Scope Of Democracy Research Articles

Democracy in Third World Countries: A Historical Analysis of Democratic Practices in Third World Countries of Asia, Latin America and Africa

Democracy is the most acclaimed system of governance today such that it has become the template for measuring civilizations around the world. The concept of democracy is understood and practiced differently in different regions of the world. The scope of Democracy as practiced in Western countries goes beyond periodic elections: It entails respect for fundamental rights and freedom of citizens, greater liberalization of the economy, good governance, and the rule of law. In Asia democracy, it is understood as equitable distribution of wealth and economic development. In Latin America, it is more of electoral and constitutional democracy with more power wielded to the presidency while today’s African Democracy has been described as Neo-patrimonialism or personal rule. A type of governance characterized by a very powerful executive and weak legislative and judiciary systems. This paper aims to shed light on the understanding and practices of democracy in Third World Countries with specific references to Asia, Latin America, and Africa. The study has been built from secondary sources and employed a qualitative research approach.

Think about the Scope of Democracy from a Capacity Perspective

Think about the Scope of Democracy from a Capacity Perspective

Demokrasi ve Eğitim: Kavramsal Bir İnceleme

Demokrasi sahip olduğu üstünlükleri ile günümüzde en uygun yönetim biçimi olarak değerlendirilmektedir ancak demokrasi bir yönetim biçimi olmanın yanında aynı zamanda bir yaşam biçimidir. Demokratik yönetimlerin etkili ve başarılı olabilmesi demokrasiyi içselleştirmiş vatandaşlar ile mümkündür. Demokratik anlayış doğumla kazanılan bir özellik olmadığı için bu anlayışın kazanılmasında eğitim hayati role sahiptir. Bu doğrultuda bu çalışmada eğitim ve demokrasi arasındaki ilişki incelenmiştir. Bu kavramsal çalışma çerçevesinde ilk olarak demokrasi kavramı ve demokrasinin kısa tarihçesi ele alınmıştır. Daha sonra demokrasinin eğitimdeki yeri incelenmiş ve bu kapsamda demokrasinin okullarda nasıl öğretilebileceğine ilişkin yaklaşımlara ve demokratik eğitimin ilkelerine yer verilmiş. Ek olarak, demokrasi eğitimi ile demokratik eğitim arasındaki farklılık netleştirilmiştir. Ayrıca demokrasi eğitiminin felsefi arka planı tartışılmış ve eğitim programlarında demokrasi başlığı kapsamında demokrasi eğitiminde kullanılabilecek yaklaşım ve yöntemlerden ve buna paralel olarak eleştirel düşünme gibi düşünme becerilerinin öneminden bahsedilmiştir. Demokratik bir toplumun oluşmasının demokrasiyi önceleyen ve kendisi de demokratik olan bir eğitim sistemi ile mümkün olduğu gerçeğinden hareketle bu çalışmada sunulan kavramsal çerçevenin demokrasi ve eğitim ilişkisinin önemine dikkat çekmesi hedeflenmiştir.

AR MODERNI DEMOKRATIJA YRA POLITINĖ SANTVARKA?

Straipsnio tikslas yra pateikti modernios demokratijos sampratos kri­tiką menkai politinės filosofijos išnaudotu būdu, keliant tokį klausimą: ar liaudies suverenumo ir piliečių socialinės lygybės principais grįsta moderni demokratija gali būti vadinama politine santvarka? Abejonė dėl demokrati­jos priskyrimo politinių santvarkų šeimai yra gana naujas būdas pažvelgti į paskutinių kelių amžių politinėje filosofijoje nagrinėjamus atstovaujamo­sios demokratijos vidinius prieštaravimus. Straipsnyje, daugiausia remiantis Apšvietos epochos ir XIX a. prancūzų demokratijos mąstytojų mintimis, na­grinėjamos priežastys, kodėl moderni demokratijos samprata yra pasmerkta blaškytis tarp socialinių mokslų skatinamo redukcinio požiūrio į politiką ir kone sakralią formą įgavusio, tačiau turinio prasme tuščio jos idealizavimo. Mėginama išsiaiškinti, kokie galėtų būti politinės filosofijos uždaviniai, sie­kiant išgryninti modernios demokratijos sąvoką nuo dogmatiškai suprantamų jos atributų. Straipsnyje plėtojama mintis, kad moderni demokratija reiškia nebe politinę santvarką, o veikiau valdžios legitimacijos principą, kuris struktūriškai primena religijos imitaciją – t. y. pseudoreligiją.

California's Proposition 2: Science, Ethics, and the Boundaries of Authority in Agriculture

Proposition 2 sought to transform the microstructure of agricultural production within the state of California. This paper examines the political debate surrounding the ballot initiative and its geographical implications. Proponents and opponents of the proposition utilized scientific and ethical principles to define their respective positions, differentiate legitimate voices from illegitimate voices, and designate which segments of the California population should have a role in determining the character of animal agriculture within the state. The generalities and specificities contained within these principles are shown to approximate different perceptions of the ideal scope of democracy. Amid these tailored principles, common sense also emerged during the election as a notion affecting the potential breadth of political inclusion in such decisions. In association with other ideas, the general character of common sense proved consequential for two reasons: it substantiated populism in politics while its embodied foundation fostered connections between humans and animals. Ultimately, however, common sense is shown to be a double-edged sword. While it appears to have played a role in the projected transformation of California agriculture, such change is not as revolutionary as some would suggest for it is grounded in the prevailing orthodoxies that characterize populism.

The Economy and Its Relation to Politics: Robert Dahl, Neoclassical Economics, and Democracy

Despite the unfortunate tendency of some political scientists to theorize and to examine political phenomena with little reference to economic issues, many scholars correctly insist on taking into account the relationship between economics and politics. Yet, even these scholars sometimes employ modes of economic thought that underestimate the diversity and complexity of the ways in which political and economic relations affect each other, including the positive and negative effects different economic practices have on democracy. In this article, I examine the work of Robert Dahl as a case study of just such a scholar, one who is explicitly concerned about the interconnections between economics and politics, but whose theorization of them falls short in several crucial ways. For example, although Dahl rightly refers to the historical, political nature of markets, at other times he adopts economistic conceptualizations of them, conceptualizations that treat the economy as an autonomous realm with its own laws of motion. Such laws set narrow constraints on permissible forms of political “intervention” and thereby curtail not only the scope of democracy but also the possibilities for altering those economic relations that negatively affect democracy—consequences that are counter to Dahl's stated political and theoretical intentions.

Constituting Humanity: Democracy, Human Rights, and Political Community

Democracy and human rights have long been strongly connected in international covenants. In documents such as 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 1966 International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights, democracy is justified both intrinsically in terms of popular sovereignty and instrumentally as the best way to “foster the full realization of all human rights.” Yet, even though they are human and thus universal rights, political rights are often surprisingly specific. In the Covenant, for example, “the right to take part in the conduct of public affairs” is equated with “the right to vote and to be elected.” More often then not, their realization is left to states and their constitutions, as for example in the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights. Political rights have a “peculiar” status among enumerated human rights, and this difficulty has to do with deep assumptions about the nature and scope of democracy and political community that remain unexamined by the drafters of these important declarations.

Editorial

This edition of Theoria speaks to the dynamics of globalization, to the nature and scope of democracy and democratic consolidation, and to the challenge of grounding authority, both sacral and ‘secular’. These themes have become especially resonant at a historical moment when religious fundamentalism has, in the context of increasing global interconnectedness, become more ‘present’, and when capitalist modernization has come increasingly to be broadly legitimated in the language of ‘democratic consolidation’.

Facing Europe: Is Globalization a Threat to Democracy?

This article examines the widespread belief that globalization constitutes a threat to democracy, and analyses some of the standard responses to this perceived threat. According to this belief, globalization is a threat to democracy because it undermines the necessary requirements of state autonomy and national identity. From this it follows that democracy can be safeguarded either by fortifying the nation-state or by extending the scope of democracy beyond its borders. Yet both solutions force us to redefine the concept of political community in ways that are hard to justify in terms themselves democratic. Contrary to popular belief, this article argues that this predicament has less to do with globalization and all the more to do with the historical and philosophical foundations of modern democracy. The article proceeds to unpack these foundations in order to explain how this perceived threat was constituted in the first place.

The Possibility of Deterritorializing Democracy: Agonistic Democratic Politics and the APEC NGO Forums

Marc G. Doucet (*) Since leadership out of this mess does not seem to be coming from the traditional places anymore--not from politicians, political parties, the church, or academia--it is up to us--working people, the unemployed, young people, old people, people of color, first-nations people--to take up the mantle. We are going to have to form the citizen movements in our countries and across borders to take back democracy in their absence. Maude Barlow, opening the 1997 People's Summit on APEC Deconstruction is something which happens and which happens inside: there is a deconstruction at work within Plato's work, for instance.... I would say the same for although the concept of democracy is a Greek heritage. This heritage is the heritage of a model, not simply a model, but a model that self-deconstructs, that deconstructs itself, so as to uproot, to become independent of its own grounds. Jacques Derrida The increasing frequency and scope of organized popular opposition to components of governance,, (1) has raised new and profound questions about the meaning of and the democratic imaginary in an era of If we are willing to accept that forcing globalization's difference into traditional 'spatial' categories creates remainders and resistances that for political theory prompt renewed investigation of the concepts and scope of democracy, (2) then we need to address recent political events surrounding opposition to global governance with alternative theoretical vantage points. Such vantage points may provide us with a better understanding of what is made to work, and what is made possible, by the opposition to globalization and the state-sponsored international organizations that sustain it. In order to help develop such a theoretical space, this article will examine the opposition to one such state-sponsored component of global governance: Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC). (3) For the better part of the 1990s, the APEC annual leaders' meeting was the site of opposition organized by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). One can perhaps draw from the history of organized opposition to APEC in order to better understand the possibilities that are opened in our political imaginary by other, similar, global social movements of contestation that have occurred in Quebec City, Davos, Prague, Melbourne, Washington, D.C., Seattle, and elsewhere. In the case of opposition to APEC, NGOs were concerned with such issues as economic globalization, human rights, gender, labor rights, migrant rights, sustainable development, and the environment. For most of the 1990s in whichever member country of APEC the heads of state met, NGOs organized parallel forums, or summits. (4) Why would APEC provoke such political opposition on such a broad range of issues? In answering this question, this article will argue that APEC, as a component of global governance, is not merely an interstate economic forum; rather, I argue, if we wish to understand the reason for the opposition we must view APEC as a political site where a particular discourse on the social is deployed. This discourse on the social contains particular resolutions of identity! difference that are, like all such resolutions, antagonistic. NGO opposition in the form of people's summits is in effect responding to this antagonism. This article will further argue that, in responding to this antagonism, the NGO discourse of contestation opens the possibility for a deterritorialization of democracy. This possibility is opened through the discursive articulation of the opposition that one can find in aspects of the final declarations or statements issued at the end of the NGO forums. Although these openings are generally few and cannot be exaggerated, they are of interest if we are looking for genuinely new ways of imagining politics and democracy in a world marked by globalization. …

The Key Role of the Working Class

The Key Role of the Working Class Jack A. Goldstone (bio) Capitalist Development and Democracy. By Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens, and John D. Stephens. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. 398 pp. This sweeping study tackles one of the biggest questions facing students of democracy today: does the demise of state socialism—and the resulting window of opportunity for liberal capitalism—necessarily mean that democratic development will follow? The authors grant that there is a significant and well-established correlation between capitalist development and democracy. In their studies of democratic development, however, they find numerous exceptions, and argue that this correlation often obscures more than it reveals. They offer as an alternative a more complex and contingent view of democratic development. While political theorists from Karl Marx to Seymour Martin Lipset have assigned a key role to the bourgeoisie and professional classes in the building and consolidation of democracies, Rueschemeyer and his coauthors argue that these groups have played a more ambiguous role. While generally favoring private property, liberal freedoms, and their own political participation, the middle classes have opposed universal suffrage and political inclusion as often as they have promoted them. Adopting the protection of property and business prosperity as its top priority, the bourgeoisie has sometimes sought to expand, and at other times to curtail, the scope of democracy, depending on whether it most feared the depredations of a conservative, landlord-dominated state or the demands of radicalized workers and peasants. This study distinguishes merely "liberal" states—which meet basic [End Page 150] standards regarding the rule of law, protection of private property, and certain political freedoms—from genuinely democratic states that feature universal suffrage and broad access to political institutions. A variety of states—from England's eighteenth-century oligarchy to the apartheid regime in South Africa—have built political institutions that appear liberal and democratic. Yet only small numbers of people in these nations enjoyed access to those institutions; true democracy was far from being attained. The authors argue that real democracy has developed only in cases where the working classes or small independent farmers have pushed for it in conjunction with liberal politicians and elements of the bourgeoisie. This critical role of the working classes explains both the general correlation between capitalism and democracy and the uneven and oft-reversed pattern of democratization in so many countries. On the one hand, capitalism tends to foster democracy because its demand for free labor creates a powerful base of support for democratic movements, and because the growing complexity and autonomy of the state tend to reduce the sway of traditional elites. Gradually, as the direct power of conservative landowners over both labor and the state is reduced, the initial seeds of democracy can take root. On the other hand, capitalism also creates conflicts among elites and between classes that can render democracy unstable. Once democracy is more or less attained, increasingly radical economic demands from the working classes tend to push the bourgeoisie in a conservative direction, leading it to seek alliances with the military, church, or other conservative organizations to enforce social control. If sufficiently frightened, the middle classes may even support military intervention to "restore order." In short, it "was neither capitalists nor capitalism as such . . . that advanced the cause of political equality" (p. 302); rather, it is the "contradictions" of capitalism, involving the creation and exploitation of a large free laboring class, that explain both the increased incidence of efforts at democratization and their frequent reversal. The authors realize that the historical paths of different countries and regions vary markedly. They are also aware that their account raises the question of how it is possible for any capitalist democracy to achieve stability. In response to these concerns, they provide case studies drawn from three regions: Western Europe and Britain's former colonies in North America, Australia, and New Zealand; South America and Mexico; and Central America and the Caribbean. These case studies all reveal that two things are crucial to the rise of democracy: the impact of international forces—including economic dependence, military intervention, and colonialism—and the rise of political parties. In examining Western Europe, North America, and the English-speaking Antipodes...

A Letter to Zhao Ziyang

To General Secretary Zhao Ziyang of the CCP Central Committee: With the sit-down hunger strike of Beijing college students still in progress on Tiananmen Square, the health and lives of the strikers are at grave risk. We are devastated by this critical situation. Out of concern for the students and in order to stabilize the situation, we urgently appeal to you as follows: 1. We feel that the current student movement is patriotic in nature and that the students' demands conform to the ideas of the State Council. We hope, therefore, that their reasonable requests can be resolved within the scope of democracy and law.

Freedom, Work, and the Scope of Democracy

Previous articleNext article No AccessFreedom, Work, and the Scope of DemocracyEdward SankowskiEdward Sankowski Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Ethics Volume 91, Number 2Jan., 1981 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/292225 Views: 6Total views on this site Citations: 3Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1981 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Michael Y. Lee, Amy C. Edmondson Self-managing organizations: Exploring the limits of less-hierarchical organizing, Research in Organizational Behavior 37 (Jan 2017): 35–58.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.riob.2017.10.002A. Anthony Smith Kant's Political Philosophy: Rechtsstaat or Council Democracy?, The Review of Politics 47, no.22 (Aug 2009): 253–280.https://doi.org/10.1017/S003467050003672XSamuel Long Abstracts of Documents in this Supplement, (Jan 1982): 1–576.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-5214-1_1