Prospects For Democracy Research Articles

Prospects for democracy, language and media in Lusophone African countries

Prospects for democracy, language and media in Lusophone African countries

Political Violence and the Prospect of Democracy in Nigeria: A Survey of the South-East Geopolitical Zone of Nigeria

Political Violence and the Prospect of Democracy in Nigeria: A Survey of the South-East Geopolitical Zone of Nigeria

Arab world and dialectics of democratization process

The Article is devoted to analysis of difficult sand contradictory process of democratization of Arabic society that takes place already many years. Modern globalization processes touched the Arabic world, where is a collision of civilization paradigms. The aim of the article is discovering of some phenomena being the basis of modern conflicts in the Arabic world.Basic factors that bother democracy in the Arabic countries are setup in the article. It is marked at the same time, that many social conflicts and elements of social and political in stability, that touched many Arabic countries, partly are the result of western influence and imposing of institutes whish are not peculiar to Arabic sociocultural tradition.Necessary condition for socially-philosophical analysis in relation to the prospects of democratization of Arabic society are different scientific spheres with in the framework of study of culture, linguistics, religious studies, political science, sociology. If to analyze the level of research of this theme in national social philosophy, then we can see that most researchers of process of democratization accented the attention on influence and value of Islam as religions in Arabic-Muslim society.The European and American interpretation models of understanding of Arabic civilization of society are situated a spectrum between two poles. From one side it is a know ledged in the west, that Arabic society has cultural features and that it is why need to get used and integrate Arab sin a global community, but with other hand, there is a strong denial of this specific feature. The whole study of history of the Arabic states and Arabic society specifies that one and other conceptions are deeply erroneous and notable to generate the correct model of development of the Arabic world.Influence of social conflicts on process of democratization is studied not enough in modern social science. Social conflicts, especially the armed, still acquire new and new forms of expression in objective reality and public consciousness. In this connection the study of conflicts in the Middle East must be made with the provision of taking into account all factors of structure of conflicts. Correct understanding of content and forms of religious, economic, political, legal, social, ethnic and cultural constituent of certain conflict give the most complete imagination about its essence and ongoing prospects.

Ideals Without Institutions: Understandings of Democracy and Democratic Participation Among Ecuadorian Youth

Many scholars of democratization have identified citizen support for democracy as an important determinant of democratic consolidation and deepening. Fewer have explored in depth what everyday citizens actually understand democracy to mean. If mass values shape democratic prospects, what specific notion of “democracy” are the masses inclined to support? This study addresses this question through focus groups conducted with 186 young people in Ecuador, a country that has epitomized challenges of democratic discontent and instability in Latin America. As compared to the dominant survey-based literature, interactive focus group conversations offer a more complex and complete picture of youth democratic perspectives, thus sharpening our analysis of the link between citizen attitudes and democratic performance. Findings have relevance for contemporary debates about “authoritarian drift” in the region, showing youth as strongly invested in democratic freedoms, though highly skeptical of the institutions that allegedly guarantee them. More broadly, the analysis provides a window into how youth conceive of and practice democracy in contexts of unstable democratization.

More Choice, Less Uncertainty: The Paradoxical Relationship of Political Identity and News Exposure in the American Public Sphere

More Choice, Less Uncertainty: The Paradoxical Relationship of Political Identity and News Exposure in the American Public Sphere Benjamin Gross Introduction Ambiguity is defined as a situation of inexactness, and is synonymous with the feelings of uncertainty and ambivalence. It is a state of mind that one might generally expect to find when discussing complex social and political issues with others, as the causes of and remedies to societal ills is far from being clear to all citizens. Nevertheless, discourse in the United States has become highly polemic in the early twenty‐first century, where the social attitudes of political partisans seem very strong, stable, and virtually impervious to change. These traits reduce the ability to appreciate the presence of ambiguity in the political beliefs held by others. While differing political viewpoints and theoretical assumptions are central to a healthy Democracy, an inability to recognize and validate the varying worldviews held by others is problematic. How has this occurred in a society where there exists a nearly countless amount of mediums for people to collect and share political information? Is it possible that the ability to share and consume information so readily actually reduces ambiguity rather than increases it? Questions such as these have been addressed by a wide variety of scholars in recent years, cutting across all academic disciplines. This article reviews the literature regarding political news media and its relevance to the rise of attitudinal extremity found among the American public. Additionally, new data will be explored that tests whether media selectivity increases feeling of antipathy and blame that self‐identified political partisans hold toward members of the opposing party in the United States. Literature review In the study of media and politics, a central figure that is widely cited among most scholars is Jürgen Habermas, whose concept of a “public sphere” () is still highly influential. He defines a public sphere as any space where individuals can come together to freely discuss & identify societal problems. Under ideal conditions, according to Habermas, this space is characterized by a wide array of perspectives that are being voiced by citizens coming from all walks of life. While such a situation is not feasible with mass mediums, due to the prohibitively high costs to entry and limited space available (such as the time of television broadcasts and length of newspapers), the Internet would seemingly enhance the public sphere. After all, virtually anyone can access the Internet at a minimal cost, and share his/her opinion as widely as they wish across a wide array of platforms. Under such conditions, this Habermasian conception of the public sphere should lead people to feel very optimistic about the prospects for Democracy. With such a vast and diverse collective of information readily available to anyone who goes online to learn about and discuss politics, one would expect that American public opinion regarding political issues would generally be defined by complexity and ambiguity today. If Americans were spending considerably large amounts of time each day online, contemplating both conservative and liberal viewpoints and assumptions about societal conditions as they learn, it should be nearly impossible to avoid feelings of ambivalence regarding these problems. However, more often than not, this does not seem to be the end result for most users. Instead, those who engage in online politics tend to engage in patterns of “selective exposure” (Freedman and Sears ), which is defined by a preference of individuals for attending to information that is likely to confirm their pre‐existing viewpoints. This concept is highly similar to Leon Festinger's () theory of cognitive dissonance, where people actively avoid disconfirming information due to their dislike of feeling uncertainness or ambiguity. Taken together, these serve as possible explanations for why those who use mass and social mediums for political information develop higher levels of certainty and attitudinal extremity over time. The research of Joseph Klapper () was the first to relate self‐selectivity to media exposure for the purpose of understanding social attitudes. What he found was that media content held only limited effects on public opinion. Klapper's results indicated that people had a strong tendency to engage in selective exposure to information when they already held stable beliefs about...

How Terrorism Affects Attitudes toward Democracy: Tunisia in 2015.

Tunisia is the only country that emerged from the Arab Spring as a democracy. However, Tunisian democracy is threatened by political divisions, economic problems, and the threat of terrorist attacks. We shed light on Tunisia's democratic prospects by examining (1) the degree to which major terrorist attacks in 2015 influenced Tunisian public opinion on democracy and (2) the extent to which preference for a democratic system affected opinions on the prospects for democracy in Tunisia. We use data from three waves of a nationwide survey conducted just before and just after Tunisia's first major terrorist attack, and just after the country's second major terrorist attack. We demonstrate that after the attacks the Tunisian public became less favourable toward democracy and less optimistic that Tunisia would soon be ready for it. Such scepticism was widespread, affecting people who preferred democracy as much as those who did not. We conclude that the prospects for Tunisian democracy are more precarious than is sometimes assumed.

Political leadership and the construction of competitive authoritarian regimes in Latin America: implications and prospects for democracy

ABSTRACTRecent developments have raised new concerns regarding the prospects of democracy in Latin America, particularly in what are often defined, although not unanimously, as cases of competitive authoritarianism, including Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. In light of their significance and diffusion on a global level, understanding how these regimes emerge is important, especially when they replace democratic or imperfectly democratic regimes such as in the cases examined in this study. What explains the emergence of competitive authoritarian regimes (CARs), particularly when the starting point is democratic or imperfectly democratic? What are the region’s democratic prospects after the emergence of various CARs in the last two decades? Through the comparative analysis of competitive authoritarian attempts in Bolivia, Ecuador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, I argue that the same passages and challenges required to transform a democratic regime into a CAR makes incumbents' features and strategies particularly important, especially the ability to weather potentially lethal institutional crises and limit the legitimacy costs associated with competitive authoritarian manipulations. Incumbents have proved more successful in these challenges and hence in their competitive authoritarian attempts when combining charisma and the elaboration of a democratic discourse including the diffusion of new democratic values.

Populism: A Threat to Democracy? Or a verification of it?

Abstract The recent surge in the number of populist governments coming into power raises the question of their effect on the prospects for democracy. This article uses the limited vs. open access framework – developed by North, Wallis, Webb and Weingast – to evaluate how populist leaders and their parties govern after coming to power. It looks at episodes of populists in power in Latin America, Europe, and the United States. Although most populist governments have kept civilian control of the military, notwithstanding some Latin American exceptions, they have typically moved their societies away from open access and sustainable democracy in several important ways: undermining rule of law in the name of the “will of the people” whom they claim to represent; reducing citizenship rights for unpopular minorities; making rules and their enforcement more personal and dependent on group identity; and hindering a free press and opposition parties that could hold the government accountable and perhaps bring about peaceful democratic transitions in the future. This sheds new light on how open access orders might revert to limited access. JEL Codes: H110, P5

Electoral Pluralism, Social Division and the 2016 Parliamentary Elections in Jordan

AbstractRepresenting one of the most stable regimes in the Middle East, Jordan has been undergoing a process of political liberalization since 1989. Due to the so‐called East Bank‐West Bank cleavage that followed by the influx of Palestinian migrants to Jordan, the country has also come to epitomize a divided society. Within this context, this paper aims to analyze the ongoing prospects for democratization in Jordan through an examination of four persistent debates shaping its electoral pluralism: those over social/identity division, electoral law as a regime‐survival mechanism, the role of the Ikhwan and the IAF's electoral boycotts, and electoral apathy. Finally, the impact of the Arab upheavals/revolts on restructuring the process of political reform — as well as opposition in the kingdom in the post‐2011 era — will be explored with reference to the changing dynamics of Islamist opposition.

Between Scylla and Charybdis: religion, the military and support for democracy among Egyptians, 2011–2014

ABSTRACTDemocracy as a form of civilian rule must navigate a path between clerical and military powers, both of which are highly engaged in the politics of post-Mubarak Egypt. The authors ask in this article how mass support for democracy changed in Egypt between 2011 and 2014, and how this support is connected with views on religion and the role of the military. This question is important for understanding the prospects for democracy in a major state in the Arab world. It is also of comparative interest because of what change in the social and ideological drivers of mass attitudes may tell us about the nature of democratic support more generally. The authors’ analysis is based on nationally representative surveys of Egyptians in 2011 after the country’s first post-Mubarak parliamentary elections and in 2014 after the removal of the Islamist President Morsi. The findings indicate that Egyptians in large numbers favour both democracy and unfettered military intervention in politics. The authors also observe important shifts in the social bases of support for democracy away from religion but also from economic aspiration. Negative political experience with democratic procedures in 2011–2013 seems to be the strongest factor behind the observed decrease in democratic support.

Popular Value Perceptions and Institutional Preference for Democracy in “Confucian” East Asia

Scholars and observers of democracy have argued that the world has entered a period of democratic recession (Carothers 2006; Diamond 2008; Kurlantzick 2011; Plattner 2015; Puddington 2007, 2009). This pessimistic view is supported by Freedom House's annual report on political rights and civil liberties, Freedom in the World 2015, which concludes that the state of freedom has declined for the ninth consecutive year (Freedom House 2015). In many cases, this rollback has taken place even as democratic institutions remain, at least superficially, in place. As the National Endowment for Democracy (2006, 2) has noted, there has been an increase in semi-authoritarian hybrid regimes characterized by superficially democratic processes that disguise and help legitimate authoritarian rule. In these countries, there has been a pushback against democracy as autocratic governments clamp down on free media, civil society, and human rights groups (Carothers 2006). In East Asia-the eastern part of the Asian continent that can be defined in either geographical or ethnocultural terms-the democratic recession in semiauthoritarian hybrid regimes has coincided with the entrenchment of authoritarianism in China, which is now the region's largest economy. In the context of the global democratic recession and the rise of China, the prospects for democratization in East and Southeast Asia are now bleaker than at any time since the beginning of the third wave of democratization.Some observers have argued explicitly that the democratic recession is closely associated with China's rise and the position taken by China's leadership toward political institutions (Ambrosio 2012; Ikenberry 2008; Leonard 2008; Tao 2015). Tao (2015) argues that the China model, as an alternative modernization model, has enhanced the normative power of autocracy over democracy. Tao describes China's authoritarian model as an economic globalization model based upon liberal state-market relations and illiberal statesociety relations, with a market economy driven by globalization and a political system operated according to the rule of law. Concerning the mechanisms for international diffusion, Thomas Ambrosio (2010) contends appropriateness and effectiveness are the two key mechanisms for the diffusion of authoritarianism. In this regard, the existence of a successful China model already shows the appropriateness and effectiveness of authoritarianism for countries where a liberal political culture has not developed and both political elites and citizens tend toward normative values such as the accumulation of wealth over political freedom.Literature ReviewThe literature on the decline of democracy is reminiscent of the Asian values debate of the 1990s, following the economic emer- gence of the four Asian Tigers (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan). In the wake of economic development and rising national pride, some politicians in East Asia, such as Lee Kwan Yew and Mohamad Mahathir, questioned the necessity and desirability of liberal democracy, and developed an alternative discourse based on Asian values.1 With the economic rise of China and the stability of its political system the debate surrounding Asian values reappeared. The global financial crisis of 2008 resulted in even more attention given to Asian values as an alternative to liberal democracy (Shin 2012). China's rise has thus reopened the debate between cultural determinism and modernization theory.Cultural determinism and modernization theory are premised on competing claims about the attitudes of ordinary people. Therefore, this study reexamines the Asian values debate by considering popular value perceptions and institutional preference for democracy among citizens in seven societies with Confucian traditions: Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, mainland China, and Vietnam.2 The economic success of Confucian (or authoritarian) societies has discredited the idea that the wholesale adoption of democracy is requisite for economic development. …

ПОЛИТИЧЕСКИЕ РЕЖИМЫ И РЕЖИМНЫЕ ИЗМЕНЕНИЯ В ЗЕРКАЛЕ НАУЧНОГО ДИСКУРСА

The article reviews the state of the recent comparative research on political regime and regime changes and the democratization prospects after authoritarian regime breakdown. The main methodo-logical problems facing the researchers of political regimes who use the regime variable in comparative research are the conceptualization, classification and operationalization of political regimes in which political changes may or may not occur. The author studies typologies of nondemocratic political regimes, the aspects of one-party, military and personalist regimes, their survival logic and the democratization prospects for every type of authoritarian regimes. Each type of authoritarianism has its own logic and inner dynamics, hence different regime-changing trajectories. Particular attention is paid to hybrid regimes as the most conceptually blurred category. Methodological problems of studying regime change include concept stretching, conceptu-alization of successes and failures and also the distinguishing of potentially relevant cases in order to increase the number of cases, since the events studied are rare events. The article proceeds to study the po-litical changes from the perspective of democratic transition theories and discusses the advantages and disadvantages of two main approaches to studying political regime changes, i.e. the structure-oriented and the agency-oriented.

Autocratic Institutions and Democratic Lessons: Evidence from Egypt

How does political experience with institutions under dictatorship influence the preferences political parties and politicians form towards those institutions in democracy? Does such experience influence political elites to create weak institutions amenable to their manipulation or strengthen their resolve to build strong democratic institutions? In a post-cold war context where dictatorships increasingly hold direct, multi-party legislative elections, this question is important for understanding their prospects for democratization and consolidation. I address these questions by studying political support for judicial independence in Egypt using unique elite-level data from an original survey of almost 200 candidates in Egypt’s first democratic parliamentary elections in 2011-2012. Egypt provides a theoretically appropriate case since it has held such direct, multi-party elections since 1976. I find autocratic institutional experience makes parties highly supportive of an independent judiciary but individual politicians less supportive. Despite this, experienced parties are able to successfully influence the institutional preferences of their most experienced and ambitious members towards democratic attitudes. Surprisingly, new parties do not support judicial independence and do not curb their member’s undemocratic inclinations towards courts. Thus, direct autocratic experience with institutions motivated Egyptian political parties to create stronger not weaker democratic institutions.

대만 민진당 출범과 양안관계의 전망에 대한 연구

대만 민진당 출범과 양안관계의 전망에 대한 연구

How Does Voting in Village Elections Influence Democratic Assessment in China?

How does voting in village elections affect one’s assessment of China’s democracy? In a time when a majority of the Chinese people believe that China is a democracy, this question has important implications for the prospects of bottom-up democratization. Village elections may play a positive role if they can bring people to realize that China is not a democracy. By contrast, village elections may play a negative role if they reinforce the belief that China is already a democracy. Using the China data of the ABS II, I show that voting in village elections does lead to more negative democratic assessment, but this does not imply a positive role of village elections for bottom-up democratization, because the negative effect of voting is only detected in elections of poor quality. In free and fair elections, voting has no influence.

From the Arab Spring to the Damascus Winter: The United States, Russia, and the New Cold War

As the war in Syria tragically approaches its fifth anniversary, more and more concerns are emerging around questions surrounding the extent and the scope of military involvement of foreign powers, which are crystallizing the feeling that the real objectives and interests at stake in the current Syrian War extend well beyond the Middle East. Intertwining the story of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (The ISIS) rise to power with the US foreign policy toward the Assad government and the renewed tensions between Russia and the United States, this article examines the implications of the current regional conflict for the international balance of power and for the prospect of democracy in Syria.

Who Democratizes? Western-educated Leaders and Regime Transitions

Many theories attempt to explain why some countries democratize and others do not. Existing accounts, however, focus almost exclusively on structural factors and ignore individual leaders. In this article, we argue that leaders educated at Western universities are more likely to democratize than other leaders because Western education socializes leaders to prefer democracy and creates transnational linkages that alter the strategic calculus of democratization. Utilizing an original data set on the specific colleges and universities world leaders attended, we show that Western-educated leaders significantly and substantively improve a country’s democratization prospects.

Personal Character or Social Expectation: a formal analysis of ‘suzhi’ in China

The notion of ‘suzhi’ (素质), which roughly means human quality or character, features prominently in public and intellectual discourses in China about the country’s social and political development, including the prospects for democratization. Despite the pervasive use of the concept by both the government and society, few studies have analyzed whether suzhi is really the root cause of the myriad social issues that have been attributed to it. This article problematizes the notion of suzhi and shows through simple game-theoretic analyses of two heavily debated issues in China that such a predominant focus on suzhi is misguided and misses the crucial role of social expectations in multiple-equilibria social interactions. In fact, without good social expectations even ‘high suzhi’ people would behave as if they were of ‘low suzhi’, which perhaps best characterizes many social phenomena in contemporary China. The results of the study thus have critical implications for a successful social and political transition.

From victorious rebels to strong authoritarian parties: prospects for post-war democratization

ABSTRACT In a number of cases, rebel movements that won civil wars transformed into powerful authoritarian political parties that dominated post-war politics. Parties whose origins are as victorious insurgent groups have different legacies and hence different institutional structures and patterns of behaviour than those that originated in breakaway factions of ruling parties, labour unions, non-violent social movements, or identity groups. Unlike classic definitions of political parties, post-rebel parties are not created around the need to win elections but rather as military organizations focused on winning an armed struggle. Key attributes of victorious rebel movements, such as cohesive leadership, discipline, hierarchy, and patterns of military administration of liberated territory, shape post-insurgent political parties and help explain why post-insurgent parties are often strong and authoritarian. This article seeks to identify the mechanisms that link rebel victory in three East African countries (Uganda, Ethiopia, and Rwanda) to post-war authoritarian rule. These processes suggest that how a civil war ends changes the potential for post-war democratization.

Unpacking the Political Resource Curse: How Oil Fuels Personalism and Undermines Democratization

Oil wealth is often associated with prolonged authoritarian rule, poor governance and other institutional pathologies. These unusual effects of petroleum have been variously described as the 'Paradox of Plenty' (Karl 1997), 'Natural Resource Trap' (Collier 2007), and the 'Oil Curse' (Ross 2012), and an increasing number of studies have examined the causes and effects of the oil curse (Humphreys et al. 2007). However, the prevailing assumption in most studies has been that oil will have an equally strong anti-democratic effect across authoritarian regime types (Ross 2001; 2012; Jensen and Wantchekon 2004; Haber and Menaldo 2011). Theoretical and empirical studies on the resource curse have ignored institutional differences in authoritarian rule emphasized by scholars of authoritarian politics (Linz and Stepan 1996; Geddes 1999; Schedler 2009; Geddes, Wright and Frantz 2014). In this study, I combine these two strands of literature and show that oil has a particularly dire effect on the democratization prospects of a particular subtype of authoritarianism, namely, personalist autocracies. The analysis of regime development patterns across oil and non-oil producing states presented in this study shows that oil wealth particularly strongly harmed democratization prospects in the personalist sub-set of authoritarianism. Using three country-case studies of Azerbaijan, Cameroon, and Venezuela, I illustrate the ways in which oil can reinforce personalism and undermine the democratization processes and suggest that the causal channels linking oil and regime outcomes (authoritarian durability and democratic transitions) depend on the composition of authoritarian rule in place, and may not be uniform across regime types. The case of Venezuela under Chavez also indicates that in democratic regimes with a long history of oil-induced elite corruption, oil wealth may contribute to the personalization of power in a failing democracy.