The article of record may be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00036846.2014.1000529 ; This article examines the impact of civil war on democratization, particu- larly focusing on whether civil war provides an opportunity for institu- tional reform. We investigate the impact of war termination in general, along with prolonged violence, rebel victory and international interven- tion on democratization. Using an unbalanced panel data set of 96 coun- tries covering a 34-year period, our analysis suggests that civil war lowers democratization in the succeeding period. Our findings also suggest that United Nations intervention increases democratization, as do wars ending in stalemates. However, wars ending in rebel victories seem to reduce democratization. These findings appear robust to conditioning, different instrument sets, modelling techniques and the measurement of democracy.
Final Manuscript copy. ; The article of record as published may be located at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00036846.2014.1000529 ; Dataset is included. ; This paper examines the impact of civil war on democratization, particularly focussing on whether civil war provides an opportunity for institutional reform. We investigate the impact of war termination in general, along with prolonged violence, rebel victory, and international intervention on democratization. Using an unbalanced panel data set of 96 countries covering a 34-year period, our analysis suggests that civil war lowers democratization in the succeeding period. Our findings also suggest that United Nations intervention increases democratization, as do wars ending in stalemates. However, wars ending in rebel victories seem to reduce democratization. These findings appear robust to conditioning, different instrument sets, modelling techniques, and the measurement of democracy.
Draft 6/4/2013 ; This paper examines the impact of civil war on democracy. Drawing from the literature on war and democracy, we investigate the impact of prolonged violence, war termination, rebel victory, and international intervention on democratization. Using an unbalanced panel data set of 96 countries covering a 34-year period, our analysis suggests that civil war lowers democratization in the succeeding period. Our findings suggest that United Nations intervention increases democratization, as do wars ending in stalemates. However, wars ending in rebel victories seem to reduce democracy. These findings appear robust to conditioning, different instrument sets, and the measurement of democracy.
After World War II, democratization came into fashion as panacea for countries in transition. This trend continues to be an issue in the 21st century too. The implications of the transformation for public as well as private life are considerably different for women than for men. Studies have shown that even in democratic states gender inequality has been reinforced than effectively attenuated. Feminist theories take up the issue of female discrimination on a theoretical level and provide explanations and measures in order to erase these inequalities. Gender mainstreaming is an approach to address gender inequalities in practice. The European Union, as a community of values, promotes gender mainstreaming not only among its member states, but also for its candidate states in the context of external democracy promotion. This paper examines the current gender initiatives in Serbia which is currently an EU candidate country. In fact, there are many gender activities form different civil society actors and NGOs around Serbia. The positivist feminist theories are more apt to explain the current gender activities. The post-structuralist theories mainly deal with micro situations. Therefore, it is difficult to apply these perspectives in a study on the overall gender situation in a specific country. By contrast, these theories could be applied for studying micro situations within a particular country. Accordingly, the theory has implications on the research design for such a study. A study based on post-structuralist theory would be based on ethnography rather than statistical data and a literature review.
This seminar is part of a series to provide societies and their journals with information and resources to help their communities be more knowledgeable and prepared to share data (and software) in a way that is relevant and meaningful for each discipline. This is a 12-month series. Democratization of Data 1 October 2021, 10am ET (1400 UTC) Speakers: Sabina Leonelli, Department of Sociology, Philosophy and Anthropology, University of Exeter (bio) Louise Bezuidenhout, Institute for Science, Innovation, and Society, University of Oxford (bio) Moderator: Doug Schuster, NCAR - US National Center for Atmospheric Research Description: Research is dependent on findable, accessible, and well-documented data. And yet there continue to be fundamental challenges in data access equity across disciplines, borders, and even teams. Research data needed for local and regional decision-making can be difficult to find, understand, or lacking altogether. Dr. Sabina Leonelli and Dr. Louise Bezuidenhout will share an overview of their around these challenges and recommend areas where societies can bring awareness and support improvements. Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/OTNEQudyZuc ; Special thank you to Laura Lyon of AGU and her support organizing and managing this seminar.
The current Internet infrastructure is not able to support independent evolution and innovation at physical and network layer functionalities, protocols, and services, while at same time supporting the increasing bandwidth demands of evolving and heterogeneous applications. This paper addresses this problem by proposing a completely democratized optical network infrastructure. It introduces the novel concepts of optical white box and bare metal optical switch as key technology enablers for democratizing optical networks. These are programmable optical switches that their hardware is loosely connected internally and completely separated from their control software. To alleviate their complexity, a multidimensional abstraction mechanism utilising software defined network technology is proposed. It creates a universal model of the proposed switches without exposing their technological details. It also enables a conventional network programmer to develop network applications for control of the optical network without specific technical knowledge of the physical layer. Furthermore, a novel optical network virtualization mechanism is proposed, enabling composition and operation of multiple co-existing and application specific virtual optical networks sharing the same physical infrastructure. Finally, the optical white box and the abstraction mechanism are experimentally evaluated, while the virtualization mechanism is evaluated with simulation.
Jordan's political-liberalization program, initiated in 1989, represents the longest sustained such opening in the Arab world today. During this time, Jordan has held three national parliamentary elections, enacted a number of liberalizing laws, removed many restrictions on the press, and minimized the role that the security services, or mukhdbarit, play in repressing opposition. Moreover, the liberalization program has survived a number of severe challenges, including the second Gulf War and the subsequent loss of Jordan's major regional trading partner, Iraq; the implementation of a difficult domestic austerity program; and the conclusion of a controversial peace treaty with Israel. Democratization in Jordan has not followed the same path as the recent democratic transitions in East Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. By closely examining Jordan's program of political liberalization' since 1989, I will argue that the process is best understood as a series of pre-emptive measures designed to maintain elite privilege in Jordan while limiting the appeal of more fundamental political change. The regime has skillfully managed and directed a process that has throughout protected the four pillars of power in Jordan: the monarchy and its coterie, the army and security services, wealthy business elites, and East Bank tribal leaders. It has simultaneously sought to undermine the only social force legally able to disrupt key regime policies, the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, and its political party, the Islamic Action Front (IAF). In other words, uncertain about its ability to survive a deepening crisis, the regime undertook sufficient reform to assure its political longevity, but without altering the core structures of power in Jordan. I term this "defensive democratization." The concept of defensive democratization provides an additional nuance to our understanding of democratic transitions more generally by focusing attention on pre-emptive liberalizing strategies available to rentier states. This essay concludes by arguing that the strategy of defensive democratization in Jordan may not be able to withstand the likely political volatility in, and Islamization of, Palestinian politics in Jordan. Ironically, what may pose the greatest threat to the democratic transition in Jordan is peace, with the sorts of demographic and political challenges the 1994 agreement with Israel has unleashed. Indeed, contrary to the optimistic forecasts found in many of the recent works on civil society, the end of the Arab-Israeli conflict may well usher in a new era of authoritarianism in Jordan-and elsewhere in the Arab world.
Anecdotal evidence from pre-modern Europe and North America suggests that rulers are forced to become more democratic once they impose a significant fiscal burden on their citizens. One difficulty in testing this taxation causes democratization hypothesis empirically is the endogeneity of public revenues. I use introductions of value added taxes and autonomous revenue authorities as sources of quasi-exogenous variation to identify the causal effect of the fiscal burden borne by citizens on democracy. The instrumental variables regressions with a panel of 122 countries over the period 1981-2008 suggest that revenues had on average a mild positive effect on democracy.
From the act of ordinary humans in shaping the world around them, to a structuralized professional practice, the perception and meaning of design has evolved. The institutional and closed definition of design in the years since the industrial revolution has failed to recognize the ingenious designs that come from the common man, the everyday designer. These solutions are contextual, sustainable and affordable and a necessity, especially for developing countries. This paper on the democratization of design seeks to recognize the ingenuity of this 'diffuse' or non-expert design and present cases of a few successful and path breaking innovations from the grassroots of India. It further explores the idea of a democratized design world where everyone would design. It would not mean de- professionalizing design, rather a new role for the designer as a facilitator to create this new reality of a participative co-design process. As we increasingly take cognizance of the impact of design in domains like businesses, organizations and even governance we are already on our way to create a pluriverse of design which creates value through a collective design capacity.
After World War II, democratization came into fashion as panacea for countries in transition. This trend continues to be an issue in the 21st century too. The implications of the transformation for public as well as private life are considerably different for women than for men. Studies have shown that even in democratic states gender inequality has been reinforced than effectively attenuated. Feminist theories take up the issue of female discrimination on a theoretical level and provide explanations and measures in order to erase these inequalities. Gender mainstreaming is an approach to address gender inequalities in practice. The European Union, as a community of values, promotes gender mainstreaming not only among its member states, but also for its candidate states in the context of external democracy promotion. This paper examines the current gender initiatives in Serbia which is currently an EU candidate country. In fact, there are many gender activities form different civil society actors and NGOs around Serbia. The positivist feminist theories are more apt to explain the current gender activities. The post-structuralist theories mainly deal with micro situations. Therefore, it is difficult to apply these perspectives in a study on the overall gender situation in a specific country. By contrast, these theories could be applied for studying micro situations within a particular country. Accordingly, the theory has implications on the research design for such a study. A study based on post-structuralist theory would be based on ethnography rather than statistical data and a literature review.
Do remittances stabilize autocracies? Remittances—money sent by foreign workers to individuals in their home country—differ from other sources of external non-tax revenue, such as foreign aid, because they accrue directly to individuals and thus raise the incomes of households. We argue that remittances increase the likelihood of democratic transition by undermining electoral support for autocratic incumbents in party-based regimes. Remittances therefore make voters less dependent on state transfers. As a result, autocracies that rely heavily on the broad-based distribution of spoils for their survival, namely party-based regimes, should prove especially vulnerable to increases in remittances. Evidence consistent with this argument suggests that remittances promote democratization in some dictatorships.
Over the past two decades authoritarian regimes in many parts of the developing world, as well as in East/Central Europe, have been replaced by democracies. This paper looks at the issue of democratization from a gender perspective. While many of the problems afflicting the 'new democracies' (such as the elitist character of political parties, and the failure of the state to guarantee civil and political rights or make a significant dent in poverty) affect all citizens, they are manifested and experienced in gender-specific ways. Women's persistent exclusion from formal politics, in particular, raises a number of specific questions about how to reform democratic institutions, since these institutions are not automatically gender-equitable. In a democratic polity citizens are presumed to have equal rights, opportunities and voice in the governance of the public domain. All versions of liberal democracy link the right to vote with the right to stand for office. Yet women are hugely under-represented in national assemblies and governments. Women's political invisibility is particularly striking in those countries where their political mobilization contributed to the demise of authoritarianism and the transition to democracy. The suppression of the conventional political arena under authoritarian rule very often shifts the political centre of gravity to 'movement-type activities' and gives prominence to women's political mobilization. What very often unites the disparate groups constituting the women's movement in these contexts is their commitment to bringing about a change in government. Nevertheless, social, political and ideological heterogeneity of women's groups, tensions between the feminist and the feminine streams, and divisions over strategy foreshadow future difficulties in forging political coalitions and aggregating interests to effect change in more 'normal' times. The new wave of democratization has not had a feminizing affect on the parliaments and the governments of the new democracies. Deeply entrenched barriers exclude women from meaningful participation in political parties. In the post-transition period, the more established political parties in countries like Brazil and Chile have remained remarkably resistant to women's participation. Newly formed parties of the left have been more accessible to women, though participation in these smaller parties may arguably produce more symbolic than real benefits. The masculine construction of political authority makes it extremely difficult for women to be elected into office without some form of electoral engineering, such as quotas or reserved seats. The adoption of quotas and reserved seats for women by the South African ANC and the Ugandan NRM, which dominate politics in their respective countries, has produced a significant increase in women's political profile. But given the lack of any realistic political options for women outside these two parties, women's political leverage vis-à-vis the party hierarchy remains strictly limited. Besides the issue of political equality and democratic justice, the argument for increasing women's representation in decision-making bodies also hinges very often on an implicit assumption that women can, more effectively than men, contribute to the formulation of woman-friendly policies because they are somehow better able to represent women's interests. But this is a controversial assumption. Questions continue to be raised about how such a diverse group as 'women' can find meaningful representation in the polity in the absence of procedures for establishing what the group wants or thinks, and in the absence of mechanisms for keeping the 'representatives' accountable to their constituents. Questions have also been raised as to why the growing presence of women in politics (in some contexts) is not translating into substantive change toward policies capable of making a positive impact on the lives of ordinary women. Given the limited success to date in feminizing political parties and getting women elected, it is not surprising that other strategies are also needed for bringing women's interests into the policy-making process. One such strategy is to enter and work directly through the public administration. Democratic transitions, however restricted, represent propitious moments for making interventions because the state is potentially more fluid than at other times. But this space is often limited because of the top-down, elitist nature of the transition. Moreover, the ability of those working on the 'inside' to push for change on a sustained basis depends less on having an institutional space per se, and much more on the relationships with autonomous women's organizations on the 'outside' that they are able to establish and exploit. But it is very often difficult to establish effective inside-outside relationships-popular women's movements and groups, in particular, may feel alienated from the 'women's machineries' in the public administration and from the women who staff these units. They may also deliberately distance themselves from public authorities because of recent experiences of corruption and co-optation. Moreover, the creation and staffing of women's spaces within the state may in itself weaken the women's movements outside the state. Although in some contexts the state has incorporated the participants and the banners of the women's movements, it has been extremely difficult for those on the 'inside' to translate even the watered-down goals of the movement into concrete policies capable of making a positive impact on the lives of female citizens. The efforts to induce change have been patchy and, in the realm of public expenditure decisions, extremely difficult. This is in part due to the lack of effective pressure from an organized women's constituency (noted above) that can articulate a coherent set of issues and priorities for policy attention, and monitor its adoption and implementation by state agencies. It is also due to the disabling environment in which women bureaucrats find themselves. The deliberate attempt to create insulated technocracies, as is currently occurring in some countries and some areas of policy, has serious implications for democratic consolidation. While gender bureaucrats well-versed in economic analytical skills may be able to contribute to what goes on inside insulated technocracies (in ministries of finance, for example), this can hardly substitute for open public debate enabling women's groups and networks, along with other social groups, to scrutinize economic decisions and policies that affect the well-being of their constituents. But women's machineries and women parliamentarians have had more significant impact in some critical areasraising the legitimacy of violence against women as a political issue; enhancing women's awareness of their existing rights through civic education; and facilitating social legislation on highly significant issues such as divorce, child custody, domestic violence, and reproductive health and rights, which address very fundamental aspects of women's oppression. But here again, success in raising these controversial issuesand maybe even legislating for themhas gone hand in hand with a failure of the state (the judiciary and the police, in particular) to guarantee such important individual civil rights across national territories and for all social strata. One cross-cutting concern in the post-transition period is that the national women's movements have been stripped of their most competent cadres, as leaders and key organizers have been drawn into the new state institutions representing gender issues, into political parties and into parliament. Another common concern is the 'NGO-ization' of women's movements, especially through donor-driven, poverty alleviation programmes. Together, it seems, they have contributed to the weakening of both national women's movements and the cross-class alliances that some had managed to forge. The formalization provoked by the proliferation of NGOs and the competition for funds has several problematic implications. Self-reliance and self-help, which characterize this model of social provisioning, can be euphemisms for reliance on the unpaid work of women (who are recruited by NGOs in voluntary and secondary positions). Moreover, politically these projects seem to have taken away the advocacy and campaigning element of local participation. The perennial issue of feminist autonomy continues to preoccupy members of women's movements-whether 'in' or 'out' of the mainstream institutions. Given the dangers of co-optation by the state or party in power, there is a distinct need for maintaining some autonomous space for interest articulation and aggregation. But at the same time, by taking an autonomous path, women's groups and movements also run the risk of becoming politically isolated-hence the need for a politics of engagement with the mainstream. Ultimately, the long-term viability and effectiveness of the women's movement depends on its ability to work at different levels and in different arenas-both 'inside' and 'outside' the mainstream-forging strategic insider-outsider alliances. This message is sometimes lost on advocates of 'mainstreaming' who see the process of institutional change as a purely technocratic exercise of tinkering with institutions in a political vacuum. To be effective and sustainable, the two sets of strategies need to go hand in hand.
The United States is losing the competition for global power to China, especially on the African continent. This thesis aims to analyze opportunities for the United States to take advantage of China's withdrawal from Ethiopia in order to develop relations with the quickly growing country and influence the country toward democratization. This author found that while democracy is not likely, through increasing relations with Ethiopia's prime minister, the United States has an opportunity to push for increased individual freedoms for Ethiopians. The author relied on open-source information and strategic analytic techniques often employed by the U.S. intelligence community.
We study the process of endogenous democratization from inefficient oligarchic systems in an economy where heterogeneous individuals can get involved in predation activities. The features of democracies are shown to be crucially related to the conditions under which democratization initially takes place. The political regime and the extent of redistribution implemented under it depend on the allocation of de facto political power across the different social groups. The cost of public enforcement of property rights depends on the extent of predation activities in the economy. The theory highlights the importance of inequality in natural resources and availability of human capital for endogenous democratic transitions. Multiple politico-economic equilibria can be sustained conditional on expectations about property rights enforcement. This generates history dependence. Democratic transitions supported by a large consensus serve as coordination device and lead to better protection of property and more stable political systems than democratic transitions imposed in conflictual environments. We test the novel predictions using available cross-country data. The link between the type of democratic transition and the outcomes under democracy is also investigated using novel data on constitutional principles. The findings support the theoretical predictions.
We construct a model of revolution and transition to democracy under individualistic and collectivist cultures. The main result is that, despite facing potentially more challenging collective action problems, countries with individualistic cultures are more likely to end up adopting democracy earlier than countries with collectivist cultures. Our empirical analysis suggests a strong and robust association between individualistic cultures and average polity scores and durations of democracy, even after controlling for other determinants of democracy emphasized in the literature. We provide evidence that countries with collectivist cultures also are more likely to experience autocratic breakdowns and transitions from autocracy to autocracy.
