Persistence Of Democracy Research Articles

Liberal Democracy in a Less-than-Liberal Context? The Case of Contemporary Greece

The persistence of democracy in today’s Greece may be surprising for two reasons. First, liberal democracy survived an economic crisis in the 2010s that was more severe than the Great Depression of the 1930s. Second, liberal democracy has remained stable despite the fact that the period since the 1974 transition from the Colonels’ Regime has witnessed the diffusion of illiberal ideas and an emergence of relatively small yet very active antiliberal parties. Liberal democracy has been resilient in the face of nationalism and populism, even though accountable liberal institutions enjoy limited political trust. The resilience of contemporary Greek democracy can be explained through two sets of factors: a political set and a social set. Political factors include a long history of political liberalism and the robustness of contemporary political-party competition. Social factors include Greece’s relatively large middle class and the absence of overlapping social cleavages that could otherwise have led to destructive socio-political polarization and then a slide toward illiberalism. The Greek case shows under what conditions a liberal democracy can flourish in a less-than-liberal context.

The Role of Fiscal Dependency in Political Development

To the best of our knowledge, the empirical corpus of work on the origins and persistence of democracy has not evaluated the impact of governments' fiscal independence from peoples' taxes on the quality of democracy. Our proxy for fiscal independence is the component 1C titled enterprises and investments taken from the Economic Freedom of the World index. Component 1C measures in a given country the fraction of total investment that is supplied by the government and state-owned enterprises. A higher fraction corresponds to greater fiscal independence. The econometric analysis employing a variety of IV estimators, which includes Lewbel (2012) generated instruments, reveals a conditional negative, robust, and statistically significant effect of fiscal independence on the degree of democracy. The study also unveils a statistically and economically significant impact of fiscal independence on variables inherent to democracy, such as judicial independence and freedom of the press, as well as on human capital, a proximate determinant of democracy. These findings account for the observed heterogeneity in the potentially confounding effects of democratic rule determinants commonly used in the democratization literature. In particular, the study allows for years of education, ethno-linguistic fractionalization, the individualism-collectivism cultural trait, legal origin, risk of expropriation protection, income inequality, geographical characteristics such as latitude and availability of oil reserves, and fixed effects to control for unobserved heterogeneity bias induced by time-invariant variables at the continent level. The evidence uncovered suggests a novel mechanism under-girding the onset, and more crucially, the persistence of democratic rule. The unveiled finding on fiscal dependency is congruous with landmark historical events such as the English Glorious Revolution as well as the tardier emergence of democracy in continental Europe. Similarly, our findings cast light on the modern heterogeneity of democratic outcomes. Specifically, results inform the flourishing Western democracies experience, and the absence or low levels of democracy among countries where governments are owners of revenue-generating companies or recipients of substantial tax revenues paid by private or state-owned corporations. Conspicuous examples of nations, with governments mostly fiscally independent, are Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.

Democracy and Public Sector Efficiency: An Empirical Study on the Cross-National Data

This paper investigates the political determinants of public sector efficiency using a cross-national data from 117 countries in the period of 2001 to 2010, with a two-stage DEA method. The first-stage DEA method finds two types of efficiency frontiers, developing-country frontiers and developed-country frontiers, and governments in developed countries on average have better efficiency than those in developing countries. Tobit estimation in the second stage finds that not the level of democracy but the persistence of democracy and current regimes contribute robustly to public sector efficiency by providing high quality institutions with respect to property rights protection and freedom from corruption.

International Integration and Democratization: An Event History Analysis

This article examines the relationships between transitions to and from democracy and membership in major intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), ratification of key human-rights treaties, and integration into the global economy while controlling for a variety of domestic factors. The findings show that for the most part, participation in the major IGOs and the United Nations' human-rights regime has made little difference to the chances that countries would attempt or sustain democracy. Participation in regional human-rights treaties in Africa and the Americas is linked to better prospects for democracy, but this association appears to stem from regional trends of which those pacts are emblematic, rather than mechanisms specific to the pacts themselves. Finally, entanglement in the global economy – as indicated by thicker trade flows and membership in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and then World Trade Organization (WTO) – seems to have had a stronger effect on the prospects for democracy than these other forms of international integration, but not always in the beneficent direction posited by liberal theorists. While participation in the GATT/WTO is associated with better prospects for the establishment and persistence of democracy, foreign trade itself is linked to the persistence of domestic political regimes of either stripe, democratic and non-democratic.

The Quality of Democracy

For the past two decades the main topic of research in comparative politics has been democratization. The question troubling scholars has been why some countries become and stay democratic, while others either do not democratize or waver between democracy and authoritarianism. This research program has been both pro lific and successful. Today, a considerable amount is known about why democracies are distributed around the world the way they are.1 Nevertheless, the third wave has largely ended, and there appear to be few new cases of democratization or authoritarian relapse to explain. Existing cases, more over, have been analyzed in depth both through careful case studies and aggregate statistical analyses. While more could be done, scholarly attention might yield greater gains by focusing on aspects of democratization besides the transition to and the persistence of democracy. One interesting place to look is in recent work that argues that many of these new democracies do not function as expected. Guillermo O'Donnell, for example, has noted that many Latin American democracies should be termed delegative democracies because presidents, while elected democratically, rule without reference to public opin

Ceteris Paribus—The Danger of the Increment

The final persistence of democracy depends upon whether its right decisions outweigh the wrong ones in number and value, though conceivably one really bad decision might ruin the structure built on all the right ones. It is passing from the stage where a few reasoning leaders govern the masses through their emotions, to the next perilous stage in which every man's thoughts matter. Right decisions depend upon access to relevant facts and doing the right thinking about them. It is of the essence of Nazi philosophy that general liberty of thought is self-destructive, the common man not being rational; it is of the essence of Nazi practice to flatter the many by the pretence that their thinking does matter, but to control and modify the whole supply of factual material upon which they must reason. One declared to me once that he favoured freedom of thought and was not afraid of it, for if he was allowed to supply the “facts” any ordinary rational mind could come to only one conclusion, viz. the one he intended. And in the process the ordinary man might remain proud of his reasoning power, so long as he could be sheltered from seeing the falsity of his conclusions. Control of facts must be perpetual, and cats must never be allowed to get out of bags. But in a democracy, where facts are all born free (and much too equal), it is the thinking about them that really matters.