effects of political power-sharing settlements in post-conflict democracies, relying on a panel dataset of 28 conflict-prone states in Sub-Saharan Africa since the onset of democracy’s Third Wave (1990–2021). The analytical technique is a time-series linear regression distinguishing between upturns and downturns across a range of continuous measures of accountability. The results show that, in line with much of the literature, political power-sharing settlements are associated with increasing executive corruption and fewer improvements in the rule of law. However, none of the other proposed mechanisms linking political power sharing to poor accountability outcomes finds consistent or significant support in the cross-national sample. Overall, these findings suggest that the relatively undemocratic institutional concessions designed to resolve conflict may not pose the serious barrier to democratic deepening and consolidation as previously assumed.

South Africa’s dwindling developmental local government: a dying dream?

ABSTRACT This article brings politics and Democratic Developmental State (DDS) theory back into the debates surrounding the operationalisation of Developmental Local Government (DLG) in South Africa. It interrogates the extent to domestic political factors and actors have impacted the ability of the DLG to fulfil its constitutional and developmental mandate. It does so by adopting a theoretical case study methodology in assessing the functioning of South Africa’s DLG against three ‘micro-foundations’ of the DDS model: Developmental-Oriented Leadership, Effective Local ‘Pilot Agency’ and Meritocratic Bureaucracy, and Developmental Performance. It finds that the political imperatives and motives of the ANC at play at the onset of democracy in 1994 coupled with the local politicking ever since has crippled the ability of local government to fulfil its constitutional and developmental mandate. This article proposes the adoption of the Developmental Civil Society (DCS) model as a tool to circumvent South African local power politics and boost developmental capacity at the local level in order to fully realise a DDS. It goes beyond the objective of DLG through the self-empowerment of citizens, not only as policy formulators and passive recipients of development, but as active producers of inclusive socioeconomic development.

Critiquing Print Media Transformation and Black Empowerment in South Africa: A Critical Race Theory Approach

ABSTRACT South Africa is a country found on extreme forms of inequality along race, gender, and class lines. Thus, transformation addressing these inequalities of the apartheid past became a critical factor in the re-organisation of society at the onset of democracy in 1994. One essential intervention in addressing mainly the economic disparities of the past was Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), introduced by the African National Congress (ANC) government to overcome the economic legacy of apartheid. The BEE programme, renamed the Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (B-BBEE) in 2007, measures the transformation performance of companies across all sectors of the economy, according to a specified scorecard. In the absence of a media-specific transformation policy, the Act serves as its transformation policy standard. This paper critiques the B-BBEE policy instrument in relation to print media transformation using Critical race theory, and related concepts, such as racial capitalism, and racial liberalism. The paper finds that despite the racial diversification of the racial composition of the media, B-BBEE is largely an illusion. The B-BBEE strategy has not changed the racial character of the economy, and fundamentally resulted in the co-optation of a small black elite into the wealthy white capitalist elite inherited from the apartheid era, where the “power relationship” reminiscent of apartheid still exists and white privilege intersects with other forms of subordination such as gender and class. Policies supporting media transformation must become “race conscious” in a way that openly confronts racism and engages with systematic racism and exclusion.

Sociocultural Barriers to Women’s Political Leadership in the North Region of Cameroon

AbstractThe issue of gender studies in general and women’s political leadership is increasingly gaining impetus in scientific discourse in Cameroon in general and in the north region in particular. Despite comprising of more than half the north region population, Women are more active in politics as voters and helpers for activities related to politics, and specifically political leadership in the north region of Cameroon. They perform the majority of campaign activities linked to mobilisations. Yet across the north region, women face an array of barriers to achieving their full potential in political leadership, from restrictive cultural practices to discriminatory traditional laws and highly segmented familial division of labour. This paper addresses the various social and cultural barriers that drag women backward as far as political leadership and decision making are concerned. From the onset of democracy in Cameroon, cultural barriers, social and religious cumbersome limits women’s entry in political leadership.

State hydrocarbon rents, authoritarian survival and the onset of democracy: Evidence from a new dataset

This article surveys the effects of state hydrocarbon rents—defined as government income from oil and natural gas—on authoritarian survival and the onset of democracy. We also examine the association of changing state hydrocarbon rents with state spending and taxation based on a new collection of historical data, the Global State Revenues and Expenditures dataset. Using these novel data, we provide evidence that increasing state rents from oil and gas hinder democratization by reducing citizens’ tax burden. However, an increase in the oil and gas income flowing directly into state coffers does not appear to lower the average risk of ouster by rival authoritarian elites. We have found no evidence of the systematic distributional effects of state hydrocarbon income on regime survival.

“Too late for tears, dear sister”: Constructing victims and perpetrators of rape in the advice column 'Dear Dolly' from 1984 to 2004.

This article reports on the ways in which the rape of women by men is constructed in the advice column Dear Dolly , published in the South African periodical Drum Magazine . The data collected for the study spans from 1984 to 2004, encompassing both 10 years before and 10 years after the onset of democracy in South Africa. The article uses critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 2003) as main analytical tool, but also draws on critical feminist theory (Bourke 2007). The findings suggest that there has been a decrease in explicit victim blaming after 1994, but that subtle and opaque victim blaming is still evident in readers’ letters and in the responses. These rape discourses presented in Drum after 1994 are, as Bakhtin (1981) suggests, made up of multiple voices articulating different gendered discourses. In this article, we argue that even though the use of less explicit victim blaming might seem like a positive move in the representation of rape and gender, this is not always the case. The more subtle forms of victim blaming avoid contestation and consequently often go unchecked (Fairclough 2003: 58). Additionally, new rape myths are created to mitigate the responsibility of males. These processes of subtle victim blaming and new myth-making manufacture consent and make it more difficult to counteract dominant discourses.

Serbia’s parties on the mend? That state of intra-party democracy in before and after regime change

Has the onset of democracy in Serbia facilitated the democratization of the country’s main political parties? By most accounts, the answer is no. Robert Michels’ ‘iron law of oligarchy’ thus appears all too relevant in a Serbian context. This paper seeks to understand whether and to what extent this remains the case in a post-Milosevic context. Have Serbia’s political parties evolved organizationally since the early 1990s? Are parties’ organizational structures uniformly undemocratic or do differences exist with respect to different parties? To answer these questions this paper relies on domestic media coverage, interview with party members, as well as party statutes.

The Changing Face of South Africa's National System of Innovation, 1991–2001

The article examines changes in the South African national system of innovation (NSI) since the onset of democracy in 1994. In particular, the recently completed 2001/02 Survey of Research and Experimental Development (R&D) is used to quantify the shifts in R&D activity for the major business, government and higher education players. The major flows of R&D expenditure are found to be within rather than between firms. Interaction between higher education and firms is encouraged by agency funding and is increasing from a relatively low base. The NSI itself has remained stable over the transition to democracy, with small shifts in research emphasis and no apparent major loss of capacity. There are, however, warning signs that the lack of availability of high-level skills may limit its further growth. There is evidence that the NSI has the potential to respond to the designated thrusts of the national R&D strategy.

Marital Fertility and Religion: Recent Changes in Spain

Since the onset of democracy in 1975, both total fertility and Mass attendance rates in Spain have dropped dramatically. I use the 1985 and 1999 Spanish Fertility Surveys to study whether the significance of religion in fertility behavior - both in family size and in the spacing of births - has changed. While in the 1985 SFS family size was similar among practicing and non-practicing Catholics, practicing Catholics portray significantly higher fertility during recent years. In the context of lower church participation, religiosity has acquired a more relevant meaning for demographic behavior. Among the youngest generation, non-practicing Catholics behave as those without affiliation. The small group of Protestants and Muslims has the highest fertility and interfaith unions are less fertile.