Chapter 17 Review Questions Answer Key

1. The “boomerang effect,” a term coined by Keck and Sikkink (1999), refers to democracy activists reaching out to international actors, like NGOs or existing democracies, who are better placed to put pressure on the authoritarian regime. This dynamic is an example of the “international actor” approach to democratic transition. [p. 312]

2. The procedural definition of democracy is a “minimalist” one that views democracy as existing as long as specific political procedures are enforced. These include the following: regular free and fair elections to choose political representatives; any citizen may run for office and vote, regardless of their gender, ethnicity, class, etc.; and that citizens’ basic rights must be guaranteed by the state, especially the rights of assembly, expression, and information. This view has a universal character, that is, it holds that democracies can actually be observed and classified across time and space. A common criticism is that the view is too reductionist and minimalist, that it deals with important but not sufficient criteria for establishing the existence of a democracy. In contrast, substantive definitions of democracy focus on the cultural, socio-economic, and citizenship factors related to democratic governance. Such views stress, for instance, the need to recognize local cultural variations of democracy, the impact of inequality on formal political rights, and the universality of rights for all citizens. [pp. 303-4]

3. Authoritarian regimes are regimes in which principles, rules, and deep-rooted practices enable state officials to prevent society from partic­ipating in the decision-making process; to resort fre­quently to arbitrary violence against their population; to extract, use, and distribute economic resources in an unaccountable and often violent fashion; and, finally, to avoid any mechanism that would make them ac­countable for their actions and decisions. [p. 302]

4. During a democratic transition, authoritarian institutions and practices are reformed and replaced by more democratic institutions and practices. This phase is characterized by high levels of uncertainty, as pro-democracy forces clash with defenders of the authoritarian regime. Democratic consolidation follows the transition phase. In this phase, efforts are made to solidify the newly created democratic foundations. Rather than debate whether democratization is the preferred course, this phase is marked instead by debate on how the democratic system should be reinforced. [pp. 302-3]

5. In this framework, we explain democratization based on the preferences, interests, strategies, and identities of political actors, the information at their disposal and what they choose to do with it, their representations of the world, and, of course, the relationships these actors develop with each other (including negotiations, conflicts, tricks, and pacts). In this view, the decisions and actions of political actors, and not structural forces over which these actors have no control, explain important political change such as democratization. [p. 307]

6. The advocates of the national actor approach argue that the structuralist vision is “teleological” in the sense that it gives an impression—a false and misleading one, according to these critics—that we can know in advance whether a country will democratize (the end point of that process) and how it will go about the transition. According to supporters of the agency-based approach, transitions are full of uncertainties and contingencies. They really depend on the choices made by a number of actors. Thus, the factors that really count must be found elsewhere. This “elsewhere”—what makes the difference in democratization—is the role of political actors. [p. 309]

7. The argument put forth here is that the procedural approach is too minimalist because it ignores one of the fundamental characteristics of any political system: the distribution of wealth and economic well-being. Whereas supporters of the procedural approach might classify a country as “democratic” once the electoral cycle is put in place correctly and political freedoms are respected, supporters of the substantive approach might hold that this same country is hardly democratic if it exhibits profound socio-economic inequalities. From the procedural point of view, distribution of wealth has nothing to do with the definition of democracy; in the substantive approach, this issue is at the very heart of democracy. Thus, those who support the substantive approach would paint a very different picture of countries such as South Africa, Indonesia, and Brazil. In these countries, there are free elections, and most political liberties are either respected or in the process of being implemented (freedom of expression, right of assembly, and so on). Yet their level of inequality is so high that they cannot be considered as true democracies. As Winters (2013) shows, using the case of Indonesia, the concentration of wealth in the hands of what he calls “oligarchs” is so massive that the political power they possess completely distorts the young Indonesian democracy. In all of these countries, the vast majority of the population is literally trying to make ends meet on a daily basis, which in effect excludes them from any meaningful participation in the political process. They are also often excluded from access to quality state services (e.g., education, health care) and are subject to discrimination from agents of the state (police officers, judges, or civil servants more generally). Quite often also, their racial, ethnic, caste, or religious identities become a justification for their social and economic exclusion. According to this approach, then, democracy is not merely a matter of electoral cycles and individual freedoms; it also presumes a more equitable distribution of wealth within a country. [pp. 305-6]

8. To say that meanings and cultural practices specific to each society should be included in our definition of democracy does not entail that “culture” is homogeneous and equally shared by all members of a given society. Nowhere do people share the exact same beliefs and ideas about power. Culture is not a “fixed” essence that remains the same in time and space. To put it in simple terms, when a dictator says that “democracy is foreign to our culture” and that “our people prefer tough rulers who rules with an iron fist,” analysts need to remain skeptical, given that the “fist” in question that people supposedly prefer to democracy happens to be that of the dictator who is making this claim. [pp. 304-5]

9. During the debates surrounding the drafting of India’s first constitution as an independent nation in 1949, Bhim Rao Ambedkar, the leader of the Untouchable (or Dalit) Movement (the most disadvantaged group in the Hindu caste system), argued that India’s democratic political institutions were not enough to make India a true democracy. According to Ambedkar, the Indian constitution lacked democratic substance because it did not take into account the massive socio-economic gap separating the different social groups of Indian society, notably between the untouchables and the so-called “ruling” castes. According to him, limiting the notion of “democracy” to elected assemblies, elections, and political parties was not only insufficient, it was dangerous. [p. 306]

10. This approach involves explaining the causes of a democratic transition by examining the political, social, and economic structures within the borders of a nation-state. One influential theory that belongs to this approach, called the Modernization theory, argues that changes within a country’s social and economic structures are one of the principal causes of democratization. Researchers have demonstrated that when the economic structures within a country that is authoritarian begin to develop—especially when the economy is experiencing industrialization and a high rate of urbanization—the social structures of the country are transformed, notably an accelerated growth of the working and middle classes. These classes are concentrated in the major cities and close to the centres of political power. Once they attain a certain size and level of education, they become powerful forces that challenge authoritarian leaders to an unprecedented degree. It was easy to deny democratic reform when the majority of the population was scattered in rural areas, without basic education and with barely enough income to pay heed to anything other than daily survival. The situation completely changed, however, with large transformations in economic structures, namely, urbanization and industrialization, which in turn transformed the social structure, increasing levels of education and income for large groups of people who were previously disadvantaged. For instance, looking at the “Arab Spring” that occurred in North Africa and the Middle East in the early 2010s, some argue that the main reasons for the ousting of the Ben Ali (Tunisia) and Mubarak (Egypt) regimes are to be found in structural domestic factors. A critical cause was the growing socio-economic gap between an extremely wealthy but small political elite and a booming class of urban poor and middle classes who were educated but whose conditions of living had declined significantly in recent years (as compared to those of the elite). At a certain point, the social and political exclusion of these large segments of society was no longer viable. [p. 307]