Democratization [2 ed.] 0198732287, 9780198732280

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THE MOST COMPLETE AND AUTHORITATIVE TEXTBOOK ON DEMOCRATIZATION Democratization provides insightful coverage of all important aspects of contemporary democratization, including theories, actors, dynamics, and real-world developments. lt brings together leading experts from a range of international backgrounds, including some of the best-known names in the field, making it an invaluable resource for students of democratization.

NEW TO THIS EDITION:

• A new chapter on social media highlights this important new dynamic in democratization. • New chapters on Post-Communist Europe and the Post-Soviet Space demonstrate the significant changes and developments in these regions in recent years. • Updates throughout the text reflect dramatic developments in world politics since the publication of the first edition, including the aftermath of the Arab Spring, and autocratizing tendencies in various regions of the world. lncreased coverage of resilient authoritarianism highlights this key area of contemporary debate.

•

• An expanded glossary helps you to develop your technical vocabulary in this complex field of study.

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online resources

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www.oup.com/uk/haerpfer2e/

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:t\n important and brilliant book which will be essential reading for students and scholars of democracy and democratization · Yosef Kamal lbssa. Univers1ty of Copenhagen

ABOUT THE EDITORS:

Christian Haerpfer is Professor of Sociology at the United Arab Emirates University. Patrick Bernhagen is Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Stuttgart. Christian Welzel is Professor for Political Culture Research at Leuphan University of Lüneburg. Ronald F. lnglehart is Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan.

This textbook is supported by a range of online resources designed to help you take your learning further.

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ISBN 978- 0-19 -8 73228 -0

UN I V ERSITY PR ESS

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www.oup.com

9 780198 732280

Democratization SECOND EDITION

Christian W. Haerpfer Patrick Bernhagen Christian Welzel Ronald F. lnglehart

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries

© Oxford University Press 2019 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First edition 2009 Impression: 3 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2018959888 ISBN 978---0--19-873228-0 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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Preface and Acknowledgements to the First Edition Since the global wave of democratization peaked in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the subject has become of crucial concern for any attempt of understanding the contemporary political world. Consequently, over the past ten years, courses on democratization have established themselves as core components of a large, and increasing, number of undergraduate and postgraduate curricula in politics and international relations. At the same time, the availability of high-quality textbooks in that field has been very limited. The idea for a new book to fill this gap first surfaced in a conversation between the editors and Ruth Anderson at Oxford University Press in October 2006. They agreed that an introductory text that would introduce students to the theoretical and practical dimensions of democratization in an accessible and systematic way has been lacking for quite some time. Bringing together leading authors from diverse international backgrounds, including some of the best known names in the field, as well as younger scholars, they decided to produce the present book. The resulting text treats in a single volume all important aspects of contemporary democratization, including theories of democratization, critical prerequisites and driving forces of democratic transition, pivotal actors, and institutions, and the conditions and challenges for the consolidation of new democracies, including the analysis of failed democratization. To demonstrate how all these factors have affected democratization around the world, we decided that all major world regions should be covered, and we included cases of successful democratic consolidation as well as countries in which the future of democracy remains highly uncertain. In the process of writing and editing this book, we have incurred great debt to an even greater number of people-too many to list in detail. But we would like to particularly acknowledge the help of Ecaterina McDonagh, who has been responsible for creating the Online Resource Centre supporting the book. Of course we also thank all our contributors for fitting their expertise into the general framework of this book. Thanks are also due to Ruth Anderson, Suzy Armitage, and Thomas Sigel, who have been patient and supportive at different stages of the process. The contribution of Christian W. Haerpfer to this volume has been supported by a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship of the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian and Ukrainian Studies in Washington DC, and by the CINEFOGO network under the Sixth Framework Programme of the European Union. The University of Aberdeen has been very supportive of this project and facilitated the participation of five scholars from its Department of Politics and International Relations as editors and/ or authors. We are also grateful to a considerable number of anonymous reviewers whose comments early on in the process were immensely helpful in improving the structure and content of this book. Needless to say, we are solely responsible for any remaining errors. The Editors (Aberdeen, Ann Arbor, and Bremen) 2009

Preface and Acknowledgements to the Second Edition At the time of this writing, almost ten years have passed since the first edition of this volume. During this time, we have witnessed the Color Revolutions and the Arab Spring, followed by a reverse wave of democratization, rising authoritarianism, democratic backsliding, and electoral triumphs of right-wing populism. This recent tum of events has nourished a new pessimism about the prospects of democracy and a general sense of democracy in crisis. Coping with this change of the academic and public mood prompted us to thoroughly re-write the introductory and concluding chapters of this volume. Likewise, all authors of the first edition have profoundly updated andwhere necessary-modified their chapters, in recognition of the newly emerging sense of crisis. Furthermore, we have recruited new authors to cover aspects in the context of democratization (and autocratization) that require more attention. Above all, this holds true for Larry Diamond's chapter on the role of the new media and the Internet. Furthermore, Christian Haerpfer's chapter on the post-communist world has been divided into two separate chapters for Central/Eastern Europe, on one hand, and the post-Soviet space, on the other. The glossary and references have also been thoroughly updated. In acknowledgement of all authors' formidable contributions to this second edition of Democratization, we wish to express at this occasion our deep and sincere gratitude-in the hope that a third edition will tum back to a more optimistic outlook on democracy. Last but not least, our sense of sincere gratitude extends to our enormously competent and helpful editor at Oxford University Press, Francesca Walker-thank you, indeed. Key parts of the research embodied in Christian Welzel's contribution to this edition in Chapters 1, 2, and 9 have been funded by the Russian Academic Excellence Project '5-100'. The Editors (Ann Arbor, Lilneburg and Moscow; Stuttgart, and Vienna) 2018

Brief Contents

How to use this book How to use the online resources About the Editors About the Contributors

xxii xxiv XXV

xxvi

Introduction

Christian Welzel, Ronald lnglehart, Patrick Bernhagen, and Christian W. Haerpfer

PART ONE

Theoretical and Historical Perspectives

2 Theories of Democratization

19 21

Christian Welzel 3 Democratic and Undemocratic States

40

Richard Rose 4 Measuring Democracy and Democratization

52

Patrick Bernhagen 5 Long Waves and Conjunctures of Democratization

67

Dirk Berg-Schlosser 6 The Global Wave of Democratization

82

John MarkDff and Daniel Burridge

PART TWO

Causes and Dimensions of Democratization

7 The International Context

IOI 103

Hakan Yilmaz 8 The Political Economy of Democracy

119

Patrick Bernhagen 9 Political Culture, Mass Beliefs, and Value Change Christian Welzel and Ronald F. lnglehart I O Gender and Democratization

Pamela Paxton and Kristopher Velasco

134

158

x

Brief Contents I I Social Capital and Civil Society Natalia Letki

171

12 Social Movements and Contention in Democratization Processes Federico M. Rossi and Donate/la de/la Porta

182

Actors and Institutions

PART THREE

195

13 Conventional Citizen Participation Ian McAllister and Stephen White

197

14 Political Parties Leonardo Morlino

212

15 Institutional Design in New Democracies Matthijs Bogaards

228

16 The Media Katrin Voltmer and Gary Rawnsley

239

17 Social Media Larry Diamond and Zak Whittington

253

18 A Decade of Democratic Decline and Stagnation Laura Jakli, M. Steven Fish, and Jason Wittenberg

267

PART FOUR

Regions of Democratization

283

19 Southern Europe Richard Gunther

285

20 Latin America Andrea Oelsner and Mervyn Bain

305

21 Post-Communist Central and Eastern Europe Christian W. Haerpfer and Kseniya Kizilova

322

22 Post-Soviet Eurasia Christian W. Haerpfer and Kseniya Kizilova

341

23 The Middle East and North Africa Francesco Cavatorta

364

24 Sub-Saharan Africa Michael Bratton

384

25 East Asia Doh Chu/I Shin and Rollin F. Tusa/em

401

Brief Contents

PART FIVE

Conclusions and Outlook

26 Conclusion: The Future of Democratization Christian Welzel, Ronald lnglehart, Patrick Bernhagen, and Christian W. Haerpfer

421 423

Glossary

432

Bibliography

440

Index

476

xi

Detailed Contents

How to use this book How to use the online resources About the Editors About the Contributors

xxii xxiv XXV

xxvi

Introduction

Christian Welzel, Ronald lnglehart, Patrick Bernhagen, and Christian W. Haerpfer The New Pessimism about Democracy A New Look at Democracy

2

Re-Examining the Centennial Democratic Trend: A Reversal?

2

Democracy's Persistent Culture-Boundedness

3

Democracy's Societal Pre-Conditions Global Support for Democracy-A False Standard

7

10

Economic Inequality as Democracy's Key Challenge

14

The Value of Democracy

15

Plan of the Book

16

PART ONE

Theoretical and Historical Perspectives

2 Theories of Democratization

19 21

Christian Welzel Introduction

22

The Nature of Democracy

22

Ancient Democracy

23

The 'Cool Water' Origin of the West's Emancipatory Dynamic

24

The Principle of Representation

24

The West-East, North-South Gradient

25

Rent-Seeking States

25

Patterns of Colonialism

27

Industrialization and Class Divisions

27

Ethnic and Religious Cleavages Socioeconomic Modernization

29 29

International Conflicts and Regime Alliances

30

Elite Pacts and Mass Mobilization

31

State Repression and Grassroots Pressures

32

The Role of Emancipative Values

32

•...

,;'~

Detailed Contents Elite Concessions versus Pressures from Below

33

Institutional Configurations

34

The Emancipatory Path to Sustainable Democracy

35

A Typology of Democratization Processes

36

Conclusion

36

3 Democratic and Undemocratic States Richard Rose Introduction Defining Democratic States

40

41 41

The state as the starting point

41

The characteristics of a democratic state

42

The State of States Today

43

Different kinds of accountable democracies

44

Different kinds of undemocratic states

45

Most regimes are incompletely democratic or autocratic

45

Evolution, False Starts, and Democratization Backwards Getting rid of tangible evils Dynamics of Democratic and Undemocratic States

47 47 48

Dynamics of democratic regimes

49

Dynamics of constitutional autocracy

49

Dynamics of plebiscitarian autocracy

50

Dynamics of unaccountable autocracy

50

Conclusion

4 Measuring Democracy and Democratization Patrick Bernhagen Introduction

50 52

53

Is Democracy a Matter of Degree?

53

Conceptualizing democracy

53

Sortal versus scalar concepts of democracy

54

Dimensions and Indicators of Democracy

56

Dimensions of democracy

56

Indicators of democracy

57

Aggregating dimensions and indicators into scales

58

The global wave of democratization according to the four major indices

61

Hybrid Regimes and Sub-Types of Democracy

63

Conclusion

64

5 Long Waves and Conjunctures of Democratization Dirk Berg-Schlosser Introduction

67

67

The Overall Picture

69

The First Long Wave, 1776-1914

71

The first positive conjuncture, 19 I8/19

72

xiii

xiv

Detailed Contents The Second 'Long Wave' (with some Intermittent Turbulences), 1945-88

74

The Latest Conjuncture, 1989/90

75

A Period of Uncertainty

76

Conclusion

79

6 The Global Wave of Democratization

82

John Markoff and Daniel Burridge 1 Introduction

83

Democracy Ascending

83

National, Regional, and Global Processes

88

Mediterranean Europe, 1970s

89

Latin America, 1980s and early 1990s

89

Soviet/communist bloc, 1989 and beyond

91

Asia, 1980s and 1990s

92

Africa, early 1990s

93

Middle East and North Africa

94

Beyond the Global Wave Into the twenty-first century

PART TWO

Causes and Dimensions of Democratization

7 The International Context

95 96

IOI

103

Hakan Yi/maz Introduction

103

The International Context of Democratization: Theoretical Approaches

104

Democracy Promotion Strategies of the USA and the European Union

106

Democracy promotion by the USA

107

Democracy promotion by the EU

II 0

Globalization, Global Civil Society, and Democratization

112

Conclusion

114

8 The Political Economy of Democracy

119

Patrick Bernhagen Introduction

119

Economic and Political Development

121

What Capitalism Does for Democracy

123

What Democracy Does for Capitalism

126

The Role of Business Actors in Democratic Transition

128

Politico-Economic Reform

130

Reforming systems based on import substitution industrialization

130

Reforming systems with a history of export-led development

131

Reforming collectivist economies

131

Reforming rentier states Conclusion

131 132

Detailed Contents 9 Political Culture, Mass Beliefs, and Value Change Christian Welzel and Ronald F. lnglehart

134

Introduction

134

Mass Beliefs-The Missing Link between Structure and Action

135

The Centrality of Emancipative Values

136

Measuring Emancipative Values

137

The Importance of Regime Legitimacy

138

The Emancipatory Impulse of Action Resources

140

Some Key Qualifications

142

The 'Tectonic Model' of Regime Change

143

Updated Evidence

145

Conclusion

154

IO Gender and Democratization Pamela Paxton and Kristopher Velasco

158

Introduction

158

Gender in Definitions of Democracy

159

Women's Democratic Representation: Formal, Descriptive, Substantive, and Symbolic Representation

161

Women's Suffrage as an Aspect of Democratization

163

Women's Representation as an Aspect of Democracy

165

Women and Democratization Movements

167

Conclusion

168

I I Social Capital and Civil Society Natalia Letki Introduction

171

172

Defining Civil Society and Social Capital

172

Civil Society and Social Capital in Democratization

173

Networks as sources of information

174

Associations as schools of democracy

175

Trust and democracy

175

Reprise

176

Paradoxes of Civil Society and Social Capital in New Democracies

176

Are civil society and social capital necessary for democratization!

176

'Civil society against the state'!

177

Social capital, civil society, and democracy: what comes first!

177

Are all forms of social capital conducive for democracies!

177

Civil Society, Social Capital, and Democracy: the Western Perspective!

178

Conclusion

179

12 Social Movements and Contention in Democratization Processes Federica M. Rassi and Danatel/a de/la Porta

182

Introduction

183

Social Movements in Research on Democratization

183

Structural approaches: modernization theory and historical class perspective

183

xv

xvi

Detailed Contents Elite transactional process approach: transitology The Role of 'Democratization from Below': Perspectives from Social Movement Studies Cycles of protest and waves of strikes during democratization Resistance to the non-democratic regime Liberalization and the upsurge of mobilization Transition to procedural democracy Consolidation of a procedural (or substantive!) democracy Expansion to post-representative democracy Conclusion

PART THREE

Actors and Institutions

13 Conventional Citizen Participation Ian McAllister and Stephen White Introduction Dimensions of Political Participation Election Turnout Institutions and Political Participation Citizens and Political Participation Political Participation and its Consequences Conclusion

14 Political Parties Leonardo Morlino Introduction: Parties as an Essential Component of Democracy Are Parties the Key Actors of Transition! Are there Alternative Actors! Variations in transitions to democracy Elite continuity, party continuity, and elite and party discontinuity International and external factors Party role in democratic transition How do Parties Anchor a Democracy! Electoral stabilization The establishment of definite patterns of partisan competition Stabilization of party leadership Legitimation Anchoring Interaction between legitimation and anchoring When do Parties Fail! Conclusion

15 Institutional Design in New Democracies Matthijs Bogaards Institutions and Institutional Design Institutional Choices President and Parliaments

184 186 187 188 189 190 191 191 192

195 197

197 198 201 204 205 208 209 212

213 215 215 217 218 219 220 220 220 221 221 222 223 224 225 228

228 229 230

Detailed Contents Duverger's and Sartori's Electoral Laws

231

Parties and Party Systems

232

The Evidence from New Democracies

233 235 237

Electoral System Design and Ethnic Conflict Management Conclusion

16 The Media Katrin Vo/tmer and Gary Rawnsley Introduction Media and Democracy: Normative Foundations Media and the Dynamics of Regime Change International broadcasting and the demonstration effect Communication technologies and the convergence between 'old' and 'new' media Democratizing the Media Media-state relationships Media regulation and media laws The ambivalence of press freedom The Media and the Market Media after communism: Central and Eastern Europe Media after capitalist dictatorship: Latin America and Asia Post-colonial media: Africa Media and the Quality of New Democracies Conclusion

17 Social Media Larry Diamond and Zak Whittington Introduction Social Media as Information Channels Online news and opinion Information crowdsourcing and government transparency Social Media as Organizing Tools Protest mobilization The value and limits of social media in driving democratic change The Empire Strikes Back: Digital Censorship and Repression Conclusion

I8 A Decade of Democratic Decline and Stagnation Laurajakli, M. Steven Fish, and Jason Wittenberg Introduction Theory and Central Concepts Measuring Democracy Democratic Stagnation What Undermines Democracy? The Limits of Explanations Based on Structural Factors Agents of Democratic Failure

239

240 240 241 241 243 244 245 245 246 247 247 248 248 249 250 253

254 255 255 256 257 257 259 261 263 267

267 268 269 271 272 276 278

xvii

xvi ii

Detailed Contents Strengthening Legislatures and Curtailing Executive Power

280

Altering the Structural Factors

280 281

Conclusion

PART FOUR

Regions of Democratization

19 Southern Europe Richard Gunther

285

Introduction

286

Portugal

286

First transition to democracy

286

Second transition to democracy

287

Reasons for democratic transition

287

Greece

289

The Cyprus conflict as trigger of transition

289

The role of Karamanlis in transition

290

Founding elections and first democratic government Spain

291 292

Elite pact as main feature of transition

292

Backward legitimacy

292

The new democratic constitution

293

Politics of consensus

294

Explaining Democratization in Southern Europe

296

The international context

296

Business and the economy

297

Social movements

298

Actors: the role of elite pacts

299

Epilogue

300 302

Latin America

305

Conclusion

20

283

Andrea Oelsner and Mervyn Bain Introduction

306

Historical Overview

306 307 307 307 308 308 309 311 312 315 317 320

The historical impact of the Cuban Revolution Argentina Chile Mexico Venezuela The International Context Economic Factors Political Culture and Society Political Parties and Social Movements Institutional Challenges Conclusion

Detailed Contents 21 Post-Communist Central and Eastern Europe Christian W. Haerpfer and Kseniya Kizilova Introduction Stage One: Failed Reforms and the Decline of Communist Regimes, 1968--88 Stage Two: The End of Communist Political Regimes, 1989-91 Stage Three: The Creation of New Democracies From New Democracies towards Consolidated Democracies From New Democracies towards Electoral Democracies From New Democracies towards Emerging Democracies Conclusion

22 Post-Soviet Eurasia Christian W. Haerpfer and Kseniya Kizilova Introduction Decline of the Soviet Union 1985-91 The End of the Soviet Union in 1991

322

323 324 326 326 327 332 336 338 341

342 343 344

The Creation of New Political Systems of the Russian Federation and the Newly Independent States From Soviet Republics towards Consolidated Democracies From Soviet Republics towards Electoral Democracies Georgia Moldova Ukraine Kyrgyzstan From Soviet Republics towards Electoral Autocracies Russia Armenia Azerbaijan Belarus Kazakhstan Tajikistan From Soviet Republics towards Full Autocracies Uzbekistan Turkmenistan Conclusion

23 The Middle East and North Africa

345 347 349 349 351 352 353 354 354 356 356 357 358 358 359 359 360 361 364

Francesco Cavatorta Introduction Authoritarian Persistence in the Arab World The International Context The role of lslamist political actors Political Culture and Society Business and the Economy Agents of Democratization and Democratic Failure Weak multi-party systems under state control

365 367 370 371 373 376 378 379

xix

XX

Detailed Contents Challenges

380

Conclusion

381

24 Sub-Saharan Africa Michael Bratton

384

Introduction

385

Africa's Democratic Wave

386

A period of transition

386

Features of transition

386

Key Cases of Regime Transition

388

South Africa

388

Ghana

389

Nigeria

390

Zimbabwe

391

Explanatory Factors International influences

391 391

Economic conditions

392

Political culture and society

392

The roles of political actors

393

Conjuncture and causality

394

Institutional Challenges

394

Elections

395

Political parties

395

Civil society

396

Legislatures and courts

396

Conclusion

25 East Asia Doh Chui/ Shin and Rollin F. Tusa/em* Introduction

397

401

East Asia as a Region of Democratization

402 402

Democratic Transition

405

Modes of democratic regime change

405

The Philippines South Korea

407 407

Taiwan

408

Thailand

408

Mongolia

409

Cambodia

409

Indonesia

410 411 412 412 414 417

Causes of democratic transitions Substantive Democratization Democratic governance Prospects of Democratization in China Conclusion

Detailed Contents

PART FIVE

Conclusions and Outlook

26 Conclusion: The Future of Democratization Christian Welzel, Ronald lnglehart, Patrick Bernhagen, and Christion W. Haerpfer

421 423

Varieties of Autocracy

423 424 425

Development

426

External Threats and Group Hostilities

427 427 429 429

Introduction Tactics and Strategies

An Evolutionary Perspective The Democratic Agenda of the Future Spreading Democracy to New Regions Consolidating and Improving New Democracies Deepening Old Democracies

430 430

Glossary

432

Bibliography

440

Index

476

xxi

:This textbook is ~nriched with-~ r~ge of learning f~a,ture~_ to help' you navigat~ ·i:heJ~ and-rclnfcirte your ·_-

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OXFORD

FOR ~TUQENTS: · Explore rele~~t issues in democratization in greater depth with additional online .• case studies. ' . Re0se key terms fro~ the text with a flashcard glossary. Expa1:1,d your knowfodge of the_ subject with weblinks to additional reliable sources ..

FOR REGISTERED LEqURERS: - . Use the adaptable PowerPoirit slides a~the basis for lecture presentations, or as hand-outs in class; Re4Jto;ce key them~~ a~d pr~mpt critical evalu~tiol!- ':wfth carefully d~~igned se~ar qilestions. • . ·, . . . . '

About the Editors

Christian W. Haerpfer is Director of the Institute for Comparative Survey Research in Vienna, and President of the World Values Survey Association. Patrick Bernhagen is Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. Christian Welzel is Professor of Political Culture Research at the_ Center for the Study of Democracy at Leuphana University in Lueneburg, Germany. He is also the Senior Foreign Advisor and Research Professor at the Laboratory for Comparative Social Research (LCSR) at the National Research University-Higher School of Economics in Moscow; Russia. Ronald F. Inglehart is Research Professor in the Center for Political Studies at the University of Michigan, USA.

About the Contributors

Mervyn Bain, University of Aberdeen, UK. Dirk Berg-Schlosser, Philipps University Marburg, Germany. Matthijs Bogaards, Central European University, Hungary. Michael Bratton, Michigan State University, USA. Daniel Burridge, University of Pittsburgh, USA. Francesco Cavatorta, Laval University, Canada. Donatella della Porta, Scuola Normale Superiore, Italy. Larry Diamond, Stanford University, USA. M. Steven Fish, University of California, Berkeley, USA. Richard Gunther, Ohio State University, USA. Laura Lakli, University of California, Berkeley, USA Natalia Letki, University of Warsaw, Poland. John Markoff, University of Pittsburgh, USA. Ian McAllister, Australian National University, Australia.

Leonardo Morlino, LUISS Guido Carli, Italy. Andrea Oelsner, University of Aberdeen, UK. Pamela Paxton, University of Texas at Austin, USA. Gary D. Rawnsley University of Nottingham Ningbo China Richard Rose, University of Strathclyde, UK. Federico M. Rossi, CONICET- Universidad Nacional de San Martin (UNSAM), Argentina. Doh Chu II Shin, University of Missouri, USA. Rollin F. Tusalem, Arkansas State University, USA. Kristopher Velasco, University of Texas at Austin, USA. Katrin Yoltmer, University of Leeds, UK. Kseniya Kizilova, V.N.Karazin Kharkiv National University, Ukraine Stephen White, University of Glasgow, UK. Zachary Whittington, Stanford University, USA. Jason Wittenberg, University of California, Berkeley, USA. Hakan Yilmaz, Bogazir;;i University, Istanbul, Turkey.

I Introduction Christian Welzel, Ronald Inglehart, Patrick Bernhagen, and Christian W Haerpfer

The New Pessimism about Democracy 'We all agree that pessimism is a mark of superior intellect.' (John Kenneth Galbraith)

When we drafted the introductory chapter for the first edition of OUP's Democratization in 2008, there was widespread enthusiasm about the centennial democratic trend and great optimism about the future of democracy. Accordingly; we pointed out that, over the last century; the world has experienced several consecutive waves of democratization that led to a situation in which a clear majority of countries are democracies and most of the global population lives in democracies. We documented this conclusion using the then standard democracy indicators from Polity and Freedom House. According to these indicators, Western countries had already started out at the top level of democracy a hundred years ago and continued to persist at the top all the way until the most recent observation. Besides the West's democratic persistence, the world as a whole has become more democratic through consecutive waves by which region after region moved towards the Western level. These waves affected, in sequential order, Southern Europe (early-mid 1970s), Latin America (late 1970s/ late 1980s), East Asia (late 1980s), Central and Eastern Europe (late 1980s/ early 1990s), and parts of SubSaharan Africa (early-mid 1990s). According to this

picture, only China, North Korea, Singapore, Cuba, and the Islamic world remained unaffected by the democratic trend and it seemed likely that this, too, would eventually change. Since then, the prevailing mood in the discipline has become dramatically more pessimistic. The resilience of authoritarianism in such successfully modernizing countries as Singapore and China, the revival of authoritarianism in Russia, Turkey; and Venezuela, democratic backsliding in Hungary; Romania, and Poland, the global spread of electoral autocracies, and the ascension of autocratic China to world power status as well as the recent successes of right-wing populism and its anti-democratic tendencies all are fuelling the new pessimism about the prospects for democracy. Two widely cited articles by Roberto Foa and Yascha Mounk (2016; 2017) represent the apex of the new pessimism, sounding the alarm that even the most long-standing democracies of the West are now in a state of deconsolidation. But critics have pointed out that Foa and Mounk's discomforting conclusions may not hold up to closer scrutiny (Alexander and Welzel 2017; Norris 2017; Voeten 2017). This debate leads us to ask whether the new pessimism may be as exaggerated as the optimism that prevailed not long ago. This question is all the more appropriate when one recognizes that, during the past 60 years, public discourse and academic debate have experienced a recurrent ebb and flow in the 'crisis of democracy' discourse-while democracy itself has weathered all these crises.

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Christian Welzel, Ronald lnglehart, Patrick Bernhagen, and Christian W. Haerpfer

A New Look at Democracy We conceive of democracy as a tool of human empowerment whose key purpose is to enable people to self-determine their personal lives and to help shape their societies' policies. The Varieties of Democracy 01Dem) project (see Chapter 4 for more on the measurement of democracy) uses the most advanced methods of expert coding to create several dozen indicators of democracy, for every country and every year since 1900 until 2014, the most recent available data at the time of this writing (Coppedge, Gerring, and Lindberg et al. 2017). V-Dem data cover three aspects that we believe are essential for democracy's empowering purpose. The first is the 'electoral democracy component', which measures how regular, open, fair, and free the elections in a country are and how large a proportion of public offices is filled by contested elections. The 'participatory democracy component' measures how many legal channels of participation a country offers its citizens, from the local to the national level, and how easy it is for the citizens to use these channels. Finally, the 'liberal democracy component' measures the extent of civil rights, including minority rights, as well as power separation and horizontal checks on the executive. The distinctiveness of these three components makes them equally important in generating 'comprehensive democracy', which exists when the electoral, participatory, and liberal component are all present at a high level. To obtain a single comprehensive measure of democracy, one needs to combine the measures of electoral, participatory, and liberal democracy. One obvious way to do so is to average the three measures. This assumes that strength in one component can compensate for weakness in another, which we think is mistaken because it seems clear that the three components of democracy interact in mutually conditional ways, such that what one component contributes to comprehensive democracy depends on the level of the other two. The mathematical procedure to model this kind of mutual conditionality is multiplication. Consequently, we calculate each country's score in comprehensive democracy for each year by multiplying the three scores for the electoral, participatory, and liberal components. Doing so sets a high bar for democracy because all three components must be pretty high in order to obtain a high overall score. Since V-Dem provides scores for the

electoral, participatory, and liberal components in a scale range from a minimum of Oto a maximum of 1, with decimal fractions for intermediate positions, the comprehensive democracy score is in the same scale range. In calculating regional and yearly averages, we weight nations for the proportional size of their population. From the viewpoint of humanity as a whole, the weighted treatment of nations is mandatory because the significance of a nation's democraticness for our entire species varies in direct proportion to its share in the world population: though we respect Icelanders, it is of greater significance for humanity that more than thirty million Canadians live under democracy than that 300,000 Icelanders do so.

Re-Examining the Centennial Democratic Trend: A Reversal? Looking at the entire world over the long time span from 1900 to 2014, Figure 1.1 shows a continuous incremental increase in all three key components of democracy, with a spike-especially in the electoral component-after World War II and a steepening slope since the mid-1970s, which persists until the end point of our observation period in 2014. The pronounced spike after World War II reflects the fact that a few nations with rather large populations-namely India,Japan, Germany, and Italy-became democratic during this time. Apparently, there is no indication of an overall recent reversal of the long-term democratic trend, at least not with the data that were most up-to-date at the time of this writing. Combining the electoral, participatory, and liberal components into a single index of comprehensive democracy replicates these trend features on a lower base level and with a slightly smaller slope. Treating the three components as mutually conditional, as our multiplicative index does, provides a more rigid measurement standard under which the democratic trend appears more modest than if we were to simply average the three democracy components. Since our index of comprehensive democracy is the product of fractions, it is exceedingly hard for all but the most democratic of the democratic to achieve scores approximating 1. Thus, we also employ a different approach to see if we can replicate this picture

Introduction

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of the global state of democracy from another angle. To do so, we average the countries' scores over the electoral, participatory, and liberal components and divide up regimes into 'pure autocracies' in the lower third of the scale (0 to 0.32 points), 'hybrid regimes' in the middle third (0.33 to 0.66 points) and 'pure democracies' in the upper third (0.67 to 1.00 points). Looking at the quantitative evolution of these three regime types over time gives us a complementary picture of the long-term democratic trend. Figure 1.2 depicts this evolution from two perspectives: the proportion of the world's population living under these regime types at a given time (upper diagram), and the proportion of independent states falling into these regime categories in a given year (lower diagram). Interestingly, as the two diagrams in Figure 1.2 illustrate, the most striking feature in this perspective is the steep, continuous, uninterrupted decrease of pure autocracies, which drop from about 85 per cent in 1900 to about 15 per cent in 2014, with periods of accelerated decline after World War II and after the end of the Cold War. 1

Democracy's Persistent CultureBoundedness Figure 1.3 displays the long-term democratic trend with regional breakdowns, using Welzel's (2013) historically grounded culture zone scheme. This scheme defines culture zones by distinct imperial and religious traditions, which overlap with language families as well as ethnic lineages and-accordingly-tend to concentrate in certain geographic areas. Welzel distinguishes four Western culture zones, which are defined by their imprint from three emancipatory movements in history that shaped Western identity: Renaissance-Humanism, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment. The 'Old West' to begin with, comprises the Romance-language nations of Southern Europe that were once part of the Roman Empire, from which they inherited their Catholic tradition. The 'New West' includes English-speaking nations that were once British-ruled white settler colonies in North America and Australasia. The 'Reformed West' refers to those Germanic-language nations in

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Christian Welzel, Ronald lnglehart, Patrick Bernhagen, and Christian W. Haerpfer

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North-Western Europe in which the Protestant Reformation was most successful. The 'Returned West' covers those (mostly) Slavic nations in Central-Eastern Europe with a West~rn-Christian tradition, which joined the European Union after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Juxtaposed to the West, history created four Eastern culture zones in the axial belt of Eurasian civilization. The 'Indic East' comprises those nations in South Asia whose history was shaped by Indian culture. Similarly, the 'Sinic East' covers those nations in East Asia that were influenced by Chinese culture. The 'Islamic East' consists of the nations in the Middle East

and North Africa that have been part of the Arab, Persian, and Ottoman Islamic empires. Finally, the 'Orthodox East' incorporates the nations of Eastern Europe and Central Asia that were historically dominated by Russia with its Christian-Orthodox roots. Besides this eight-fold East-West scheme, Welzel distinguishes the culture zones of Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa, to which we add the Pacific islands ('Oceania'). When we examine Figure 1.3, certain features are obvious. Starting from a relatively high base level, the 'New West' has moved on a trajectory of continuing incremental gains in comprehensive democracy

Introduction

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throughout the entire period from 1900 to 2014. The 'Reformed West' joins this trajectory later, after Germany's democratization at the end of World War I, but became derailed during Nazi rule, and only rejoins the high base upward trajectory after World War II. Since then, the 'New' and 'Reformed' West move along in unison. The 'Old West' starts from a lower base level and drops further during fascism in Italy. The 'Old West' then returns quickly to a higher base level after World War II but remains considerably behind the 'New' and 'Reformed West', until Portugal, Spain, and Greece democratize in the early/ mid 1970s. Ever since then, the 'Old West' moves in unison with the 'New' and 'Reformed West', joining their high base upward trajectory. The last culture zone to join this trajectory is the 'Returned West', which skyrockets during the late 1980s/ early 1990s from the bottom sharply upward to meet the West's high base trajectory; albeit on a somewhat lower intercept and slightly decreasing slope since 2000, reflecting democratic backsliding in Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia. More generally; since the turn of the millennium, the upward slope of the West's trajectory has leveled off, which resonates with recent concerns about populism

and its tendency to undermine key features of democracy; such as power separation, critical media, cultural pluralism, and minority protection. Nevertheless, the recent democratic stagnation of the West occurs at an exceptionally high base level of comprehensive democracy that no other culture zone in the world comes even close to. Despite consecutive waves of democratization around the globe, high levels of comprehensive democracy still remain a singularity of the West. In other words, the centennial democratic trend has by no means produced global convergence on Western-typical democracy levels. Partly; the lack of global convergence in comprehensive democracy reflects the fact that the continuous rise of the global average was derived to a large extent from a rise among Western nations themselves. Standard democracy measures by Polity and Freedom House gloss over this important observation because their less nuanced views set the standard for democracy much lower, so that Western nations are given the highest possible democracy scores from the beginning, and consequently show a flat trajectory from then on-toward which various regional groups of non-Western countries have converged

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Christian Welzel, Ronald lnglehart, Patrick Bernhagen, and Christian W. Haerpfer

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I Introduction Fig 1·.6 The global co-evolution of action resour~~s. emancipative values,, and c~mprehensive D.emocracy : . -----, .42 ~ .40 ~ .38 ~ .36 i::i .34 ~ .32 ..... 30 Ill .28 .26 A. .24 @ .22 U .20 .18 .16 .14 .12

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maps similarly-and even more strongly-on culture zones. But unqualified support shows no such mapping. This suggests that the cultural boundedness of comprehensive democracy is explained by the cultural boundedness of emancipatory support for democracy. Figure 1.9 demonstrates that this is indeed the case: Cross-cultural variation in emancipatory support for democracy accounts for 95 per cent of the cross-cultural variation in comprehensive democracy. The evidence further suggests that the driving attitude behind comprehensive democracy is not support for democracy as such but, much more specifically, emancipatory support for democracy. Results from a multivariate regression analysis in Figure 1.10 support this conclusion. The two partial regression plots in this figure show the simultaneous impact of emancipatory and unqualified support for democracy on comprehensive democracy.

In the upper diagram of Figure 1.10, we see that in countries like Denmark, New Zealand, and Switzerland where people have more emancipatory than unqualified support, there is more democracy. Conversely, in countries like Jordan, Uzbekistan, and Yemen where people have less emancipatory than unqualified support, there is less democracy. Thus, the general tendency is that-among countries at the same level of unqualified support-more emancipatory support is strongly conducive to democracy. This tendency accounts for 67 per cent of the entire crossnational variation in comprehensive democracy. The lower diagram of Figure 1.10 shows that in countries like Egypt, Morocco, and Zimbabwe in which people have more unqualified than emancipatory support, there is less democracy. Conversely; in countries like Latvia, Slovenia, and South Korea where people have less unqualified than emancipatory support, there

Introduction

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• Democratization has be~n on the rise on a·global scale. from the early 1970s into the early twenty-first century. • The ,growth of democratization is different in different geographic regions. Dell)ocratization is ~Isa-different for poor and rich countries, and for countries with different cultural systems.

National, Regional, and Global Processes The timing differences of major world regions suggests that democratization came about in different ways in Southern Europe, Latin America, the Soviet bloc, Asia, and Africa. A closer look will show important differences even in neighbouring countries: between

Portugal's democratization and Spain's, Argentina's and Brazil's, Poland's and Czechoslovakia's, South Korea's and Taiwan's. To invoke specific places is to be reminded how idiosyncratic particular national experiences might be. Yet the fact that so many geographically distant places significantly democratized so closely in time strongly suggests that these processes were not simply nationally; or even regionally; idiosyncratic, but rather operated on a truly trans-continental scale to move multiple countries in the same general direction. There are a variety of imaginable processes that might produce change in so many different countries in such a short space of time. For clarity; we will classify such processes into four kinds:

• Internal processes unfolding in similar ways in a number of countries, producing similar outcomes, without any coordinating mechanisms across those separate cases.

6 The Global Wave of Democratization • External processes affecting in similar ways a group of countries, but not involving actions deliberately aimed at encouraging democracy. • Emulative processes in which changes happening in some countries inspire people in other countries. • Supportive processes in which one or more countries or other powerful actors set out to encourage democracy elsewhere. Those critical of such actions call them 'interventionist'.

Mediterranean Europe, I970s To understand the transformations of Portugal, Greece, and Spain in detail, one must understand the very particular and distinctive unfolding of events in each. A colonial war going badly against revolutionary guerrillas in Portugal's still extensive African colonies led some officers, in emulation of their determined foes, to favour a revolutionary overthrow of the Portuguese state, an action carried out in 1974. A few months later, Greece's military rulers seemed likely to bring on a war with Turkey, a prospect that led frontline officers who anticipated disaster to prefer to drive their tanks to Athens and terminate military rule. The following year, Spain's long-time ruler, Francisco Franco, died, which opened new possibilities for political party leaderships, organized workers, and rural people to work out new political arrangements. Such elements, and more, were deeply idiosyncratic. But there were common internal and external processes, in play as well. All three Mediterranean countries were a lot poorer than their Western European neighbours and would have benefited mightily from full membership in the European Community (which later became the European Union), but the Community staunchly refused to countenance membership for avowedly anti-democratic states. So when these countries faced major, though distinct crises, their common poverty in comparison to wealthy neighbours gave those neighbours influence, and the pressure from those neighbours to democratize was strong. There also was an element of emulation. For many it was an embarrassment to live in a country whose rulers tried to make its citizens look different from other Europeans as when Greece's colonels outlawed long hair for men or Spain's laws enforced dress codes. And once Portugal began its democratic journey, it was an extra embarrassment to many in Spain that Portugal, sometimes experienced as a sort of backwards country cousin, was actually moving faster to

be more like the rest of Europe. For Greeks, resentful of their rulers' attempts to keep them from participating in contemporary European culture, the absence of democracy was all the more poignant in that their country was the place that coined the word. (See Chapter 19 for more on democratization in Southern Europe.)

Latin America, I980s and early I990s At first glance, nothing connects Latin American and Southern European processes. Indeed the histories of anti-democratic politics in different countries in Latin America were different from each other. Mexico's early twentieth-century revolution led to the congealed rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party that dominated political life for decades. Central America and the Caribbean, except for democratic Costa Rica and revolutionary but not democratic Cuba, were dominated by a variety of military or non-military strongmen, and prey to intermittent military intervention by the US. Militaries ruled most of South America (except for Colombia and Venezuela). Yet during the 1980s and early 1990s every military regime withdrew; and in the 1990s the Mexican system began to open. Latin American countries had long been noted for oscillations between more or less democratic and more or less authoritarian forms. Against that background, a big part of the story is not just that the political pendulum swung towards democracy but that it has swung back again so little. In 1974 only three countries in the region could reasonably be called democratic; three decades later, all but Cuba could. The non-Spanish speaking Caribbean was mostly democratic too, except for turbulent Haiti. Not only did most countries democratize, but those democracies, while sometimes very troubled, were generally more resilient than in the past. By one measure, the likelihood of democratic breakdown in a given year had been 20 times greater in the years preceding 1978 than in the two decades that followed (Mainwaring and Perez-Lifian 2005: 20). What accounts for the new democratic durability? Let's look back a generation. Latin America is the world region with the most unequal distribution of income (Hoffman and Centeno 2003), generating great fearfulness on the political right about the potential appeals of leftist revolution, and leading the right repeatedly, often with the support of the US, to foster military coups. In the 1960s and 1970s, Cuban-inspired

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John Markoff and Daniel Burridge

threats, some real and some not so real, made such fears especially plausible to the Latin American right and to US governments as well. But by the late 1970s in much of the region, apart from Central America, a plausible revolutionary threat was fading for several reasons. Success in revolutionary guerrilla warfare had turned out to be far more difficult than proponents imagined (Wickham-Crowley 1992). In some countries, the Latin American revolutionary left had been decimated and demoralized by post-coup repression. And on a global scale, the appeals of revolutionary solutions were fading as the Soviet Bloc lost any lingering propensity to inspire. Finally; after 1989, in the wake of the collapse of European communist rule, military or other support for left revolution from that quartereven for Cuba-dried up. In short, global external processes and parallel internal processes greatly weakened support for Latin American revolution on the left. Reduced fear of a revolutionary left joined several forms of supportive change to weaken the cause of anti-democratic politics on the right as well, something even more important since it was the right that actually carried out the coups (Markoff 1997). First of all, beginning in the late 1970s the US became a less reliable supporter of coups and authoritarian rule claiming the anti-communist mantle, which had been an extremely important element in the coups of 1964 and 1973 in Brazil and Chile. By the 1980s it became engaged in what was called 'democracy promotion'through such organizations as the Agency for International Development and the National Endowment for Democracy. This policy combined support forcertain democratic practices and economic liberalization, a body of policies known to critics as 'neoliberalism' (Cox et al. 2000). But it was not only the US Government that seemed less skittish about democracy in Latin America. The Catholic Church had undergone a dramatic transformation from a key moral support of right-wing authoritarians, as in Portugal and Spain (and earlier in Italy), to a supporter of democratic politics, as signalled in the convening of a Vatican Council (known as Vatican II) in 1962. This shift was of considerable significance in helping stabilize Catholic Iberia's new democracies, and in easing the path for Catholic Latin America's as well. It also inspired radical Catholic organizing against social inequalities and the governments of the right that supported them. There was another important cluster of parallel internal and external processes. The coups of

the 1960s and 1970s had been justified not only as anti-communist defensive measures, but also to protect the nation against the corruptions of democracy itself-since the political class was seen as caving in to the irrational demands of those whose votes they sought, thereby bringing on economic disaster. The developmental programmes of the 1950s and 1960s were financed by enormous foreign borrowing and often seemed to be going nowhere. By the 1960s it was rather widely believed that getting rid of democracy would improve economic performance. Distinguished US economists advised the brutal Chilean regime after the coup of 1973. But, apart from Chile, the 1980s were to show that anti-democratic state brutality was hardly a guarantee of hopeful patterns of economic progress. When criticism of economic affairs emerged again in the troubled 1980s, it was the generals who were accused of bungling and corruption. One of the causes of coups had been the mounting foreign debt in country after country. But under the military the debt generally grew even more. Democracy, by comparison, had come to look efficient. That skyrocketing debt was embedded in another external process that unfolded on a transcontinental scale. In the early 1970s the oil-exporting countries radically raised the price of oil. Oil-rich countries then invested their vast new profits in Western banks. The Western banks in turn began to lend their new funds feverishly. In other words, the enormous debt expansion of Latin America happened not only because there were ready borrowers on a continental scale, but ready wealthy lenders as well. Sooner or later, there would be trouble as nervous banks sought to recover their investments and powerful financial bodies like the International Monetary Fund played a pivotal role. This took the form of demands on Latin American states for what were taken to be sound economic practices, which is one of the important mechanisms by which the political crises that ended military rule also led to neoliberal policy shifts: downsizing the public sector, controlling inflation, selling state-owned resources to the private sector, and reducing tariffs. Finally; there was a significant regional supportive process. As countries began to democratize, they joined together for collective action to keep their own recent democratizations in place and encourage others to join. The Organization of American States authorized intervention in the event of democratic breakdown and some scholars think it effectively discouraged several coups in the 1990s (Mainwaring and

6 The Global Wave of Democratization Perez-Linan 2005). In addition, members of the important common trade area, the Mercosur, eventually embracing half a dozen countries, agreed to expel any of its members that broke with democracy. Moreover, the new practice of international election monitoring and the threat of UN-backed economic sanctions also helped to discourage anti-democratic revivals. This mutual support for democracy was without precedent in Latin American history. (See Chapter 20 for more on democratization in Latin America.)

Soviet/communist bloc, 1989 and beyond Despite great differences in language and history the various states of communist Europe in the early 1970s had much in common: similar institutional structures under the command of ruling parties making ideologically similar claims. This was even true of states with hostile relationships with the Soviet Union, like Yugoslavia or, later, Romania. When people meet for the first time who had lived before 1989 in different Soviet-bloc countries, they swiftly discover how similar many aspects of daily life were. Even the same grey concrete housing blocs dominated urban landscapes throughout the region, widely taken by Soviet-bloc intellectuals as a material metaphor for a dreary political regime (although dreary urban vistas were hardly unknown in Glasgow, or the suburbs of Paris, or the south side of Chicago). Beyond the common institutional mould, a large part of the region was linked to the Soviet Union via economic specializations, largely organized for Soviet benefit and tied in militarily to the Warsaw Pact-the Soviet Union's response to the West's North Atlantic Treaty Organization. And the threat, or even actuality, of Soviet military action to rein in straying neighbours was palpable. Under its openly announced Brezhnev Doctrine, in fact, the Soviet Union would simply not permit any dilution of communist rule. One very important consequence of such commonalities was that dramatic events in one country resonated throughout the region, and the opening of some new opportunity anywhere might suggest there were opportunities everywhere. Thus, many emulative processes were at work, as patterns of dissent in one place quickly suggested possibilities or impossibilities elsewhere. Stalin's death in 1953 helped galvanize revolt in East Germany and the denunciation of Stalin's crimes (in a supposedly secret but soon widely known speech by Soviet head of state Nikita Khrushchev) in

1956, triggered revolt in Poland and Hungary, the latter taking an especially violent turn. The bloodily successful suppressions were taken by future dissenters to demonstrate the futility of armed resistance. When a reform movement inside the Czechoslovak ruling party in 1968 was also met by the Soviet occupation of that country, the message to future dissenters was that reform inside the ruling party was hopeless. Up to that moment some dissenters had acted in the name of Marxism against Soviet tyranny, and had hoped for a national and reformed socialism-as opposed to postStalinism backed up by Soviet tanks. After 1968 dissent was about creating a new social order. In the Soviet Union itself, in Czechoslovakia, in Hungary, and in Poland, small groups of intellectuals mastered the art of evading censorship and circulated clandestine manuscripts in supportive contact with each other. A transcontinental external process provided some additional cover. Troubled by the limitations of its economic growth, the Soviet Union sought increased trade with the West. US manufacturers and farmers sought increased trade with the Soviet Union, something that was politically difficult for the US Government to support without the appearance of political concessions. The result was the Soviet Union's entry into the Helsinki Accords in 1975, providing for international monitoring of human rights abuses. This provided limited protection for some limited forms of dissent, especially if those dissenters campaigned for peace and disarmament, since the Soviet Union hoped for pressures against the US military presence in Western Europe. Other dissenters organized around religious institutions. Still others moved into environmental causes, avoiding overt head-on challenge to the regimes. But for many others, listening to Western radio, hanging out at basement jazz concerts, laughing at official statements that no one believed (not even the officials), dressing like Western young people, or joining a strolling crowd at precisely the hour the TV played the official news programme, diffused a sense of widespread rejection, even if a positive course of action was unclear. In Budapest, or Prague, or Warsaw, things were similar. In the economic realm, another external process played its part. Just as banks were eager to lend to Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, but got skittish eventually, so they were eager to lend to the states of communist Europe, which faced the very real problems of maintaining standards of living while pursuing goals of socialist development through heavy

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industry. Apart from Romania, which rejected the path of national indebtedness (and thereby impoverished its people), East European governments borrowed heavily, leading down the road to the problem of how these loans were to be paid back, just as in Latin America. By the 1980s few believed any more that the Soviet bloc had some alternative path to economic growth that would eclipse the West, morally or materially, and extensive borrowing from Western banks or food purchases from Western farmers rubbed the failure in. So, despite the vast dissimilarity of their regimes, part of what brought down communist rule in Poland and military rule in Brazil was being prepared unintentionally in the offices of Western banks. As a general tactic Central and Eastern Europe's intellectuals had worked out the notion of reviving civil society through non-violent construction of a realm of freedom. In Poland, uniquely, this turned into a vast mass movement when a strike at the Gdansk shipyard in August 1980 sparked the Solidarity movement in which millions participated, demonstrating how utterly the regime had lost the people, and emboldening countless everyday acts of routinized defiance even after the great mass displays were crushed under martial law and the threat of Soviet military action. All over Central and Eastern Europe, people had in Poland a model of a land of defiance, though how to remove their regimes was not obvious, not even in Poland. In the Soviet Union itself, the premier, Mikhail Gorbachev; confronted a sense of economic and political ossification alongside a ruinous military commitment to a failing Afghan war. In the course of restructuring Soviet institutions and reordering priorities, Gorbachev was not only an important promoter of change at home, but also an enabler of change elsewhere. In a UN speech in December 1988 he abandoned his predecessor Brezhnev's commitment to block change throughout the region by force. A year later communist regimes had been brought to an end in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany, and Romania, followed over the next few years by the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Albania. Out of uniformity came diversity: ex-communist states to the West of the ex-Soviet Union democratized; the Soviet Union disintegrated; some of its fragments, now separate states, also democratized, while others erected new forms of authoritarian rule. Poland, for example, is listed in Table 5.1, but Belarus is not. Yugoslavia fragmented, entered a period of warfare, and to some extent democratized. (See Chapter

21 for a discussion of democratization in post-communist Europe, and Chapter 22 for discussion of the former Soviet republics.)

Asia, 1980s and 1990s At the beginning of the 1970s, Asian patterns of government were an extremely diverse collection and its democratizations from the mid-1980s into the early 1990s correspondingly idiosyncratic (Diamond and Plattner 1998). India is frequently called the world's largest democracy but it entered a crisis in which democratic practice considerably contracted in 1975 ('the emergency'), a state of affairs that lasted until 1977. China was, and remains, the world's largest authoritarian state, with a ruling communist party that successfully suppressed enormous protests in 1989, and maintained its political domination while enacting major economic reforms. While in the Soviet bloc, 1989 stands for the year everything changed, in China it is the year the ruling party demonstrated its capacity to participate in the global economy without democratization when it crushed major protest in Beijing. Communist parties ruled other Asian states in the early 1970s and with one exception, these states have not travelled any great length towards democracy since then. North Korea remains under the rule of its Great Leader. South Vietnamese revolutionaries and their North Vietnamese allies, at war with the US and the government of South Vietnam, won their war, and the reunified country of Vietnam has remained under one-party rule. Cambodia's Khmer Rouge carried out killings on an extraordinary scale but was overthrown by the neighbouring Vietnamese. Despite a great deal of international attention, that country has not moved far towards democracy. Located between China and Russia, Mongolia proved quite exceptional. Encouraged by the events of 1989, protest demonstrations were mounted in the capital, and the party leadership debated between following the Chinese or East European course. They chose the latter, rewrote the constitution, held multiparty competitive elections in 1990, did very well in electoral politics, surrendered parliamentary power peacefully after electoral defeat in 1996, but captured the presidency in elections in 1997 (Ginsburg 1995). Although its scores on various measures of democratization are less than those obtaining in Western Europe or North America, they are not only well ahead

6 The Global Wave of Democratization of China, North Korea, or Vietnam, but well ahead of the former Soviet Central Asian republics, too (Fish 2001). Other places of Chinese heritage travelled different paths. Singapore was and has remained a wealthy former British colony whose undemocratic rule has been justified as being in accord with i\sian values' that stress community over individual freedoms. Hong Kong was a British colony with little democratic character into the 1980s. As the date approached at which the British would turn over that prosperous coastal city to the People's Republic of China, the departing rulers set up a democratic process. The first elected Legislative Council of the colony took office in 1985, and other posts became elected ones over the next several years. The result was that when China assumed sovereignty in 1997, it had acquired a small, rich place with significant democratic elements whose future was deeply uncertain. Taiwan was under martial law until the late 1980s and ruled by the Kuomintang (KMT), a party still claiming itself the rightful ruler of all of China, despite US recognition of the People's Republic in 1979. Many Taiwanese experienced this as an alien occupation and the KMT sought to contain potential challenges by ending martial law in 1987, displaying symbols of Taiwanese culture, language and history, disbanding a legislature representing mainland provinces, organizing a multi-party contested election in 2000, and accepting electoral defeat that same year (Tien 1997). Dramatic developments also took place in the Philippines and South Korea. In the early 1970s, the Philippine government was headed by Ferdinand Marcos, who was elected president in 1965 and then went on to rule under martial law, justified as defence against communists and Muslims. In the mid-1980s, a mass protest movement formed around the widow of an assassinated opposition figure, and military leaders removed Marcos, initiating a period of democratization widely taken to demonstrate the effectiveness of 'people power'. In South Korea military rule endured into the 1980s, long justified as a response to the threat from the North. Regional disparities and mobilized students fuelled protest movements and even insurrection. Korean politics were so turbulent that the current authoritarian period was the 'Fifth Republic'. In the face of an enormous anti-regime petition campaign of 1987 and the loss of US support, the government and opposition began to negotiate an opening of the

system, inaugurating the Sixth Republic and a democratic process (Diamond and Kim 2000). With democratic models all around; with a decreasing likelihood of enlisting US support for militaries claiming the mantle of anti-communism; with foreign sources of funds seeing in democracy an antidote for authoritarian corruption; and with the increasingly general acknowledgement on the international stage of democracy as the sole legitimate form of government, democratic currents took heart in other places as well-in Nepal, in Burma, in Pakistan-places where they faced considerable resistance. But the most spectacular development in the next decade was the collapse of the Indonesian regime in 1998 and its replacement by one with democratic claims. As of the early twenty-first century, Asia was politically very heterogeneous, as it had been 30 years before. While some external and emulative elements have made democratic outcomes more probable than in the past, the national political trajectories seem extremely idiosyncratic. (See Chapter 25 for discussion of democratization in East Asia.)

Africa, early I990s We saw in Figure 6.1 that from the 1970s until the end of the 1980s the mean democracy scores for Sub-Saharan Africa were very close to those for the Middle East and markedly lower than for Asia or Latin America. Indeed, after a brief, small ascent in the mid-1970s, the scores were actually declining slightly for the next decade. The early 1990s, however, were years of considerable change. By 2004, the mean democratization score had departed markedly from that of the Middle East. Bratton and van de Walle (1997) suggest that for much of the continent there was a typical sequence running from protest and political liberalization, through competitive elections and, sometimes, on to further democratization. At the beginning of the 1970s much of the continent was ruled by what journalists were apt to call 'strongmen', academics 'neopatrimonial' rulers, and observers of official titles 'presidents for life'. South Africa had its distinctive system of apartheid in which the great majority of its citizens lacked political rights. During the 1960s and 1970s, the region as a whole had experienced some economic growth and per capita national income had risen modestly. The 1980s, however, were disastrous, with average incomes falling.

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Widespread poverty led to overgrazing and deforestation, which in the worst hit places generated massive famine. The decline in per capita income grew larger each year from 1990 to 1992, and then eased off (while remaining negative) in 1993 and 1994 (Mkandawire 2005). So the local impact of the global economy helped bring about rising rates of protest in the early 1990s. The protests were not simply the direct consequence of local economic disaster. African governments, desperate for financial aid, signed numerous loan agreements with the World Bank and International Monetary Fund that came with a variety of harsh conditions. The more such agreements a country negotiated, the more protests its government endured (Bratton and van de Walle 1997: 132-3). On top of protests triggered by economic difficulty in themselves, or by the harshness of the loan conditions, entering into repeated humiliating arrangements with the world of international finance seriously sapped support for the governments in place. In coping with these crises, at once economic and political, governments moved to open up their political systems, and 29 African countries held contested multi-party elections for president, legislative office, or both between 1990 and 1994. Protests peaked in 1991, liberalizations in 1992, elections in 1993 (Bratton and van de Walle 1997: 4--5) and democratization kept rising for a decade. For its part, South Africa-long an icon of racial exclusion-came under pressure from social movements at home, condemnation abroad, and threats of disinvestment by foreign sources of capital, causing it to become increasingly worried about social turbulence, and decreasingly inclined to see anti-democracy as the best bet to protect investments. It began its own democratization process, leading to the elections of 1994, the first ever in which the black majority could vote. It did not hurt that after 1989, it was hard to persuade Washington to prop up an ally in a global struggle against communism. Parallel national cases in Sub-Saharan Africa were seen as failures internally and externally. They had failed to produce growth and they had failed to protect against the demands of foreign bankers. In a large number of separate countries, parallel political processes of negotiation, both in national politics and economic policy, led to liberalization followed by contested elections, and then to increased but not unchallenged democratization since personalism and

corruption proved durable. Democratization scores actually dropped, on average, late in the 1990s, but then resumed their upward climb (Bratton and van de Walle 1997). We see external processes as well. Global financial institutions began to rethink their view of authoritarianism as a defence of investments against the irrationalities of democracy since autocrats were proving at least as corrupt as vote-seeking politicians. Latin America had democratized during the 1980s without threatening transnational finance. In addition, as in Latin America the US was less inclined to support tyrants with anti-communist claims and more inclined to the promotion of neoliberal democracy, especially after 1989. Finally, there was the effect of emulation as African movements and African governments learned from each other. The movements saw the rising possibilities of challenge and the governments saw democratization as a way to manage the challengers. In the decade and a half since 1990, African governments had moved very different distances from the authoritarianisms of the recent past, some becoming significantly more democratic like Cape Verde and some like Swaziland remaining as authoritarian as ever. Most places were somewhere in between. Bratton et al. (2005: 17) call the modal African variant 'liberalized autocracy'. (See Chapter 24 for more discussion of democratization in SubSaharan Africa.)

Middle East and North Africa This region entered the 1970s with a very low mean democracy score and entered the twenty-first century with very little change, despite several turbulent decades that included civil warfare, foreign occupations, interstate warfare, and a lot of political upheaval. Although in the first decade of the new century, the US claimed to be promoting democracy in the region and had gone to war and occupied Afghanistan and Iraq, the results were not only unimpressive, but widely taken to be discrediting democracy promotion and perhaps democracy itself On the other hand, Turkey seemed to enter a new period in its long history of oscillation between more democratic and more authoritarian politics, as a new party both repudiated the long-dominant commitment to militant secularism and staved off the threat of military intervention. Dramatic regional events were soon to

6 The Global Wave of Democratization give democracy scholars much new food for thought (see Chapter 23).

Beyond the Global Wave By the early twenty-first century, more people in more countries lived under political arrangements with some reasonable claim to the label 'democracy' than ever before in human history. Figure 6.4 shows the number of people living in countries with differing levels of rights and freedoms, following the global wave. Lower numerical scores indicate more extensive rights and freedoms. The countries at the far right, where rights and freedoms were most extensive, are places like Canada, Denmark, Spain, Uruguay, and the US. But many more people were in countries scoring 2.5, places like Brazil, India, Senegal, and Thailand. And many more were at a very low 6.5, in places like

KEY POINTS • Both internal and external processes drove democratization in Southern Europe, Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe, and Sub-Saharan Africa. _ _ . In addition: S1.Jpportive processes played part in Latin .. American democratizations. • East Asian democratization followed more idiosyncratic pro'cesses. _ _ • Democracy made few notable inroads in North Africa and the Middle East

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Belarus, China, Haiti, Somalia, or Uzbekistan. It is evident after more than two centuries of democratization and even after the great wave explored in this book, that many people live under very undemocratic circumstances and many others under circumstances less than fully democratic by the standards of the day.

Into the twenty-first century By the middle of the new century's first decade, scholars were beginning to take more notice of such limits to the geographically most extensive wave of democratization in human history. Not only had democratization progressed to only a limited degree-or not at all-in some places, but major new democratizations became scarce. Scholarly debate was shifting away from how much further would the great wave advance, to whether it had already crested, and whether it was even beginning to recede. Larry Diamond (2015: 99), for example, argues that not only has there been no further global expansion in the number of democratic countries, but even a slight decline, and many other scholars agree. Diamond writes of a 'democratic recession'. But others have argued that a better description would be more akin to stabilization: the great wave may have halted, but there has been no major fallback (Levitsky and Way 2015). Consider one of the regions we have looked at, the Middle East. No one could maintain that on the whole democratization had made notable gains since 2004. At that point, as we indicated earlier, some observers discerned the emergence of a new party that seemed to be putting an end to the propensity of the Turkish military to launch coups, and for many Muslims to feel marginalized by the militant secularism of dominant forces. A dozen years later, it was clear that Turkish democracy was being closed down by an increasingly repressive state. In Iran, a major democratic movement in 2009 challenged a disputed election, but the Green Revolution, as those turbulent events have been labelled, was crushed. An additional dozen years of US involvement in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq has not advanced democracy in the slightest. Most sobering of all is the aftermath of what became known as Arab Spring in 2011. Enormous democratic movements toppled autocrats in Tunisia and Egypt and challenged other regimes. Many social movement activists in many countries took heart. But other Middle Eastern states, like Bahrain, crushed the movements in their countries. In Syria and Libya, rather than a more

democratic order, the result has been years of civil war with horrendous loss of life. In Egypt, a new, equally autocratic regime has come to power. Five years later, only in Tunisia has the aftermath been a significant shift towards democracy. In analysing the global wave of democratization, we noted that in addition to processes that are internal to particular countries, we need to take note of external processes affecting multiple places, emulative processes by which people in one country are inspired by events in another, and supportive processes that encourage democracy elsewhere. All are much less favourable than they were when the twenty-first century began. Economic troubles had undermined authoritarian regimes in poorer countries in the 1980s and 1990s; the financial crisis of 2008 has been a major, unsolved challenge to the wealthy democracies. The US of the 1990s, no longer worrying about a communist challenge or revolutionary threats, was more supportive of democracy than in the past; but after the terrorist bombing of New York's World Trade Center in 2001, its support of democratic change weakened and its toleration or even support of authoritarian rulers grew. In 2009, it did nothing to· discourage a military coup in Honduras, for example, and in 2011 it supported the rulers of Bahrain against the great protests. In Latin America, we noted regional concerted action deterring coups in the early 1990s, but Mainwaring and Perez-Lifian (2013: 234) show it playing no such role in the 2000s. Meanwhile, important authorit\lrian states are acting forcefully on the world stage. Russia and China, for example, invest heavily in promoting positive views of their accomplishments abroad (Diamond et al., 2016). In Hungary, the party that triumphed in democratic elections in 2010 used its large parliamentary majority to curtail institutions that had functioned as checks on executive power. The Hungarian actions helped encourage a Polish government that won election in 2015 to start to travel a similar path. At the same time, publics in democratic states were showing significant doubts about how well their own democratic institutions were functioning. In country after country, citizens told pollsters how little confidence they had in presidents, parties, and parliaments and party membership was in decline. This was happening not just in new, or shaky, or dubious democracies but in places like Portugal and Spain where the recent global wave of democratization began, or in the US and Prance, whose revolutions helped launch

6 The Global Wave of Democratization modern democracy (Norris 2011). Some observers were beginning to argue that confronting the great global problems of the twenty-first century, the democratic states were appearing inadequate in addressing such unresolved challenges as climate change, massive migration of people fleeing violence and poverty, social inequalities, and transnational financial crises, fuelling a widespread distrust of existing institutions, democratic or otherwise. One broad survey described 'the dashed expectations and defects of representative democracy' (Alonso, Keane, and Merkel 2011: 15). Whether or not democracy has gone into decline, as opposed to simply having stopped advancing, the disappointment with democracy as now practised has been generating an astonishingly broad array of proposals for changing that practice. In the US, the conception of an Election Day is being blurred as 33 states in 2016 allowed some form of early voting. Canada has been convening randomly chosen citizens' panels to study some matters of pubhc concern and formulate recommendations. Freedom-of-information acts in many countries, especially in conjunction with electronic searching, promise to make the actions of government better known to otherwise frequently mystified citizens. Many countries have been developing norms that mandate gender quotas in political office to advance gender parity. For Europe, Schmitter and Trechsel (2004), survey a large number of varied reforms. Rethinking democracy has been happening in many places, and at national, transnational, and local levels. Let us dwell a bit, for example, on recent proposals and practices in Latin America, some of which may suggest new forms and meanings of democracy. First, at the national level, we can observe the recent claims to be 'refounding' national states made by leftist governments in the name of a democratic future significantly different than the past. Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador have adopted new constitutions that claim to fundamentally alter the constitution of political authority so as to 'decolonize' and 'democratize' states understood as mainstays of racialized oligarchies founded by creole elites in the nineteenth century, and to create new political arrangements that will include the large numbers of poor and nonwhites. Many scholars of democracy stress the authoritarian and illiberal dimensions of these regimes and tell us that this is a part of the democratic recession. But here we highlight their spur to rethinking democracy. We observe how the institutionalization of more participatory, referendum-based processes has empowered historically

marginalized groups and social movements in materially and symbolically consequential ways. For example, Bolivia is now a 'pluri-national' state that has enshrined the rights of Mother Nature, and has mechanisms for directly incorporating indigenous groups into local and national governance. Nevertheless, continuing confrontation between social movements and state institutions in Bolivia-and other 'refounded' nations-are perhaps just as frequent as successful moves towards democratic transformation. At the transnational level, the consolidation of a bloc of leftist governments in the region led to new attempts at regional governance, and many rightleaning governments have also made use of these initiatives. To facilitate 'regional dialogue and integration', there is now the Comunidad de Estados Latino Americanos in which the US and Canada do not participate. To maintain regional political order and project the interests of the region as a whole on the global stage, the Union de Naciones Suramericanas has become an increasingly important forum for dialogue among Latin American leaders. The first of these transnational organizations, MERCOSUR, continues to facilitate regional economic integration on the condition of internal respect for democratic proceedings. These organizations have helped Latin Americans run their own affairs with less US domination than in the past and may suggest a future in which whether at some particular moment the US favours democracy or military rule will not have the significance it once did. Finally, we can look below the level of the nationstate to see the democratically innovative practices of social movements in Latin America. Chief among these are indigenous and autonomist movements, many of which are increasingly implementing horizontalist (non-hierarchical) organizing structures, more territorialized political objectives, and a privileging of autonomy from traditional state, party, and movement structures--or at the very least, cautious negotiations with these more established forces. Especially important for these movements is the participatory democratic organizing ethos of 'leading by obeying', which eschews typical representational mechanisms, and promotes direct participation by community or movement members in local governance. The Zapatistas of Chiapas, Mexico are credited with coining this concept and practice, although other indigenous groups, feminist movements, workers' cooperatives, anti-mining networks, and urban housing associations throughout the region are utilizing variants of

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John Markoff and Daniel Burridge horizontalism and autonomous movement activity as a complement or substitute to formal electoral democracy (Stahler-Sholk, Vanden, and Becker 2014). Another important example of the surge in popular and participatory democratic mechanisms is that of 'participatory budgeting' which from its rise in Porto Alegre, Brazil and diffusion to other parts of the region and world has sought to give citizens more direct control over tax revenues. Citizens meet locally and decide on spending priorities, a practice that in one variation or another has spread to thousands of cities around the world and generated a large scholarly literature (Baiocchi and Ganuza 2016). In general, movement trends towards greater autonomy and participatory practices are increasingly becoming part of debates about the practice of democracy not only in activist circles in Latin America, but also'in academic literature. Despite democratic innovations at national, transnational, and local levels in Latin America, recent political and economic collapse in Venezuela, the removal of Brazil's head of state by corrupt political

enemies, and the rise of vast levels of violence tied to youth gangs and narcotrafficking in Mexico and Central America do not suggest a rosy near-term prognosis for democracy in the region. Beyond Latin America, as noted previously; the great global wave seems to have halted by the second decade of the twenty-first century. In that decade as well, countries at the forefront of ending communist rule, Hungary and Poland, elected governments contracting their own recent democratic practice. India and the Philippines elected leaders associated with past or present violence. Perhaps still more disturbing, the US elections of 2016 and their aftermath show democracy under threat even in a country long at the centre of modern democracy. While we have described ebbs and flows in the · practice of democracy in the world, we have little way of knowing what its future will be. We began this chapter by noting how poor have been past predictions about the future of democracy and will not add a prediction of our own.

I. How might you explain that in the early 1970s, just before the global wave of democratization, countries in different world regions were on average very different in how democratic they were (as shown in Figure 6.1 )7 Come up with at least two possible reasons.

2. How might you explain that since the 1970s countries in different world regions have tended on average to democratize to different degrees (as shown in Figure 6.1 )? Come up with at least three possible reasons. 3. In what ways did countries that were already very democratic at the beginning of the 1970s contribute to the democratization of other countries in the years since then? 4. Are there ways in which countries that were already very democratic at the beginning of the 1970s hindered democratization in other countries?

5. Have external processes been more important in some parts of the world than others? 6. How would you assess the state of democratization in the world in the past dozen years?

~' a range of other resources: www.oup.com/uk/haerpfer2e/.

Visit the online resources that accompany this book for additional questions to accompany each chapter, and

Alonso, S., Keane, J., and Merkel, W. (eds) (2011 ), The Future of Representative Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Fascinating collection on how democracy is being reimagined in the early twenty-first century. Baiocchi, G. and Ganuza, E. (2016), Popular Democracy. The Paradox of Participation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press). An important study of a major innovation in how democracy works.

6 The Global Wave of Democratization Bratton, M. and van de Walle, N. ( 1997), Democratic Experiments in Africa. Regime Transitions in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Shows why democratization occurred in the 1990s in some very poor countries and shows the limits of that democratization as well. Linz, J. J. and Stepan, A ( 1996), Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation. Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press). A broad, comparative treatment of transitions in three regions. Markoff, J. (20 I5), Waves ofDemocracy. Social Movements and Political Change, 2nd ed. (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers). Sets the late twentieth-century wave of democratization within the history of democracy over the centuries and takes a look at the new century ahead. Considers the role of social movements in pushing democratization forward. Norris, P. (20 I I), Democratic Deficit. Critical Citizens Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Robinson, W. ( 1996), Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, US Intervention and Hegemony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). A critical look at deliberate efforts to promote democracy and the market. Stahler-Sholk, R, Vanden, H., and Becker, M. (20 14), Rethinking Latin American Social Movements: Radical Action from Below (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield). On the significance of social movements in Latin America after the great wave of democratizations.

www.nipissingu.ca This site provides a variety of fascinating materials on the world history of democracy. www.alainet.org/es/temasx-especiales/integracion This site provides access to scholar-activist articles and reports on Latin American regional integration processes. www.oidp.net/en Website for the International Observatory on Participatory Democracy, the largest global network for systematizing and disseminating participatory democratic initiatives. www.sela.org/celac This is the CELAC site and includes links to its declarations and agendas.

Thanks to Amy White for assistance with an earlier version of this chapter.

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Christian Welzel and Ronald F. lnglehart under-democratic relative to people's emancipative values at the beginning of this generational period (i.e. in 1980). The successful transition cases in South America (Chile, Uruguay), Central Europe (Czech Republic, Slovenia, Croatia), East Asia (South Korea), and Sub-Saharan Africa (South Africa) provide the clearest illustration of this tendency: By the same logic, regimes became subsequently less democratic to the extent they were initially over-democratic relative to people's emancipative values. Venezuela provides the single-most striking illustration of this tendency. By the same logic too, regimes that were neither largely -under- nor over-democratic relative to people's emancipative values a generation ago, remained largely stable. Persistent Western democracies and persistent Middle Eastern autocracies illustrate this regularity most clearly. Overall then, the direction and scope of regime change operate largely as a function of the regimes' initial misfit with their surrounding culture, in striking confirmation of the 'tectonic model' of regime change. The upper diagram in Figure 9.8 shows this before controlling action resources at the beginning of the observation period; the lower diagram shows it after controlling these action resources. There is hardly any difference. Still, the relationship between emancipative values and civic entitlements could be symmetrically reciprocal, such that values also change in

response to their initial misfit to the regimes' democratic quality: values could be over-emancipative when they score higher than the regime's scope of civic entitlements suggests. Or they could be underemancipative when they score lower than the regime's scope of civic entitlements suggests. Now, if regimes-merely by means of their presence-instill congruent values into people, emancipative values would change as a function of their misfit with the regime's civic entitlements: initially over-emancipative values subsequently turn less emancipative, at the same time as initially under-emancipative values subsequently turn more emancipative. The two diagrams in Figure 9.9 conclusively disprove this interpretation, whether we control for action resources or not. Indeed, people's values have mostly turned more emancipative, regardless of whether they misfitted the regime's civic entitlements a generation ago.

r- KEY Po1Nrs Updated evidence based on simulated data strikingly confirms the 'tectonic model' of regime change. Thus, cultures and regimes co-evolve, albeit in such a manner that regimes adjust to changing cultures much more than the other way around.

. Conclusion Emancipative values are the most important aspect of political culture concerning a population's readiness for democracy. These values are not a culture-bound product that belongs exclusively to the West. Instead, emancipative values emerge as part of a broader process of human emancipation that evolves naturally as economic development puts more resources into the hands of ordinary people. The desire to pursue a purpose of one's choice that inevitably emerges with emancipative values directs people's attention towards civic entitlements that guarantee freedom of choice-which is the central theme of democracy. For these reasons, emancipative values provide the key selective force in the evolution of political regimes. The resulting selective pressures operate in favour of democracy

because emancipative values build the grassroots motivations that channel mass support towards prodemocratic actors and away from anti-democratic ones. This makes it increasingly likely that emerging conflicts over the desired type of regime end in favour of democracy and in disfavour of autocracies once emancipative values have become sufficiently widespread. By the same token, democracy remains a fragile achievement that is in danger of backsliding where emancipative values are weak. Sharp social divisions over people's access to action resources constitute the single-most important cause behind the parochialisms embedded in familism, religiosity, and nationalism that block emancipative values. In a nutshell, the prospects of democracy are bleak where emancipative values remain weak.

9 Political Culture, Mass Beliefs, and Value Change

8:QUESTION'"s- _: __ -------~·,:,--__ -- ___ ,-__ · ;_---~~---_:,:.___, ·, ___ :~•-;

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I. What is the meaning of political culture? 2. What does congruence theory say?

3. In what regard do mass beliefs play a mediating role?

4. What are emancipative mass beliefs? 5. Why are emancipative values important for democratization? 6. Are emancipative values endogenous to democracy?

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Visit the online resources that accompany this book for additional questions to accompany each chapter, and a range of other resources: www.oup.com/uk/haerpfer2e/.

Almond, G. A and Verba, 5. ( 1963), The Civic Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). This book is the classic of the political culture paradigm. It lays the conceptual groundwork and introduces many concepts still used today. Dalton, R. J. (2004), Democratic Challenges, Democratic Choices (Oxford: Oxford University Press). This book analyses mass attitudes related to democracy throughout postindustrial societies, lnglehart, R. and Welzel, C. (2005), Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy: The Human Development Sequence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Now a classic, this book was the most encompassing study on the influence of mass beliefs on democracy and democratization at its time. Norris, P. (20 I I), Democratic Def,dt: Critical Citizens Revisited (New York: Cambridge University Press). This book updates and extends the evidence in Dalton (2004) to all countries for which survey data are available, Welzel, C. (2013), Freedom Rising: Human Empowerment and the Quest for Emancipation (New York: Cambridge University Press). This book updates and largely expands the evidence in lnglehart and Welzel (2005) and places it on a more solid and elaborate theoretical fundament, integrating a plethora of findings in an encompassing theory of emancipation.

www.worldvaluessurvey.org This is the homepage of the World Values Survey Association. It presents and offers for download survey data from some 80 societies covering a period from 1981 to 200 I.

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Munck's forthcoming critique of modernization theory is flawed in several ways. First, Munck attributes basic assumptions to modernization theory that modernization theorists abandoned long ago. Thus, lnglehart and Welzel's (2005) revised version of modernization theory replaces: (a) the premises of determinism with probabilism, (b) directional constancy with directional change, (c) irreversibility with reversibility and (d) Western universalism with culture-zone specificity.

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Christian Welzel and Ronald F. lnglehart Second, despite Munck's unsupported claims, lnglehart and Welzel (2005: Ch. 9) analyse the role of modernization as a social force that interacts with collective actions, mass movements, elite constellations, and international alliances. In the interplay of these factors, modernization is described as a selective force at the grassroots of society that shifts the power balance from anti- to pro-democratic actors. Munck claims that lnglehart and Welzel do not consider any of these factors. Third, Munck underestimates the pervasiveness of the modernization-democracy link, which has been powerfully reconfirmed every time a new critic has tried to disprove it (most recently Murtin and Wacziarg 2015 in rebutting Acemoglu and Robinson 2006). In fact, Munck's claims are not actually supported by the authors he cites as critics of modernization theory (Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens 1992; Boix 2003): these and other authors explicitly acknowledge the modernization-democracy link and take it as their point of departure in trying to sort out why the link exists. Fourth, in denying that modernization is cross-culturally applicable, Munck overlooks the fact that when modernization occurs, it shows strong country-invariant isomorphisms, including rising living standards and life expectancies, falling fertilities, and expanding education, communication and information, as well as technological advancement, productivity growth, and social mobility. Although national specificities clearly persist, these transformations put increased material, cognitive, and connective resources into the hands of ord'1nary people. This enhances people's capabilities to join forces for a common cause in social movements, thus shifting the power balance from the elites towards the masses. Fifth, instead of examining the role of actor constellations and other specific factors in context with the diffuse effects of modernization, Munck needlessly assumes that any explanation must be an either/or choice, which is an intellectual step backwards. Sixth, Munck's insistence on 'endogenizing' democratization processes confuses descriptive reconstruction with causal explanation. Looking inside a process is not explaining it but describing it: a causal explanation must refer to factors that are exogenous to their object of explanation, or one will be trapped in tautological endogeneity circles. The same flaw underlies Munck's insistence on the autonomy of politics, which ignores decades of research in political sociology showing that politics does not take place in a vacuum, but plays out in the context of broader social forces that condition politics. Modernization is one of these forces, and indeed one of the most pervasive and powerful. Seventh, Munck misrepresents modernization theory, even in its reduced materialistic variant. Lipset ( 1960), Dahl ( 1971 ), and Vanhanen ( 1989) all emphasize that the level of economic resources are relevant to democracy only in so far as a higher level indicates a more universal availability of economic resources, which is eventually a matter of distributional equality (Boix 2003). The distributional question provides a central link to the class coalition theories that Munck pitches against modernization theory, when in fact they represent an integral branch of modernization theory. The link is based on the fact that a more equal resource distribution diminishes class divisions. Finally, it is ironic that, although the central issue of Munck's book is knowledge innovation, it makes no new contribution but merely repeats outdated criticisms of modernization theory that were proposed by the dependency school in the 1960s. 2

The same limitations apply to the models applied by Spaiser and Sumpter (2016), which are also based on countryyear observations.

3

In their second criticism, Dahlum and Knutsen (2016) repeat the points of their first criticism. In so doing, they refuse to engage with Welzel, lnglehart, and Kruse's (2015) 'tectonic model' and its evidence. Moreover, their replication of these authors' simulation is misleading because they drop the lagged dependent variable, which-according to Keele and Kelly (2006)-is inappropriate for most panel applications. The only new point Dahlum and Knutsen bring up is to show that for a dozen carefully-selected countries, regime change sometimes happens more smoothly than Welzel, lnglehart, and Kruse suggest.

9 Political Culture, Mass Beliefs, and Value Change 4

Obviously, the assumption is that the values people adopt around the age of 15 reflects the country's dominant mentality at the time. We could have based our transposition rule on another age, like the age of 20, 25 or even 30. Doing so affects the intercept of emancipative values but not the slope of their temporal sequence.

5

Only where the state receives substantial 'unearned' rents, as in Qatar or Singapore, or where there is a threat of external intervention, as in Hong Kong vis-a-vis mainland China, are people's emancipative values out of touch with their action resources.

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to G.ender and Democratization Pamela·Paxton and Kristopher.Velasco

• Introduction

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• Gender in Definitions of Democracy

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• Women's Democratic Representation: Formal, Descriptive, Substantive, and Symbolic Representation

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• Women's Suffrage as an Aspect of Democratization

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• Women's Representation as an Aspect of Democracy • Women and Democratization Movements • Conclusion

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.Overview This chapter addresses gender aspects of democracy and democratization. It begins with a discussion of gender in definitions of democracy, stressing that while women may appear to be included in definitions of democracy, they are often not included in practice. Explicit attention to gender (and other minority statuses) in democracy is aided by making a distinction between formal, descriptive, substantive, and symbolic representation. Women's formal political representation is explored by introducing the fight for women's suffrage. Following that, the chapter focuses on women's descriptive representation with detailed information on women's participation in politics around the world. Finally, the chapter turns to a discussion of women's role in recent democratization movements around the world.

Introduction Generally little attention is paid to gender in discussions of democracy (Pateman 1989; Waylen 1994; Paxton 2000). Theorists use gender-neutral language when defining democracy and measure democracy

with seemingly universal concepts such as the people's right to vote. But as pointed out by numerous feminist theorists, the appearance of 'neutrality' towards gender in political theory or 'equality' between men and women in government actually hides substantial gender inequality. If gender-neutral language is used

IO Gender and Democratization in principle, but in practice only men appear, then women are not equal in our theories or measures, but invisible. A cursory look around the world suggests that women are underrepresented in democracies, implying that gender may be more important to democracy and democratization than typically understood. At the turn of the twenty-first century, there is little overt discrimination against women in politics. Almost every country in the world provides the legal right for women to participate in politics. Women can vote, and women can run for office. But the lack of visible women in the political life of most nations suggests that veiled discrimination against women remains. In some countries, such as Sweden, Argentina, and Rwanda, women have made remarkable progress in their numbers. In many other countries, the struggle for equal representation proceeds slowly. This chapter will address gender aspects of democracy and democratization. We begin by discussing gender in definitions of democracy. It becomes clear that a lack of direct attention to gender in discussions of democracy, rather than including women under universal concepts such as citizen, removes them . from theory and measurement. As Navarro and Bourque (1998: 175) point out: 'philosophical discussions of political democracy have been carried on largely in the absence of a discussion of women's rights or the impact of gender inequities on the function of a democratic political order.' If women are not typically included in our understanding of democracy, how can they be move in that direction? The second section of this chapter introduces the distinction between formal, descriptive, substantive, and symbolic representation. Distinguishing between these four types of representation opens the door for the inclusion of gender (and other minority statuses) into theory on democracy. To introduce women's formal political representation, the next section of the chapter briefly introduces the fight for women's suffrage. Following that, we focus on women's descriptive representation by presenting detailed information on women's participation in politics around the world. This section highlights both women's generally low levels of representation around the world and the substantial variation that exists in women's achieved levels of representation. Finally, the chapter turns to a discussion of women's role in recent democratization movements around the world.

Gender in Definitions of Democracy Almost all definitions of democracy derive from Dahl's (1971: 4) classic distinction between competition (contestation) and participation. Competition requires that at least some members of the political system can 'contest the conduct of the government' through regular and open elections. Competition is concerned only with the procedures used to determine leaders and not with the numbers of individuals who participate. Participation, Dahl's second dimension, relates to the numbers of people that can participate in politics. A democratic regime must be 'completely or almost completely responsive to all its citizens' (Dahl 1971: 2). Following this lead, contemporary scholars' definitions of democracy typically involve some discussion of universal suffrage, or the right to vote. Democracy requires inclusive political participation where all adults of a certain geographic area have political privileges. As an example consider Diamond, Linz, and Lipset's (1990: 6-7) definition of democracy: democracy . . . denotes ... a 'highly inclusive' level of political participation in the selection of leaders and policies, at least through regular and fair elections, such that no major {adult) social group is excluded ....

A third common dimension, civil liberties, can be described as the freedom to express a variety of political opinions and the freedom to form and to participate in any political group. Does the definition of democracy include women? On the surface it would appear so, as women should be able to contest elections and are included in the term 'major (adult) social group'. But feminist political theorists warn against the assumption that neutral language signifies inclusion. Indeed, theorists such as Anne Phillips, Carol Pateman, and Iris Young have shown that the abstract terms used in political theory, such as 'individual' or 'citizen', while having the appearance of being gender-neutral, actually signify white men (Pateman 1989; Phillips 1991; Young 1990; for a review see Waylen 2015). So, do women count as 'adults' or 'citizens' and are therefore included in these definitions of democracy? Or does the neutral language actually mask the exclusion of women? To answer this question we have to dig a bit deeper into various writers' definitions of democracy. Consider, for example, Samuel Huntington's

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Pamela Paxton and Kristopher Velasco (1991) definition of democracy. Huntington claims a

government is democratic when 'its most powerful collective decision-makers are selected through fair, honest, and periodic elections in which candidates freely compete for votes and in which virtually all the adult population is eligible to vote'. Huntington goes further, explicitly stating: 'to the extent, for instance, that a political system denies voting participation to part of its society-as the South African system did to the 70 percent of its population that was black, as Switzerland did to the 50 percent of its population that was female, or as the USA did to the 10 percent of its population that were southern blacks-it is undemocratic' (1991: 7). Far from rendering women invisible, it appears that Huntington explicitly includes them. In fact, in explicitly mentioning women and minorities, Huntington is almost unique. Most definitions use generic terms such as 'adults' or 'the people' without being explicit about who might be excluded. But turning a few more pages in Huntington's book reveals that women can be excluded after all. Huntington (1991: 16) continues by giving' ... reasonable major criteria for when nineteenth-century political systems achieved minimal democratic qualifications in the context of that century.' One of these operational criteria is that '50 percent of adult males are eligible to vote.' Huntington's working definition using this criterion leads to a voting population made up of only 25 per cent of a typical adult population. And-at least in earlier historical contexts-it allows countries to be defined as democracies even if women do not have the right to vote. The removal of women in practice from a definition that ostensibly includes them is also apparent in the work of Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens (1992). Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens begin with a fairly typical definition of democracy'regular, free and fair elections of representatives with universal and equal suffrage' (1992: 43). Indeed, they state: 'however we define democracy in detail, it means nothing if it does not entail rule or participation in rule by the many' (1992: 41). But again turning a few additional pages sees women excluded from the definition of 'the many.' Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens explain that they 'choose for our historical investigations universal male voting rights, rather than truly universal suffrage, as a critical threshold that allows us to speak of democracy' (1992: 48). Thus, countries are considered democratic when

universal male suffrage is achieved. Huntington's and Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens' definitions of democracy are hardly the only ones to include women in principle but exclude them in practice. See Paxton (2000) or Paxton (2008) for a variety of other examples. Some newer efforts to define and measure democracy do take gender into account (e.g. Biihlmann et al. 2012). The most notable is Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) (Coppedge et al. 2011; V-Dem Dataset Version 7 2017) which explicitly includes gender in both conceptualization and measurement. For example, V-Dem measures both the formal and descriptive representation of women and differentiates between men and women in their extent of civil liberties, access to justice, and participation in civil society (see also Sundstrom, Paxton, Wang, and Lindberg (2017)). If women are often overlooked in traditional theories of democracy, what about the newer trend to talk about the quality of democracy (Diamond and Morlino 2005)? Rather than distinguishing democracies from nondemocracies, theorists of the quality of democracy focus on determining what makes a 'good' democracy. And definitions of the quality of democracy are more likely to explicitly mention gender. Diamond and Morlino argue that eight dimensions help differentiate democracies by quality: the rule of law, participation, competition, vertical, and horizontal accountability; respect for civil freedoms, greater political equality; and responsiveness. Equality is the relevant dimension for the inclusion of women. Diamond and Morlino (2005: xii) define this dimension as 'progressive implementation of greater political (and underlying it, social and economic) equality.' They further explain that the equality condition of democratic quality' entails the prohibition of discrimination on the basis of gender, race, ethnicity; religion, political orientation, or other extraneous conditions' (p. xxvii). A focus on democratic quality therefore opens the door for the explicit discussion of gender in political theory. However, to this point, assessments of the quality of democracy have not explicitly considered the participation or representation of women (e.g. Altman and Perez-Lilian 2002). A particularly nice feature of a focus on equality is the acknowledgement that social and economic inequalities shape political inequalities. As Dietrich Rueschemeyer (2005: 47) explains:

I O Gender and Democratization Dominant groups can use their social and economic power resources more or less directly in the political sphere. And they can use their status and influence over education, cultural productions, and mass communications-their 'cultural hegemony; in short-to shape in a less direct way the views, values, and preferences of subordinate groups. If these effects of social and economic inequality are not substantially contained, political equality will be extremely limited.

Although most current discussions of political equality focus on economic power, wealth, or socioeconomic inequality, the arguments easily apply to gender inequality. Think of men as the dominant group under gender stratification and re-read the previous quote. To see how gender stratification might influence the views of the subordinate group, consider recent research by Richard Fox and Jennifer Lawless (2004). These researchers found that in a sample of equally qualified men and women, men were substantially more likely to express ambition towards political office. When the women were asked why they did not aspire to political office, they explained that they did not feel qualified. Such research suggests that women are socialized to believe that they are not qualified to participate in politics (see also Wolbrecht and Campbell 2007). Assessing the quality of democracy raises the question: if a government chronically underrepresents women, are we positive the 'rules of the game' are fair? Certainly, the same question can be asked about any historically marginalized or oppressed group, for example a racial or ethnic group, and about economic groups. Understanding the quality of democracy requires going beyond a simple understanding of participation to understand the factual representation of such traditionally marginalized groups. It follows that to understand the way that gender can be incorporated into our understanding of democracy, we must better understand the concept of representation.

KEY POINTS • _Women may appear to be included in d~flnitions of · democracy but are often not included in practice. • Focusing on the quality of democracy opens the door to the ·explicit inclusion of women. • The V-Dem dataset is a new effort at measuring · democracy that explicitly includes gender:

Women's Democratic Representation: Formal, Descriptive, Substantive, and Symbolic Representation If the representation of women and other marginalized groups is central to democracy, what does 'equal representation' mean? When discussing democracy and women, theorists often make distinctions between formal, descriptive, substantive, and symbolic representation. The most basic formulation of equal representation is formal representation-that women have the legal right to participate in politics on an equal basis with men. Achieving formal representation requires the removal of any barriers to women's participation in politics. Women must have the right to vote and the right to run for office. The goal of formal representation is the absence of direct and overt discrimination against women in politics. The idea that women should have the right to vote has become nearly universally accepted over the last 100 years. Women's rights are now seen as human rights, and statements about women's political participation are set out in the resolutions, codes, and formal conventions of most international bodies, as well as in the law of many individual countries. For example, at the fourth UN World Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995, 189 countries agreed to a Platform for Action stating, 'No government can claim to be democratic until women are guaranteed the right to equal representation.' This is the type of representation at least is overtly exemplified in most definitions of democracy-democracies must grant adult citizens the formal right to political participation. But formal representation does not necessarily result in substantial numbers of women in positions of political power. Even though in most countries of the world women have the equal opportunity to vote and to participate in politics, women remain significantly underrepresented in positions of political decision-making. Over 99 per cent of countries in the world have granted women the formal right to vote without restrictions and the formal right to stand for election. But many countries still do not have more than 20 per cent women in their legislative bodies. Equal opportunity does not appear to automatically produce equality in the numbers of men and women participating in politics. For this reason, feminist political theorists have argued that we need a different conception of equal

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representation. Equal representation can also require descriptive representation-descriptive similarity between representatives and constituents. If women make up 50 per cent of the population, they should also make up roughly 50 per cent of legislative and executive bodies. Arguments for descriptive representation suggest that it is not enough to have formal political equality in politics. Rights alone do not remedy the social and economic inequalities that prevent women from taking advantage of their political opportunities. Instead, their past and continued exclusion from political elites reinforces the idea of women's inferiority (Phillips 1995). To address this problem, feminist political theorists argue that something more is required: 'Those who have been traditionally subordinated, marginalized, or silenced need the security of a guaranteed voice and ... democracies must act to redress the imbalance that centuries of oppression have wrought' (Phillips 1991: 7). That is, action must be taken, for example, electoral laws changed, or gender quotas introduced, to ensure that women are represented in politics in numbers more proportionately similar to their presence in the population. The case for descriptive representation hinges on the notion that racial, ethnic, and gender groups are uniquely suited to represent themselves in democracies. In principle, democratic ideals suggest that elected representatives will serve the interests of the entire community and be able to transcend any specific interests based on their own characteristics such as sex, race, or age. But in practice, 'while we may all be capable of that imaginative leap that takes us beyond our own situation, history indicates that we do this very partially, if at all' (Phillips 1991: 65). Because social groups (gender groups, ethnic groups) have different interests due to varied economic circumstances or histories of oppression, representation by groups other than one's own is not assured. If groups cannot be well represented by other groups, each group needs to be represented among political elites (Williams 1998). In the case of women, theorists argue that due to different socialization and life experiences, 'women bring to politics a different set of values, experiences and expertise' (Phillips 1995: 6). Because of women's historically marginalized position, their general relegation to certain economic roles, and their primary responsibility for child and elderly care, they have shared experiences and therefore

common interests. Women have different interests than men, those interests cannot be represented by men, and therefore women must be present themselves in the political arena. Even if we accept that women can best represent themselves and need to be numerically represented in politics, a question remains. Can women represent women? This question leads to a third type of equal representation: substantive representation, that women's interests must be advocated in the political arena. Substantive representation requires that politicians speak for and act to support women's issues. Going even further than the numerical representation of women outlined in descriptive representation arguments, advocates of substantive representation point out that 'standing for' is not the same as 'acting for' (Pitkin 1972). Getting higher numbers of women involved in politics is only a necessary but not sufficient condition for women's interests to be served. For women's interests to be represented in politics, theorists argue that women politicians must be willing to and able to represent those interests. Some advocates of substantive representation argue that rather than simply electing women to political office, we should elect feminists, either women or men, who are more likely to be directly supportive of women's interests (Tremblay and Pelletier 2000). Others advocate mechanisms such as women's caucuses to support women who speak on heretofore unarticulated issue topics. Others point out that women are not a monolithic group and that women of one race, ethnicity, religion, class, or sexual orientation, especially the elite group, may not be able to represent all women (Sagot 2010; Hughes and Tienes 2011; Smooth2011). A final type of representation is symbolic representation, or the 'feeling of being fairly or effectively represented' (Pitkin 1972; Schwindt-Bayer and Mishler 2005:407). When there are more women visible in politics, it acts as a signal to women citizens that they are represented, and that politics may be receptive to them. 'Just as the exclusion of women from politics at an elite level sends the implicit message that politics is a 'man's game' ... the inclusion of women in politics at an elite level sends messages to women that politics is a woman's game too' (Barnes and Burchard 2013: 770). Symbolic representation increases the political interest and engagement of women and girls (e.g. Barnes and Burchard 2013; Beaman et al. 2009), and the aspirations of parents of girls (Beaman et al. 2012: 4). Symbolic representation can create a virtuous circle

IO Gender and Democratization as greater numbers of women in politics increase cultural beliefs about women as leaders (Alexander 2012).

KEY'POINTS • Formal· representation is the legal right to p~rticipate iri · politics. For women th_is means having the right to vote and stand for office. . . • . Descriptive representation requires numeric similarity·be-. tween _legisiative bodies ~nd the electorate they· repres·ent in.terms of gender; race, ethnicity. or_ other. demographic · , chara~teristics. Fqr wofri_e'n this ·means achieving a high· · percentage of representation in a legislature. • . Substantive representation requires _that the interests ?tnd :'issues of group be advocated_ in the p'olitical_arena. ·For . women this means ensuring that politicians speak for and act to support wome~'s i~sues. . · · · · • . Symbolic representation invokes the feeling of being 'fairly represented'.::

a

Women's Suffrage as an Aspect of Democratization If we take the arguments in the previous section seriously, then understanding women's suffrage (formal representation) and women's legislative representation (descriptive representation) is critical to any understanding of democracy. This section will provide a brief review of the expansion of women's suffrage around the world while the next will present detailed information on women's political representation around the world. Today we often take for granted that women have the right to vote almost everywhere, but this was not the case until the last century. From the world's first democracy in ancient Greece through the mid-1800s, political thinkers excluded women from notions of citizenship. Politics was the domain of men, and women were thought to lack the qualities and capabilities necessary for equal citizenship. Furthermore, religious doctrine and cultural traditions about women's proper place in society served as barriers to women's political participation. In the Third World, these beliefs were often reinforced by European Colonialism, which carried notions of separate spheres backed by political philosophers of the Enlightenment. Against these powerful barriers, the fight for the formal representation of women in politics was long, difficult, and occasionally bloody. It was only

following decades of struggle that women in many countries achieved suffrage. The enfranchisement of women was the primary goal of First-Wave feminism. The term 'First Wave' is used to distinguish early women's movements (covering the time period of the late nineteenth through the early twentieth century) from the women's liberation movements of the 1970s. Although women in many countries won the right to vote during feminism's first wave, in parts of the world the struggle continued for many years afterwards. Compared to fights for men's suffrage, women's suffrage movements faced unique obstacles. Often a woman's movement in a particular country had to address distinctive cultural, political, or religious circumstances. In Latin America, for example, traditional values and machismo served to hinder women's progress (Lavrin 1994). In Uruguay, one opponent to suffrage invented a new term, machonismo, to describe the desire to copy men and divert women from their natural path (Hannam, Auchterlonie, and Holden 2000). Authoritarian regimes and conservative parties tended to oppose democratization and the extension of voting rights. Direct government suppression of independent women's organizations occurred at various times in France, Russia, China, Japan, Indonesia, Iran, Brazil, and Peru (Randall 1987). And in the Middle East, Islam was (and is) used to justify women's continued exclusion from political participation. Across the world, women's suffrage movements differed in many ways. For example, some women's movements developed earlier than others. Ann Knight, a British Quaker, produced the first recognizable women's suffrage pamphlet in 1847. And the first formal demand for women's right to vote in the USA was made only a year later at the Seneca Falls Convention in New York. By 1893, when New Zealand became the first country to introduce universal suffrage, movements in many Western countries were in full swing. The First Wave of the women's movement had begun in France and Germany in the 1860s, followed by the Nordic Countries in the 1870s and 1880s. Women's movements in Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East often lagged behind, developing in the first decades of the twentieth century. Another factor that varied both within and across suffrage movements is women's use of militant tactics. Militant tactics, used first by suffrage organizations in the United Kingdom, can be distinguished from more conventional tactics such as lobbying, petitioning, and

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Pamela Paxton and Kristopher Velasco letter writing. Militancy can include the disruption of meetings, tax resistance, breaking windows, arson attacks on public buildings, imprisonment, and hunger striking. For example, on March 1, 1912 British suffragettes made coordinated stone-throwing attacks to break windows throughout London at 15-minute intervals Qorgensen-Earp 1999). Women used militant tactics, organizing demonstrations and attacking legislatures, in a wide range of countries Qayawardena 1986). For example, in 1911, the Chinese Suffragette Society went to the first meetings of the National Assembly. When they were refused the vote, they launched an attack, and by the third day, the Assembly had to send for troops for protection. Similarly, in Guangdong, the Provisional Government had promised women the vote, but retracted it, and women invaded the legislature (Hannam, Auchterlonie, and Holden 2000). Women also used militancy in Japan (1924), Egypt (1924), Iran (1917), and Sri Lanka (1927). In other countries women were reluctant to use militant tactics, afraid of being called unwomanly or too radical. Just because women were fighting for the right to vote does not mean they achieved it quickly. From the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention demand for women suffrage, it would take the United States 72 years, until 1920, to grant women that right. Table 10.1 presents dates of women's suffrage around the world for a select list of countries. Over time, these varying national debates about women's rights gave way to an intemationally-recognized universal belief in women's enfranchisement (Paxton, Hughes, and Green 2006; Towns 2010; Thames and Williams 2013) and most countries of the world had granted women suffrage by the 1960s. Interestingly, it was sometimes countries with longer histories of democratic principles that held out, continuing to deny women rights. In Switzerland, for example, women gained the right to vote nationally only in 1971 and in local elections as late as 1990. Another group of countries with late suffrage rights were in the Middle East. In 1999, women secured voting rights in the country of Qatar, followed by Bahrain in 2001, Oman in 2003, Kuwait in 2005, and the United Arab Emirates in 2006, and Saudi Arabia in 2011. Despite these recent victories, women's equal citizenship is not yet universal. In Lebanon, proof of education is required for a woman to vote, while a man is not subject to any education restrictions. Women's vote is optional, while men are required to vote by law.

Table I 0.1 Dates of Women's Suffrage in- Selected Countries· 1893

New Zealand

1902

Australia (aboriginal women excluded)

1906

Finland

1913

Norway

1915

Denmark

1918

Austria, Estonia, Germany, Hungary, Poland, United Kingdom (women over 30)

1920

United States of America

1930

South Africa (Whites), Turkey

1931

Chile (municipal elections), Spain, Sri Lanka

1932

Brazil, Thailand

1937

Philippines

1939

El Salvador

1942

Dominican Republic

1944

France

1945

Indonesia, Italy, Senegal

1947

Pakistan

1949

China, Costa Rica, Syria

1952

Greece

1956

Egypt

1959

Madagascar, Tunisia, Tanzania

1963

Afghanistan, Iran, Kenya

1971

Switzerland

1972

Bangladesh

1974

Jordan, Solomon Islands

1976

Portugal

1980

Iraq, Vanuatu I

1994

South Africa (Blacks)

2005

Kuwait

201 I

Saudi Arabia

In Bhutan, only one vote per family is allowed at the village level, meaning that women are often excluded.

KEY POINTS • Women's fight for the right tovqte was long, difficult, and sometimes bloody. • Women achieved suffrage only ~ecently in_ some plac~s and still do not have the full right to vote in a few countries. ,

IO Gender and Democratization countries, women have become commonplace as members of parliament, reaching 20, 30, 40, and even over 50 per cent of legislatures. In many other countries, however, the struggle for descriptive representation proceeds slowly and women remain barely visible in political life. The pace of women's access to positions of power was also very different from country to country. In some countries women appeared in politics in significant numbers by the 1970s while in others it would take until the 1990s to gain a political presence. Figure 10.1 provides a way to understand the growth in women's descriptive representation over time. Figure 10.1 demonstrates that while women have reached important milestones such as 30 per cent of national legislatures in an increasing percentage of countries, women's overall representation has room to increase. Although over 80 per cent of countries have reached at least 10 per cent women in their national legislature, fewer (46 per cent) have crossed the 20 per cent barrier.

Women's Representation as an Aspect of Democracy After the fight for formal representation was largely won, women needed to fight for descriptive representation. Slowly over the course of the twentieth century, women began to make inroads into areas of power typically held by men: women began to hold political office, a few led the way as presidents and prime ministers, and women began to fill cabinet positions and advise leaders on public policy. But despite important landmark gains, women today are not fully represented in politics. The worldwide average percentage of women in national parliaments is 23 per cent. Of the over 190 countries in the world, a woman is the head of government (president or prime minister) in only 12. There is substantial variation around the world in women's political representation, however. In some

Fig _I 0.1. Changes in Women's Descriptive Political Repre_s;ntation · -~, . -~-- - ---- ---·-- ·----- --- .. -- .~- ·~ ---- -- - ·-, - - " --·- _. ___ -- - ----- ----------. -·-- - ---'.

__ ,_, __ ,,,,, __ ,... ________ .,,,.

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I

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I

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- - - - Suffrage - - Ten Percent .......... Twenty Percent - •- •- Thirty Percent Source: Paxton, Green, and Hughes (2008); Inter-Parliamentary Union (20 17)

I 65

166

Pamela Paxton and Kristopher Velasco

:Table

I 0.2 Per cent Wom~n in National Legislatures: Top 20 and Bottom' 20 Countries

•-'"-•-'••• .. ~•~-.:

-•-~-• ••' •••'••,.•-•••-

, .. ._.,::..•~ ,_ ~~

• 2.5 for some year between 2014-16: avg. FHI 0

V Vl

0.6

0

0.5

.c

>

0.7

~

0.3 20000 40000 60000 80000100000120000 GNlcapita

Sources: For liberal democracy scores, V-Dem Data Version 6(2016); for percentage Muslim, Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life (2009); for fuels dependence, World Bank (20 ISc); for GNI per capita, World Bank (20 ISa).

275

276

Laurajakli, M. Steven Fish, and Jason Wittenberg democratization significantly as well. The proportion of the population that adheres to Islam in the failed democratizers averages 43 per cent; in the robust democratizers, it is just 7 per cent. Moreover, predominantly Muslim countries comprise nearly half of the failed democratizers. Meanwhile, Senegal is the only predominantly Muslim country in our dataset that is categorically a robust democratizer. While the effect of late national independence is somewhat weaker, it is still notable. Of the failed democratizers, only four maintained national independence prior to 1900. Among robust democratizers, eight maintained national independence prior to 1900. Since neither ethnic fractionalization nor sex inequality were statistically significant, we do not plot their marginal effects. How can we interpret these marginal effects on V-Dem indices in relation to the more popular Freedom House measures? The average V-Dem electoral democracy score at a Freedom House score of 1 is .85; at a Freedom House score of 2 it is .74; at 3 it is .64; at 4 it is .47; at 5 itis .41; at 6 itis .28; and at 7 itis .16. The results are similar for V-Dem liberal democracy scores, but for each 1-point interval jump along the Freedom House score, there is greater variation in the change along V-Dem liberal democracy scores and the 'drop-off' in liberal democracy scores is steeper. The average V-Dem liberal democracy score at a Freedom House score of 1 is .78; at a Freedom House score of 2 it is .61; at 3 it is .46; at 4 it is .31; at 5 it is .22; at 6 it is .16; and at 7 it is .07. In sum, a 1-point change in the Freedom House Index corresponds to a roughly .1 change along the 0-1 ranging V-Dem scoring spectrum.

KEY POINTS The level of economic development is positively related to successful democratization. •. Fuels export dependence, a large Muslim share of the population, and late national independence are all negatively related to successful democratization.

The Limits of Explanations Based on Structural Factors It is critical for us to understand the limits of our model in the context of failed democratization. We

now hone in on the 26 cases of failed democratization to understand how well our model predicted various cases' strength of electoral democracy and liberal democracy. Table 18.5 presents the expected electoral democracy and liberal democracy scores of each failed democratizer (based on their actual scores on the explanatory variables), with 95 per cent confidence intervals in parentheses below each estimate, and the country's actual score alongside it in the adjacent column as well for comparison. We assume that if our statistical model predicted a country's level of both electoral and liberal democracy (or at least one of the two), then our explanations work reasonably well. & Table 18.5 demonstrates, of the 26 cases in our dataset, only 12 met one of these criteria. For example, our model is spot on for Kenya-a country with very low GNI per capita (US$3,070), high ethnic fractionalization, and late independence (1963). It also works very well for the Maldives-a Muslim majority country (98.4 per cent), with a moderate GNI per capita (US$11,480), which was quite recently decolonized (1965). Pakistan's fate is also well predicted-another Muslim majority country (96.3 per cent), highly unequal in terms of sex (the literacy gap is 27 per cent), with a low GNI per capita (US$5,320), and late independence (1947). In 14 of the failed democratizers, however, our predictions for the strength of electoral democracy and liberal democracy are quite inaccurate. They appear in bold in Table 18.5. Most often, the failures were the old Soviet states-the democratic performance of which the model overpredicted. These include Russia, Belarus, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. What is notable is that these cases all do exceptionally well on literacy rates across both genders, which contributes to inflated estimates via our sex inequality variable. Some of these countries also have reasonably high GNI per capita, and relatively small Muslim populations. Later in this analysis, we will provide some plausible explanations for the state of democratization in these post-Soviet states. Our model also overpredicted the performance of a number of African countries-including the Central African Republic, Zimbabwe, and Madagascar. Other African states were severely under predicted-including Burkina Faso, Mali, and Nigeria. Some degree of inaccuracy is of course expected; after all, our model only accounts for the effects of certain background conditions. A more complete explanation would also account for the agency of the actors in political systems that have a stake in regime

18 A Decade of Democratic Decline and Stagnation TableJS.5 The Failed Democr~tizers an'd our Mqdel's Prediction of th~ir Fates - ----·' __ ,__________ , --- - --·'--·--·-~ ·--~---------·---· ·--~•"---·--, ------------··--·--- -- .

-

____ · .. : -·---•- -- -- -·-"·~ ·-·~-

-

Country

Predicted Polyarchy

Actual Polyarchy

Predicted Libdem

Actual Libdem

Armenia

.56

.36

.43

.20

(.48-.64) Belarus

.54

Burkina Faso

.43

.3

.41

.7

.27

.32

.36

.38 .36

Gabon

.38

Gambia

.37

.31 .3

.21

.42

.23

.3.1

.22

.43

.42

Kenya

.51

.52

.26

.52

.36

.5 .51

Maldives

.42

.58 .21

.41 .25

Pakistan

.4

.44

.27

.39 .14

.69

.23

.22

(.3 1-.46) .24

(.18-.37) .5

(.15-.30) .31

.25

.26

(.18-.33) .58

.12

.41

.24

(.15-.35) (.30-.50)

.35 .38

(.3 1-.49) Nigeria

.22

.37

(.29-.47) Morocco

.35

(.27-.43)

(.32-.53) .38

.19

(.15-.30)

(.44-.59)

Mali

.34

(.28-.43)

(.41-.59) Malaysia

.23

(.17.36)

(.28-.47) Madagascar

.53

.27

(.43- .59) .38

.3

(.43-.63)

(.3 1-.53)

Kyrgyzstan

.IS

(.22-.37)

(.6-.78) Jordan

.23

(.15-.29)

(.37-.54) .7

. IS

(.13-.32)

(.26-.50)

Honduras

.I

(.13-.27)

(.26-.50)

.45

.22 (.14-.31)

(.27-.45)

Guinea-Bissau

.16

(.26-.46)

(.27-.49) Djibouti

.52

(.21-.34)

(.40- .61) Congo

.I

(.34-.47)

(.36-.50) .51

--

(.36-.5 I)

(.47-.60)

Central African Republic

C

.13

(.06-.19) .27

(.16-.33) (Continued)

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Laura Jakli, M. Steven Fish, and Jason Wittenberg

Country

Predicted Polyarchy

Actual Polyarchy

Predicted Libdem

Actual Libdem

Russia

.61

.30

.43

.15

(.5 1-.71) Sri Lanka

.56

Tajikistan

.40

Thailand

.71

(.32-.54) .55

.43

.21

.25

.17

.56

(.51-.61)

(.38-.48)

(.30-.50)

.53 .53

.I

(.46-.65) .45

(.39-.67) Zimbabwe

.08

(.16-.33)

(.63-.79) Venezuela

.34

.33

.17

(.19-.46) .32

(.46-.59)

outcomes. Some may fight for democracy, whereas others may prefer the opportunities for power and corruption that comes with dictatorship. In the next section, we focus in particular on the actors inhibiting democratization.

Agents of Democratic Failure We can distinguish between five primary agents of democratic failure: (1) the masses; (2) insurgents; (3) meddling foreign powers; (4) power-seeking armed forces; and (5) a despotic chief executive. The masses may carry out an uprising or revolution. Insurgents may sabotage democratization by instigating a civil war. A foreign power may thwart a democratic opening by launching an invasion or arming insurgent forces. The armed forces may also intervene to throw elected leaders out of power. Lastly; a chief executive may engage in despotic actions. In turn, referencing Table 18.5, we consider which of these agents may have contributed to the 14 cases of failed democratization that our model failed to predict. In Armenia, the cause of strife remains a despotic chief executive. Most recently; election monitors expressed concern over the fairness of the 2013 presidential election, in which the incumbent candidate, President Sargsyan of the Republican Party of Armenia (HHK), was re-elected.for his third term. On the one hand, monitors were concerned because of the

.38

.17

(.32-.44)

reported use of administrative resources towards Sargsyan's reelection campaign. On the other hand, there was scepticism among experts concerning the unusually high electoral support for the incumbent. In Belarus, the narrative is similar: President Aleksandr Lukashenko secured his fifth term in the October 2015 presidential election. Election monitors were highly sceptical over the freedom and fairness of the election. He also continues to hold a tight grip over the media and describes his style of governance as authoritarian (see Chapter 22). Burkina Faso has most recently been subject to democratic weakening due to interference from the military as well as mass uprisings. Following mass protests at the end of 2014, the long-time president Blaise Compaore was forced to resign. However, in September 2015, the presidential guard-the Regiment de Securite Presidentielle (RSP)-comprised of his core loyalists, attempted to stage a military coup. Dozens of civilians were killed in the process, and the political situation has remained fragile since. In the Central African Republic, both insurgencies and armed forces continue to weaken the chances of successful democratization. The ongoing conflict between Muslim Seleka forces and Christian militias has led to large-scale religious cleansing. The conflict is so severe that approximately one million people have reportedly been internally displaced. In early 2014, the UN interfered to launch a large-scale stabilizing mission involving 11,000 troops. Although the insurgency

18 A Decade of Democratic Decline and Stagnation was followed by a cease-fire agreement, peace and rule of law has proven difficult and short-lived. In Honduras, a despotic chief executive has brought the country into democratic decline. The ruling National Party (PN) and its leader-President Juan Orlando Hernandez-have continued to disrupt the country's democratic development with corruption scandals. Moreover, the Honduran constitution was recently amended to eliminate the term limits previously imposed on the president and to circumvent the congressional vote on military policing. Kyrgyzstan's democratic failure is also primarily due to an unruly executive. President Atambayev has reportedly used the executive branch to harass, intimidate, and altogether eliminate his political enemies. Moreover, ultranationalist vigilante groups like Kyrk Choro (40 Knights) and Kalys (Justice) have repeatedly threatened political opponents of the ruling party (particularly ethnic minority groups). Over the last decade, Madagascar has been severely weakened by Andry Rajoelina's 2009 military-backed coup. Madagascar continues to experience large-scale political corruption (Wickberg 2014), cuts to international aid, and general political discontent. In May 2015, the National Assembly voted to impeach President Hery Rajaonarimampianina-but it was quickly struck down by the courts. While this would usually be lauded as a demonstration of judicial power vis-a-vis the executive, the action was particularly damaging to democracy because, reportedly, Madagascar's executive often exerts pressure on judges through reassigning magistrates to different locations. In light of these dynamics, the opposition supporters perceive the court decision as illegitimate. In Malaysia, the primary limiting factor is also the executive. Multiple electoral oversight commissions have noted that the electoral framework is severely unjust and thereby weakens the country's electoral legitimacy (Norris, Frank, and Martinez i Coma 2014; Khoo 2014). Moreover, corruption scandals are frequent and Malaysia's partisan patronage networks are complex and far-reaching (Siddiquee 2010; Gomez 2014). The Malaysian case is yet another instance in which the executive keeps very tight control over the media 1 . As we briefly discussed earlier in this chapter, Tuareg insurgents have destabilized Mali. Given the tenuous peace with the rebels, Mali's. constitution was briefly suspended in 2012, and elections have been delayed repeatedly (Lecocq et al. 2013). Corruption remains a problem in Mali's government, and media

self-censorship has increased significantly as a result of insurgents' widespread terrorizing of journalists during the 2012 rebellion (Freedom House 2016). Nigeria has recently gained democratic momentum--'-after 16 years in power, the People's Democratic Party (PDP) lost the 2015 presidential election and its majority in the National Assembly to the opposition, All Progressives Congress (APC). However, insurgent forces-specifically, Boko Haram-have continued to terrorize civilians as well as members of the government. In response to the terrorist threats, the Nigerian government's forces have continued to commit human rights violations. These violations reportedly include extrajudicial killings, mass arrests, illegal detentions, and even civilian torture. Russia's continued problems with democratization are also rooted in its executive: President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin have continued a far-reaching crackdown on civil society, specifically targeting domestic non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Over the last decade, the regime has continued to intensify control and state censorship of media. The Russian media landscape is saturated with nationalist, pro-Putin propaganda. Moreover, the regime has been closely linked to the execution of a dozen dissidents and political opponents in recent years. It has also been accused of meddling in foreign elections and promoting proRussian separatist insurgencies in the region. In Tajikistan, the executive is yet again arguably responsible for the country's democratic failures. The President of Tajikistan, Emomali Rahmon, has been in power since 1994. His ruling People's Democratic Party (PDP) reportedly ramped up efforts to persecute the opposition prior to the March 2015 parliamentary elections, as well as directly following the elections. The PDP has not only arrested opposition leaders, but it also banned the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan (IRPT)-labelling it a terrorist organization. Given this series of purges, the ruling party has cemented a virtually unopposed position in policy legislation and implementation. In Thailand, the masses as well as the military played an important role in undermining democratic rule. Indeed, the country's political environment rapidly deteriorated in 2014 due to a series of public demonstrations that often devolved into violent disruptions organized by an opposition group, the People's Democratic Reform Committee (PDRC). A number of PDRC supporters occupied government ministries and major intersections in Bangkok. Allegedly, the

279

280

Laura Jakli, M. Steven Fish, and Jason Wittenberg PDRC was also responsible for cutting off power to the homes of members of the governing Puea Thai Party (PTP). Following counter protests by the administration's loyalists and a series of bombings, dozens were killed and hundreds more injured. Eventually, the army declared martial law and detained senior leaders from both the opposition's camp and the government; it shortly thereafter announced a coup d'etat. The resulting National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO) suspended the constitution, forcibly dispersed all rallies, and imposed severe restrictions on freedom of speech, association, and the press. Thailand has since remained in a very fragile political state. In Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe led ZANU-PF in an authoritarian manner for over three decades, until he was sacked in a coup orchestrated by elements within his own party. Following in Mugabe's tradition, the ruling ZANU-PF continues to use state institutions as well as intimidation to punish opposition politicians, their supporters, and critical political activists (Kriger 2005; Meredith 2018). Moreover, recent elections (both local and national) have been marred by small-scale electoral violence and other reported irregularities 2 • In short, we find that despotic chief executives continue to reign as the agent of democracy's demise. In eight of the 14 cases our model failed to predict, the primary cause was, arguably, a despotic executive. In another three cases, they shared responsibility with another actor. In a small subset of our cases, insurgents, militaries, and mass protests also contributed to democratization's demise. However, the trend remains: the chief executive has been the primary agent of democratic backsliding. Note that in almost all instances, the culprit is specifically the president. This is not surprising given the wealth of literature on the relative danger of presidential versus parliamentary systems (Linz and Valenzuela 1994; Fish 2006). It thereby follows that finding ways to constrain a president may be crucial to safeguarding democracy.

KEY POINTS O_bjective structural conditions predict the levels of electoral and liberal democracy with a reasonable degree of accuracy in about half of the cases of failed democra- _ tization. •

Beyond that, we have to look at political actors; the role of the chief executive is particularly important

Strengthening Legislatures and Curtailing Executive Power As suggested by Fish (2006), a strong legislature may be the best antidote to an executive's abuse of power. This continues to ring true given the modern political climate of faileddemocratizers. Constitutions' drafters who seek to maximize the chances of democratic success should vest expansive powers in the parliament and design rigorous checks and balances between the legislature and the executive. Because the V-Dem liberal democracy index focuses on institutional checks and balances and the limitation of government power, this measure may be especially important in formulating certain predictions about the future regarding the viability of a country's democracy. We make no causal claim in regard to the design and power of the legislature, given the variety of other factors that contribute to both institutional design and democratic outcomes. However, we suggest that designing and sustaining a strong legislature could have helped prevent the level of democratic backsliding we have witnessed in-for example-Armenia, Belarus, Central African Republic, Russia, and Zimbabwe. Moreover, in many cases, the bolstering of the legislature has promoted open politics. Bhutan serves as one recent example of this.

Altering the Structural Factors Many of the structural variables used in the previous analysis are rather slow to evolve; economic development is generally a multi-decade endeavour. Its effects on the prospects for democratization may take generations to materialize. Moreover, countries' histories of national independence are also fixed and immutable. However, a majority of even the robust democratizers obtained independent statehood only in the twentieth century. The percentage of Muslims (or any other faith community) in a population is also relatively stable over time. Still, a country's religious composition may be viewed as a source of special challenge, rather than an insuperable barrier to, successful democratization. In countries like Indonesia, Islamic mass organizations have played constructive roles in building civil society and aiding democratization. Fuels export dependence is not immutable, but it is rather sticky; at least in the short term. Yet, countries like Mexico have successfully democratized in the past by changing policy and reducing their reliance

18 A Decade of Democratic Decline and Stagnation on hydrocarbons and diversifying their exports. The success of Mexico prompts us to speculate about what might happen if fuels-dependent countries whose democratization failed manage to diversify their exports. In sum, while structural factors do change, they are very difficult to move in the short term. Diversifying exports seems like the most viable option in terms of providing a 'quick fix.' Concentrated efforts of rapid economic development and industrialization may also provide positive democratic gains-as in the case of South Korea in recent decades.

~_E.Y ~_61'~:r.~::':,:,_,_•~:~:i~\- _,•: · ~T~ • Although ~iflk~lt to m~nipulate in-the ·short term, reductions· i~-fu~I ~9rt dep-~nd_eiic~ would -~educ~ the likelihood cif democratic breakdo~n-. . - . . - -. . • Other if!]p~~ant·structu~al fa'i:tocs ar~· l;ss amen" : . -. 'able t~ p61~i~I engineering; ~blit1J soluti~ns ;ych is"·• proyiding ch~~ls,s and balances\,n the executive 2an ;: • still act as ari important bulwark"iigainst__ relapsei/irto --authoritar,ia'~ism. . .-- . ,, - .

Conclusion In a majority of countries around the world, democratization continues to be tenuous at best. In fact, only 62 of our 158 cases have achieved the status of established democracy or robust democratizer. As we have argued countries' degree of electoral democracy and liberal democracy indicate similar trends and are explained by a similar set of factors-including: (1) fuels export dependence; (2) economic development; (3) percentage of Muslims in the population; and (4) late national independence. We have argued that there is hope for rapid democratization if policies are implemented to alleviate poverty and alter dependency on hydrocarbons. Failed democratizers usually feature despotic executives who can take advantage of weak institutions. We detailed multiple instances in which despots manipulated institutions to stay in power for decades. Since it can be difficult to know in advance who will become a despot, the solution is to design better institutions to constrain executive power. Popular anti-authoritarian uprisings gain media attention, but it should be recognized that sometimes 'the people' are against democracy. Foreign influence, however, was not particularly prevalent amongst our cases. To be sure, outsiders

have done some meddling. For example, some of the chief executives who presided over democratization's demise enjoyed the backing of foreign governments. Yet these governments are never the primary actor in democracy's demise. Our focus on failed democratizers does miss a very worrying trend undermining democratization. There are a number of countries that are unambiguously in democratic decline, but by any index of democratic strength, remain too democratic compared to underdeveloped democracies to enter into our in-depth analyses of democratic failure. Three such notable cases of relative democratic decline include Hungary; Poland, and Turkey-wherein the parties (and rulers) in power have continued to chip away at checks and balances and concentrate executive power. The transformations have been more gradual because in each case the leader has chosen to legitimize the institutional changes by implementing them through at least nominally democratic procedures such as parliamentary votes or popular referenda. If the people no longer support democracy, then even strong constraints on the executive will not be enough to save the system.

I. How do measures of liberal and electoral democracy serve to analyse the factors determining failure of democratization? 2. How does a failed democratizer differ from an established autocracy? 3. How might economic dependence upon oil and gas production affect the prospects for democratization? Under what regime conditions do we expect a strong negative effect?

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Laura Jakli, M. Steven Fish, and Jason Wittenberg 4. How might a long history of national independence and statehood decrease the probability that democratization will fail?

5. What factors other than those discussed in this chapter might affect the probabilitythat.democratization will succeed or fail?

~ a range of other resources: www.oup.com/uk/haerpfer2e/.

Visit the online resources that accompany this book for additional questions to accompany each chapter, and

I

Aslund, A (2007), Russia's Capitalist Revolution: Why Market Reform Succeeded and Democracy Failed (Washington, DC: Peterson Institute for International Economics). This book furnishes a provocative explanation for one of the most momentous cases of democratic failure of modern times, and provides a welcome evaluation of economic as well as political transformation. Linz,

J.J. ( 1978), The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Crisis, Breakdown and Reequilibration

(Baltimore, MD: Johns

Hopkins University Press). This slim volume remains the starting point for all studies on the failure of democracy. Though it focuses largely on interwar cases, its acute theoretical insights remain relevant for contemporary circumstances. Posusney. M. P. and Angrist, M. P. (2005) (eds), Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Regimes and Resistance (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner). This edited volume provides a wealth of insights on why democratization fails. Its focus on the Middle East, given that the region is often overlooked in studies of regime change, makes the volume particularly useful. Smith, P. H. (2005), Democracy in Latin America: Political Change in Comparative Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press). This engaging book holds up theories of regime change to the experience of Latin America. Exemplary in its use of theory to understand cases, and of cases to refine theory. the book provides a wealth of information as well as insights into various theories of democratization. It also probes the possible limits of democratization and the factors that may impose those limits. Villal6n, LA and Von Doepp, P. (2005) (eds), The Fate ofAfrica's Democratic Experiments: Elites and Institutions (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press). Focusing largely on the effects and the limits of the effects of institutions on democratization, this edited volume provides much insight into the difficulty and tenuousness of many of Africas experiments with open politics.

https://www.v-dem.net/en/data/ The Varieties of Democracy website provides access to various versions of their

data, as well as an online analysis tool to explore multiple indices in a single country. http://hdr.undp.org/en/ The Human Development Report, issued annually by the United Nations Development

Programme, contains a wealth of data for nearly all of the world's countries on factors related to socioeconomic development and living standards.

While the May 2018 general election led to the first alternation in power, it is too early to tell whether this will set Malaysia on the path to full democracy.

2

The 2017 coup d'etat opened prospects for democratic renewal in Zimbabwe; however, it is too early to say whether this will materialize.

JD ELITE CONVERGENCE. · --·. ---., -~·-·~'•"-• service_their ·· Joans. .· . .: ' . '. . ' . . in'the aftermath of tne 1982 debt crisis ne'oliberalism b~came the pred~r,-;lnant.economic model _i~ Latin America-in line with the ideas o~the 'Washington Consensus'.

of economics (Roddick 1988) it was most certainly not lost with respect to democracy. & detailed previously, after 1982 the region found itself immersed in the debt crisis. To some extent, the failure to overcome it debilitated some undemocratic regimes and was one of the reasons behind the wave of democratization in Latin America. However, it also debilitated the newly restored democracies. This lack of economic success eventually led international crediting institutions to draft the 'Washington Consensus', the conditions of which were attached to new loans of the 1990s. Yet neoliberal economics has also resulted in a number of problems for democracy as amongst other things unequal distribution of wealth has increased within the region. Although the result of a very different economic model than the neoliberal one, the economic situation in Venezuela in the mid-2010s, would impinge on democracy within that country.

Political Culture and Society which would lead to the prevalence of neoliberal economics within the region. In the case of Chile, as mentioned earlier, the neoliberal economic model had been implemented at a much earlier stage than in the rest of the continent. Perhaps as a consequence of many disliking the economic policies pursued by Salvador Allende between 1970 and 1973 the military junta, who certainly disliked it for ideological reasons, instigated this model soon after coming to power in September 1973. Moreover, a number of the government's economic advisers had studied at the University of Chicago, where they had been heavily influenced by the ideas of Milton Friedman. They became known as the 'Chicago boys' and were essential to Chile following a very different economic path from the rest of the region. These economic policies also partly explain the high regard which many in Reagan's and Thatcher's governments held Pinochet in. The significance of this would become apparent once he was no longer the president of Chile. Neoliberal economics is often closely associated with the spread of democracy (see Chapter 8). This combination, which Francis Fukuyama celebrated in his. book The End of History and the Last Man (1992), was vital in the case of Latin America. Although the 1980s has been described as the 'lost decade' in terms

During the various occasions that the military intervened in politics civil society was silenced and excluded from public debate, let alone the decision-making process. The bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes of the Southern Cone, for instance, saw organized labour as the cause of economic stagnation and even the source of Marxist insurgency, and consequently embarked on their brutal repression with the aim of depoliticizing, if not dismantling them. Nonetheless, trade unions in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile succeeded in re-organizing themselves and mounted a series of strikes and protests that were key in weakening and destabilizing military juntas. Other groups also made important attempts to make themselves heard. Some of these succeeded in putting through an agenda that impacted on the processes of democratization. One such group was the Madres de Plaza de Mayo in Argentina-the mothers of the 'disappeared' who had been victims of military repression. In 1977 a group of women whose sons and daughters had been abducted by agents of the military government met to organize weekly demonstrations in the Plaza de Mayo, Buenos Aires' central square, demanding information about their missing children. The organization's claims, activities, and overall role during and after the authoritarian rule contributed significantly to pushing the military out of power and uncovering the extent to which the junta had abused

20 Latin America

human rights. Probably taking inspiration from the Madres, in 2003 a group of Cuban women began to protest against the imprisonment of their dissident relatives. The Damas de Blanco (Ladies in White), as they came to be known, can still be seen walking through Havana in white dresses. Despite the contribution of labour unions and the Madres to bringing down the dictatorship, Argentine civil society emerged from the military rule years fragmented and weakened. While organized labour (dominated by the Peronist party) staged a series of general strikes that paralyzed the first democratic government of Raul Alfonsin and facilitated the victory of Peronist candidate Carlos Menem in 1989, the neoliberal economic model implemented by the latter only weakened their power and that of civil society more generally. The market reforms of the two successive Menem administrations resulted in the privatization of state enterprises and services and deregulation of economic activities, yet also in further deindustrialization, mass redundancies of public employees, growing unemployment, and a dramatic reduction of the middle class. After years of recession, unemployment and corruption, a full-blown economic collapse in 2001 triggered a brief upsurge of new kinds of civil society movements. Ordinary people banging pots and pans in the cities' squares and streets prompted the fall of De la Rua's shortlived tenure and of a succession of interim presidents in 2002. During that period there were also neighbourhood assemblies putting direct democracy into practice, road blockades by unemployed piqueteros who soon organized themselves into a national movement, and the taking over of abandoned factories by former workers, who transformed them into cooperatives. In Chile, the neoliberal economic model had been applied much earlier. Already by 1975 the government of General Pinochet had successfully implemented it, aided by the open repression of those who opposed it. Indeed, widespread repression prompted the Catholic Church, inspired in the teachings of the Liberation Theology; to create the Vicariate of Solidarity with three main objectives: defend the lives of political prisoners, obtain their release, and help the destitute and the oppressed. In 1982-83, along with the rest of Latin America, Chile was beset by an economic crisis resulting from the regional foreign debt crisis. Soaring unemployment figures and a rapidly shrinking middle

class gave rise to a powerful opposition movement led by the Copper Workers' Federation, which between 1983 and 1986 mounted a number of mass demonstrations that seriously damaged the military government. Although their force had worn out by 1986-partly explained by the economic recovery that started in 1984-their actions paved the road for political parties' demanding free and fair elections for the 1988 plebiscite. The 'protected democracy' that ensued, where conservative political forces retained extraordinary powers, guaranteed political stability and economic prosperity during the transitional period. Yet by ensuring a favourable business environment, Chilean democracy was unable to effectively address the demands of (admittedly weakened) social groups such as urban and rural labour. However, other groups have felt the benefits of the newly restored democracy. Women's movements have had a number of victories with the creation of the National Women's Service aiming to reduce discrimination in society, the passing of a divorce law in 2004, and the access of women to high political posts-not least the presidency, which Michelle Bachelet won twice: in 2006 and in 2014. Also indigenous peoples, who make up about 3 per cent of the population, saw their situation improve with democratization. After suffering abuse, discriminatory policies, poverty and exploitation during the military government, the main indigenous group, the Mapuches, organized themselves, achieving recognition and protection of their indigenous communities and ancestral lands, as well as the creation of a National Corporation of Indigenous Development that administers indigenous affairs. Indigenous identity also remains strong in other parts of Latin America. In Ecuador and Bolivia, as well as Central America, it has been at the centre of civil and political mobilization. But perhaps the best-known indigenous organization is the Zapatista National Liberation Army (Ejercito Zapatista de Liberaci6n Nacional, EZLN) in Mexico, and the social movement around them. For decades PRI policy towards indigenous minorities sought their assimilation and cultural homogeneity across the country, since this was believed to be a condition for socioeconomic development. In the 1980s indigenous groups became more vocal and won some concessions from the government, but it was not until 1994 that their demands for political and cultural autonomy and control over their own resources and land became

3 I3

3 14

Andrea Oelsner and Mervyn Bain vociferous-with the appearance of the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas. Indeed, the debt crisis and the implementation of neoliberal economic policies proved especially hard on indigenous communities. Thus, when Mexico joined NAFTA in 1994 the Zapatistas launched their armed campaign-an anti-globalization rebellion of mainly Mayan peasants resorting to guerrilla methods as well as to the media and Internet to gain national and international support. Some argue that it was the Zapatista movement, rather than opposition parties, that has been the driving force behind Mexico's democratization by pushing civil society to demand democracy from the bottom up (Gilbreth and Otero 2001). By contrast, more traditional civil society groups, such as trade unions, played only a limited role due to the corporate structure of the PRI and thus of the state, which controlled the labour movement by exchanging considerable resources for political support, with Box 20.2 providing a more detailed account of the labour movement in Brazil, which was emblematic of the other labour movements outlined previously.

Unequal wealth and land distribution remains an important problem in Brazil today. According to the National Institute for Agrarian Colonization and Reform, in 20 I 0, 56 per cent of the land was owned by 2.5 per cent of the farmers, whereas the bottom 90 per cent of the farmers owned just 23 .per cent of the land.: Land concentration, mechanization of agriculture, and expulsion of workers from rural areas caused unemployment and mass migration t6 the cities. In the late I 970s--.

. Table '.?I :3

Electoral D~mocracies,in.Pb~~~~~h1u~i~Centrai'~dE~;n'l:E~;;b~ --- --- ---- ·--· - --- ·- _, --·- ~--· ----·- '-----·

-·---- -- -·-· - - -~---•--4., ··- _,.:., ---~ -------····- --· .

Country

J

.,,.• ___ ,, __

-

• _____ ...:,_,. __ -

91

10

II

12

13

14

15

8

8

7

7 6

7 6

7

7

* *

* *

* *

6

6

6

6

6

6

6

*

6

5

5

5

5

5

5

*

6

6

6

6

6

6

6

6

7

4

4

5

5

5

5

5

5

5

6

7

7

7

6

6

6

6

6

5

5

5

5

5

5

5

5

5

* *

* *

* *

* *

*

06

8

8

7

8

7

7

6

7

7

7

7

6

6

6

6

6

6

4

4

4

6

7

7

4

5

5

02

03

09

05

01

04

89

90

Electoral D

3

7

8 7

8 7

8 7

8 7

8 7

8 7

8 7

8 7

8

6

8 7

8

2

8 7

8

Liberal D

7

7

7

6

6

7

7

7

7

7

7

7

7

7

7

7

7

7

4

5

6

6

6

6

6

6

6

6

6

6

6

6

6

5

5

5

5

5

5

6

6

6

6

6

6

6

6

3

3

3

4

4

4

4

4

4

4

4

4

4

2

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

5

6

3

07

08

Hungary

6

Bulgaria

Electoral D Liberal D

0

Romania

Electoral D Liberal D

0

Serbia

Electoral D

2

Liberal D Albania

Electoral D

I

2

4

4

4

4

4

4

4

4

4

4

4

5

5

5

5

6

6

6

6

6

6

6

*

Liberal D

0

0

. 2

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

4

4

4

4

4

4

4

4

4

4

4

*

Source: Varieties of Democracy research project (V-Dem7. I data-set), University of Gothenburg and Notre Dame University; source: https://www.v-dem.net

*

21 Post-Communist Central and Eastern Europe elected. The new government was quite successful in establishing formal democratic institutions and initiating a number of pro-democratic changes in political, social, and economic life, and a new constitution was finally accepted in Serbia in 2006. Despite this major breakthrough in 2001-2004 as compared to the Milosevic era, in from 2005 to 2010, stagnation was a prevailing feature Serbia's transition process. This indicates a gap between the formal introduction of the new institutions and the available democratic resources necessary for their sustainable development and their stable functioning. Since 2010, similarly to other young democracies in Eastern Europe, signs of recession in Serbia's democratic transition have been observed. This is related to the relatively high levels of corruption in Serbia (higher than in other Balkan states, according to the Freedom House Index), a decrease in the media freedom, and lack of progress with reforms in the judicial system. Serbia's elections are still categorized as primary free and fair, though the quality of elections has been on the decline since 2008. Similarly to Serbia, democratization in Albania was delayed by several years due to internal conflicts and civil war. The new Albanian Republic, declared in 1991, was still governed by the Communist Party, who got a majority of votes at the parliamentary elections that year. The pro-democratic parties came to power after the subsequent elections, which were organized in 1992. The reforms organized by the democratic party lacked efficiency and hence did not bring observable progress and improvement in the country's democratic governance and economic performance. After a short period of democratic revival, the governance style of the president Sall Berisha became more autocratic, with an increasing pressure on the media, civil society, and political opposition. However, after this period of democratic recession, Albania came back to the path of democratization in 2001, and for the next ten years moved towards a model of consolidated liberal democracy. Prior to this, the country's social and economic transition was also halted by an economic crisis and a civil war. The lack of experience in market economy and private entrepreneurship led to high popularity of financial banking pyramid schemes (Ponzi schemes), which, after their collapse, caused a wave of violent civil unrests in 1996-97. Following the resignation of the government and the president, the crisis was resolved with the support of the international organizations

and UN peacekeeping forces. After a short period of political stabilization, the country was affected by the Kosovo war in 1999. Similarly to other countries with such 'postponed' transition, the constitution of Albania-which fixed parliamentary democracy as the form of governance and basic liberties and freedoms for the population-was accepted only in 1998. Although Albania has seen progress in its democratic rule compared to the situation in 1990, there is still a lot of improvement required for the country's economy and political system. Albania has a high level of corruption (in particular, political corruption is higher than in Serbia), its elections cannot be fully identified as free and fair, and improvement of the quality of elections is considered to be one of the main pre-conditions for Albania to join the European Union. Similarly, the freedom of media and the independence of the judicial system are frequently questioned in Albania, and the country requires more time to further consolidate its political and economic system. Hence, after a long, controversial, and sometimes dramatic period of transformations, Serbia and Albania have also become electoral democracies. The process of democratization in both countries can be characterized as very slow over the last 15 years. The level of liberal democracy remains very low in both countries, but the quality of democracy has improved since 2002 to an index of '5', which is on a par with Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary. Albania can be labelled as an electoral democracy with an index of '6' since 2006.

KEY POINT_S

. ,I .\ , ·1

, - - - ~ ~ - - - - · · _, --~~--.-... -----,...,.,.• ----,-~~~------' _ : i

• A political regime can be described as an electoral democracy when it fulfils a minimum definition of democracy: when it holds competitive and multiparty\ilections. Within Central and Eastern Europe, :five n:w democracies have been identified as electoral democracies, namely Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Se'rbia, and Albania. • These countries achieve·d transparency in their electoral process and have free and fair elections; further .effor:ts are required for the improvement of social and political integration, consolidation of the political system, -higher political participation and engagement of the population, clear division between the branches of.power, and ~edia .. . . . independence. ·

335

336

Christian W Haerpfer and Kseniya Kizilova

From New Democracies towards Emerging Democracies The final path of political transformation which we shall consider for this region is towards an 'emerging democracy'. An emerging democracy has a far lower level of democratic quality than a liberal democracy such as the Czech Republic or Slovenia, but also compared to electoral democracies like Bulgaria or Romania. An emerging democracy refers to the initial, immature stage of democratic rule; its main attributes are the declared vector of democratic development, the introduction of some (or very little) of the necessary democratic institutions and the set-up of a general legal framework (constitution) for the pro-democratic development of the state. Such a type of regime can be lacking democratic institutions, and the existing institutions usually operate in a way far from the principles of efficiency and transparency. Finally the free and fair character of elections as the fundamental constitutive process of democracy still needs to be reached. Emerging democracies can be described as 'work-in-progress', where democratic intentions and expectations frequently exceed actual success in the democratic transition of a political system. The difference between an emerging democracy and autocracy or electoral autocracy is in the consistency of the state authorities in the introduction of the democratic institutions and principles as well as in the prevailing support for democracy as the preferred form of governance among the population. The reasons for the immature state of democracy, which countries with emerging democratic rule feature, could be found in their history (lack of national cohesion, lack of democratic experience in the past, periods of violence and conflicts); ongoing disagreements within the political elite on the priorities of national development and means to achieve them (lack of efficiency); and clientelism and the prevailing role of agency over institutions in the political sphere (ODI briefing paper 2013). Emerging democracies have been located exclusively in the South East of the region, in former regions of Yugoslavia, which are now independent states or territorial units. Emerging democracies have been found in Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Bosnia-Herzegovina (see Table 21.4). An

index of democratization of '5' has been found in Kosovo, Macedonia, and Montenegro. The level of democratization is stable and constant over time in Kosovo and Montenegro. The process of democratization in Macedonia displays a bell-shaped pattern. Between 1992 and 1998 the index of democratization increased slowly from '2' to '6'. The quality of democracy was rather high with '6' between 1999 and 2009, but in the last nine years democratic backsliding has brought Macedonia to a very low democracy index of '4'. By far the lowest level of democratization in Central and Eastern Europe is in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The index of liberal democracy in this post-Yugoslav country is constantly at a very low level of '2' and the index of electoral democracy is at '3', displaying a very weak level of democratization. All the Balkan states and territories that belong to the 'emerging democracy' type are characterized by lower levels of the rule of law (separation of power branches and in particular, independence of the judiciary system); stability and performance of democratic institutions, their commitment to democratic principles; political and social integration and political participation of the population. Indicators of economic development, market organization, currency and price stability are often closely correlated with the success of the political transformations in these countries.

KEY POINTS • An emerging democracy is a relatively unstable political system with a formally set up democratic agenda and the announcement or partial ·introduction of some formal prerequisites of democracy ' · · • Emerging democracies have,b.een located exclusively in the South East of the region,·i[l former regions of Yugoslavia, and can be found in ,Kosovo, Macedof)ia, J':1ontenegro, and Bosnia-Herzegovina: • All the Balkan 'emerging democracies' are characterized by lower levels of the rule of law and unclear separation of power branches; lack of independence of the judicial system; unsatisfactorY. performance of democratic institutions; low~r political ~~d social integration, and insufficient political"participat!on' of :the population,

Table 21.4 Emerging Democracies in Post-communist Central arid Eastem'Europe

'--·-· -- -'·----~---·· -- ._., ___ , ..,. __ . , _____ ,,.. --·- -·-'•··'--•·· - ··-•·' "~-- ___, .. '----- ·---- --- - ------ ____ ,__, _______ ····0I

02

03

04

05

06

07

08

09

I0

II

12

13

14

3

5

5

5

5

5

5

4

5

5

*

5

5

5

5

2

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

4

*

6

6

6

6

6

6

6

6

5

5

4

4

4

4

3

3

4

5

5

5

5

5

4

4

3

3

3

2

2

2

4

4

4

5

5

5

5

5

5

5

5

5

5

5

*

3

3

3

4

4

4

4

4

4

4

4

4

4

4

*

* *

* *

89

90

91

92

93

94

95

96

97

98

99

.,.

* *

*

*

*

* *

* .,.

*

*

* *

.

.,

* *

* *

* *

2

2

2

4

4

4

*

6

5

2

2

2

3

3

3

3

4

4

* *

·*

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

* *

*

*

*

00

15

Kosovo

Electoral D Liberal D

*

Macedonia

wElectoral D

*

Liberal D

.,.

Montenegro

tv

Electoral D

*

*

Liberal D

*

*

Bosnia and Herzegovina

Electoral D

*

*

Liberal D

*

*

~

n

0

* *

2

2 0

*

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

2

2

2

2

2

2

2

2

2

2

2

2

2

2

2

2

2

2

2

2

Source: Varieties of Democracy research project (V-Dem7. I data-set), University of Gothenburg and Notre Dame University; source: https://www.v-dem.net

3 3

C ::J ~-

n

(1)

~

el..

P> ::J 0..

m

i3

m

C

a

-0 (1)

w w --..J

338

Christian W. Haerpfer and Kseniya Kizilova

Conclusion This chapter has provided solid empirical evidence that the process of democratization is not linear and identical in all 14 post-communist political systems. The most important conclusion of this chapter is that democratization is not an inevitable and necessary, quasi-natural transition from a communist one-party state towards a full and liberal democracy. Quite the contrary, democratization deals with an open process of political transformation, which can take the form of three different paths of democratization: towards full, consolidated democracy, electoral democracy, or emerging democracy. The first path of successful democratization leads from a new democracy towards a consolidated democracy, a full member of the group of liberal democracies of the world. The best examples of such a successful democratization are the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Croatia. The optimal path of democratization in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe has been identified in the Czech Republic, followed by Slovenia. The trajectory of democratization in Poland appears to be very different from the pattern observed in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Croatia. The curve of democratization in Poland has a bell shape with improvement of democratic structures at the beginning of transition and with a backsliding of democracy and 'autocratization' since 2012. Slovakia and Croatia experienced failed attempts of autocratization by Presidents Meciar and Tudjman during the 1990s, but successfully reinstated the path towards full and liberal democracy since 2000. In the Balkans, the predominant path of political development is that towards an 'Electoral Democracy'. The political systems and the political culture in Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, and Albania have not achieved the highest level of democratization to a full and liberal democracy, but they managed to achieve the status of partial and electoral democracies, which still have the potential to transform towards full and liberal democracies in the foreseeable future. The comparative study of democratization in Central and Eastern Europe found two post-communist regimes, which started the process of democratization

in a very promising way during the 1990s but have been backsliding away from liberal democracy and commencing an anti-democratic process of autocratization. The first such case is Poland-as we have discussed-and the second case of autocratization is Hungary. In Hungary the current right-wing nationalist government of Prime Minister Orban is attempting to gain full political dominance and control by the government over the legal system, the media system, civil society and parliament, altogether the dissolution of the constitutional separation of powers in a liberal democracy. The current political regime in Hungary is also characterized by high levels of xenophobia, especially against Jews and Arabs, open chauvinism, and an extreme rejection of European identity and European integration. Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, and Albania are all at the same level of democratization after 15 years of political transformation, but all four political systems are still plagued by high levels of political and economic corruption. Nevertheless, all four Balkan countries have still the potential to evolve into full and consolidated democracies like Slovenia or Croatia, if they manage to introduce structural reforms of accountability and transparency and achieve a significant reduction of corrupt structures in government and administration. The third path of transition into an emerging democracy in post-communist Europe displays the lowest level of democratization. Post-Yugoslav countries and territories like Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Bosnia-Herzegovina have transformed since 1991 from new democracies into emerging democracies, which can also be labelled as 'Proto-Democracies'. The political regime in those four countries in South Eastern Europe is characterized by first elements of democracy like general elections but is still missing crucial pillars of electoral and liberal democracy. These results also provide clear scientific evidence that democratization in Central and Eastern Europe is still a work-in-progress, with oscillations be'tween democratization and autocratization and with unknown outcomes in the near future of democratic politics in this region.

21 Post-Communist Central and Eastern Europe

I. How did the main pre-conditions and drivers of the post-communist transition differ in Central and Eastern European states?

2. What contributed to the success of democratization in Czech Republic, Slovenia, and Poland? What do the political systems in these countries have in common? Which peculiarities of the transition process were different there?

3. What are the main obstacles for the democracy development in the Balkan states? What do you think about the potential enlargement of the European Union with the inclusion of Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia?

4. What are the main distinctive features of liberal democracy as compared to electoral or 'minimalist' democracy? Do you find the concepts of 'emerging' or 'electoral' democracies feasible and helpful to reflect the differences in the state of democratization in Europe and around the globe?

5. What would be your thoughts about the future for democracy in Hungary and ·Poland given the emerging new trends?

r.;,•ii, Visit the on line resources that accompany this book for additional questions to accompany each chapter, and •

a range of other resources: www.oup.com/uk/haerpfer2e/.

Agh, A ( I 998), The Politics of Central Europe (London: Sage Publications). This leading Hungarian political scientist describes the initial transformation to democracy in Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Albania. An excellent and detailed historical account of democratization in these countries. Buzogany,A.(2017), 'Illiberal Democracy in Hungary: Authoritarian Diffusion or Domestic Causation?', In: Democratization, 2417: 1307-25. This article analyses the democratic involution in Hungary, which was followed by the country embracing a pro-Russian policy in 20 I 0. These processes came to be viewed as a rare case of authoritarian diffusion taking place towards an EU member state. Based on the discussion of interest versus ideational appeal as factors of authoritarian diffusion, the article develops a relational and dynamic framework to analyse the question of authoritarian diffusion. Dawisha, K. and Parrott, B. (1997), The consolidation of democracy in East-Central Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Outstanding comparative analysis of democratization in Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. Dawisha, K. and Parrott, B. ( 1997), Politics, Power, and the Struggle for Democracy in South-East Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Regional analysis of democratization in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia. Slovenia, Macedonia, Albania, Bulgaria, and Romania. Derleth, J. W (2000), The Transition in Central and Eastern European Politics (New Jersey: Prentice Hall). Systematic comparative analysis of democratization in an historical and contemporary perspective regarding Russia, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Poland. Fukuyama, F. ( 1992), The End ofHistory and the last man (Glencoe: Free Press). The book discusses the establishment of the western-style liberal democracy as an end-point of the cultural and ideological evolution of humans. Western liberal democracy is also considered as a universal form of governance which will be gradually accepted by all the states of the world. Haerpfer, C. W. (2006), 'Hungary. Structure and Dynamics of Democratic Consolidation', in: Klingemann, H. D. (ed.),

Democracy and Political Culture in Eastern Europe (London and New York Routledge Publishers), 148-71. The book discusses such questions like the relationship between democracy and political culture in countries undergoing major systemic change; to which extent the subjective political orientations of citizens have been important in shaping the

339

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Christian W Haerpfer and Kseniya Kizilova development of democracy in Central and Eastern Europe after the fall of communism etc. This particular chapter focuses on the process of democratic transition and consolidation in Hungary. Haerpfer, C. W (2002), Democracy and Enlargement in Post-Communist Europe. The Democratisation ofthe Moss Publics in 15 Central and Eastern European Countries, 1991-1998 (London & New York Routledge Publishers). The book presents the principal findings of a unique in-depth study of the birth of democracy and the market economy in 15 post-communist countries. Analysis employs information collected by the New Democracies Barometer public opinion surveys to provide an overview of the process of democratization across Central and Eastern Europe. This is an extremely valuable resource and will be useful for all those interested in the European Union, comparative politics and democracy and the communist legacy. It contains data from Belarus, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania the Russian Federation, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Ukraine. Kaldor, M. and Vejvoda ( 1997), Democratization in Central and East European Countries, International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944-), 73/ I (Jan. 1997), 59-82. Excellent account of democratization in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Romania, and Bulgaria by Central and Eastern European scholars. Lijphart, A. ( 1984), Democracies: Patterns of Mojoritorion & Consensus Government in Twenty-one Countries (Yale: Yale University Press). A great example of in-depth, comprehensive and systematic comparative analysis of the democratic political systems in 21 countries. Very helpful for understanding the similarities and discrepancies between the democratic systems and the how they work. Mechkova, V and Lohrmann, A., and Lindberg, S. (2017), 'How Much Democratic Backsliding?'Journo/ ofDemocracy, 28/4:

162-9. The article employs data from the Varieties of Democracy to analyse the trends of democracy development in the world in the period between 20 I I and 20 17. Menocal, A. R. (20 13), Emerging Democracies. Rising to a Challenge. Briefing paper of the Overseas Development Institute. The paper discusses the concept of 'emerging democracy', its distinctive features and historical preconditions of its development. The paper discussed both the theoretical frame as well as the existing measures and indexes of democratic rule. Popper, K. R., Ryan, A., and Gombrich, E. H. (2013), The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton: Princeton University Press). The book belongs to the field of political philosophy and describes the advantages of the open society and liberal democracy. Saxon berg, S. (2000), The Foll: AComparative Study ofthe End ofCommunism in Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, and Poland (London & New York Routledge Publishers). The book provides a comparative analysis of the cases of the collapse of the communist system in the four states aiming to explain why the collapse took place and why this happened in different ways in those four countries. Sik, 0. ( 1976), The Third Woy (White Plains, NY: International Arts and Sciences Press). The books provides a summarizing overview of Hungary's development and its social and political transformations as well as proposes a new societal model of development Szelenyi, I., Eyal, G., and Townsley, F. (200 I), Making Capitalism without Capitalists (London & New York: Verso Publishers). This book is aimed at contributing to a deeper understanding of the origins of modern capitalism. While the classical social theory explored the process of transition from feudalism to capitalism, the current book focuses on the transition from socialism to capitalism, where capitalism system is developed without the actual capitalist class. The book hence provides reflection on the sociological characteristics of the breakdown of the communist system in 1989-91 and offers a theory of social structure of post-communist societies. Zielonka,

J, (200 I), Democratic Consolidation in Eastern Europe. Volume

I: Institutional Engineering (Oxford: Oxford

University Press). Comparative study of the role of new constitutions and constitutionalism in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Hungary, and Poland, mainly by Central and Eastern European scholars.

22 Post-Soviet Eurasia Christian W Haerpfer and Kseniya Kizilova

• Introduction

342

• Decline of the Soviet Union 1985-91

343

• The End of the Soviet Union in I 991

344

• The Creation of New Political Systems of the Russian Federation and the Newly Independent States 345 • From Soviet Republics towards Consolidated Democracies • From Soviet Republics towards Electoral Democracies • Georgia

349

• Moldova

351

• Ukraine

352

• Kyrgyzstan

353

• From Soviet Republics towards Electoral Autocracies • Russia

354

• Armenia

356

• Azerbaijan • Belarus

356

357

• Kazakhstan • Tajikistan

358 358

• From Soviet Republics towards Full Autocracies • Uzbekistan

359

• Turkmenistan • Conclusion

349

361

360

359

354

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Christian W Haerpfer and Kseniya Kizilova

,Ov~rview· This chapter describes and explains the pro-democratic political revolutions and the subsequent transformations which occurred between 1985 and 2017 in the Republics of the former Soviet Union and the area of the post-Soviet Eurasia which emerged from the 15 former USSR members. It first analyses the decline of Soviet Communism and the failed attempt to reform the Soviet Union in the period between 1985 and 1991 as stage one of political transformation. The next section deals with the end of the Soviet Union as a second stage of democratization between 1991 and 1992. The following part is devoted to stage three of the democratization process, which focuses on the creation of new political regimes and political systems in all 15 former Soviet Republics between Tallinn and Tashkent. The dynamics of post-Soviet political transformations are differentiated into four separate paths of development: the path towards a full democracy; the path towards partial and electoral democracies; the path towards electoral autocracies; and finally, the transformation of post-Soviet countries into fully-fledged autocracies. The conclusions present the main drivers of democratization on the one hand and the causes of failed democratization on the other in post-Soviet Eurasia.

Introduction According to international law; the Russian Federation created in 1992 is the successor state of the USSR. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) itself originated from the Russian Revolution of October 1917. Following Lenin's Bolshevik coup and the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II, the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic was founded in 1917. It was the first Soviet Republic established, followed in 1922 by the official and legal establishment of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, comprising the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR), the Ukrainian SSR, the Belarussian SSR, and the Federation of Transcaucasia (which included the Armenian SSR, the Azerbaijan SSR, and the Georgian SSR). The territory of the modern Central Asian states initially belonged to the Russian Empire and later to the Russian SSR As separate administrative units, the Kazakh SSR, Kyrgyz SSR, Tajik SSR, Uzbek SSR, and Turkmen SSR-the predecessors of the modern independent Central Asian states-were founded via the corresponding administrative decrees of the central Soviet government as a part of the policy of national delimitation in 1924-25 and in 1935-36. That statehood in some Soviet republics was planted from above is significant in the analysis of the paths of post-Soviet transition and potential causes of democratization failures. After 1940, with the occupation of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, the USSR consisted of 15 republics. The Soviet Union existed for 70 years, from 1922 to 1992, as an 'Eastern' authoritarian state-planned political and economic regime and an alternative to the democratic capitalist 'West'. By competing with the Western pluralist democracy and capitalist market economy of the 'First World', the USSR subsequently constituted

the so-called 'Second World' of communist one-party states. The ideological basis which became the foundation for the organization of the political, economic, and the social systems in the USSR was the political theory of 'Marxism-Leninism'. According to this theory; the ultimate goal of the state's development is establishment of a communist system as a special sodoeconomic order based on the principles of common ownership of the means of production, and the abolition of the class structure, money; and the state. In reality; this ideal type of societal organization was never reached. Following this ideological approach, the Communist Party became the only legal political party in the country and the supreme political institution in the USSR, as well as the main force defining and organizing society: Beginning with Lenin's successor, Joseph Stalin, the Secretary General of the Communist Party was also considered to be the leader of the state. The constitution and the political system in the USSR did not presume clear separation of the legislative, executive, and judiciary power branches: the Supreme Soviet (council) of the Soviet Union, alongside its legislative tasks, was also an executive and controlling body. The political system in USSR was amended in the course of its relatively long history with the acceptance of new Constitutions in 1924, 1936, and 1977, but these amendments did not affect the leading role of the Communist Party and its leadership as the de facto main power and governing force. Hence, as a legacy of the Soviet Union traditions, the political elites in the newly established post-Soviet states of 1991 had very limited experience of separation of power as a necessary pre-condition of a democratic political system. The economy in the USSR was regulated through such tools as nationalization (turning all enterprises

22 Post-Soviet Eurasia into state property) and central planning. 'Gosplan' (the State Committee on Planning) collected information on the available resources, their supply and demand, and developed one-year and five-year plans for all branches of the economy on the amount of goods and services they were expected to produce and deliver. Similarly; distribution of goods was planned and organized in a centralized way. Early economic experiments of the Soviet system included 'War Communism' (1918-21) and the New Economic Policy (NEP, 192228). The War Communism' policy was the first example of state control of the economy in the USSR and was used as an emergency measure when World War I and the Russian Civil War disrupted the regular production and distribution of goods. This policy severely damaged the Soviet economy; and the New Economic Policy was introduced as a contra-measure in 1920s. This allowed small private entrepreneurship and other liberalizations and elements of a market economy. After Lenin's death, Stalin accumulated power and successively removed his main opponents, reaching the status of the sole state leader by late 1920s, which he remained until his death in 1953. Stalinist policies included rapid industrialization and urbanization, collectivization of agriculture, a full rejection of the principles of market economy introduced by the NEP, and the 'Great Turn' towards a command economy. Governance became highly centralized, and there was practice of class-based violence, terror, and executions, as well as mass deportations to Siberia and Central Asia. Stalin is one of the most controversial figures in Soviet history: on the one hand, his name is associated with a transition from a traditional, rural society to a modern, highly industrialized society; on the other, his rule is associated with the death of several million of Soviet citizens. Stalin's rule aggravated such features of Soviet (and later post-Soviet) politics as the limited regional self-governance and the primarily role of agency (personalities) over structure (institutions). Overcoming both of these phenomena became a challenge for the democratic transformations in Eurasia after 1992. The rule of Stalin's successor, Khrushchev (195364), differed a lot from the Stalinist regime: 'Khrushchev's thaw' introduced more openness and social and political liberalization. During this time, repression and censorship in the USSR were significantly reduced and thousands of political prisoners released from the camps in Siberia. The Soviet system was opened to new economic reforms, to international trade and foreign culture. Educational and cultural contacts with other countries were initiated and contributed to the

liberation of the minds of Soviet people. In the political field, the policy of 'de-Stalinization' saw the removal of a number of controlling and punitive bodies, abolition of the cult of personality; and an amendment to the absolute role of the Party's General Secretary. During the rule of Khrushchev; USSR was successful in launching its space programmes, and in 1960s the USSR reached the peak of its international influence. The period between 1964 and 1982 can be characterized as the 'Brezhnev era'-after the USSR's then-leader, Leonid Brezhnev. Brezhnev's rule was not absolute and was organized in a form of'collective leadership' where decisions were made by leaders of several main political institutions. To improve the speed of economic growth, a reform aimed at slight decentralization of the economic management was first introduced. Fearing that this might reduce the power and prestige of the Communist Party; the reform was stopped, and the speed of economic growth decreased at the beginning of 1970s. The period of Brezhnev's rule is often referred to as the 'era of stagnation'. The 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s in the Soviet Union were characterized by political and social stability providing a modest but stable economic standard of living for the Soviet citizens. After Brezhnev's death in 1982, his successors undertook a number of steps to improve the pace of economic development, which eventually led to the dissolution of the USSR.

Decline of the Soviet Union 1985-91 The last political leader of the USSR was Mikhail Gorbachev; who came into power in 1985. He sought to overcome the general economic stagnation and social paralysis of the Soviet system by introducing decisive structural reforms. Gorbachev began his 'seven years that changed the world' (Brown 2007) in 1985. He tried to overhaul the Soviet political and economic system by introducing an extremely ambitious programme of reforms. These final, as well as fatal, reforms of the Soviet Union were united under the title 'perestroika' (meaning 'restructuring') and were aimed at reorganization of the social, economic, and political order to increase the viability of the Soviet system. Apart from improving the domestic policy; perestroika was also expected to change the USSR's foreign policy and improve the country's image in the wider world. The programme of the first component of the perestroika reforms, called uskorenie ('acceleration'), was presented by Gorbachev in April 1985. At that time, the need for a total transformation of the Soviet

34 3

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Christian W. Haerpfer and Kseniya Kizilova system was not yet recognized, and the acceleration of economic development was first meant to be a small amendment to the existing system which was expected to solve the existing 'minor' problems and to increase the competitiveness of the USSR economy. Uskorenie did not presume any radical economic reforms and included mainly administrative solutions aimed at improving the pace of economic growth. The two most unpopular economic reforms were tightened control over citizens' illegal incomes (the 'grey' economy) and the public campaign against alcohol consumption (' dry law'). In the political field, Brezhnev's nomenklatu.ra was gradually replaced with new political managers. By 1987, the insufficiency of administrative means became clear to Gorbachev and his team. In addition to the ongoing economic stagnation, declining oil prices, war in Afghanistan (1979-89), and the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant (1986) caused deep dissatisfaction with the Soviet government among citizens, making the introduction of more fundamental reforms highly necessary. At the Communist Party meeting in 1987, a new programme of national development in the spirit of 'democratic socialism' (also called 'socialism with a human face') was announced. 'Demokratisatsiya' became another dimension of these deep structural reforms. It tried to introduce democratization of Soviet society without departing from the communist oneparty state mode. Further reforms included glasnostan increase in openness and transparency, mitigation of censorship for media, and freedom to discuss political issues and ethically sensitive topics (e.g. drug consumption problems). Discussion and critique of the Stalinist regime and the political history of the USSR also began. In the economic realm, private entrepreneurship in a form of cooperatives was introduced. While the steps undertaken did not resolve the USSR's economic problems, they significantly activated its citizens who now were able to talk openly about their dissatisfaction with the regime. Gorbachev's reforms led to a significant disagreement and factionalism inside the Communist Party. At the same time, new liberties intensified the political consciousness of citizens, leading to the establishment of new political actors and organizations. The policy of glasnost also activated numerous 'frozen' ethnic and territorial conflicts. The period of perestroika could therefore be considered as the beginning of decline of the USSR and the first stage of democratization and transformations in Soviet Eurasia. Gorbachev's intention to modernize the USSR in order to compete successfully with the Western world

of democracy and free market economy ultimately failed, despite very high ambitions. He wanted to reform the Soviet Union, the biggest country in the world, in an evolutionary way; and to ensure a sustainable political, military; and economic future for the Soviet Union, and for world communism in its Marxist-Leninist variety as a sustainable and long-term alternative to democracy and capitalism of the so-called Western World. This ambitious project of perestroika collapsed in August 1991, when orthodox communist political and military actors attempted a coup d'etat in Moscow and put Gorbachev under house arrest in his Crimean holiday residence ('Dacha') in Foros at the Black Sea.

r

KEY POINTS ____ -···---····-··-··-·--- --·-·----·-

The decline of the USSR started· in_ 1980s and was closely linked with the economic stagnation of the co~ntry. The last USSR leader; Mikhail Gorbachev, undt:!rtoo~ a series of reforms ( 1985-~ I) aimed at acceler~ting and restructuring the economy. in_creasing openne,ss and · transparency, and abolishing ce~sorship. • These policies contributed to a 'significant upheaval of the political conscio_usness of Soviet citizens, and the emergence of new political actors af1d bodies. The Soviet system was no longer capable:ofcontrollingsociety.

The End of the Soviet Union in 1991 In 1991, the Soviet Union found itself in a difficult situation: after the fall of the Berlin Wall and declarations of independence by former USSR satellite states in Eastern Europe, the Warsaw Pact (see Chapter 21 on Eastern Europe) ceased to exist. In 1990, independence from the USSR was also proclaimed by five of its Soviet Republics: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Armenia, and Georgia (these events are sometimes referred to as the 'parade of sovereignties'). Russia announced its sovereignty in summer 1990, with the subsequent election of Boris Yeltsin as its first president in June 1991 in its first free elections. Under these circumstances, the conservative faction of the Communist Party believed emergency actions to be necessary to restore 'order' in the country. In August 1991, the conservative faction of the Communist Party forces in government, parliament, the security apparatus, and the armed forces

22 Post-Soviet Eurasia attempted a coup d'etat to stop and reverse Gorbachev's structural reforms of the Soviet system (and more importantly-their unintended consequences). After the Gorbachev's arrest on the day of the coup on August 19, 1991 the conspirators announced a state of emergency, about which the population was informed via all television and radio channels. The parliament building in Moscow was surrounded by the military and later by citizens. Yeltsin arrived to lead the fight against the conspirators; standing on the tank, he gave inspiring speeches describing the actions of the conspirators as illegal and inviting people not to accept their claims. The coup was stopped within three days. After his return to Moscow on August 24, 1991, Gorbachev resigned as the Party's General Secretary, and in November 1991, Yeltsin signed a decree which dissolved the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. This attempt by the conservative and old-fashioned elite to stop the disintegration of the USSR achieved the opposite: it accelerated the very end of the Soviet Union. Yeltsin's violent suppression of the failed communist restoration involved casualties and deaths but the final collapse of the Soviet Union itself wa: peaceful. The final dissolution of the Soviet Union began on December 8, 1991, when the presidents of Russia (Boris Yeltsin), of Ukraine (Leonid Kravchuk), and the Head of the Belorussian Parliament (Stanislav Shushkevich), signed a declaration which declared the Soviet Union (USSR) as officially dissolved. This document has become known as the 'Belavezha Accords' and constitutes the final and closing document of the history of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union ceased to exist on December 31, 1991.

I KEY POINTS

r .---: . -- ---•-·-----··----·---'·:..-..:,...------"···;__·---· Th_~ last attempt to preserve the USSR was µndertaken in • Aug~st 1990 by the conservative faction or'the Communist Party. It was unsu_ccessful.. _ • . The legal dissolution ;)f the Soviet Union was peaceful and commenced on December 8, 1991. .•. Several former Soviet ~epublics, first of allthe Baltic . states: announced their independence and .held their first d~mocratic election~ before the ~fficial dissolution of the USSR.. An important role .played by the n'ewly' elected presidents of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine, who signed the 'Belavezha Accords' which formally dissolved the l-)SSR.

v:,~

,.

'··.

.

The Creation of New Political Systems of the Russian Federation and the Newly Independent States Though the official dissolution of the Soviet Union took place in December 1991, the process of creating new independent states was initiated earlier in 1990, when the Baltic countries and Georgia declared their independence. It is notable that the countries who made these significant historical decisions on their sovereignty before the official dissolution of the USSR also attained the highest degrees of success in the subsequent democratization of their political systems. After the dissolution of the USSR, the new 15 independent republics started re-organizing their political, economic, and social life. The specific characteristics of post-Soviet political change and economic transformation in comparison with other forms of democratization-like in Southern Europe (see Chapter 19)-is that we are confronted with a tri-fold revolution: a political revolution from a communist one-party authoritarian state to a multi-party democratic system; an economic revolution from a centrally planned command economy to a free capitalist market economy; and finally, a social revolution from a communist and so-called 'classless' society with a small political and administrative upper class (nomenklatura), to a modern and open society with a broad middle class. Essential transformations were also to be made in relation to civil society: the collapse of the Soviet Union abolished the system of party-associated organizations with mandatory membership for children and youth, and made possible freedom of speech, demonstrations, and other civil liberties. Post-Soviet transformations therefore should be considered as a complex process which involved all spheres of public as well as private life of citizens. The first free parliamentary elections (an important sign of the beginning of a democratic transition) had taken place in all countries in 1990, before the USSR was legally dissolved. The elections to the national Supreme Soviets (the national parliaments at that time) saw a voter turnout exceeding 80 per cent in most countries. By the time of dissolution of the USSR in December 1991, Armenia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, and Ukraine had also conducted their first free democratic presidential

345

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Christian W. Haerpfer and Kseniya Kizilova elections. It is remarkable that in the countries which have since become electoral autocracies or consolidated autocracies-Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan-elections did not take place immediately and were postponed until several years after the end of the USSR. Political scientists often consider the timing and character of the first elections to be held in the country as an important precondition for the choice of the democratic (or alternative) vector of future development. Another interesting feature of post-Soviet politics (which is also a legacy of the Soviet political system) is the malfunction of the mechanisms of democratic power transfer and rotation of elites: in Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, the Russian Federation, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, the same political leaders who were newly elected into the president's office in the 1990s or had held their position since the time of the USSR remained in power for ten or more years, sometimes until their death. The absence of the clear mechanism of election of the USSR leader in the past and lack of related practices and experiences-both by the population and the political elite-turned the elections into a primary confirmatory procedure in a number of post-Soviet states. After the declaration of independence, new constitutions were introduced by all post-Soviet states in 1992-95, except for Ukraine, which accepted its constitution in 1996. As the period of Soviet rule in the three Baltic states was recognized to be an 'illegal occupation', the Latvian, Lithuanian, and Estonian states were reinstated de juro in the form in which they had existed before the occupation started in 1940; old constitutions were revived in these three countries and subsequently accepted with minor amendments. The experience of past statehood is also considered as a crucial factor which pre-defined the success of the democratic transition in the Baltics. In addition to changing their political systems, post-Soviet states undertook a number of steps to reform their economies. Although these differed from country to country, all aimed at eventually developing a free capitalist market system. Under the Soviet system of Gosplan, industries in the 15 republics were organized to serve as regional components of a greater Soviet economy, so independence created a necessity of re-organizing national economies

to make them capable of satisfying the needs of the country's population in terms of basic goods and products. During the first five to ten years of economic transformations, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of all post-Soviet countries dropped by 20 per cent to 80 per cent as compared to 1991. With the exceptions of Ukraine and Moldova, all post-Soviet countries eventually reached the 1991 level of their GDP in between2000 and2010 and have managed to exceed it by the time of writing. The early years of political and economic transformations were associated with a significant decline of the populations' well-being, income level, and quality of life. In the post-Soviet context, as previously mentioned, the historical need for a trifold transformation required a full-scale destruction of the three old areas of politics, economy, and society, and a simultaneous construction of a new democracy, a new market economy, and a new civil society. This put millions of post-communist and post-Soviet citizens under enormous pressure and produced a high level of so-called transition stress associated with the rapid increase of unemployment caused by privatization of industries, restructuring of economic branches, and the closure of some factories. During the economic crisis of 1995-98, unemployment rates reached 15 to 20 per cent. Re-structuring the economy initiated a slow transition from an industrial society focused on heavy industry towards a post-industrial society in which services and trade constituted the main economic branches. As a result, a significant part of the USSR's working class could no longer find jobs in which to use their skills and had to obtain new professions. Economic crisis also caused significant decline in the size of social benefits and salaries paid from the state budget (to pensioners, students, . teachers, doctors etc.). These events resulted in a deep demographic crisis with the reduction of the life expectancy at birth (from 65 to 57 years among men and from 75 to 70 years among women), significantly increased rates for heart diseases, and negative population growth rates which reached zero-level only by 2010. In the first ten years of transition, the population of Kazakhstan declined by two million out of 17 (in 1990); the population of Ukraine declined by four million out of 52, and the population of Moldova declined by 1 million out of 4.5.

22 Post-Soviet Eurasia KEY POINTS • After the dissolution of the USSR, the new 15 independent republics emerged. •

Following independence, new constitutions were intro- ' duced by all post-Soviet states in 1992-95. · In the 'first five years after indepe.ndence, all post-Soviet · CO!-]ntries, except for Turkmenistan, hel9,thei_r'first presidential elections. The timing, the nature, and the personality of the first leaders. elected in were indicative ofthe subsequent path_oftransformati~ins.

• T:ansitions towards market economies initiated in all 'post-. Soviet_ states caused a significant decrease in· GDP in the 1990s: many post-Soviet states experienced economic, .. : ~ocial, and demographic crisis iri the first decade o( th~ir transformations.

From Soviet Republics towards Consolidated Democracies The optimal path of democratization in post-Soviet Eurasia is that from a Soviet Republic towards a 'consolidated democracy' (see Table 22.1). A new democracy can be described as consolidated when it fulfils the criteria for a liberal democracy, which includes the rule of law, a clear separation of the three power branches, a vibrant civil society independent from the state, a democratic constitution and associated constitutionalism, open pluralism of political actors and institutions, respect of human and political rights, and freedom of media and political association. In addition

to these criteria, new democracies must also fulfil the minimum criteria of free, fair, and competitive multiparty elections and successful consolidation of its political and legal institutions. Finally, democracy must be supported by a clear majority of the citizens for the country to have a consolidated democratic system. The process of democratization can be measured by a variety of empirical indicators and indices (see Chapter 4). To analyse the progress of democratization in post-Soviet Eurasia, two such indicators of democratization have been selected: The 'Index of Institutional Democracy' from the POLITY IV project at the CSP in Vienna VA, on the one hand, and the 'Index of Electoral Democracy and Polyarchy' from the V-Dem-Varieties of Democracy Programme of the University of Gothenburg and Notre Dame University, on the other (Table 22.1). Both indexes in their composition consider different aspects of the political system which makes them comprehensive evaluations of the democratization process. The indexes have also good geographical coverage and coverage over time which allows us to examine the paths of post-Soviet transition both in the European and Asian parts of the post-Soviet region. The results of the comparative study of democratization processes of the 15 former Soviet· Republics confirm the assumption that the transformation from autocracies to democracies can be characterized as an open process of regime change. Only three of the 15 former Soviet Republics achieved a successful transformation from a communist autocracy to a full and complete liberal democracy. This optimal path of democratization took place in three countries from

. ·t~b1h2.1 .tr~sforrnations from Soviet Republics to F~II Dernoc~ie~:' 1992-'-2015 •. . . . , . • ~ • • • ~ - , , . _ -

••

••-••

;••--~••••••-•

••••-•-•-.•••r~•-•--••••••~-

02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 II

12 13 14 15

9

9

9

9

9

9

9

9

9

9

92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 00 01

Estonia V-Dem

8

9

9

9

9

9

---"••••---•••...._ ___ ,_-;

9

Country

9

•••-•---••

9

9

9

9

9

9

* *

Polity IV

7

7

7

7

7

7

7

8

9

9

9

9

9

9

9

9

9

9

9

9

9

9

Lithuania V-Dem

8

8

8

8

8

8

8

8

8

8

8

8

8

8

8

8

8

8

8

8

8

8

Polity IV

10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10

Latvia V-Dem

7

8

8

8

8

8

8

8

8

8

8

8

8

8

8

8

8

8

8

8

8

8

8

Polity IV

8

8

8

8

8

8

8

8

8

8

8

8

8

8

8

8

8

8

8

8

8

8

* *

8

8

* * 8

Source: Varieties of Democracy research project (V-Dem7. I data-set; source: https://www.v-dem.net) and Polity research project (Polity IV data-set; source: http://www.systemicpeace.org/polityproject.html)

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Christian W. Haerpfer and Kseniya Kizilova the Baltic Region, in Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia, which are all located at the Western border of the demised Soviet Union. The remaining 12 former Soviet Republics have been unable to complete the transition from autocracy to full democracy and have followed other paths of political transformations. The most successful regime change in post-Soviet Eurasia was in Estonia, with an average value of 9 out of a maximum of 10 on a 11-point scale between 0 and 10 on both the V-Dem index of Democracy and the Polity IV Index of Institutional Democracy. The level of democratization in Estonia was slightly lower during the first six years of transition, with a Polity Index value of 7. This slightly lower level of democratic quality was caused by the lack of political integration of Russian citizens living in the territory of Estonia during those first years of political transformation. High rates of democracy in Estonia and quick accomplishment of the transition process were predefined by a special political process-legal restoration. According to this process, Estonia did not enter a new era of independence in 1992, but rather obtained an opportunity to restore the pre-1940 republic which had existed before the Soviet occupation. The strong feeling of national and state belonging among its citizens contributed to the quick legitimization of democracy. In the economic realm, Estonia abandoned heavy industry and focused its economy on services and new emerging segments; in the first ten years of transition, the country showed ten to 11 per cent rates of economic growth. Estonia regularly holds parliamentary and presidential elections which are identified as free and fair by international observers. New democratic institutions established in the early 1990s have been effectively functioning since then. The second Baltic country to manage to become a complete democracy; after starting as a small Soviet Republic, was Lithuania. The democracy values for Lithuania are slightly different, with 8 points at the V-Dem index and 10 points at the Polity IV Index. The average level of democratization of 9 for Lithuania is at the same level as for democratic quality in Estonia. However, unlike Estonia, Lithuania did not have a strong sense of statehood originating from pre-Soviet times, and the state-building process was properly initiated only after 1990. The influence of the EU, which Lithuania joined in 2004, allowed the country to accomplish democratic transition and join the group of liberal European democracies in a short period of time. Establishment of the new state became a fruitful

basis for the development of national identity. The first step of transition occurred in 1992-93 with the acceptance of the new constitution and organization of the first parliamentary elections. The new democratic political system of Lithuania proved to be efficient, as was demonstrated during the impeachment of its president in 2003-04, for which the process was organized in strict accordance with the constitution and existing European practices. In its economic transformations, Lithuania faced the burden of economic crisis and the structural problems similar to those in Russia and Ukraine, related to the disproportion of economic branches and industries created by the Soviet Gosplan. After the period of economic recession and GDP decline in 1994-95, Lithuania managed to restore its economic growth starting from the 2000s. The third former Soviet Republic to achieve successful transformation from a communist one-party state to a full democracy is Latvia, which is also located in the Baltic Sea region. Both indices of democracy give Latvia a value of 8 points out of a maximum of 10 points. Similarly to Estonia, the political transition in Latvia started from re-acceptance of the country's pre-Soviet constitution, dating from 1922. Like other Baltic states, parliamentary elections took place in Latvia in 1993, with the participation of new political parties which had emerged in the late 1980s. Like neighbouring Lithuania, Latvia faced significant challenges in transitioning towards a market economy; its transition included currency reforms, economic crisis, and high unemployment in the 1990s, privatization of industries, and return of property to preSoviet owners. Despite moderate economic growth after 2000, in 2008 Latvia was hit by the world financial crisis: unemployment rates reached 22 per cent, and the country applied for a loan from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. The economic crisis caused anti-government protests, but civic unrest and the difficulties of the economic transition nevertheless did not affect the quality of the new democratic institutions or the free and fair character of Latvian elections. Hence, despite the difficulties of the economic transition, the country maintained its commitment to the democratic principles andafter joining the EU and NATO in 2004-it became a member of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 2016. Thus we can see that in the period between 1991 and 2015 (see Table 22.1), the region of full democracies in Europe expanded eastwards from

22 Post-Soviet Eurasia Scandinavia-which has overall the best performing democracies in the world-to the ex-Soviet Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. This European expansion of democracies, open societies, and market economies to those three small countries has been stabilized by their proximity to successful democracies like Finland and Sweden, the geopolitical influence of Germany and Poland, their integration into the political, social, and economic framework of the European Union, and (to a lesser extent) military integration into the NATO zone. The geopolitical consequence of the integration of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania into the area of European democracies and open societies is that the Baltic region now appears to be an integrated part of Europe in general and the European Union in particular, and as opposed to as a part of Eurasia as successor region of the former Union of Soviet Republics.

'KEY.POINTS· The first and ciptim~I path of deinocratizati_on is from a So~iet Republic towards a consolidated or .full democrac;y. • The _best_achi~vements of democratization in post-Sovie_t cciu~tries have been _found in this study i'n Estonia: Lithu·.ania, and,Latvia. ; : The successful transition'from the three former Soviet " . Republics in the Baltics to full democracies had 1he effect · of a 'riew''belt' :of full democracies around the Baltic Sea· between Poland.and Scandinavja. • . The. de~'ocratization of these three B. .. :. · C;mplet~ arid n9n:cornpetitiv~ ~uto;acies_ without-any democratic elements have be_ehJou'nd in Uzbekista~ and Turkmenistan. • . Neither in Uzbekistan nor in_ TLirkriJenistan·tould any · attempt of democratization be,ideritified between 1992. ;. ,_-:.an~ 2017.' ~ . . · - .. · ··>· \ ·-. -. _·, , . ·. ·• Jn both l)zbekistan and_Tu~kiri"enistan;ti")e study results in... dicate'a direct political tra'ri;forQ'iatf~n'fro~ an aUdtratic '~: S~viet},e~ublic to an autocrJti;·po~~~;ie·tahd,central .. ·. Asiatic state': . ' ' ; ' ' . ,' .,

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22 Post-Soviet Eurasia

Conclusion The most important conclusion of this chapter is that democratization is not an inevitable and necessary outcome, or quasi-natural transition from a communist one-party state towards a pluralistic and liberal democracy. In addition to democratization in a number of post-Soviet countries, we also identified the inverse political transformation towards autocratization in other post-Soviet states. The analysis of the process of democratization in the post-Soviet space has provided clear evidence that political transformation can take four different paths. The first path of successful democratization leads from a former Socialist Republic towards a consolidated democracy, a full member of pluralist democracies and open societies of the world. The best examples of such a successful democratization after the fall of the Soviet Union are the three Baltic States: Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia. The successful process of democratization of these countries has produced a geographical enlargement of European democracies, free market economies, and open societies at the Baltic Sea and has closed the gap of full democracies between Poland and Scandinavia. Their democratization has been facilitated by integration into the European Union and into the 'family' of European democracies, as well as by the past-experience of statehood which these countries had prior to becoming members of USSR. The second path of post-communist democratization consists of the political transformation of a former Soviet Republic towards an electoral democracy, which can be described as a partial democratic system which lacks a number of elements and institutions found in a complete liberal democracy. This path of development has been found in Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan. The Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the Rose Revolution in Georgia, and the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan had the main historical function of keeping these transforming systems on the way to a full democracy and to avoid decline into autocratic regimes. The third path of post-Soviet political transformations has been identified as the transition from Socialist Republics to so-called electoral autocracies as part of a general process of autocratization. Electoral autocracies are hybrid regime types, which combine elements of democracy with elements of

autocracy. The classic type of electoral autocracy in this analysis is the political system of the Russian Federation, which combines autocratic and democratic structures in a unique way. This is reflected by other electoral autocracies, which are all members of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). The Commonwealth of Independent States constitutes an attempt by a number of post-Soviet states to create an international structure of cooperation after the end of the Soviet Empire. The analysis in this chapter demonstrated that the regime type of an electoral autocracy could be found not only in Russia, but also in Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and Tajikistan. The fourth path of political transformation in the post-Soviet space is the transition from Socialist Republics to full autocracies. The study found this type of autocratic regime without any democratic elements first and foremost in post-Soviet Central Asia. The most autocratic political regimes have been identified in this study in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. In post-Soviet Central Asia, the main political process was not democratization, but the core political transformation since the end of the Soviet Union has been the process of autocratization. The overall conclusion of this chapter is that three out of 15 former Socialist Republics of the demised Soviet Union have achieved a completed process of successful democratization to a full democracy-Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia. A further four out of the remaining 12 former Soviet Republics can also be characterized as democracies, albeit only as 'electoral democracies'. These four electoral democracies, which still have the potential for a successful democratization and the chance to join the 'family' of European democracies, are Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan. Hence almost half of all former Socialist Republics (seven out of 15) have managedafter over 25 years of political and sometimes revolutionary transformations-to become either a full or a partial democracy, arguably quite an achievement after many generations of autocratic rule in the Soviet Union. In the remaining eight post-Soviet countries in Europe and Eurasia, it remains to be seen whether in future political transformations those electoral or full autocracies will return to a political path towards democracy or remain autocratic regimes.

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