Ethnic Groups in Conflict

The course is focused on historical texts, most of them philosophical. Context for understanding the texts and the course of democratic development will be provided in lecture and discussions, and by some background readings (Dunn). We begin with the remarkable Athenian democracy, and its frequent enemy the Spartan oligarchy. In Athens legislation was passed directly by an assembly of all citizens, and executive officials were selected by lot rather than by competitive election. Athenian oligarchs such as Plato more admired Sparta, and their disdain for the democracy became the judgment of the ages, until well after the modern democratic revolutions. Marsilius of Padua in the early Middle Ages argued for popular sovereignty. The Italian citystates of the Middle Ages did without kings, and looked back to Rome and Greece for republican models. During the English Civil War republicans debated whether the few or the many should be full citizens of the regime. The English, French, and American revolutions struggled with justifying and establishing a representative democracy suitable for a large state, and relied on election rather than lot to select officials. The English established a constitutional monarchy, admired in Europe, and adapted by the Americans in their republican constitution. The American Revolution helped inspire the French, and the French inspired republican and democratic revolution throughout Europe during the 19 century.

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Democracy and Its Critics

Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe.

This article updates and describes a widely used data set on democracy. Covering 1800–2007 and 219 countries, it represents the most comprehensive dichotomous measure of democracy currently availab...

A Complete Data Set of Political Regimes, 1800–2007

In Patterns of Democracy, Arend Lijphart (1999) not only contends that democratic institutions cluster in two distinct forms, but also that consensus democracies—when contrasted with majoritarian arrangements—are “kinder, gentler” types of institutional settings (Lijphart 1999: 301-302). The present article reveals that Lijphart’s two dimensional map of democracy, although applicable to established democracies, does not apply equally well to post-communist countries. Nevertheless, multivariate empirical verification reveals that some elements included in the consensus democracy framework should be introduced in new constitutions, but perhaps not as the monolithic cluster of basic laws of constitutions originally suggested by Lijphart. Hence the present study casts a shadow on the relevance of the majoritarian versus consensus classification of democratic regimes.

Patterns of Democracy

The ‘third wave’ of democratization has resulted in the proliferation of regimes that are neither fully democratic nor classic authoritarian. To capture the nature of these hybrid regimes, the democratization literature has come up with a wide variety of adjectives as descriptors of different forms of democracy and authoritarianism. This article reviews two of the most systematic recent approaches, centring on the concepts of ‘defective democracy’ and ‘electoral authoritarianism’. An important limitation of both approaches is that each covers only one side of the spectrum. Where they meet in the middle, confusion arises. As a remedy, the article suggests to embed the concepts of defective democracy and electoral authoritarianism in a ‘double-root strategy’ that maps the full range of contemporary regimes from both sides of the political spectrum.

How to classify hybrid regimes? Defective democracy and electoral authoritarianism

By most definitions, the third wave of democratisation has given rise to dominant parties and dominant party systems in Africa. The effective number of parties, the most widely used method to count parties, does not adequately capture this fact. An analysis of 59 election results in 18 sub-Saharan African countries shows that classifications of party systems on the basis of the effective number of parties are problematic and often flawed. Some of these problems are well known, but the African evidence brings them out with unusual clarity and force. It is found that Sartori's counting rules, party system typology and definition of a dominant party are still the most helpful analytical tools to arrive at an accu- rate classification of party systems and their dynamics in general, and of dominant party systems in particular.

/pdf/counting-parties-and-identifying-dominant-party-systems-in-4tgdnxcm63.pdf

Counting parties and identifying dominant party systems in Africa

Consociationalism has enriched comparative politics with a whole lineage of non-majoritarian types of democracy: from consociational democracy to consensus democracy and power-sharing. This article unravels the development, interaction and succession of empirical and normative typologies in 30 years of consociational literature as embodied in the work of Lijphart. It argues that consociational theory is plagued by serious conceptual problems which remain undetected by current inquiries into proper concept formation. The problem lies both in Lijphart's empirical typology of democracies and in the presence of a complementary but incongruent normative typology. The conclusion is that in the end the two kinds of typology weaken instead of strengthen each other and lay bare fundamental weaknesses in consociational theory. It is suggested that the empirical investigation of the normative rival types of consociational and majoritarian democracy, properly defined and operationalized, should be at the heart of new...

The Uneasy Relationship between Empirical and Normative Types in Consociational Theory

Scholarly attention has started to shift from democratization and democratic consolidation to trends of democratic deconsolidation, backsliding, regression, and erosion. This article examines Hunga...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/13510347.2018.1485015

De-democratization in Hungary: diffusely defective democracy

The favourable factors for the establishment and maintenance of consociational democracy are among the most contested elements of consociationalism. The debate concerns both the favourable factors themselves and their status. The debate over the former is provoked by the inductive character; the debate over the latter can be traced back to an unresolved conflict between deterministic and voluntaristic elements in consociational theory. What is at stake is a trade-off between the empirical explanatory and predictive power of the consociational model on the one hand and its normative usefulness on the other. Shifting the focus from contextual variables to a theory of elite behavior may present a way out of the current stalemate. This would be in line with the recent interest in crafting democracies.

Matthijs Bogaards

Papers

How to classify hybrid regimes? Defective democracy and electoral authoritarianism

Counting parties and identifying dominant party systems in Africa

The Uneasy Relationship between Empirical and Normative Types in Consociational Theory

De-democratization in Hungary: diffusely defective democracy

The favourable factors for consociational democracy: a review