Steven Levitsky y Daniel Ziblatt, profesores de Harvard, nos presentan una obra extremadamente atingente para nuestros tiempos. Y es que How Democracies Die se origina desde la preocupación política de los autores al observar la creciente fragilidad contemporánea de la democracia. A esta preocupación se le añade, y esto es muy notorio, un profundo conocimiento sobre los quiebres democráticos y los autoritarismos que ambos autores han construido a lo largo de muchos años de estudio
This volume is about India's deep and complex relationship with its chosen form of government. It is an interdisciplinary book with approaches drawn from history, anthropology, sociology, political science and social geography. We believe this volume provides new perspectives on how to approach and analyse the complexity of India's democracy. The book's unfortunate publishing history also tells a tale of India.
We test if the political regime of a country associates with the patience of the citizens. Recent findings indicate that i) more democratic countries tend to have higher growth, and ii) patience correlates positively with economic development, suggesting a potential link between the political regime and patience. We document a positive association between the level of democracy and patience for most of the political regime indices that we use, even after controlling for region, economic development, geographical conditions, and culture. We report some evidence that political participation is behind our findings.
Estimates of democracy's effect on the public sector are obtained from comparisons of 142 countries over the years 1960-90. Based on three tenets of voting theory - that voting mutes policy preference intensity, political power is equally distributed in democracies, and the form of voting processes is important - we expect democracy to affect policies that redistribute, or economically favor the political leadership, or enhance efficiency. We do not find such differences. Instead democracy is correlated with policies that limit competition for public office. Alternative modeling approaches emphasize the degree of competition, and deemphasize the form or even existence of voting processes.
Does public cheap talk by a biased expert benefit voters? The answer depends on the nature of democratic institutions and the extent of communication possibilities. Expert endorsements induce office-seeking parties to serve the expert's interests, hurting voters. Expert advocacy makes policies respond to information, helping voters. Together, policy advocacy and partisan endorsements are often better than either alone. Their interaction creates a delegation benefit that makes indirect democracy superior to direct democracy and office-seeking parties better than those motivated by public interest. But voter welfare is highest when an expert captured technocratic party competes against an uninformed populist one.
Viele Studien zeigen, dass die Beteiligung an politischen Protesten in mittel- und osteuropäischen Ländern geringer ausfällt als in Westeuropa. Das Ausmaß und die Ursachen dieser Ost-West-Partizipationslücke werden jedoch immer noch debattiert. Diese Dissertation untersucht die Ursachen dieses europäischen Protestgefälles. Inspiriert von den Theorien politischer Sozialisation wird untersucht, inwiefern ein frühes Erleben von (1) Repression und (2) Mobilisierung während der Transition zur Demokratie das Protestverhalten verschiedener Generationen in Mittel- und Osteuropa geprägt hat. Hierfür werden mehrebenen Alters-Perioden-Kohorten-Modelle mit wiederholten länderübergreifenden Umfragedaten genutzt. Studie 1 zeigt, dass ein frühes Erleben von Repression einen nachhaltigen Effekt auf die Teilnahme an Demonstrationen hat, nicht aber auf Petitionen und Boykotte. Darüber hinaus beeinflusst die Art der erlebten Repression die Richtung des Effekts: Personen, deren Bürgerrechte während ihrer Jugend eingeschränkt wurden, scheinen in ihrem späteren Leben häufiger an Demonstrationen teilzunehmen. Das Gegenteil ist der Fall für Personen, die Verletzungen persönlicher Integrität erlebt haben. Studie 2 zeigt, dass das Erleben der Mobilisierung während der Transition zur Demokratie diese Ost-West-Protestlücke nicht moderiert. Studie 3, eine Analyse des Protestverhaltens von Ostdeutschen, bestätigt, dass die Erfahrung der bottom-up Transition die mit gewaltsamer Repression verbundene Demobilisierung nicht kompensiert. Durch diese neu gewonnen Erkenntnisse zum Verhältnis von Regimewechsel und Zivilgesellschaft, verbindet und bereichert diese Dissertation die Forschungsfelder zu politischem Verhalten, sozialen Bewegungen und Demokratisierung. ; Many studies have shown that protest participation is lower in Central and Eastern Europe than in Western Europe. Yet, the extent of and causes underlying the East-West participation gap are still debated in the literature. This thesis sheds new light on the sources of the European protest divide. Inspired by political socialization theories, it examines how early exposure to (1) repression and (2) mobilization during the transition to democracy has shaped the protest behavior of different generations in postcommunist democracies. This projects applies multilevel age-period-cohort models on data from repeated cross-national surveys to measure the effects of these types of exposure. Study 1 reveals that early exposure to repression has a lasting effect on demonstration attendance but not on participation in petitions and boycotts. Furthermore, the direction of this effect depends on the type of repression experienced by citizens: early exposure to civil liberties restrictions increases citizens' participation in demonstrations while exposure to personal integrity violations depresses their participation. Study 2 demonstrates that exposure to mobilization during the transition to democracy does not moderate the East-West protest gap. Study 3, an analysis of East Germans' protest behavior, confirms that the experience of a bottom-up transition does not compensate for the demobilization associated with violent repression. By generating new insights into the relation between regime change and civil society, this project bridges and contributes to the fields of political behavior, social movements, and democratization.
In the literature on democratization the mainstream of theoretical and empirical consolidology uses the dichotomy autocracy versus democracy. Democracy is generally conceived of as 'electoral democracy'. This simple dichotomy does not allow a distinction between consolidated liberal democracies and their diminished sub-types. However, over half of all the new electoral democracies represent specific variants of diminished sub-types of democracy, which can be called defective democracies. Starting from the root concept of embedded democracies, which consists of five interdependent partial regimes (electoral regime, political rights, civil rights, horizontal accountability, effective power to govern), the article distinguishes between four diminished sub-types of defective democracy: exclusive democracy, illiberal democracy, delegative democracy and tutelary democracy. It can be shown that defective democracies are by no means necessarily transitional regimes. They tend to form stable links to their economic and societal environment and are often seen by considerable parts of the elites and the population as an adequate institutional solution to the specific problems of governing 'effectively'. As long as this equilibrium between problems, context and power lasts, defective democracies will survive for protracted periods of time.
This dissertation examines the causes and electoral consequences of political dynasties in developed democracies. The researcher develops a model of candidate recruitment and selection to explain the persistence of "legacy politics" in some democracies, such as Japan, focusing in particular on electoral rules and internal party recruitment processes. This model is then tested using legislator-level biographical data from eight democracies, and an in-depth, candidate-level case study of Japan, where electoral reform has also resulted in party adaptation in candidate selection methods. The researcher finds that "legacy" candidates enjoy an "inherited incumbency advantage" in both the selection and election stages of their careers. However, the relative value of this inherited incumbency advantage varies significantly by the institutional contexts of the electoral system and the candidate recruitment process within parties
In this paper we consider a dynamic model of government formation and termination in parliamentary democracies. Our analysis accounts for the following observed phenomena: (1) Cabinet reshuffles; (2) Cabinet replacements; (3) Early elections; (4) Surplus governments; (5) Minority governments; (6) The relative instability of minority governments.
As of 2009, about one-third of the world's countries were governed by some form of dictatorship and an even larger percentage of the world's population lived under authoritarian rule. Despite the prevalence of dictatorships, scholars understand little about the internal politics of these regimes. The opaqueness surrounding authoritarian governance – especially compared to the transparency required in democracies – has impeded our ability to learn how dictatorships function. Despite the inherent limitations in studying dictatorships, an increasing number of studies elaborate on authoritarian regimes. Scholars of authoritarianism concur: dictatorships are not one and the same. Differences among regimes lead to systematic variations in how their leaders behave and in the policies they choose. We examine how leadership differs across dictatorships. Our research contributes to the burgeoning research on authoritarian regimes and broadens our understanding of leadership across political systems.
This article argues for inductive exploration of mass–elite differences in new democracies. Grounded in the "delegate model" of political representation, I do this by studying issue positions and issue salience of masses before turning to elites. The article demonstrates this approach using Tunisia, the only Arab democracy, by analysing survey data and originally coded party manifesto data. From an issue position perspective, the article uncovers mass–elite incongruence on the democratic–authoritarian and secular–Islamist political dimensions. From an issue salience lens, there is mass–elite congruence on the economic dimension. How mass–elite incongruence unfolds might affect the future of democracy in Tunisia. ; Peer Reviewed
El despliegue casi generalizado de las democracias iliberales en el centro de Europa es inquietante. La mayoría de esos países (Polonia, Hungría, República Checa, Eslovaquia) están afectados pero, en esos mismos países, abundan los partidos extremistas, además de los que están en el poder. En Eslovaquia, hay varios partidos nacionalistas, algunos de ellos muy radicales. En Hungría, el partido Jobbik deja a Orban por moderado. El fenómeno es amplio y profundo. Como consecuencia, aumentan las disensiones entre la Europa occidental y la Europa central. La incomprensión viene de lejos y no lo habíamos advertido…
The major predecessor to Ringen's and my own efforts to measure democratic quality in terms of the purpose of democracy is Robert Dahl's seminal book Polyarchy (1971). Measuring the quality of democracy requires two prior judgments: (1) making sure that, in terms of institutional characteristics, a country is sufficiently democratic, and that, as a minimum, it has universal suffrage, and (2) that its democracy has been uninterrupted for a minimum number of years. To an important extent, higher democratic quality can be attributed to institutional characteristics of consensus democracy, especially proportional representation.
Constitutional theory has long regarded the separation of powers as unique to presidential systems and incompatible with parliamentary ones. In this Article, I suggest that the core values of the separation of powers are achievable in both presidential and parliamentary systems, contrary to the conventional wisdom which insists that the separation of powers is the exclusive province of presidentialism. This conclusion – that parliamentary and presidential systems are comparably receptive to the practical and philosophical strictures of the separation of powers – unlocks interesting possibilities for rethinking constitutional structure anew.
The major predecessor to Ringen's and my own efforts to measure democratic quality in terms of the purpose of democracy is Robert Dahl's seminal book Polyarchy (1971). Measuring the quality of democracy requires two prior judgments: (1) making sure that, in terms of institutional characteristics, a country is sufficiently democratic, and that, as a minimum, it has universal suffrage, and (2) that its democracy has been uninterrupted for a minimum number of years. To an important extent, higher democratic quality can be attributed to institutional characteristics of consensus democracy, especially proportional representation.
