Third Wave Of Democratization Research Articles

Autocratisation, electoral politics and the limits of incumbency in African democracies

ABSTRACT The world is experiencing a new wave of autocratisation, characterised by a global democratic reversal. From 2010 to 2020, the share of the world population living in autocracies increased from 48 to 68%. Electoral autocracies are now the world's most common regime type, and along with closed autocracies they number 87 of the world's 195 states. Even during the height of the third wave of democratisation, elections in Africa rarely led to an alternation of power. Thirty years after the third wave, this special issue introduction takes stock of how many transfers of power occurred in the three crucial decades between 1991 and 2021. In this special issue, we focus on Zambia to understand some of the factors that contributed to an electoral turnover, notwithstanding the many benefits of incumbency that were enjoyed by the ruling Patriotic Front (PF) led by President Edgar Lungu. We show that the outcome of Zambia's August 2021 election demonstrates the limits of incumbency. We suggest that voters and opposition parties in countries with previous experiences of peaceful transfers of power might rely on a ‘democratic muscle-memory’, to dislodge autocrats and call for more research on when and why incumbents lose.

Democratic Breakdown through Lawfare by Constitutional Courts: The Case of Post-"Democratic Transition" Thailand

Third-wave democracies have massively adopted mechanisms of judicial review, notably constitutional courts, considered key institutions of successful democratic transitions. By preventing abuses of the constitution and safeguarding people's rights, they act as a bulwark against the claims of potential autocrats. In Thailand, the 1997 democratic transition led to the adoption of a powerful constitutional court tasked with safeguarding democracy from the threats of populism, corruption, and authoritarianism. Yet since its inception, the court's record has been puzzling. It has dissolved most, if not all, of the pro-democracy, anti-military political parties, dismissed all elected prime ministers, and paved the way for two military coups. In short, against established theories linking constitutional courts to democratization, the introduction of constitutional review in Thailand has led to democratic breakdown. To make sense of this puzzle, this article will investigate three variables of the court—strategic interests, ideologies, and institutional design—within the larger bureaucratic structure of the Thai state, to account for the anti-democratic behaviour of Thailand's Constitutional Court. This piece considers materials in Thai and English.

Manifestos and Voting Behavior in Third-Wave Democracies: Evidence from Ghana

Custom to pluralistic societies in emergent democracies, political mythology holds that since Ghana's Fourth Republic's inception, electoral outcomes have been fundamentally determined by ethno-political identification and other social cleavages to political parties. However, despite the potential influence of party manifesto contents in determining electoral outcomes, very little is known about the value of party manifestos in shaping voting behavior in the history of elections in the Fourth Republic. This is unfortunate because such knowledge can inform both the academic study of electoral politics and voting behavior. This article, rooted in the classical work on economic voting at both the individual and aggregate levels, presents original results from interviews with voters who participated in all the three recently held elections under study. Through interviews with 11,600 respondents from 116 constituencies and across all 16 regions, the study finds that the voting pattern in recent elections is not consistent with the popular ethno-social dynamics of Ghana's electoral politics. The results imply that party identification remains a significant determinant of voting decisions; nonetheless, the manifesto contents of political parties have become pivotal in shaping voting behavior rather than voting patterns based on socio-psychological notions and political party alignments. It concludes that voter inducement (kind or cash) in election periods is less relevant in structuring voting behavior. Further, it concludes that unless a major realignment occurs, electorates prefer a party with policies that maximize their utilities or will lead to the most considerable average benefit, as there is no reason to vote for a policy with idiosyncratic benefits or values. Thus, parties' policy blueprints or manifesto contents have become strong mobilizers and key determining factors for voters. As such, political parties need to invest in developing concrete policy programs that resonate with the citizenry to spur successful electoral outcomes.

Country or party? Variations in party membership around the globe

AbstractThis paper explores external (country-level) and internal (party-level) drivers of membership variations across parties. Relying on the Political Party Database combined with other datasets, we provide original, cross-sectional analyses of membership variation across 223 parties in 38 countries, innovatively covering third-wave democracies, post-communist countries, and advanced democracies. It allows for a unique analysis of recruitment patterns of parties under quite different contexts. Departing from the dominant view that parties are the powerless victims of external trends, we show that, while context matters, parties’ choices regarding affiliation rules and organization structure also matter. They are more powerful determinants of membership ratios than country-level variables. Especially, the representation of sub-groups in the party structure is a key driver of membership recruitment. We also show how party origins, and the foundational environment in which they emerged, are important to understand how membership varies across parties today. Overall, this study strongly advocates for a broad comparative, multilevel approach to party membership.

Transitional Justice Incubator: Bridging European Fault Lines

Transitional justice is typically perceived as a product of the third wave of democratisation, which came to the fore after the fall of the Iron Curtain, bringing along with it various mechanisms, from truth commissions and lustration procedures to national trials, leading to the creation of hybrid and international tribunals of global reach.1 Despite its obvious relevance, the aftermath of the Second World War is generally treated as a cursory prehistory in the transitional justice literature. With the exception of the Nuremberg trials, robust research on legal and extralegal ventures which characterised the first postwar decade remains largely disconnected from contemporary transitional justice concerns, and yet it offers a number of valuable lessons.2 Three recent publications which are the subject of this review are therefore a welcome intervention, highlighting the scope and depth, successes and fallacies of efforts to come to terms with the atrocious legacy of the Second World War in its immediate aftermath.

A CRITICAL STUDY OF THE PROPOSITIONS OF CEDRIC DOUPON & FLORANCE PASSY ON THE APPROACHES OF ARAB SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

The Eastern European countries, some Latin American countries, the republics of the Soviet Union, and some Arab countries have been knew a deep change shock politically, economically and socially. It has been called the third wave of democratization . At the same time, theoretical proposals to explain it, represented in the modernizing approach - the transitional approach - the structural approach - the cultural approach. Also, the western mind was the first who theorize about the recent events in our Arab region. Eastern explanations have been given with different descriptions, it employed terms such as (the Arab Spring, the Arab revolutions, the Arab uprisings, the political movement), As concepts that reflect Western perceptions. Although some Arab researchers have against these description. Key words: Democratization, Social Movement, Arab Spring, Scholars, Arab Countries.

Democracy in the Global South

Given the legacies of colonialism and the inequities of the global capitalist system, consolidated democracies in the Global South were the exception prior to the third wave of democratization in the 1970s. As democratization in the Global South grew, a first generation of work by sociologists challenged mainstream political science's preoccupation with electoral and liberal democracy and brought popular mobilization to the center of the analysis. This literature made key contributions to the debate on democratic transitions and consolidation. A more recent wave of work has focused on the democratization of democracy, examining civil society, movements, participatory democracy, transnational activism, and the wide range of political actors and forms of collective action that have emerged in a democratizing Global South. Variation across and within democracies remains high, but there have been clear cases of democratic deepening. Improving our understanding of the fabric of democratic institutions and practices, including recent cases of regression, calls for more research, especially in subnational and local contexts.

Dokąd zmierza Wenezuela? Od republiki sfragmentaryzowanej do autorytarnej retrogresji Cháveza i Maduro

Latin America celebrated the symbolic 40th anniversary of the third wave of democratization in 2018. This process began in the Dominican Republic in 1978, then covered the Andean countries. In the 1980s, it reached Central and South America, as well as Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, then Chile and Nicaragua. Only Cuba remained outside this trend. The countries went through an election cycle, which was an unprecedented event in the history of Latin America, dominated by more or less cruel dictatorships and brutal violence against those who criticized them and wanted to change this state. More than 30 presidential elections were held on this continent between 2009 and 2016. There passed 17 elections only during the three years between 2013 and 2016. Thus, democratic election campaigns and presidential elections have become a permanent part of the landscape of this region marked for centuries by strong authoritarianism and dictatorial power. The aim of this analysis is to present Venezuela’s political system nowadays on the map of Latin America 30 years after the opening of the third wave of democratization. We accept the thesis that the violence and brutal strategy of the authorities towards the political opposition cause fear and weaken its action, and thus postpone the possibility of democratic political changes. Systems analysis and comparative analysis should help to find answers to the following questions: What is the condition of the political system in Venezuela? What are the possible scenarios for the introduction of democratic rule after 22 years of authoritarian rule? What is the strategy of the political opposition? Is it able to win the fight against the Maduro dictatorship?

The Re-exploration of Democracy Index

The third wave of democratisation has been sweeping the world since the beginning of the 21st century, and with the expansion of internet applications and the spread of big data algorithms, the term 'democracy' has gradually moved from a definitional distinction to a new form of scientific measurement. A large number of scholars have become interested in measuring the extent of democracy, not only in what democracy is, but also in what constitutes a good democracy. In this paper, we attempt to construct a new index model for measuring the degree of democracy by statistically analysing the data from the World Values Survey, and explore its impact on the degree of democracy in terms of political confidence, political participation, political rights, civil liberties, the rule of law and the level of society.

Insecure Institutions

AbstractMost theories of judicial politics are built around explaining the puzzle of judicial independence. This article instead theorizes explicitly about the conditions under which politicians are prone to manipulate their courts. By positing that courts can partly endogenously shape leaders’ fate at the hands of legislative opponents, we argue that greater political insecurity leads presidents to gut judicial independence, not shore it up. Drawing on a novel data set of judicial crises across 18 Latin American countries following the third wave of democratization, we show that variation in judicial crises is systematically correlated with the president’s risk of nonelectoral instability as captured by the history of past presidential crises, presidential power, and antigovernmental protests. To identify whether the effects of protest on judicial manipulation are causal, we use an instrumental variable approach based on international commodity prices weighted for each country.

Building Parties’ Grassroots: Electoral Systems, Party Organizations, and Social Linkages from a Cross-National Perspective

This article explores the connection between the proportional electoral system (PR) and party organizations as a key institutional determinant of party-group linkages from cross-party and national perspectives. Developing a nuanced framework, we propose an integrated model to address two questions: 01. Do candidate-centred electoral systems affect the development of party-group linkages? 02. In the case that electoral systems do have an impact, is it a direct impact or is it mediated by party organizations? Using V-Party (2020) and V-Dem (2020) databases, we selected and analyzed 617 parties in 48 countries covering third-wave democracies, post-communist countries, and the most extensive proportional democracies in Europe (Western and Eastern Europe) and Latin America between 1989 and 2019 – Large- N cross-national comparative analysis (JANDA, 1980). Based on panel models, we found that the candidate-centred electoral system is negatively related to the development of strong ties between parties and groups, but only in the case of party organizations with low levels of party strength, intraparty cohesion, and financial linkages with non-party groups. When decision-making powers are concentrated in the hands of powerful party elites, these elites can solve coordination problems, mitigate intraparty conflicts, and deal with the consequences of personalization. Therefore, intraparty politics varies empirically since parties respond to their contextual challenges (electoral rules) strategically, with consequences for party-group linkages.

Contested, violated but persistent: presidential term limits in Latin America and sub-saharan Africa

ABSTRACT Presidential term limits have been a crucial institutional feature of the third wave of democratization. They are meant to safeguard democracy by promoting alternation in office and preventing the personalization of power. However, since the 1990s term limits have been subject to frequent contestation by incumbents. This process has often been considered a sign of autocratization because it involves the weakening of other constitutional constraints, such as courts and legislatures. Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa are focal points of these trends, despite their different histories of presidentialism and diverging types of term-limit rules. Term-limit contestations have attracted the attention of scholars working with a global perspective as well as with a regional or country-specific one too. In this article, we argue that bringing together the regional scholarship on Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa can generate new both empirical and theoretical insights. We further present our findings on institutionalization, the power of precedence, incumbent-centred strategies and approaches to protect presidential term limits. We also show that despite frequent reforms, term-limit rules have persisted until today in the majority of constitutions found in the two regions.

Render unto Caesar Just a Little Bit Longer: The Relationship between Constitutional Reforms and Executive Survival

AbstractSince the third wave of democracy, term limits have become a popular fixture of most constitutions intended to constrain the executive. Yet, recent constitutional reforms around the world show that presidents seeking re-election sometimes overturn the entire constitutional order to extend their power. What is the impact of these constitutional manipulations on the longevity of the executive in office? Using survival analysis of all political leaders and national constitutions from 1875 to 2015, this article demonstrates, for the first time, that when ‘authoritarian-aspiring’ presidents remove constitutional term limits, they increase their stay in office by more than 40%. Our findings contrast with a widely held position in the comparative authoritarian literature suggesting that dictators survive longer under institutional constraints. On the contrary, we argue that by removing constitutional barriers, rulers consolidate more power at the expense of their most ambitious allies and can stay in power longer.

Sequences of presidential-term-Limit reforms: Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa

ABSTRACT In this article we take a longitudinal view on presidential-term-limit reforms in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa since the third wave of democratization. Many countries in the two regions (re-)introduced term limits at this time as a democratic safeguard against personal rule and power abuses. Since then, term limits have been contested by a plethora of reform attempts. Such reforms are commonly seen as a risk to democracy since stable institutions are considered essential for democratic consolidation, while term-limit eliminations are associated with processes of autocratization. From the literature on democratic consolidation, institutionalization and presidential-term-limit reforms we distil theoretical expectations on term-limit-reform paths across time and examine how they relate to the evolution of the political regime. To empirically investigate reform paths across regions we apply the research method of sequence analysis. We find that the stability of term-limit rules is more prevalent than expected, but that this stability sometimes masks institutional ineffectiveness under authoritarian regimes. Rule instability induced by frequent reforms can be part of a piecemeal path towards autocratization, but it can also reflect an open-ended tug of war between authoritarian tendencies and democratic resistance.

E-EDUNOMICS –LIBERTIES IN DEMOCRATIZING THE DIGITAL EDUCATION REVOLUTION

Customers, workers, and employers are all seeing their relationships recast by digital platforms. As a result, adapting to technology rather than simply embracing it has various advantages. Education and competition policies will also have to be changed. Future generations should be provided with the skills they will need to succeed in the developing economy through schools and colleges, while technological democratisation looms, a third wave of democracy is on the horizon. The importance of the Internet in promoting more public activism and government openness has been recognised. We propose the E-edunomics Triangle to demonstrate that, while the Internet has democratising impacts, it cannot offer democracy at all levels of society unless technologies are purposefully created for the intricacies of democracy, notably with the involvement of higher educational institutions, governments, and industry in initiating change through technical literacy.

Globalization, state capacity and the third wave of democratization: an empirical study

ABSTRACT Instead of looking at the relationship between globalization and democratization from a social and institutional perspective, this article focuses on the moderating role of state capacities, which are divided into two sub-categories: state coercive capacity and state administrative capacity. Using panel data from 129 countries for 1974–2018, we arrive at two conclusions. First, globalization is positively correlated with democratization, but this relationship weakens with stronger state administrative capacity. Second, while state coercive capacity has an inverse relationship with democratization, state administrative capacity is positively associated with democratization, and this positive effect wanes with greater degrees of globalization.

YÜRÜTME ORGANININ GÜÇLENDİRİLMESİ EĞİLİMİNİNCUMHURBAŞKANLIĞI HÜKÜMET SİSTEMİNE GEÇİŞE ETKİLERİ

One of the most important problems of the countries that have just proclaimed the democracy and are governed by democracy is being experienced at the point of preference for the government system within the process of the third wave of democracy. With the transition to the Presidential System of Government, the existence of the Council of Ministers was ended and the Executive Power has been left to the discretion of the President. Neverthless, in the new system, minis-ters who have a different position than those in the Parliamentary system keeps going on.In our study, I will try to explain the tendency to strengthen the President within the position of Executive authority during the transition to the Presidential Go-vernment System, the reasons for the abolition of the Council of Ministers and, based on these reasons, to hit the target that is appropriate to abolish the Council of Ministers.

Democracy’s third wave and national defense spending

I investigate how the third wave of democracy influenced national defense spending by reference to a panel of 110 countries over the 1972–2013 period. I apply new data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute on military expenditures, which has been extended to years prior to 1988, and four democracy measures to address differences among indices of democracy. The results from a dynamic panel data model suggest that democracy’s third wave reduced defense spending relative to GDP by about 10% within countries that experienced democratization. I exploit the regional diffusion of democracy in the context of the third wave of democratization as an instrumental variable (IV) for democracy in order to overcome endogeneity problems. The IV estimates indicate that democracy reduced national defense spending relative to GDP by about 20% within countries that experienced democratization, demonstrating that OLS underestimates the effect of democracy on national defense spending. The cumulative long-run effect of democratization resulting from the dynamics in defense spending is almost three times larger for both OLS and IV estimates.

The political impact of environmental mobilization: a theoretical discussion in the light of the Argentine case

ABSTRACT Upon the third wave of democratization, environmental mobilization has increased throughout Latin America. In line with this process, the literature has analyzed different aspects of environmental mobilization, such as the types of groups involved and the resources mobilized. Yet, less attention has been paid to the impacts of those mobilizations. So, we ask: what are the impacts of environmental mobilization and how can they be best understood? Based on a review of the literature and on our own studies on Argentina, we build a novel typology to explain the connection between the political impacts of environmental mobilization and their concrete effects on the environment. We argue that the best way to understand those impacts is to analyze the state decisions that respond to such a mobilization, focusing on two key dimensions: the spatial and the temporal scope. We illustrate our typology with the analysis of four different environmental areas in Argentina.

Protests in Hybrid Regime: The Shahbag and Road Safety Movement in Bangladesh

Following the third wave of democracy, several countries got stuck in their transition to full-fledged democracy. These countries have been labeled, among others, as hybrid regimes. Hybrid regimes are neither fully democratic nor entirely autocratic, thus incorporate elements of both democratic and authoritarian systems and these present valuable research questions for political scientists. One avenue for research is legitimization and protests movements in a hybrid political environment. This paper explores how hybrid regimes respond to protests movements and the relationship between protest and legitimacy. Can protest movements provide an opportunity for these regimes to seek legitimacy? Protests movements in Bangladesh between 2013 and 2018 are examined. Two arguments are presented: first hybrid regimes adopt different strategies of responses co-optation or repression depending on a) the nature of the movements, whether the movement is pro or anti-government and b) the level of competition from the opposition; and second protests can provide political opportunities for hybrid regimes to utilize identity- or repression-based legitimacy. By analyzing the question of domestic legitimacy and the relationship between protests and legitimacy in hybrid regimes, this articles aims to provide insights into the mechanism that hybrid regimes use to consolidate their power.