Democratic Performance Research Articles

Explaining mass support for democracy in Hong Kong

This article aims to identify the main causal factors that underlie the overall levels of mass support for democracy in Hong Kong in the light of two approaches of comparative politics. Using a common questionnaire in 2003, 2005, and 2008, analyses of their results reveal a more or less stable level of support by Hongkongers for democracy. Viewed from the perspective of a mass values approach, post-materialism and respect for authority are found to be consistently statistically significant factors in explaining the support across the three years. The future prospects for Hong Kong will thus in part rest on the future trends of post-materialism and respect for authority. Viewed from the perspective of a perceived performance approach, both perceived economic and political performance are found to have consistently exerted a causal effect on mass support for democracy. Thus, any attempt to suppress the popular demand for democracy by offering only economic sweeteners will not, it is argued, be enough. Also, the democrats’ ability to shape the public's perception of the performance of democracy is pivotal to raising mass support. However, it is shown here that the lack of relatively strong support among younger and more educated people in Hong Kong casts a pall over the prospects for Hong Kong's democratic development. Finally, the theoretical implications of the theory of post-materialism and the Asian values debate are discussed.

The aggregating function of political parties in EU decision-making

This Living Review uses concepts of aggregation to analyse what we do and do not know about the contribution of political parties to the politics and democratic performance of the European Union. It suggests that present representative structures are better at aggregating ‘choices of policies’ than ‘choices of leaders’. Much more, however, needs to be done to analyse the causal contribution of party actors to those patterns of aggregation, and to understand why European Union parties do not develop further where aggregation seems to be deficient in the EU arena.

Fernando Henrique Cardoso: The Astuzia Fortunata of Brazil's Sociologist-President

Even in the Renaissance, there were not that many Renaissance men. But if it was hard to live many lives in one even for the best placed of Renaissance Europe it is surely harder in contemporary republican Brazil. And yet Fernando Henrique Cardoso or FHC achieved it. How was this possible and at what cost in terms of conflict between the different specialized roles he occupied? What does this tell us about “politics as a vocation” in twenty-first century democratic Brazil? And what light does it shed on the scope for and limit of political leadership in contemporary democracies? To understand how choices are made we need to consider what motivated the career; what baggage the leader brought into office; what team of ministers were assembled and how their talents were used; what rivals (or enemies) spurred the leader into self-definition; what ethics were in play. These strands are not arbitrary or beyond systematic analysis. They are what mostly explain how democratic leaders behave, one of the most vital dimension of democratic performance.

The Limits of Representative Democracy

We are conversant today with a variety of democratic deficits. There is the gap between the promise and performance of democracy; then there is also the gap between the success of procedural democr...

Fishing in Muddy Waters: Principals, Agents, and Democratic Governance in Europe

The evolution of new forms of public governance in Europe presents a challenge to methods of democratic policy making, accountability, and control that are predicated on a theory of representative democracy. The article discusses the evolution of supranational institutions and considers empirical data on the democratic performance of governance networks in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in Europe. It concludes that bureaucratic actors in the European Union and in subnational governance networks operate to a large extent as political principals, which would in the theory of representative democracy, promote and in some cases determine public policy. Governance networks present a special form of third-party government, with a high degree of autonomy in their specific jurisdiction. The article outlines research strategies for democratic analysis that do not presuppose representative democracy.

Judicial Review and Democratic Failure

We use an agency model to analyze the impact of judicial review on democratic performance. We find that judicial review may increase democratic failure by rescuing elected officials from the consequences of ill-advised policies, but may also decrease democratic failure by alerting voters to unjustified government action. We further find that judges will defer to the decision of elected leaders unless the level of democratic failure is sufficiently high. We then show how judicial review affects voter welfare both through its effect on policy choice and through its effect on the efficacy of the electoral process in selecting leaders. We also analyze how the desirability of judicial review is affected by characteristics of the leaders and the judges. Our welfare analysis establishes general conditions under which judicial review serves majoritarian interests - and thereby arguably increases the “democratic” character of political outcomes, despite the non-democratic nature of judicial review itself.

Constitutional Power and Competing Risks: Monarchs, Presidents, Prime Ministers, and the Termination of East and West European Cabinets

Some European constitutions give cabinets great discretion to manage their own demise, whereas others limit their choices and insert the head of state into decisions about government termination. In this article, we map the tremendous variation in the constitutional rules that govern cabinet termination and test existing expectations about its effects on a government's survival and mode of termination. In doing so, we use the most extensive government survival data set available to date, the first to include East and West European governments. Our results demonstrate that constitutional constraints on governments and presidential influence on cabinet termination are much more common than has previously been understood and have powerful effects on the hazard profiles of governments. These results alter and improve the discipline's understanding of government termination and durability, and have implications for comparative work in a range of areas, including the survival and performance of democracies, electoral accountability, opportunistic election calling, and political business cycles.

Democratic Anchorage of Infrastructural Governance Networks: the Case of the Femern Belt Forum

Governance networks are often praised for their contribution to making public governance and spatial planning more effective. However, the democratic performance of governance networks is heavily disputed. In order to make a more precise assessment of the democratic quality of governance networks, we need to develop normative criteria that permit us to measure the democratic quality of governance networks on different dimensions. Such criteria are developed and brought together in our model for the democratic anchorage of governance networks. This article aims to improve the democratic anchorage model in two different ways: by offering operational definitions of the basic dimensions of the model and by demonstrating how the assessment criteria can be applied in an empirical case study of a long-lasting, multilevel governance network involved in the recent decision to build a bridge between Denmark and Germany. The democratic anchorage model helps to assess the democratic performance of specific governance networks and to gain knowledge about the critical factors determining their degree of democratic anchorage. Such knowledge is crucial for developing pro-active strategies for enhancing the democratic performance of specific governance networks.

The Logic of the Novelist: The Causal Mechanism Approach in Public Opinion Research

This paper aims to assess the value of the causal mechanism approach (Hedstrom and Swedberg, 1998; Elster, 1998; Gambetta, 1998) in public opinion research. With this idea in mind, our work explores the types of rationality that underlie choice for political regime, understanding those as causal mechanisms that intervene in the process of preference formation. In doing so, we seek to “clarify, what it might mean in practical terms – i.e., for practicing social scientists – to assume a mechanismic view of causation” (Gerring, 2007:165). The strategy is to test two types of rationality as process derived from supporting democracy at individual level. The analysis focuses on Brazil, a society that recently completed a successful process of transition towards democracy. Our interest is to focus on the balance between the impact of survey respondents‟ evaluations of different dimensions of democratic performance (that we label here as “utilitarian causal mechanism”), and the effects of citizens‟ normative preferences (that we label here as, “normative causal mechanism”), as well as their joint impact on molding individual preferences for a particular type of government in Brazil. The results endorse the hypothesis that utilitarian rationality prevails along some important signs of normative rationality. Finally, we suggest that if public opinion research only considers the utilitarian causal mechanism in preference formation, we would be considering only a portion of the entire portrait. Therefore, an argument in favor of the causal mechanism approach is recommended.

Russian Citizens and Russian Democracy: Perceptions of State Governance and Democratic Practice, 1993-2007

Many observers of Russian politics since 1993, and particularly in the Putin years, have pointed to great and growing deficits in the democratic character and performance of its institutions. Do Russians share this increasingly pessimistic view of Russian democracy and politics under Putin? These issues are addressed using data from national surveys conducted in Russia on six occasions between 1993 and 2007. A possible discrepancy between many elite and international estimates of Russian democracy in practice and the views of ordinary Russian citizens is investigated with attention focused on whether there was a shift in values away from democracy.

Membership in voluntary organizations and democratic performance: European post-Communist countries in comparative perspective

The article challenges the hypothesis that there is cohabitation of civic engagement and democratic institutions and practices. While valid at a general level, the relationship is not confirmed once it is scrutinized thoroughly and heterogeneous categories are disaggregated. For the European post-Communist cases, the pattern of the relationship between the regime type and the propensity to associate closely resembles the one in Latin mature democracies and non-authoritarian countries, provided that voluntary associations are chosen as measurements of vitality of social capital and robustness of civil society. A possible consequence of this provocative finding would be re-evaluating the well-established concepts in social sciences.

Are semi-presidential constitutions bad for democratic performance?

Many countries since 1990 have adopted semi-presidential constitutions, which are often considered to be problematic, primarily because of the potential for conflict between the assembly-supported government and the popularly elected president. Such conflicts are said to lead to unstable governments, policy paralysis and the eventual undermining of the democratic regime. Using data for all parliamentary and semi-presidential democracies between 1946 and 2006, we examine the effect of semi-presidential constitutions on the duration of prime ministers’ tenure in office, government accountability with respect to economic outcomes, and democratic survival. We also examine (for a smaller sample of post-communist countries) the impact of these constitutions on the progress of structural reforms. We find that the observed higher instability of prime ministers in semi-presidential democracies is more due to the electoral system than to the presence of a popularly elected president. We also find that semi-presidential constitutions have little impact on the government’s accountability to economic outcomes and on the survival of democratic regimes. Finally, we find that neither a weak president nor a weak government is optimal for the progress of economic reforms in post-communist countries. Regarding economic reforms, the optimal allocation of constitutional powers between the president and the government grants both significant powers.

Semi-presidentialism and Democratic Performance

AbstractThere is a long-standing and widespread consensus that semi-presidentialism is bad for democratic performance. This article examines whether there is empirical evidence to support the arguments against semi-presidentialism. Examining countries that are incompletely consolidated and yet are not autocratic, we identify the relationship between democratic performance and the three main arguments against semi-presidentialism – the strength of the presidency, cohabitation, and divided minority government. We find that there is a strong and negative association between presidential power and democratic performance, but that cohabitation and divided minority government do not have the negative consequences that the literature predicts.

Constitutions and Democratic Performance in Semi-Presidential Democracies

AbstractIn 1946 there were three democracies in the world with constitutions that, on the one hand, required the government to obtain the support of a legislative majority in order to come to and remain in power and, on the other hand, established a popularly elected president. In 2002, this number had grown to 25. Constitutions with this feature are often considered to be problematic, and, given the number of new democracies that have adopted them, have received considerable attention from political scientists. The primary concern has to do with the potential for conflict between the assembly supported government and the popularly elected president, which may lead to unstable governments, policy paralysis, and the eventual undermining of the democratic regime. Concern has also been raised regarding the negative role a popularly elected president may have on party development and the ‘chain of delegation’ that in a pure parliamentary democracy runs from voters to government through political parties. In this paper, we examine the effect the combination of assembly confidence with a popularly elected president has on government instability, accountability, legislative effectiveness, and democratic survival. We also examine the impact on these outcomes of different combinations of presidential powers. We find that the introduction of a popularly elected president in parliamentary constitutions is of little significant impact and that the preoccupation with the specific powers of the president is mostly overblown.

Executive–Legislature Divide and Party Volatility in Emergent Democracies: Lessons for Democratic Performance from Taiwan

AbstractAre new democracies with divided government and volatile parties politically ill fated? The literature suggests so, but cases of emergent democracies such as Taiwan and Brazil that face both conditions defy the prediction. This paper explains why: party volatility follows from pursuing distinct executive and legislature agendas under divided government; the political ambition that underlies these conditions sustains democratic and even political performance. We evaluate the argument through government spending in Taiwan. The results corroborate our expectations: they show more parties composing the legislature as government spending favors an executive agenda and neglects a legislative welfare-spending agenda. The findings make three contributions to the literature: first, they reveal a political divide between executive and legislature rather than ideological parties to undercut concerns regarding performance. Second, they demonstrate that the strategic use of government spending to institutionalize party development along an executive agenda fuels party fragmentation. Third, they show that legislators split, switch, or create alternative routes to office in reaction to strategic spending to underscore that ambition underlies party volatility and divided government.

Governance Arrangements and Public Service Performance: Reviewing and Reformulating the Research Agenda

Changing the nature of governance arrangements comprises one element in the public service reform programme. New governance forms include arm's-length agencies, multi-organisational partnerships, hybrids and company structures. In theory, changed governance arrangements offer benefits in terms of public service performance. Public service performance is typically defined in terms of organisational outputs and outcomes. However alongside this needs to be considered democratic performance, the relationship between the entity and the polity. Several detailed studies of the impact of governance change on public service performance are reviewed. These offer some empirical data against which to assess theory, but are limited and sometimes inconclusive. An alternative post-positivist research strategy is outlined. This engages with the underlying discursive settlement and its expression in the institutional structure of governance and the meanings held by actors. This approach is illustrated through a study of the relationship between partnership governance and public service performance.

Clientelism, Committees, Pluralism and Protests in the European Union: Matching Patterns?

Many efforts have been made to identify general patterns of interest intermediation in the EU, ranging from early studies about clientela relations to recent depictions of protest politics. This review covers studies that aim at cross-sectoral generalisations as well as analyses that are confined to specific sectors, policy areas, and issues. While many analyses are rooted in the debate on corporatism and pluralism, since the 1990s the conceptual range has extended to the study of policy networks and communities. More recent studies identify a simultaneous trend towards greater politicisation and institutionalisation of EU interest intermediation. Altogether, this literature has yielded inconclusive results. It is unclear whether the EU is marked by cross-sectoral patterns or whether it is more meaningful to focus on policy areas or sectors as units of observation. The discussion suggests that part of the controversy surrounding these findings stems from problems inherent in the typological logic that frames these analyses. It is also argued that the explanatory aspects of this literature need to be strengthened and linked more explicitly to studies examining the democratic stability and economic performance of the EU.

Does Democratic Transition in Africa Enhance Economic Performance? The Case of Togo

Many authors assert that political reforms, notably the introduction of competitive electoral politics have positive effects on economic growth and the livelihood of the people. Western donors considered Togo as a model case to test despotic African regimes' propensity to change towards democratization and economic prosperity. The parliamentary elections of October 2007, the first free Togolese elections since decades, were meant to correct at least partially the rigged presidential elections of 2005. Yet, in the light of past experience it is open to question, whether Togo's economic consolidation is due to democratization of its institutions or to the improved external environment, notably the growing competition between global players for African natural resources. Empirical findings on the linkage between democratization and economic performance are challenged in this paper because of its basic data deficiencies.

Factors Influencing the Decision of the Young Politically Engaged To Join a Political Party

Situated in the literature concerning the decline of party members, and the dearth of young party members, this article considers the factors that influence the decision of a politically engaged young person to join, or not join, a political party. Making use of a unique dataset, we examine the attitudes and socialization of a large group of politically active young Canadians, a group that includes a significant number of both party members and non-party members. The article finds significant attitudinal differences towards political parties, with non-members highly suspicious of parties in terms of their general democratic performance, their efficacy in achieving social and political change and in the ability of grassroots members to influence party decision-making. We also find important socialization effects, the most significant being that young party members are considerably more likely than non-members to have a parent who is a party member. Recruitment through family members appears to be a principal path to party membership for young voters.

VOTER TURNOUT IN CENTRAL AND SOUTH AMERICA

Political participation is inextricably linked to democratic performance and legitimacy. The act of voting as a form of political participation has been studied extensively and it is commonly associated with the degree to which policy outcomes are representative of citizens’ preferences (Gimpel and Schuknecht 2003; Highton 1997; Lijphart 1997; Tollison and Willett 1973). Moreover, voting turnout has often been used as a yardstick for democratic “progress” in old and especially new democracies, including the new democracies of Latin America often characterized as “uncertain” due to their authoritarian past and present circumstances (Booth and Richard 1996). In his study of polarization and voter turnout in Nicaragua and El Salvador, Barnes (1998) argues, “voter turnout can be a meaningful indicator of progress on some dimensions of democratization.. .” since . . .the level of turnout in “foundational” elections, as opposed to routine elections in consolidated democracies, is more significant: it says something more fundamental about the status of democratization, particularly where abstention is concentrated among the poor. At stake are the original institutionalization, and the basic credibility, of the principles of mass suffrage and citizenship (ibid.: 69).’