“South America is not the poorest continent in the world, but it may very well be the most unjust.” This statement by Ricardo Lagos, then president of Chile, at the Summit of the Americas in January ...2004 captures nicely the dilemma that faces Latin American countries in the wake of the transition to democracy that swept across the continent in the last two decades of the twentieth century. While political rights are now available to citizens at unprecedented levels, social and economic rights lag far behind, and the fledgling democracies struggle with long legacies of poverty, inequality, and corruption. Key to understanding what is happening in Latin America today is the relationship between the state and civil society. In this ambitious book, Philip Oxhorn sets forth a theory of civil society adequate for explaining current developments in a way that such controversial neoconservative theories as Francis Fukuyama’s liberal triumphalism or Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” cannot. Inspired by the rich political sociology of an earlier era and the classic work of T. H. Marshall on citizenship, Oxhorn studies the process by which social groups are incorporated, or not, into national socioeconomic and political development through an approach that focuses on the “social construction of citizenship.”
Although democracy is a widely held value, concrete measurement of it is elusive. Gerardo L. Munck’s constructive assessment of the methods used to measure democracies promises to bring order to the ...debate in academia and in practice.
Drawing on his years of academic research on democracy and measurement and his practical experience evaluating democratic practices for the United Nations and the Organization of American States, Munck's discussion bridges the theories of academia with practical applications. In proposing a more open and collaborative relationship between theory and action, he makes the case for reassessing how democracy is measured and encourages fundamental changes in methodology. Munck’s field-tested framework for quantifying and qualifying democracy is built around two instruments he developed: the UN Development Programme’s Electoral Democracy Index and a case-by-case election monitoring tool used by the OAS.
Measuring Democracy offers specific, real-world lessons that scholars and practitioners can use to improve the quality and utility of data about democracy.
The concept of social capital has been used by political scientists to explain both the transition to democracy in Eastern Europe and the decline of social cohesion in Western societies. This edited ...collection presents the latest quantitative research on how post-communist countries are adapting to Western models of society. The book combines theoretical and institutional analysis with detailed case-studies looking at Russia, Poland, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Romania and the former East Germany.
Gabriel Badescu is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Eric M. Uslaner is Professor of Government and Political at the University of Maryland, College Park.
O desafio analítico proposto por este artigo é explorado primeiramente a partir dos seus limites, o que vou denominar, com base em Santos (2007a), divisões abissais do acesso à justiça. O meu ...principal argumento é que a ação soberana do Estado que cinde o desenvolvimento civilizacional em zonas democráticas e estados de exceção é necropolítica (Mbembe, 2003), isto é, na medida em que distribui de forma excludente e desigual os recursos políticos e económicos exerce um direito de veto sobre as condições de vida e, consequentemente tem um poder de decisão sobre a exposição à morte, dos grupos marginalizados. Um exercício de veto que uma estrutura de assistência jurídica pode interromper circunstancialmente, mas não pode derrubar. Nesse sentido, o papel da política pública de acesso à justiça não manifesta a garantia de livre desenvolvimento democrático do indivíduo dentro do Estado, mas a abertura de redes de ação e luta social empreendidas em diferentes escalas de realização do direito. Na parte final, pretendo demonstrar que adotar uma conceção emancipatória do direito implica substituir a afirmação única da democratização promovida pelo direito estatal através do acesso à justiça pela repetição dupla e recíproca dos regimes epistêmicos da democracia e sua exceção. Palavras-chave: Acesso à justiça, pensamento abissal, necropolítica, poder, governamentalidade This paper posits an analytical challenge exploring for its limits, what I will call, based on Santos (2007a), access to justice abyssal divisions. State's action as sovereign split the civilizational development into democratic zones and states of exception, emerging a necropolitics of access to justice (Mbembe, 2003). By necropolitics of access to justice, I refer to a standard mode of distributing society political resources with implications on the living conditions or the exposure to death of underprivileged groups and poor people. A veto power of the sovereignty over life that a provision of legal aid could suspend extraordinarily but could not derogate. I will argue that, instead of operating as indicator of the levels of individual opportunities and state's democratization, the provision of legal aid should aim the replication of social struggles networking in different scales of law and justice. In the final part of the paper, I will argue that an emancipatory conception of law replaces the sole affirmation of the State's democratization through access to justice with the double and reciprocate affirmation of the epistemic regimes of democracy and its exception. Keywords: access to justice, abyssal thinking, necropolitics, power, governamentality
The contrast between Kuwait and the UAE today illustrates the vastly different possible futures facing the smaller states of the Gulf. Dubai's rulers dream of creating a truly global business center, ...a megalopolis of many millions attracting immigrants in great waves from near and far. Kuwait, meanwhile, has the most spirited and influential parliament in any of the oil-rich Gulf monarchies.
InThe Wages of Oil, Michael Herb provides a robust framework for thinking about the future of the Gulf monarchies. The Gulf has seen enormous changes in recent years, and more are to come. Herb explains the nature of the changes we are likely to see in the future. He starts by asking why Kuwait is far ahead of all other Gulf monarchies in terms of political liberalization, but behind all of them in its efforts to diversify its economy away from oil. He compares Kuwait with the United Arab Emirates, which lacks Kuwait's parliament but has moved ambitiously to diversify.
This data-rich book reflects the importance of both politics and economic development issues for decision-makers in the Gulf. Herb develops a political economy of the Gulf that ties together a variety of issues usually treated separately: Kuwait's National Assembly, Dubai's real estate boom, the paucity of citizen labor in the private sector, class divisions among citizens, the caste divide between citizens and noncitizens, and the politics of land.
Since the end of the Cold War, the assumption among most political theorists has been that as nations develop economically, they will also become more democratic-especially if a vibrant middle class ...takes root. This assumption underlies the expansion of the European Union and much of American foreign policy, bolstered by such examples as South Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan, and even to some extent Russia. Where democratization has failed or retreated, aberrant conditions take the blame: Islamism, authoritarian Chinese influence, or perhaps the rise of local autocrats.
But what if the failures of democracy are not exceptions? In this thought-provoking study of democratization, Joshua Kurlantzick proposes that the spate of retreating democracies, one after another over the past two decades, is not just a series of exceptions. Instead, it reflects a new and disturbing trend: democracy in worldwide decline. The author investigates the state of democracy in a variety of countries, why the middle class has turned against democracy in some cases, and whether the decline in global democratization is reversible.
In societies divided on ethnic and religious lines, problems of democracy are magnified – particularly where groups are mobilized into parties. With the principle of majority rule, minorities should ...be less willing to endorse democratic institutions where their parties persistently lose elections. While such problems should also hamper transitions to democracy, several diverse Eastern European states have formed democracies even under these conditions. In this book, Sherrill Stroschein argues that sustained protest and contention by ethnic Hungarians in Romania and Slovakia brought concessions on policies that they could not achieve through the ballot box, in contrast to Transcarpathia, Ukraine. In Romania and Slovakia, contention during the 1990s made each group accustomed to each other's claims and aware of the degree to which each could push its own. Ethnic contention became a de facto deliberative process that fostered a moderation of group stances, allowing democratic consolidation to slowly and organically take root.
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