Comparative Democratization

What is the role of popular mobilization in the process of democra-tization? Based on a thorough critique of the elite-centric perspective in the literature of democratic transitions, this paper proposes an alternative view. If popular mobilization played a significant role in the initial phase of regime transition, it is likely to have an enduring effect on the development of democracy in the period that follows, because the collective memory of advancing democracy from below shapes citizens' favorable attitudes toward direct civic action and increases their commitment to democracy. A comparison between South Korea and Taiwan's paths toward democracy effectively shows how this dynamic operates. While the Korean democratization movement successfully mobilized a massive wave of protests in response to the opening of political space, such a large scale of popular mobilization was absent in Taiwan. The difference in this distinct feature of the early phase of transition appears to be reflected in the degree of public confidence in democracy in the two countries.

Engendering State Institutions: State Response to Violence Against Women in Latin America, provides a much-needed explanation for two questions central to general inquiries about the quality of democracy, state-building, and institutional performance: What are the conditions under which states will construct institutions that address the needs of historically marginalized groups? What explains variation in the performance of these institutions that are charged with protecting vulnerable groups and ensuring their access to justice? I examine the creation and performance of specialized policing institutions for women as examples of these broader state-building efforts. I conduct a rich in-depth comparative analysis of Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, with additional attention to Honduras and El Salvador.

Surprisingly, countries with the fewest resources such as Nicaragua have developed a wide network of policing institutions, while countries with more capacity such as Costa Rica have not. I explain that the history and strength of transnational advocacy networking determines the creation and performance of these new state institutions, as opposed to efforts located and initiated primarily within the state or within local civil society. Transnational advocacy networks help to solve the twin problems of lack of will within the state and lack of resources within civil society by providing external pressure and funding. To support this argument, I draw heavily on 18 months of fieldwork with over 200 in-depth interviews conducted in Latin America with actors in the state, civil society, and international organizations between 2007 and 2014. Engendering State Institutions makes a unique contribution to existing scholarship both in terms of its empirical contribution (it is the first on the topic of responsiveness to violence against women that focuses comparatively on Central American countries) as well as its theoretical contribution (it is the first to advance a theoretical framework explaining how states build institutions to protect women victims of violence).

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This article discusses the lessons that can be drawn from post-Soviet experiences of democrati-sation in hybrid regimes for debates on Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) democratic backslid-ing. Focusing on Moldova and Ukraine, the article investigates the ebb and flow of post-Soviet democratisation in hybrid regimes. It explores factors that have hindered democratisation, namely state and media capture by business-political interests, and factors that have hindered authoritarian consolidation, namely civil society and citizens potential for mobilisation. The article reflects on how these factors can inform debates on backsliding in more consolidated democracies, such as CEE states.

In recent years, democracy has been facing increasing challenges. How has comparative regime research responded? Focusing on the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project, this paper argues that the perception of serious threats to democracy in general and liberal norms in particular has given rise to a convergence around the liberal conception of democracy, reversing a previous turn towards recognising its conceptual contestability. In tracing V-Dem’s discursive turn from the contestation to the decontestation of democracy, the paper reconstructs two mechanisms that concern the ways in which academic research relates to the outside world and that have jointly pushed V-Dem scholars towards embracing unequivocally liberal conceptions of regime type and regime change. As a response to the crisis of democracy, this gradual abandonment of a pluralist conceptualisation of democracy is understandable but also deeply problematic as it contributes to downplaying the inherent limitations of liberal democracy.

The territorial and qualitative expansion of democracy
reached its global highwater mark in 2005, and since then
the world has experienced an ebb of democracy, or so
claimed Larry Diamond in his 2015 article published in
the famous “Is Democracy in Decline?” issue of Journal of
Democracy. Although the thesis of the democratic ebb has
been intensely debated, in the last couple of years there
appears to be a broad consensus among democracymeasuring
projects about the end and reversal of what
once was called the “third wave of democratization.”
The reversal of democratization has had a true global
footprint. Not only have democratization processes slowed
down or remained stuck, but also hybrid regimes have
devolved back into authoritarian directions and autocracies
have fortified. The quality of consolidated democracies
has degraded as well. EU member states and once
consolidated democracies such as Hungary and Poland
already appear to have left the democratic development
path; the Democracy Index of the Economist Intelligence
Unit labels the United States as being a “flawed democracy”
since 2016. V-Dem also noted in its 2020 Democracy
Report that the United States suffers from substantial
autocratization.
However, the democracy ebb, or “the third wave of
autocratization,” did not only affect the quality of political
regimes. It also had a significant transformative effect on
the market of democracy measuring. It amplified already
existing methodological criticisms of democracy indices
that have dominated the market for a long time, like
Freedom House’s Freedom in the World or Polity. Indices
that were unable to track the obvious changes in the
democracy landscape have lost importance. It also became
obvious that there is strong demand both in the academic
and policy community for a complex, multifaceted
democracy-measuring project that is both devoid of the
methodological and conceptual weaknesses of its predecessors
and able to capture the complexity of democracy in
a way that does not reflect cultural and political bias
favoring Western-type liberal democracy. Among the
various, complex democracy-measuring projects started between 2005 and 2010, one clearly stands out today and
has grown into one of the largest contemporary research
projects in political science: Varieties of Democracy (VDem).

The article is dedicated to analyzing the historiography and conceptualization of the phenomenon of efficiency and quality of democracy. The author of the research outlined the definitive and conceptual parameters of comparative analysis of efficiency and quality of democracy, argued that different political regimes are more or less democratic. The article highlights various approaches, theoretical and empirical features of studying efficiency and quality of democracy, represents the most systemic/holistic indicators and methods of operationalization of democracy quality and efficiency. On this basis, the author actualized a unified approach to the analysis and conceptualization of quality and efficiency of democracy and argued that quality and efficiency of democracy is expedient to be mentioned not in a holistic continuum of political regimes, but when a certain state is actually democratic. As a result, the research confirmed that democracy is a multi-piece category and is able to expand its efficiency and quality.
Keywords: democracy, political regime, efficiency of democracy, quality of democracy, concept of democracy, minimal democracy.

В статье сделано попытку историографии и концептуализации феномена эффективности и качества демократии. Автор исследования очертил дефинитивные и концептуальные параметры сравнительного анализа эффективности и качества демократии, аргументировал, что различные политические режимы больше или меньше демократичны. В статье выделены различные подходы, а также теоретические/эмпирические особенности изучения эффективности/качества демократии, представлены наиболее системные/целостные индикаторы и методики операционализации качества и эффективности демократии. На основании этого актуализирован унифицированный подход к анализу и концептуализации качества и эффективности демократии, а также аргументировано, что о качестве и эффективности демократии целесообразно говорить не в целостном континууме политических режимов, а только в случае, когда определённое государство на самом деле является демократией. В результате этого подтверждено, что демократия является многосоставной категорией и способна расширять свою эффективность и качество.
Ключевые слова: демократия, политический режим, эффективность демократии, качество демократии, концепт демократии, минимальная демократия.

In 2013, the European Union (EU) mission in Zambia made a public statement about its financial support to the LGBTI community. In panic and fear, LGBTI leaders urged the EU office to withdraw the statement and encouraged other foreign missions to instead offer discrete support to the LGBTI community. This anecdote is illustrative of the experiential gap between geopolitical groups confronting a similar policy issue. For the EU, the rights of LGBTI persons are universally important; for the LGBTI community in the Zambian context, safety and discretion are more important. This paradox illustrates the challenges facing the transnationalizing of disability policy. How could we explain the fact that transnational disability actors have for the last two decades been trying to disseminate disability 'knowledge' and norms in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) without corresponding social policy and ideational success? This article examines this policy and ontological discrepancy. Advancing a constructivist argument, the article contends that transnational policy diffusion, largely built on colonial legacies of universalizing Western knowledge paradigms, has preoccupied itself with political institutional engagements at the expense of engaging context-specific sociological and ideological factors, resulting in sterile legislative exercises. To develop a truly SSA-relevant disability policy infrastructure, the article proposes ideational bricolaging and translation, a constructivist process of carefully adhering to and negotiating with context-specific ideational factors that inform the disability experience in SSA countries.

Le choix de mon titre (et de mon thème) peut surprendre, surtout venant de la part d'un Tchèque, citoyen d'un pays dont la démocratie est considérée depuis longtemps comme consolidée et où la notion de post-communisme paraît largement dépassée. Jacques Rupnik, auteur d'un beau livre L'autre Europe (cf. Rupnik, 1993), a écrit, il y a déjà quinze ans : « Ten years after the collapse of the Soviet empire, one thing is clear: The word 'postcommunism' has lost its relevance. The fact that Hungary and Albania, or the Czech Republic and Belarus, or Poland and Kazakhstan shared a communist past explains very little about the paths they have taken since. » (Rupnik, 1999 : 57) De même Slobodan Milacic dans son remarquable ouvrage De l'âge idéologique à l'âge politique. L'Europe post-communiste vers la démocratie pluraliste : « Le groupe de Visegrad (et, notamment, Pologne, Hongrie et Tchéquie), les 'meilleurs élèves de la démocratisation', en sont déjà au stade de la consolidation démocratique. À cet égard, le post-communisme est, en partie, déjà, une appellation un peu dépassée. » (Milacic, 2010 : 84) Il est intéressant que Georges Mink et Jean-Charles Szurek, dont les travaux sur le post-communisme font autorité, aient jadis argumenté, dans l'ouvrage Cet étrange post-communisme, édité sous leur direction, contre le terme « post-communisme » de telle façon qu'on pourrait aujourd'hui retourner l'argument au contraire en faveur de son maintien : « Déjà le vocable post-communisme fait problème. Installé de facto dans le langage usuel, il indique une démarcation avec le régime communiste. Mais est-ce un concept valide, qui prétendrait à une nette rupture entre un avant et un après, alors que

Fishman (Carlos III University, Spain), author of books and articles on comparative democratization, political economy, and political culture, offers a book focusing on comparative political analysis of two Iberian countries, Spain and Portugal. The main research question in the book is why some democracies, such as Portugal, include the economically underprivileged and the cultural others within the circle of political relevance that sets policies and the political agenda, and others, such as Spain, exclude them. The main argument in the book is that this difference is a result of divergent national pathways going back to the start of democratization. Portugal democratized through social revolution; Spain did it through reforms from above. More than 40 years following democratization, Portugal still invests more in general education and in stimulating economic growth and general employment than Spain. Different democratization pathways still make the Portuguese political elite understand protesters as citizens who need to be heard; the Spanish elite, at best, and even before the constitutional crisis in Catalonia, sees protest as a problem to be managed. Methodologically, the book relies on different sources of data: official statistics, surveys, and existing literature for secondary analysis.