Showing papers on "Legitimacy published in 1991"

The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century

Abstract: Between 1974 and 1990 more than thirty countries in southern Europe, Latin America, East Asia, and Eastern Europe shifted from authoritarian to democratic systems of government. This global democratic revolution is probably the most important political trend in the late twentieth century. In The Third Wave, Samuel P. Huntington analyzes the causes and nature of these democratic transitions, evaluates the prospects for stability of the new democracies, and explores the possibility of more countries becoming democratic. The recent transitions, he argues, are the third major wave of democratization in the modem world. Each of the two previous waves was followed by a reverse wave in which some countries shifted back to authoritarian government. Using concrete examples, empirical evidence, and insightful analysis, Huntington provides neither a theory nor a history of the third wave, but an explanation of why and how it occurred.Factors responsible for the democratic trend include the legitimacy dilemmas of authoritarian regimes; economic and social development; the changed role of the Catholic Church; the impact of the United States, the European Community, and the Soviet Union; and the ""snowballing"" phenomenon: change in one country stimulating change in others. Five key elite groups within and outside the nondemocratic regime played roles in shaping the various ways democratization occurred. Compromise was key to all democratizations, and elections and nonviolent tactics also were central. New democracies must deal with the ""torturer problem"" and the ""praetorian problem"" and attempt to develop democratic values and processes. Disillusionment with democracy, Huntington argues, is necessary to consolidating democracy. He concludes the book with an analysis of the political, economic, and cultural factors that will decide whether or not the third wave continues. Several ""Guidelines for Democratizers"" offer specific, practical suggestions for initiating and carrying out reform. Huntington's emphasis on practical application makes this book a valuable tool for anyone engaged in the democratization process. At this volatile time in history, Huntington's assessment of the processes of democratization is indispensable to understanding the future of democracy in the world.

The Legitimation of Power

Abstract: Preface to the 2nd edition.- Preface to the 1st edition.- Introduction.- PART I: THE CRITERIA FOR LEGITIMACY.- 1. Towards a Social-Scientific Concept of Legitimacy.- 2. Power and its need of Legitimation.- 3. The Intellectual Structure of Legitimacy.- 4. Social Science and the Social Construction of Legitimacy.- PART II: LEGITIMACY IN THE MODERN STATE.- 5. Dimensions of State Legitimacy.- 6. Crisis Tendencies of Political Systems.-7. Modes of Non-Legitimate Power.- 8. Legitimacy in Political Science and Political Philosophy.- 9. The Legitimation of Power in the 21st Century.- PART III: LEGITIMACY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY.- 10. Legitimacy Within the State.- 11. Legitimacy Beyond the State.

Procedural Justice, Institutional Legitimacy, and the Acceptance of Unpopular U.S. Supreme Court Decisions: A Reply to Gibson

Abstract: Gibson (1989) questions whether the Supreme Court's ability to legitimate unpopular policies is based on public views that the Court is a fair decisionmaker. His claim is based on his analysis of a survey examining the ability of the Supreme Court to gain acceptance of the right of an unpopular political group to demonstrate. A reanalysis of Gibson's data using a model allowing for both direct and indirect effects of public views about the fairness of court decisionmaking procedures on acceptance does not support Gibson's conclusion that procedure has no influence on acceptance. Our results indicate that public views about the fairness of Supreme Court decisionmaking procedures have an indirect effect on acceptance through their influence on public views about the Court's legitimacy and support the suggestion of a number of studies that the legitimacy of both local and national legal institutions, and the willingness to accept their decisions, are influenced by views about the fairness of their decisionmaking procedures.

Legitimation from the Top to Civil Society: Politico-Cultural Change in Eastern Europe

Abstract: Communism has collapsed in Eastern Europe because the regimes, no ionger justified by their Soviet hegemon, lost confidence in their “mandate from heaven.” Domestically and internationally discredited, East European regimes had traditionally shielded themselves behind a principle of legitimation from the top that saw communism as the global fulfillment of a universal theory of history. Once the theory became utterly indefensible, a crippling legitimacy vacuum ensued. Reacting against that theory, East European dissent, and a civil society of sorts, survived under communism not just as an underground political adversary but as a visible cultural and existential counterimage of communism. This fact must be given proper weight when assessing the capacity of civil society to rebound in postcommunist Eastern Europe.

Mapping reeds and reading maps: the politics of representation in Lake Titicaca

Abstract: This article examines a common sort of conflict, one between peasants and the state, in an uncommon setting, the beds of reeds (quite productive in ecological and economic terms) that occupy hundreds of square kilometers in Lake Titicaca, high in the Peruvian Andes. To summarize this conflict as briefly as possible, in 1978 the Peruvian government declared these reed beds to be an ecological reserve and attempted to regulate and limit their harvest. The peasants, who had customary use rights of long standing, opposed this reserve, and they succeeded in their efforts to retain control of the reed beds. By the mid-i 980s, the dispute had calmed down; the state retained weak authority in one corner of one section of the reserve, and none elsewhere. The case might seem to have some bearing on conventionally posed questions of political economy, since it suggests that one class, in many instances a weak one, gained an unusual victory over a powerful opponent. This article, however, takes a different direction, the incorporation of questions of interpretation into political economy, by studying the conflict through a set of maps that were drawn between 1977 and 1984, some by peasants and some by government officials. A careful examination of these visual representations of portions of the lake and its shores shows a surprising lack of communication between the peasants and the state. Each side views itself as being in control of the reeds, and it sees the other as accepting, rather than contesting, its position. (The peasants' and officials' oral narrative descriptions of the conflict contain similarly divergent views of its outcome.) The absence of a shared understanding of the outcome is as striking a feature of the conflict as is its having been won by a subordinate class. This article focuses on this puzzling feature of the conflict: how can two parties, both of whom made frequent use of bureaucratic channels of communication, hold such different understandings of a situation in which they are both involved? It is as if the case suggests a violation of a hitherto unstated anthropological analogue to the principle of the impenetrability of matter. Widely accepted in physics since Newton's time, the principle states that two bodies cannot occupy the same space at the same time. In this instance, two social bodies, peasants and government officials, believe not only that they each have a legitimate claim to this space, but also that they are effectively exercising these claims and that other parties acknowledge the legitimacy of their claims and accept their control of the territory. A dispute between government ministries and peasant communities over control of the reed beds in Lake Titicaca, Peru, in the 1970s led to a state of irresolution, with each side believing that the conflict had been resolved in its favor. In this article, maps drawn by both sides are examined in order to analyze the understandings that each side had of the conflict and to discuss the lack of resolution. The article elaborates a framework for the analysis of maps and other representations, and discusses other theories about the role of representations in political encounters. [communication, maps, peasants, Peru, politics, representations, the state]

Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan

Abstract: "Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan" examines the political role played by working men and women in prewar Tokyo and offers a reinterpretation of the broader dynamics of Japan's prewar political history. Gordon argues that such phenomena as riots, labor disputes, and union organizing can best be understood as part of an early twentieth-century movement for 'imperial democracy' shaped by the nineteenth-century drive to promote capitalism and build a modern nation and empire. When the propertied, educated leaders of this movement gained a share of power in the 1920s, they disagreed on how far to go toward incorporating working men and women into an expanded body politic. For their part, workers became ambivalent toward working within the imperial democratic system. In this context, the intense polarization of laborers and owners during the Depression helped ultimately to destroy the legitimacy of imperial democracy. Gordon suggests that the thought and behavior of Japanese workers both reflected and furthered the intense concern with popular participation and national power that has marked Japan's modern history. He points to a post-World War II legacy for imperial democracy in both the organization of the working class movement and the popular willingness to see GNP growth as an index of national glory. Importantly, Gordon shows how historians might reconsider the roles of tenant farmers, students, and female activists, for example, in the rise and transformation of imperial democracy.

The process of delegitimation: Towards a linkage theory of political terrorism

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to close the gap between terrorism and other non‐terroristic conflicts which exist in the normal world, and to identify the behavioral links between various forms of terrorism and less radical disputes. The paper argues that all rebel terrorist organizations have a long pre‐terroristic history, and are products of a prolonged process of delegitimation with the powers that be. It shows that this rather lengthy trajectory of radicalization can be divided into smaller development stages, and is open to an unconventional theoretical manipulation. Three consecutive ideological and behavioral stages are identified: Crisis of Confidence; Conflict of Legitimacy; and Crisis of Legitimacy. The paper also offers a new classification of terrorist organizations, according to the type of the delegitimation processes they undergo: ‘Transformational Delegitimation'; ‘extensional Delegitimation'; and ‘Split Delegitimation’, and demonstrates and analytic and empirical usefulness of the new appr...

Max Weber and the legitimacy of the modern State

Abstract: Abstract Max Weber’s typology of legitimate ‘Herrschaft’ has provided the basis for the treatment of legitimacy in twentieth century sociology and political science. The thesis of the article is that this typology is a misleading tool for the analysis of the modern state, and especially for the comparative analysis of political systems. This is because of basic flaws in Weber’s conceptualisation of legitimacy itself, and in his account of the normative basis of authority. The article offers an alternative, multi-dimensional, account of political legitimacy, and suggests how it might be used to develop a typology of forms of ‘Herrschaft’ more appropriate to the analysis of the modern state.

The Triumph of Tokenism: The Voting Rights Act and the Theory of Black Electoral Success

Abstract: For almost two decades, the conventional civil rights political empowerment agenda of black activists, lawyers, and scholars has focused on the election of black representatives. The belief that black representation is everything has defined litigation strategy under the Voting Rights Act. Through judicially enforced spurs to black electoral success, black voters gain political self-confidence and legislative influence.A set of submerged premises and assumptions concerning the goals and strategies for achieving black equality underlie this empowerment agenda. Through use of what I characterize as "the theory of black electoral success," this article identifies, organizes, and presents these related propositions. In black electoral success theory, empowerment is obtained through meaningful enfranchisement, which exists where blacks are elected. The theory thus promotes the election of individual black representatives as spokes models f or political e quality. Simply by virtue of election opportunities, black electoral success advances civil rights enforcement, government intervention on behalf of the poor, and black "role-model" development. Although pervasive and influential, the theory of black electoral success has not been explicitly endorsed as a strategy nor articulated as a coherent conceptual model. Neither political science nor legal academic literature has provided voting rights lawyers, courts, or activists with a clear theoretical understanding of their project. Instead, black electoral success has been pursued somewhat unselfconsciously as the inchoate rationale and frame of reference for black political and legal empowermentIn this article, my goal is to organize the divergent themes of black electoral success strategy with in one conceptual framework in order to give the themes more cogency and attention. Having exposed the existence of a coherent theory, I then argue that the theory posits many of the correct goals but fails to provide a realistic mechanism for achieving them. The article proceeds in three Parts. In Part I, I develop the ideological and statutory roots of black electoral success theory. In Part II, I analyze the inadequacies of current voting rights litigation and its failure to realize the statute's original goals. I conclude in Part III by arguing that contemporary Pre-occupation with black electoral success stifles rather than empowers black political participation for three reasons. First, black electoral success theory romanticizes black elected officials as empowerment role models. By ignoring problems of tokenism and false consciousness, the theory promotes black electoral success in order to legitimate the ideology of "equality of opportunity." Second, even in jurisdictions with proportionate black representation, black electoral success has neither mobilized the black community nor realized the promised community-based reforms. As an empowerment mechanism, electoral control of winner-take-all majority-black districts ignores critical connections between broad-based, sustained voter participation and accountable representation. In addition, although it claims legitimacy as a practical enforcement mechanism of the original goals of the civil rights movement, district based electoral ratification enforces only one of three original goals. While the current approach may result in the election of more black officials, it ignores the movement's concern with broadening the base of participation and fundamentally reforming the substance of political decisionsThird, the theory assumes that majority winners rule legitimately, even where such rule leads to permanent minority losers. The theory responds to minority disadvantage not by challenging majority rule but by providing a few electoral districts in which blacks are the majority.8 Consequently, black electoral success theory simply recon-figures winner-take-all electoral opportunities into geographically based, majority-black, single-member districts. Representing a geographically and socially isolated constituency in a racially polarized environment, blacks elected from single-member districts have little control over policy choices made by their white counterparts. Thus, although it ensures more representatives, district-based black electoral success may not necessarily result in more responsive government.In Part III, based on my critique of the black electoral success theory, I put forth suggestions for a different approach to voting rights reform. Relying on what I tentatively call "proportionate interest representation"9 for self-identified communities of interest, I propose to reconsider the ways in which representatives are elected and the rules under which legislative decisions are made.

Legitimacy Structures in the Ottoman State: The Reign of Abdülhamid II (1876–1909)

Abstract: For those who have, or once had it, power holds a strange fascination. For that very reason it waxes men inventive. It is almost invariably surrounded by ideologies of legitimacy, which adduce tradition, divine grace, or the law in order to support the establishment of those at the top. These ideologies are, strictly speaking, instruments of mystification; yet they are permissible weapons as long as they do not prevent the other side from returning them in kind.—Ralf Dahrendorf1

Politics and Islam in modern Turkey

Abstract: Until the founding of the Turkish Republic in October 1923, the principal component in the ideology of the former Ottoman regime was Islam under the Sultan-Caliph, who was both the temporal and the spiritual ruler. Mustafa Kemal Pasha, later Atatiirk, and his supporters decided to adopt secular nationalism as the ideology of the new state, hoping in time to relegate Islam to the sidelines. The aim in adopting secularism was to create a modern, rational state with institutions and laws which would facilitate the development of capitalism in Turkey. The Kemalists did not want any opponents to their grand design to use religion as barrier to the changes they envisaged. Thus, having learned the lesson of the second constitutional period (1908-18) they tried to remove Islam from political discourse, though not always successfully. Turkish society as yet undifferentiated in terms of classes and deprived of other means of expressing disaffection by the single-party regime, tended to use Islamic discourse to challenge the legitimacy of the state. The state responded by limiting the space in which this discourse took place by extending secular laws and becoming more and more militant against Islam. This was, in fact, the continuation of the contest for the state which began soon after Sultan Abdulhamid II (1876-1909) was forced to restore constitutional government in July 1908. The state retained its Islamic character, with Islam specified as its official faith and the Sultan-Caliph as its head. Nevertheless, after the election of the Chamber of Deputies in December 1908 and with the secret Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) exerting influence from behind the scene, the power of the sultan was no longer as absolute as it had been. Needless to say, Abdulhamid was not happy with his new role and would have liked to restore the status quo ante as he had done once before in 1878.

Friedrich Schiller : drama, thought, and politics

Abstract: In this important study, Lesley Sharpe assesses Schiller's development as a dramatist, poet and thinker, and provides detailed discussions of all his major works, including his essays on aesthetics. His works are viewed against the social, political and literary background of the late eighteenth century. Spanning a period from the late 1770s to 1805 they explore the insistent themes of the age - the loss of tradition and authority, the individual's claim to self-expression and the search for stability. While the early works focus on the turbulent individual, Schiller later turns to the great public concerns of the French Revolutionary era - legitimacy and power, the exercise of freedom and the relationship between morality and politics. The aesthetic essays explore the vital role of art in integrating the aesthetic, moral and political realms.

Feminism and Motherhood in Germany, 1800-1914

Abstract: European historians have noted the prominent role of the maternal ethic -- the idea that woman's role as mother extends into society as a whole -- in the theory and practice of German feminism from 1840 to 1914. This body of ideas, however, has seldom been taken seriously. German feminism has been interpreted as a political strategy, not as an intellectual tradition. Historians have portrayed German feminists as conservative, in contrast to their liberal counterparts in other countries who were more likely to campaign for equal rights. Ann Allen revises these views by analyzing German feminism as an attempt to create a symbolic framework for understanding the world rather than simply to attain practical results. She examines the relationship between the experiences of individual female activists and the evolving intellectual traditions of German culture and of international feminism. Women thought their maternal role led to empowerment and ethical authority. The role gave them the legitimacy to give speeches, to organize reform movements, and to build feminist institutions. They campaigned for infant welfare and the expansion of state responsibility for the welfare of mothers and children. German feminists responded to central public issues, including revolution, national unification, and urbanization. They worked to transform both public and private worlds by extending their ethical values, developed in the family, to political and social issues. To make her argument, Allen examines the lives and work of the women who were important to the history of German feminism. They centered their careers on issues relating to motherhood and childcare. Allen relates their stories to a broader theme: the relationship of women's experience, under specific historical conditions, to the development of feminist ideology and practice. Allen assesses the historical significance of German feminism in the context of German history and of similar feminist movements in other countries, particularly the U.S. Allen calls for the ideas of German feminists to be judged with reference to the specific, local conditions under which they developed, rather than to essentialist notions of feminism. Some historians have identified equal rights ideologies as progressive and maternalist ones as conservative. But the women themselves did not perceive the antithesis between these two forms of ideology. "

Security Council Resolution 678 and Persian Gulf Decision Making: Precarious Legitimacy

Abstract: In his recent book The Power of Legitimacy Among Nations, Thomas Franck defines “legitimacy” as it applies to the rules applicable among states. “Legitimacy,” he writes, “is a property of a rule or rule-making institution which itself exerts a pull toward compliance on those addressed normatively because those addressed believe that the rule or institution has come into being and operates in accordance with generally accepted principles of right process. In adopting Resolution 678 of November 29, 1990, implicitly authorizing the use of force against Iraq in response to Iraq’s August 2, 1990 invasion and subsequent occupation of Kuwait, the United Nations Security Council made light of fundamental UN Charter precepts and thereby flirted precariously with “generally accepted principles of right process.” It eschewed direct UN responsibility and accountability for the military force that ultimately was deployed, favoring, instead, a delegated, essentially unilateralist determination and orchestration of world policy, coordinated and controlled almost exclusively by the United States. And, in so doing, it encouraged a too-hasty retreat from the preeminently peaceful and humanitarian purposes and principles of the United Nations. As a consequence, it set a dubious precedent, both for the United Nations as it stands today and for the “new world order” that is claimed for tomorrow.

Mapping the Ties That Bind: Legitimacy, Representation, and Alienation

Abstract: any of the most worthwhile theoretical and methodological challenges social scientists face spring from phenomena that link different levels of aggregation. For some concepts, the system-level manifestation is the summation of properties of individuals aggregate demand for a product or district partisanship, for instance. For these, the challenge is in properly formulating the aggregation rule that produces the social choice. The difficulty of this task should not be underestimated, but its practitioners do begin from a single, consensual perspective methodological individualism and this facilitates coherent theorizing by grounding key concepts in a common foundational assumption. Other multi-level constructs lack this characteristic feature. Legitimacy is a paradigmatic example, a systemlevel property that has no direct individual-level counterpart. Research on legitimacy is particularly difficult because the key decision, choosing the right theoretical perspective, presents a dilemma for which there is no necessarily correct solution. Proponents of a macro viewpoint note that evaluating a political system's claim to legitimacy depends on the presence of constitutional guarantees of access and equality, properties that can be competently judged by an outside observer. Moreover, they warn that popular support is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for legitimacy, since history shows examples of regimes widely judged legitimate that were overthrown and others that retained their incumbency through manipulation or force in spite of being clearly illegitimate. But proponents of the individuallevel perspective also have a strong claim to define how legitimacy should be conceptualized and research on it organized. Even the most

Cultural imperialism: A media effects approach

Abstract: The issue of cultural imperialism has emerged largely from the communication literature involving development and political economy. These orientations ultimately construct formulations concerning cultural heritage and behavior based on analysis of government and/or corporate policy and practice. This paper questions the legitimacy of such inferences and explores the idea of integrating direct‐behavior research with political‐economy perspectives.

Fourth Lecture. Universal Corporatism: The Role of Intellectuals in the Modern World

Abstract: The lecture I am about to deliver, on the initiative of the Asahi newspaper, falls within the sphere of the bicentennial celebrations of the French Revolution. And I would like to contribute in my own way, which is, no doubt, a little paradoxical or perverse, to these celebrations by recalling, following the lecture I delivered yesterday at Todai University, that the organizers of these ceremonies are none other than, in the France of 1989, the members of this State nobility, the power of which finds its legitimacy in cultural capital, that is, from a naive point of view, in intelligence. One can immediately see that this new form of domination raises a difficult and probably unprecedented problem for intellectuals, who are dominated dominants, that is, the dominated among the dominant. Unlike those whom nineteenth-century writers designated as "bourgeois" or, worse, "shopkeepers," a good many of the modern rulers of great public or private bureaucracies are technocrats or even epistemocrats who pretend to use science-notably, economic science-in order to govern and who have, by virtue of this, more power than ever before to contest the monopoly of intelligence that intellectuals used to readily appropriate to themselves. But I am coming to the subject. At the risk of overstepping the bounds tacitly prescribed for a lecturer, especially when he is also a

Political culture revisited

Abstract: Although culture is one of the most powerful concepts in the social sciences, the discipline of political science was slow to exploit it in spite of its obvious relevance for many basic concerns in the discipline, such as legitimacy, tradition, constitutional norms, and basic national values. However, once the concept was accepted in the 1950s there was a decade of intense interest in cultural analysis during which leading figures in all the social sciences engaged in bold theory-building. For various reasons interest in political culture declined in the 1970s, but recently there has been a revival of work on political culture. A review of the early history may be helpful in ensuring that the revival will proceed on a solid basis.

Political Religion: The Case of the Cultural Revolution in China

Abstract: This article focuses on Chinese ritual activities during the Cultural Revolution, when all the traditional religions were abolished by the Chinese Communist Party. It shows that China has never been an atheist country and explores the similarities of Chinese communist rituals to Western religious rituals; it spells out the differences between Chinese political religion and Western civil religion. The analysis is based primarily on the personal experiences and observations of the author during that period. Throughout Chinese history, the legitimacy of the political regime was built upon the charismatic authority of the emperor, an authority strengthened by hereditary successorship (Weber, 1964). This style of leadership did not change when the Chinese Communist party came to power. Because of the agrarian nature of the Chinese economy and the lack of political differentiation, the new regime still relied on the charisma of the national leader. After the 1949 revolution, the exercise of charismatic authority reached a peak during the Cultural Revolution in the People's Republic of China (1966-1976), characterized by the near deification of Chairman Mao Ze-dong. Although China delcared itself an atheist country, this deification, combined with Mao's interpretation of Marxism, created a form of "political religion" that affected millions of people and profoundly transformed Chinese society (see Murvar, 1985).

The African Quest for Freedom and Identity: Cameroonian Writing and the National Experience

Abstract: Independence generated the promise of a better future for the ethnically diverse populations of African countries, but during the past thirty years economic and political crises have called into question the legitimacy of speaking about nationhood in Africa. Richard Bjornson argues here that a national consciousness can indeed be seen in the shared systems of references made possible by the emergence of literate cultures. By tracing the evolution of literate culture in Cameroon from the colonial period to the present and by examining a broad spectrum of writing in its social, political, economic, and cultural contexts, Bjornson shows how the concepts of freedom and identity have become the dominant concerns of the country's writers, and he relates those themes to the history of Cameroon's as a complex modern state. Bjornson also analyzes in detail works by writers such as Mongo Beti, Ferdinand Oyono, Marcien Towa, Guillaume Oyono-Mbia, Rene Philombe, and Francis Bebey."

Democracy and Globalization

Abstract: There is a striking paradox to note regarding the contemporary era: from Africa to Eastern Europe, Asia to Latin America, more and more nations and groups are championing the idea of democracy; but they are doing so at just that moment when the very efficacy of democ racy as a national form of political organization appears open to question. As substantial areas of human activity are progressively organized on a re gional or global level, the fate of democracy, and of the independent democratic nation-state in particular, is fraught with difficulty. Throughout the world's major regions, there has been a consolidation of democratic processes and procedures. In the mid-1970s, more than two thirds of all states could reasonably be called authoritarian. This percent age has fallen dramatically; less than a third of all states are now authori tarian, and the number of democracies is growing rapidly.1 Democracy has become the fundamental standard of political legitimacy in the current era. Events such as the release of Nelson Mandela from prison and the tearing down of the Berlin Wall are symbolic of changes indicating that, in more and more countries, citizen voters are, in principle, able to hold public de cisionmakers to account. Yet, at the same time, the democratic political community is increasingly challenged by regional and global pressures and problems. How can problems such as the spread of aids, the debt burden of many countries in the "developing world," the flow of financial re sources that escape national jurisdiction, the drugs trade, and international crime be satisfactorily brought within the sphere of democracy? What kind of accountability and control can citizens of a single nation-state have over international actors, e.g., multinational corporations (MNCs), and over in ternational organizations, e.g., the World Bank? In the context of trends toward regionalization, European integration, fundamental transformations in the global economy, mass communications and information technology, how can democracy be sustained? Are new democratic institutions neces sary to regulate and control the new international forces and processes? How can citizens participate as citizens in a new, more complex, interna tionally organized world? In a world organized increasingly on regional and global lines, can democracy as we know it survive?

Governance and economy : a review

Abstract: Governments determine how well, or how poorly, markets function. This simple truth explains the current concern with"governance"as the world shifts toward an overwhelming endorsement of markets as the base of economic activity. If governments are assumed to be neutral, and committed to serving the public good, then deviations from optimum economic performance can generally be corrected simply through policy reform, or through improving information systems. To understand economic performance, it is important to factor in the political role of governments. The exercise of power and authority lies at the heart of governance. Governments use their power and authority to establish and maintain the formal and informal framework of institutions that regulate social and economic interaction. This paper attempts to give the current concern with governance an historical dimension, and to locate governance as a technical and intellectual issue within a body of literature that has long addressed these concerns. It examines a limited number of governance dimensions -- accountability (including legitimacy, institutional pluralism and participation), openness and transparency, and predictability (or the rule of law) -- in a selective review of recent social science literature. The paper makes no claim to be exhaustive, but rather to offer an introduction to recent work which is built in part upon the analysis of how politics and economics interact in shaping economic development.

Niger: Anatomy of a Neotraditional Corporatist State

Abstract: The apparent failure of competitive party politics to take root in much of contemporary Africa has not curtailed efforts by military regimes to extend popular participation. Curiously, current scholarship does not adequately reflect the range of such initiatives.' While analysts periodically look for liberalizing trends in Africa's soldier states and are primed to consider the prospects for a return to civilian rule,2 few have examined participatory institutions under indeterminate military tutelage.3 Indeed, the literature reflects a tendency to assume that officers who tarry in government regard the modem bureaucratic army as a paragon for the organization of society as a whole.4 There is growing evidence to suggest, however, that in the future Africa's military rulers will have greater recourse to corporatist models of state-society relations as they seek to avoid a return to the barracks. Why this is so and what characteristics these structural alternatives are likely to assume are central questions addressed in this essay. Following a brief typology of corporatist systems, my purpose here is to relate the installation of corporatist modes of representation and policymaking in Africa to the quest for effectiveness and legitimacy by regimes faced with a crisis of governance which is inseparable from the international context of capitalism. This proposition will be developed more fully in a case study of neotraditional corporatism in Niger. Distinctions among several frequently occurring varieties of corporatism establish the parameters for elaborating the special case of neotraditional corporatism, a mode of governance that draws heavily on indigenous cultural patterns of authority, interest aggregation, and leader-follower relations as prime sources of legitimation. By examining Niger's recent experience with participation fostered through a five-tier hierarchy of development councils, we shall see how a corporatist-style representational system was installed by the military rulers in a two-step process. First the system was presented as transitional; it served to draw civilian constituencies into preparations for a return to constitutional government. Then, when Niger's domestic economy began wrenching from the shocks of a precipitous decline in the price and market for uranium, the existence of these purportedly transitional participatory structures preempted the formation of class-based parties or pluralist political alternatives. The. final section of our analysis, which links the onset of a crisis in Niger's political economy of development with the new politics of participation, explores the regime's recourse to corporatist intermediaries in the implementation of structural and policy reforms. Following a discussion that highlights the interactive relationship between economic policy dilemmas and the problems of governance, we conclude with a few theoretical and empirical observations about neotraditional corporatism and regime legitimation in Niger.

Co-optive politics and state legitimacy

Abstract: This text considers the co-option of outside interests into the machinery and processes of government, the reasons why and to whom it occurs and the consequences for government, group and society.