			Home About us Contact

Democratic Transition (democratic + transition)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	80%
Law and Criminology	9%
2 Other Domains	11%

Selected Abstracts

When Cartels Fail: The Role of the Political Class in the Italian Democratic Transition

GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION, Issue 1 2000
Sergio Fabbrini
[source]

Corporatism and Democratic Transition: State and Labor During the Salinas and Zedillo Administrations

LATIN AMERICAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY, Issue 4 2002
James G. Samstad
ABSTRACT A long process of free-market reforms and gradual democratization seems to be dismantling Mexico's corporatist system of labor representation. A thorough analysis of the country's corporatist institutions yields theoretical reasons to believe that Mexico's practice of labor relations is indeed changing. An empirical examination of the nation's labor congress and ruling party during the two previous presidential administrations (1988,2000) demonstrates that corporatism is being transformed at a practical level, although the process of reform has been complex and uneven at best. The continuing strength of an officialist labor sector will complicate the task of establishing a new system of labor representation, a problem that may have important implications for future democratic consolidation. [source]

Trust and Democratic Transition in Post-Communist Europe , Edited by Ivana Markova

POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 3 2006
Arthur H. Miller
Books reviewed: Trust and Democratic Transition in Post-Communist Europe. Edited by Ivana Markova. Oxford University Press, New York, NY. 2004. 217 pp. [source]

The Mexican Presidential and Congressional Elections of 2000 and Democratic Transition

BULLETIN OF LATIN AMERICAN RESEARCH, Issue 3 2001
Darren Wallis
The article examines the presidential and congressional elections of July 2000 in Mexico. The elections brought to an end more than 70 years of single party government and the culmination of a gradual democratisation process stretching back at least a decade. The long term decline in the bases of support for the regime and the changing institutional rules for elections and parties are described by way of contextualising the campaign itself and its leading protagonists. While the new rules of the game guaranteed free and fair elections, issues of internal party democracy and negative, personality-based campaigning do not paint a universally rosy democratic picture. Analysis of the election results demonstrates how the opposition was able to move beyond its traditional geographic confines and challenge across the country. However, voters did not give an unambiguous victory to Vicente Fox; his alliance does not possess a majority in either house of congress. Divided government and developments in the party system are considered as two key issues that will shape Mexico's democratic future. [source]

Portents of Pluralism: How Hybrid Regimes Affect Democratic Transitions

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, Issue 3 2009
Jason Brownlee
The original studies of "competitive authoritarianism" and "hegemonic authoritarianism" inspected the occurrence of hybrid regimes during the 1990s but stopped short of testing their propensity for democratic change. This article assesses the causal effects of hybrid regimes, and the post,cold war period itself, on regime breakdown and democratization. Using a dataset of 158 regimes from 1975 to 2004, and a discrete measure for transitions to electoral democracy, I find that competitive authoritarian regimes are not especially prone to losing power but are significantly more likely to be followed by electoral democracy: vigorous electoral contestation does not independently subvert authoritarianism, yet it bodes well for democratic prospects once incumbents are overthrown. [source]

Limits to Democratic Development in Civil Society and the State: The Case of Santo Domingo

DEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE, Issue 1 2003
Anne Marie Choup
Some scholars see civil society as key to democratization of the political system. In this view, pressure from civil society forces democratization of the state. However, this disregards the fact that changes in civil society's behaviour require changes in political society , changes are reciprocal. The demand,making strategies of grassroots organizations in the Dominican Republic in 1999 provide a good example of this dynamic: the incomplete nature of the democratic transition (specifically, the persistence of paternalism and clientelism) constrained the democratic strategy choices of the civil society organizations. Just as democratization within political society is inconsistent and incomplete, so will be the demand,making strategies of the grassroots towards the state. The Dominican case is of particular interest as it illustrates the blend of personalized and institutionalized elements characteristic of democratic transition. [source]

Democratization and State Feminism: Gender Politics in Africa and Latin America

DEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE, Issue 3 2002
Ihejirika, Philomina E. Okeke
This article addresses the link between state feminism and democratization in the global South. The authors use the contrasting cases of Chile and Nigeria to show some of the factors that encourage women to exploit the opportunities presented by transitions to democracy, and link the outcome of state feminism to the strategies and discourses available to women during democratization. Based on evidence from the cases analysed, the authors propose that the strategic options available to women are shaped by at least three factors: (1) the existence of a unified women's movement capable of making political demands; (2) existing patterns of gender relations, which influence women's access to arenas of political influence and power; and (3) the content of existing gender ideologies, and whether women can creatively deploy them to further their own interests. State feminism emerged in Chile out of the demands of a broad,based women's movement in a context of democratic transition that provided feminists with access to political institutions. In Nigeria, attempts at creating state feminism have consistently failed due to a political transition from military to civilian rule that has not provided feminists with access to political arenas of influence, and the absence of a powerful women's movement. [source]

Accession's Democracy Dividend: The Impact of the EU Enlargement upon Democracy in the New Member States of Central and Eastern Europe

EUROPEAN LAW JOURNAL, Issue 4 2004
Wojciech Sadurski
The purpose of this article is to examine this claim, that accession will provide a ,democracy dividend' in this fashion. To this end, the article begins by examining the political conditionality of the accession process, and the extent to which the process of democratisation can be understood as a result of ,external' pressures. It also discusses the extent to which the effectiveness of political conditionality is likely to survive after the accession takes place. The article then moves on to consider the effects of accession upon democracy in the states of the region by looking in detail at three areas that have been particularly important: the role of national parliaments, the new constitutional courts, and the tendency towards decentralisation and regionalism. The article concludes by noting that, although not all of the developments discussed are necessarily good for democracy in the region, the real dividend coming from the accession process lies in the fact that, on a macro-level, membership in the EU will make the democratic transition in Central and Eastern Europe practically irreversible. [source]

Labor Reform and Dual Transitions in Brazil and the Southern Cone

LATIN AMERICAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY, Issue 1 2002
María Lorena Cook
ABSTRACT The sequencing of transitions to democracy and to a market economy shaped the outcome of labor law reform and prospects for expanded labor rights in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. Argentina and Brazil experienced democratic transitions before market economic reforms were consolidated in the 1990s. During the transition, unions obtained prolabor reforms and secured rights that were enshrined in labor law. In posttransition democratic governments, market reforms coincided with efforts to reverse earlier labor protections. Unable to block many harmful reforms, organized labor in Argentina and Brazil did conserve core interests linked to organizational survival and hence to future bargaining leverage. In Chile this sequence was reversed. Market economic policies and labor reform were consolidated under military dictatorship. During democratic transition, employers successfully resisted reforms that would expand labor rights. This produced a limited scope of organizational resources for Chilean unions and reduced prospects for future improvements. [source]

Public Experiences of Police Violence and Corruption in Contemporary Russia: A Case of Predatory Policing?

LAW & SOCIETY REVIEW, Issue 1 2008
Theodore P. Gerber
"Predatory policing" occurs where police officers mainly use their authority to advance their own material interests rather than to fight crime or protect the interests of elites. These practices have the potential to seriously compromise the public's trust in the police and other legal institutions, such as courts. Using data from six surveys and nine focus groups conducted in Russia, we address four empirical questions: (1) How widespread are public encounters with police violence and police corruption in Russia? (2) To what extent does exposure to these two forms of police misconduct vary by social and economic characteristics? (3) How do Russians perceive the police, the courts, and the use of violent methods by the police? (4) How, if at all, do experiences of police misconduct affect these perceptions? Our results suggest that Russia conforms to a model of predatory policing. Despite substantial differences in its law enforcement institutions and cultural norms regarding the law, Russia resembles the United States in that direct experiences of police abuse reduce confidence in the police and in the legal system more generally. The prevalence of predatory policing in Russia has undermined Russia's democratic transition, which should call attention to the indispensable role of the police and other public institutions in the success of democratic reforms. [source]

The Struggle between Security and Democracy: An Alternative Explanation of the Democratization of South Korea

PACIFIC FOCUS, Issue 1 2010
Dongsoo Kim
South Korea experienced democratic reform relatively recently. Before its significant democratic reform in 1987, South Korea had been dominated by a series of authoritarian regimes over a few decades since its liberation from Japanese colonial rule. This study aims to uncover a set of variables that helped the democratic development of South Korea. For that purpose, I will demonstrate that prior to democratization the politics of South Korea were characterized by the struggle between democracy and security, and that the authoritarian leaders were successful in utilizing the unstable international security environment to strengthen their power during those years. I will also show that the favorably changing security environment played a significant role in the process of democratic transition. In so doing, I will argue that consideration of the external security environment is essential in the discussion of democratization. [source]

Does Truth Lead to Reconciliation?

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, Issue 2 2004
Reconciliation Process, Testing the Causal Assumptions of the South African Truth
Throughout the world, truth commissions have been created under the assumption that getting people to understand the past will somehow contribute to reconciliation between those who were enemies under the ancien regime. In South Africa, the truth and reconciliation process is explicitly based on the hypothesis that knowledge of the past will lead to acceptance, tolerance, and reconciliation in the future. My purpose here is to test that hypothesis, based on data collected in a 2001 survey of over 3,700 South Africans. My most important finding is that those who accept the "truth" about the country's apartheid past are more likely to hold reconciled racial attitudes. Racial reconciliation also depends to a considerable degree on interracial contact, evidence that adds weight to the "contact hypothesis" investigated by western social scientists. Ultimately, these findings are hopeful for South Africa's democratic transition, since racial attitudes seem not to be intransigent. [source]

Social representations of democratic transition: Was the Philippine People Power a non-violent power shift or a military coup?

ASIAN JOURNAL OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 3 2010
Cristina Jayme MontielArticle first published online: 16 AUG 2010
This research looked at social representations of the 1986 People Power in the Philippines among Filipino civilians and the military. Using mixed qualitative,quantitative methods, the research collected military narratives, ran a survey of civilians and military personnel and reviewed newspaper accounts of People Power anniversary celebrations over 20 years. Civilians saw People Power as a strong and positive power shift, while the military viewed it as an aborted coup led by military officers that was weak and bad. The findings about the social representations of transition are linked to civilian,military social identities after 1986 and illuminate the subjective landscape of State power contests in a new democracy. [source]

Working Under Monarchy: Political Leadership and Democracy in Nepal

ASIAN POLITICS AND POLICY, Issue 1 2009
Ina Acharya
The purpose of this study was to discover the prospects and challenges of democracy in Nepal. Mired with corruption and escalating conflict, Nepal is in its 16th year of democratic transition, with little hope for a fully functional, consolidated, liberal democracy. In trying to study the causes, the author hypothesizes that political leaders have made decisions that have had an adverse effect on democracy in Nepal. Empirical research has been conducted on landmark decisions made by political leaders to test the hypothesis. The author concludes that charismatic leaders, depending on their vision, statesmanship, and liberalism, choose to decide differently, and these decisions determine their mode of governance and its impact on democracy. [source]

The structural context of recent transitions to democracy

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL RESEARCH, Issue 3 2004
RENSKE DOORENSPLEET
An analysis of the influence of these structural factors is however important, and it has not yet been done in a systematic way in order to explain recent transitions to democracy since 1989. It will be shown that some structural factors indeed play a role in generating transitions to democracy. These results contradict the idea that structural factors can be ignored when explaining recent transitions to democracy. An additional finding in this article is that some structural factors, such as economic development, growth and a country's role in the world-system had an unexpected impact on democratic transitions since the end of the Cold War. These findings set bounds to the strength of the modernization and world-system theories to explain transitions to democracy, but on the other hand, democratic diffusion played a significant role after 1989. In the (structural) context in which a state had a peripheral role, a low level of economic growth and a high proportion of democratic neighbors, the probability of a state's transition to democracy was high. This structural context seemed to be fertile soil for recent transitions to democracy. [source]

The Fate of Former East German Police in Reunified Germany, 1990,1996: The Dialectics of Inclusion and Exclusion

JOURNAL OF HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY, Issue 2 2010
KATY A. CROSSLEY-FROLICK
This article analyzes the vetting of former East German police in Berlin and Brandenburg in the context of the former East Germany's transition to democracy and German unification. Police are one of the most critical and sensitive sectors of the civil service and typically, along with teachers, among the first groups to be vetted in the context of democratic transitions. The German case illustrates the often unpredictable and inconsistent approaches to vetting that led to very different outcomes throughout the East. It identifies several factors that influenced vetting and employment prospects for former East German police officers. These included political geography, who did the vetting, how a candidate's past was interpreted (whether aggravating or mitigating circumstances were weighed), the institutional arrangements for vetting, state-mandated guidelines or criteria for determining suitability, and timing. [source]

Labor Reform and Dual Transitions in Brazil and the Southern Cone

Externalised Justice and Democratisation: Lessons from the Pinochet Case

POLITICAL STUDIES, Issue 2 2006
Madeleine Davis
The attempt to try Pinochet in Spain exemplified and publicised a trend to use ,externalised justice' to tackle impunity for human rights crimes. It also demonstrated the possibilities and limitations of externalised justice initiatives, in terms of securing democracy at the national level, and of advancing accountability for serious crimes under international law. In Chile, Argentina and Spain the Pinochet affair served to restart stalled impulses towards accountability, accelerate democratic reform and challenge the legitimacy of compromises conceded during earlier democratic transitions. With regard to the wider role of international law in limiting impunity, expectations for rapid or consistent replication of ,the Pinochet precedent' have not been met. Despite some notable achievements, the exercise of universal jurisdiction by national courts remains inconsistent and controversial. The International Criminal Court (ICC) provides a new mechanism for external justice. An aggressive US campaign to undermine it, and to reverse progress in international law, is a serious obstacle to fulfilment of the ICC's enforcement role. However, at the domestic level the ICC may have similar indirect effects to the Pinochet litigation, boosting domestic enforcement prospects and strengthening democratic commitment. In both cases the key role for externalised justice is as stimulus or back-up. This suggests that progress in tackling impunity depends on incremental and dynamic interaction between domestic and international law, and between national and transnational actors. [source]

Dominant Party Strategy and Democratization

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, Issue 1 2008
Kenneth F. Greene
How do incumbent parties strategize against challengers when a new partisan cleavage cuts across the incumbent's electoral coalition? This article argues that a two-dimensional extension of Riker's anticoordination thesis conflicts with Downsian extensions. It shows that when voters coordinate on a single challenger based on their shared preference on a cross-cutting cleavage, a vote-maximizing incumbent party should move away from the challenger on the primary dimension of competition, even at the risk of abandoning the center. The article develops this hypothesis with reference to dominant parties in competitive authoritarian regimes where challenger parties constantly attempt "heresthetical" moves by mobilizing regime issues into the partisan debate, and it tests the predictions with an original sample survey of national leaders of Mexico's Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI). It also spells out the implications of the findings for dominant party survivability in democratic transitions and, more broadly, for incumbents' spatial strategies in the face of new partisan cleavages. [source]

Parasites, democratization, and the liberalization of values across contemporary countries

BIOLOGICAL REVIEWS, Issue 1 2009
Randy Thornhill
Abstract The countries of the world vary in their position along the autocracy,democracy continuum of values. Traditionally, scholars explain this variation as based on resource distribution and disparity among nations. We provide a different framework for understanding the autocracy,democracy dimension and related value dimensions, one that is complementary (not alternative) to the research tradition, but more encompassing, involving both evolutionary (ultimate) and proximate causation of the values. We hypothesize that the variation in values pertaining to autocracy,democracy arises fundamentally out of human (Homo sapiens) species-typical psychological adaptation that manifests contingently, producing values and associated behaviours that functioned adaptively in human evolutionary history to cope with local levels of infectious diseases. We test this parasite hypothesis of democratization using publicly available data measuring democratization, collectivism,individualism, gender egalitarianism, property rights, sexual restrictiveness, and parasite prevalence across many countries of the world. Parasite prevalence across countries is based on a validated index of the severity of 22 important human diseases. We show that, as the hypothesis predicts, collectivism (hence, conservatism), autocracy, women's subordination relative to men's status, and women's sexual restrictiveness are values that positively covary, and that correspond with high prevalence of infectious disease. Apparently, the psychology of xenophobia and ethnocentrism links these values to avoidance and management of parasites. Also as predicted, we show that the antipoles of each of the above values,individualism (hence, liberalism), democracy, and women's rights, freedom and increased participation in casual sex,are a positively covarying set of values in countries with relatively low parasite stress. Beyond the cross-national support for the parasite hypothesis of democratization, it is consistent with the geographic location at high latitudes (and hence reduced parasite stress) of the early democratic transitions in Britain, France and the U.S.A. It, too, is consistent with the marked increase in the liberalization of social values in the West in the 1950s and 1960s (in part, the sexual revolution), regions that, a generation or two earlier, experienced dramatically reduced infectious diseases as a result of antibiotics, vaccinations, food- and water-safety practices, and increased sanitation. Moreover, we hypothesize that the generation and diffusion of innovations (in thought, action and technology) within and among regions, which is associated positively with democratization, is causally related to parasite stress. Finally, we hypothesize that past selection in the context of morbidity and mortality resulting from parasitic disease crafted many of the aspects of social psychology unique to humans. [source]