Democratization

How can the seeds of accountability ever grow in authoritarian environments? Embedding accountability into the state is an inherently uneven, partial, and contested process. Campaigns for public accountability often win limited concessions at best, but they can leave cracks in the system that serve as handholds for subsequent efforts to open up the state to public scrutiny. This book explores how civil society ‘thickens’ by comparing two decades of rural citizens' struggles to hold the Mexican state accountable, exploring both change and continuity before, during, and after national electoral turning points. The book addresses how much power-sharing really happens in policy innovations that include participatory social and environmental councils, citizen oversight of elections and the secret ballot, decentralized social investment funds, participation reforms in World Bank projects, community-managed food programs, as well as new social oversight and public information access reforms. Meanwhile, efforts to exercise voice unfold at the same time as rural citizens consider their exit options, as millions migrate to the US, where many have since come together in a new migrant civil society. This book concludes that new analytical frameworks are needed to understand ‘transitions to accountability’. This involves unpacking the interaction between participation, transparency, and accountability.

This book, comprising papers contributed to a conference entitled Constitutional Design 2000 and held at the University of Notre Dame in December 1999, brings together the views of the leading academic specialists on the theory of effective democratization, and of the institutional design tasks involved.

A review of the main theoretical findings in the literature on democratic changes prompts the author to propose an empirical definition of democracy, to discuss the main existing normative definitions and to suggest a new type of regime, the hybrid regime, which is also empirically analysed. The second and third parts of the book cover three geopolitical areas (Southern and Eastern Europe and Latin America) and present the main theoretical results of the empirical analysis on transition towards democracy and installation, consolidation and crisis, deepening and worsening of qualities with all related connections and hypotheses. The analysis reveals two new and relevant results. First, how the different macro-processes should be explored in different ways and with different theoretical ends: only a framework when transition and installations are considered; more precise hypotheses when consolidation and crisis are under scrutiny; connections and theoretical hypotheses when qualities and deepening are studied. Second, the empirical research makes it possible to single out three core sub-processes and a key mechanism. When dealing with transition and democratic installation the core sub-process is the unfolding of a learning process at elite and mass levels towards democratic legitimation. When consolidation and crisis are considered, domestic anchoring and external anchoring are the two core sub-process that should be mentioned. In the macro-processes of deepening or weakening of qualities, the core mechanism is mutual convergence of qualities. This mechanism emerges from the empirical analysis of existing connections between the procedures, contents, and results of democracy.

This book shows how political reformers across the Asia-Pacific region have responded to the reality of their internal diversity by deliberate, innovative, and often highly ambitious forms of political engineering. Harking back to the success of the East Asian ‘Tigers’ and their unorthodox but successful interventions in the economic arena, many democratizing Northeast Asian, Southeast Asian, and Pacific Island states are now seeking to manage political change by far-reaching reforms to their electoral, parliamentary, and party systems. This book is part of the Oxford Studies in Democratization, a series for scholars and students of comparative politics and related disciplines. Volumes concentrate on the comparative study of the democratization process that accompanied the decline and termination of the cold war. The geographical focus of the series is primarily Latin America, the Caribbean, Southern and Eastern Europe, and relevant experiences in Africa and Asia.

The two major political institutions acting in modern democracies–civil society and the state–assume new ways of relating among themselves, thereby producing new democratic governance. Discusses two aspects of this global change: the republican democracy that is emerging in the twenty-first century and public management reform. The objective of this reform is to increase state capacity, to create a ‘strong state’: able to produce representative and accountable democratic governments; able to protect civil rights and assure markets, and so liberal; able to promote social justice, and so social; able to resist corruption and rent seeking, and thus republican. Starts from the assumption that, just as only a strong civil society may guarantee democracy, only a strong state may assure competitive markets. Defines the words ‘nation-state’ (or ‘country’), state, and civil society.

This book is the fourth in a five-volume series examining the cultural, economic, political, and social changes that have transformed Southern Europe (Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain) in the final three decades of the 20th century. Like the preceding three volumes, it examines the impact of three powerful transformative forces that, in general, have eroded away the “exceptional” status of these countries and moved them toward the mainstream of Western industrialized societies: democratization, socioeconomic modernization, and Europeanization. Four public policy sectors (taxation, environmental protection, social welfare programs, and aggregate levels of social spending) and three institutional arenas of the state itself (the judiciary, public administration, and relationships among the national, subnational, and supranational levels of government) serve as the analytical foci of these studies. In contrast with the rapid, “leapfrogging” processes of political change identified in the first two volumes (especially with regard to democratic consolidation and the emergence of “modern” political parties and patterns of electoral behavior), transformations of the state and public policies in these four countries have entailed considerable time-lags, persisting rigidities in some sectors, and striking divergences in the evolution of state structures. At the same time, there have been substantial cross-national differences and divergences among policy sectors (with taxation, aggregate levels of social spending, and, in Spain, political decentralization evolving rapidly, while other policy domains and state institutions have resisted change). The book concludes that these three broad social forces alone cannot account for these patterns. It concludes that they can only be accounted for by political processes, involving the extent to which institutions or policy subsectors had been closely linked to or autonomous from the former, pre-democratic regime, as well as the resources available to defenders of the status quo.

Recently Iran has once again been in the headlines. Reputed to be developing nuclear weapons, the future of Iraq's next-door neighbor is a matter of grave concern both for the stability of the region and for the safety of the global community. President George W. Bush labeled it part of the “Axis of Evil,” and has railed against the country's authoritarian leadership. Yet as Bush trumpets the spread of democracy throughout the Middle East, few note that Iran has one of the longest-running experiences with democracy in the region. This book looks at the political history of Iran in the modern era, and offers an in-depth analysis of the prospects for democracy to flourish there. After having produced the only successful Islamist challenge to the state, a revolution, and an Islamic Republic, Iran is now poised to produce a genuine and indigenous democratic movement in the Muslim world. Democracy in Iran is neither a sudden development nor a western import. The concept of democracy in Iran today may appear to be a reaction to authoritarianism, but it is an old idea with a complex history, one that is tightly interwoven with the main forces that have shaped Iranian society and politics, institutions, identities, and interests. This book seeks to understand why democracy failed to grow roots and lost ground to an autocratic Iranian state. Why was democracy absent from the ideological debates of the 1960s and 1970s? Most important, why has it now become a powerful social, political, and intellectual force? How have modernization, social change, economic growth, and the experience of the revolution converged to make this possible?

The field of deliberative civic engagement is rapidly growing around the world—but it remains highly fragmented. Motivated by the widely recognized need to pool the collective experience and knowledge of scholars, practitioners, and advocates, this book represents the first comprehensive assessment of deliberative civic engagement. Each chapter in the book addresses a broad, yet specific “big question” about deliberative civic engagement, and reviews both published and unpublished writings across disciplines, settings, locations, and processes to assess what we know, how we know it, and what we do not yet know. Part I provides a broad overview of deliberative civic engagement, defining terms and examining the many organizations doing work related to deliberative civic engagement. Part II introduces the reader to process and design issues central to deliberative civic engagement, including questions about recruitment and participation, communication, inclusion and diversity, and the use of online tools. Part III examines issues integral to deliberative civic engagement, including questions about the impacts and outcomes of such processes for individuals, communities, and policy, and well as questions about the evaluation of such processes. Part IV concludes the book with two chapters. This book examines and responds to critics' concerns about deliberative civic engagement. The other draws together the work in the previous sections, examining uncertainties and unresolved questions, and looks to the future, developing an agenda for the advancement of the practice and study of deliberative civic engagement.