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Established Democracies (established + democracy)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences100%

Selected Abstracts

Why the democratic nation-state is still legitimate: A study of media discourses

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL RESEARCH, Issue 4 2009
ACHIM HURRELMANN
Focusing on media discourses, this article maps the communicative reproduction of legitimacy in Great Britain, the United States, Germany and Switzerland. It argues that political communication constitutes a distinctive dimension of legitimation that should be studied alongside public opinion and political behaviour. Research on legitimation discourses can help us understand why the legitimacy of established democracies remains stable in spite of the challenges of globalisation: Delegitimating communication tends to focus on relatively marginal political institutions, while the core regime principles of the democratic nation-state, which are deeply entrenched in the political cultures of Western countries, serve as anchors of legitimacy. These democratic principles also shape the normative benchmarks used to evaluate legitimacy, thus preventing a ,de-democratisation' of legitimation discourses. Finally, the short-lived nature of media interest as well as ritualistic legitimation practices shield the democratic nation-state from many potentially serious threats to its legitimacy. [source]

Differentiating the democratic performance of the West

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL RESEARCH, Issue 3 2003
JOE FOWERAKER
It is a commonplace of comparative politics that the democratic performance of the established democracies of the West is both uniform and superior to that of other democracies across the globe. This commonplace both reflects and reinforces the mainstream measures of democracy, like those of Freedom House or Polity III, that fail to differentiate the democratic performance of the West. This article examines this commonplace by deploying the measures of democratic performance contained in the newly constructed Database of Liberal Democratic Performance, and uses descriptive statistics (means and variance) to compare the performance of individual Western democracies, as well as the West overall with the ,rest'. The Database is designed to capture a wider normative range of performance than the mainstream measures, and shows that the performance of the West is neither uniform nor superior in every respect, especially with regard to civil and minority rights. These findings are explored and confirmed by comparative case studies of minorities in the criminal justice systems of those Western democracies that tend to perform worst in this respect. In conclusion, it is suggested that the findings may begin to change the way we view the relationships between economic growth and democracy, political culture and democracy, and even constitutional design and democracy. [source]

How Likely is Proportional Representation in the House of Commons?

GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION, Issue 4 2009
Lessons from International Experience
This article asks what international evidence suggests about the likelihood of major reform of the system used to elect the British House of Commons. It identifies four paths that have generated major electoral reform or come close to doing so in established democracies in recent decades and examines how likely each is to lead to reform in the UK. It argues that, on this evidence, reform in the UK is unlikely but not impossible. [source]

Re-founding Representation: Wider, Broader, Closer, Deeper

POLITICAL STUDIES REVIEW, Issue 2 2010
Lucy Taylor
This article challenges conventional understandings and methodologies associated with the study of political representation. It imagines representation as a power relationship and shifts attention from elections to a closer examination of the interface between representatives and those they claim to represent. It argues for the need to make representation studies wider, moving our focus to study polities beyond the confines of prosperous, established democracies. Secondly, we should broaden our understanding of representation agents in two ways. We should consider how non-voters are represented and we should include diverse forms of social organisations, problematising relationships of representation within these groups and taking their political-representational role seriously. Thirdly, we should move closer, conducting not only macro-level analyses but also micro-level studies, exploring representation among and between individuals and groups in order to understand the complex relationships, motives and dynamics of power at work. Finally we need to go deeper, looking at our own subject positions as scholars critically and challenging the neutrality of the ideas and assumptions that we use as intellectual tools. Moreover, we should promote deeper relationships of representation, reconnecting it to ideas and practices of participation, and promoting the role of accountability in ,closing the loop' and enhancing democracy. [source]

Learning and re-learning regime support: The dynamics of post-communist regimes

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL RESEARCH, Issue 1 2002
William Mishler
The political support of citizens of new democracies reflects two sets of experiences. Initially, people are socialized into an undemocratic regime; then, they must re-learn political support in relation to a new regime. In an established democracy, it is difficult to disentangle the effect of early socialization and current performance because both refer to the same regime. However, this is both possible and necessary in countries where there has been a change in regime. Critical questions then arise: When, whether and how do citizens determine their support for their new regime? At the start of a new regime past socialization should be more important but, after a few years, current performance should become more important. We draw on 47 Barometer surveys between 1991 and 1998 in ten more or less democratic post-communist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to test the relative importance of early socialization influences, the legacy of the communist past, and the political and economic performance of new regimes. We find that economic and political performance explains the most variance in support and, secondarily, the communist legacy. Early socialization is insignificant. However, contrary to economic theories of voting, the impact of political performance is greater than the impact of economic performance in post-communist countries , and its impact is increasing. [source]