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Artificial intelligence (AI) policy, innovation, and practice are moving ahead in rapid fashion. There is a growing mismatch between technological innovations in AI, which are advancing at a rapid rate, and normative and regulatory frameworks, which are lagging, particularly when it comes to protecting democratic values and human rights principles. National governments and multilateral institutions are attempting to catch up. At least 175 countries, firms and other organizations have produced documents listing ethical principles for AI. These efforts have proceeded in a somewhat fragmented manner, yet there are emerging signs of consolidation as the United States, Europe, and other countries begin to coalesce around shared principles. Europe, in particular, has raced ahead to draft comprehensive legislation, the Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA), to oversee these technologies and systems. What has motivated the European Union to pursue this approach? And how will this effort influence AI norms globally? This paper describes how Europe's AI norm-building process represents an effort to ensure EU priorities are reflected in the AI governance landscape. Europe's approach faces uncertainty. While it is likely that the AIA will meaningfully influence global AI norms, several factors may hinder its global diffusion and adoption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Democracies are under attack from various sides. In recent years AI-powered techniques such as profiling, targeting, election manipulation, and massive disinformation campaigns via social bots and troll farms challenge the very foundations of democratic systems. Against this background, demands for regulating AI have gotten louder. In this paper, we focus on the European Union (EU) as the actor that has gone the furthest in terms of regulating AI. We therefore ask: What kind of instruments does the EU envision in their binding and non-binding documents to prevent AI harm to democracy? And what critique can be formulated regarding these instruments? To address these questions, the article makes two contributions. First, by building on a systematic understanding of deliberative democracy, we introduce the distinction between two types of harm that can arise from the widespread use of AI: rights-based harm and systemic harm. Second, by analysing a number of EU documents, including the GDPR, the AI Act, the TTAP, and the DSA, we argue that the EU envisions four primary instruments for safeguarding democracy from the harmful use of AI: prohibition, transparency, risk management, and digital education. While these instruments provide a relatively high level of protection for rights-based AI harm, there is still ample space for these technologies to produce systemic harm to democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic development fails to greatly increase demand for liberal democracy in China. Is China an exception to modernization theory? If so, why? This paper studies these questions by analysing five waves of Asian Barometer Survey data from 2002 to 2019. We have three major findings. First, the shift of political values exhibits an inverted U-shaped curve with the mid-2010s as its turning point. Second, the better educated and more media exposed turned conservative much faster than the rest after the mid-2010s. Third, to trace the mechanism of this unusual reversal and divergence, we resort to a Difference-In-Differences model, taking political indoctrination, measured by media exposure and education, as treatment and the post-2013 era as treatment time, finding that political indoctrination significantly explains political cultural backsliding. Our findings enrich modernization theory by identifying the "interceptive" power of the state between economic development and cultural shifts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is often claimed that we are living in an age of increasing polarization. Political views, opinions, and worldviews become increasingly irreconcilable (idea-based polarization), while at the same time society appears to be getting fractured in antagonistic, opposing camps (identity-based polarization). However, a closer look at international datasets reveals that these forms of polarization do not affect all democracies to the same extent. Levels of identity-based and idea-based polarization strongly vary across countries. The question then becomes what can explain these diverging levels of polarization. In this paper, we hypothesize that the institutional design of a country impacts polarization, and that consensus democracies would display lower levels of polarization. Based on a quantitative analysis of the Comparative Political Dataset and Varieties of Democracy data in 36 countries over time (2000–2019), our results show that institutions did matter to a great extent, and in the hypothesized direction. Countries with consensus institutions, and more in particular PR electoral systems, multiparty coalitions, and federalism did exhibit lower levels of both issue-based and identity-based polarization, thereby confirming our expectations. Moreover, we found that consensus democracies tend to be better at coping with identity-based polarization, while the effect on idea-based polarization is smaller. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although Western donors allocate billions of dollars each year to democracy assistance, the role of such assistance in democratization processes remains contested. This paper is the first to capture the influence of European Union-led democracy assistance projects across 126 recipient countries. Using panel data, the analysis carried out employs democracy assistance data extracted from the OECD Crediting Reporting System for all the available years at the time of writing, i.e. 2002–2018, and data from the Varieties of Democracy Institute to capture democracy levels. The study finds that EU's democracy assistance positively impacts democracy levels of recipient countries. The EU is one of the largest and most credible promoters of democracy worldwide, and I argue that its democracy assistance can be successful because it is coupled with political conditionality and monitoring mechanisms in the beneficiary countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing literature examines democratic backsliding, but there is little consensus on when, where, and why it occurs. Reviewing more than 100 recent articles and working papers, this research note argues that inattention to the measurement of backsliding and the underlying concept of democracy drives this disagreement. We propose three remedies. First, we outline several questions that help researchers navigate common measurement challenges. Second, we argue that conceptual confusion around backsliding is driven in large part by inconsistent definitions of democracy. We show how outlining a comprehensive concept of democracy enables researchers to better account for the diversity of instances of democratic backsliding. Our third contribution is drawing attention to a previously overlooked form of backsliding: when governments lose the effective power to govern or voters and elites increasingly disagree about truths and facts. The research note urges scholars to pay closer attention to the conceptualization and measurement of backsliding prior to empirical analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hybrid regimes have consolidated on the back of techniques that balance strong regime structures with tokenistic pluralism. This democratic veneer is performed through pseudo markers of democracy such as weak political parties and semi-competitive elections, which aim to ratify regime legitimacy. How public opinion polling fits into authoritarian landscapes, however, is an aspect of hybrid regimes that remains less understood. Scholars of public opinion research in democracies believe that polling can contribute to constructing the world around it, prompting this paper to examine whether public opinion research – and pre-election polling in particular – contributes to the democratic veneer in hybrid regimes by constructing a perception of participatory democracy. It examines the nature and quality of pre-election polling undertaken in authoritarian Iran in the lead-up to the 2017 presidential election in order to make preliminary observations about the potential impact of polling on a regime's pluralist credentials. It finds that while most polls were poor quality, no polling in an authoritarian environment is benign because the very process of asking citizens their opinions and publicizing responses creates an impression that individual opinions count, in an environment where the opposite is often true. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India is often credited for its success as the world's largest democracy, but variation in subnational democracy across its states has not been systematically incorporated into scholarship on subnational regimes. This paper develops a conceptualization of subnational democracy based on four constitutive dimensions – turnover, contestation, autonomy and clean elections – and introduces a comprehensive dataset to measure each of the dimensions between 1985 and 2013. The inclusion of India – an older parliamentary democracy with a centralized federal system – broadens the universe of cases for the study of subnational regimes, and reveals variation across constitutive dimensions that has not yet been theorized. The paper shows that threats to subnational democracy come from multiple directions, including the central government and non-state armed actors, that subnational variation persists even decades after a transition at the national-level, and that subnational democracy declines in some states in spite of the national democratic track record. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why are some democratically elected presidents more likely than others to extend or remove their current term limits? This paper argues that the frequency and type of reforms relaxing executive term limits depend on the relative partisan power of presidents and on inherited institutional constraints. These reforms are more likely when short-term shifts in the distribution of partisan resources significantly favour an incumbent executive vis-à-vis the opposition. Yet partisan imbalances do not fully account for the observed variation in outcomes across presidential democracies. Long-standing institutional legacies also affect whether presidents are willing and able to ease existing term limits. Specifically, the maintenance of effective executive constraints over time reduces the probability that incumbents facing restrictions on consecutive re-election will obtain a one-term extension and makes it extremely unlikely that they will abolish term limits altogether. A statistical analysis of reforms allowing consecutive executive re-election in Latin America between 1978 and 2015 and a comparison between Ecuador and Colombia support these arguments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship on the institutionalization of politics in Africa has highlighted the consolidation of constitutional leadership turnover in electoral democracies. However, leadership turnover is not limited to democracies, and is increasingly also regularized in a subset of non-democratic regimes ruled by dominant parties. Why have some dominant ruling parties in Africa been able to facilitate leadership turnover while others have not? With evidence from a detailed case study of Ethiopia's leadership transitions, we argue that the historical persistence of ideology and its institutional expressions are important drivers of dominant parties' ability to manage leadership turnover. In Ethiopia, the ideology of ethno-national self-determination (forged in the 1960s) influenced political development for decades, culminating in the adoption of constitutional ethnic federalism and the creation of a ruling party alliance comprised of ethno-national parties. This institutional backdrop defined the contours of transitions in 2012 and 2018. It also explains contestations over the nature of federalism in Ethiopia, including the outbreak of conflict in Tigray in 2020. In addition to highlighting the role of ideology in African politics, this paper brings a comparative perspective to the study of Ethiopia, a country that is often studied in isolation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lipset's "well-to-do" quote coined decades of debate on the interaction between economic performance and democracy. However, results remain preliminary and unsatisfying. Many authors report a strong relationship while others deny it. Our paper first reviews research on the impact of (1) both economic growth and general economic performance on overall democracy, (2) the chance of transition towards democracy, and (3) the chance of a democracy to avoid autocratic regression. We demonstrate ambiguity throughout and that no clear picture on potential relations between economic performance and democracy has emerged so far. In a second step, we discuss reasons for this ambiguity. We take insights from methodological research on false-positive findings and draw insights for modernization theory research. Particularly, we identify problems and challenges on both the dependent and the independent variables of modernization theory modelling which cause considerable flexibility of research design and, therefore, making false-positive findings more likely. For each issue, we make suggestions for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past few decades there has been a great deal of interest in the academic literature on the relationship between civil society organizations (CSOs) and the state, and the impact of state power on CSOs in the Middle East North Africa (MENA) region. Yet, despite this interest, very few detailed empirical explorations of these issues have been conducted to date. Of the detailed empirical work that does exist, none has focused on state–CSO relations in a democratic context in the MENA. This paper contributes to filling this gap by examining these relations and their implications in the Turkish context. More specifically, this paper explores the democratizing role of independent women’s organizations in Turkey and the ways in which the state has sought to exert power over and control these organizations. The methodology consists of a series of 38 in-depth interviews with both registered and unregistered women’s organizations from across the seven administrative regions of Turkey. The findings show that while CSOs do challenge the state in some regards, the state is by far the more powerful actor and very effective at moderating and de-radicalizing civil society. The state does this by controlling the areas in which CSOs can operate and be effective, and through the use of repressive measures. The results show that these measures have the effect of tempering the demands of CSOs and reducing their capacity to challenge and counterbalance state power. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Consociationalism has become a key institutional mechanism for managing conflict after civil war. Proponents argue that a period of consociational influence can contribute to the erosion of ethnic cleavages and even a society where ethnicity is depoliticized. Critics, however, are sceptical of this claim and argue that consociationalism institutionalizes ethnic identities and stymies the transition to a healthier democracy. In response, proponents outline a liberal model of consociationalism which limits the pre-determination of ethnicity in social and political structures. Yet, problematically, consociations in postwar societies often provide guarantees of ethnic representation in order to entice belligerents to abandon violence for democracy. This issue of transitioning from a corporate consociation to a more liberal form requires sustained analysis. This paper examines this conundrum by examining contemporary Lebanese consociationalism. Given that ethnicity is central to debates about revising consociationalism, via qualitative interviews with Lebanese political elites and civil society activists, the paper analyses how these subjects conceptualize ethnicity in contrasting ways which generate different approaches to consociationalism but which ultimately frustrate meaningful reform. It does this by exploring various debates to entrench, reform or transform Lebanese consociationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the extent to which democratic values and institutions propagated by the international community and measured by influential governance indices correlate with local perceptions of politics and democracy in one eastern region of Madagascar. A careful reading of the political crisis that erupted in Madagascar in 2009 highlights how 'undemocratic' behaviour - a 'coup' even - can have roots in democratic desires that have little to do with elections. I argue that local perceptual lenses, identifiable by characteristic competences and dispositions, have considerable interpretive significance regarding what might otherwise be labelled deviant behaviour in unconsolidated or hybrid democracies. Using qualitative data collected using an innovative methodology during five months of ethnographic fieldwork immediately preceding the crisis, this paper examines the interface between international democracy assistance policies and mass local political perceptions. It concludes that long-term prospects for deepening democracy in Africa and elsewhere depend in part on how - and how well - external experts strategically engage with the communities they propose to reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most sub-Saharan African countries are neither liberal democracies, nor fully authoritarian. Officials from Western governments that provide assistance to these 'hybrid regimes' often become apologists for their lack of democracy. Rather than cogently arguing why democracy promotion activities should not be a priority, such donor officials frequently claim either that their host country is more democratic than it actually is, or that it could not be any more democratic for the time being. Drawing on some 70 interviews with donor officials in three African countries - Kenya, Malawi and Rwanda - over a period of more than a decade, this paper examines numerous individuals' common use of three methods to deflect criticism of the democratic credentials of their host countries: (1) focusing on election day, rather than the campaign and conditions as a whole; (2) setting the standard very low (do not expect too much); and (3) setting a long time horizon (do not expect it too soon). Perhaps equally important, the paper also explores the various reasons why these donor officials make such excuses for authoritarian practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1994 genocide, the Rwandan government has sought to navigate a difficult path between the multi-party democracy favoured by donors and a more tightly managed political environment that it argues is necessary for security. Using the fragile post-genocide political context and a history of political manipulation of ethnic identity as justification, the government has stigmatized and criminalized all references to ethnicity. This paper argues that this strategy has required careful management and manipulation of local narratives of identity and citizenship. It suggests that this has led, for one group in particular - the indigenous Batwa - to a politics of exclusion which limits their ability to participate effectively in post-genocide politics and advocate for their rights. Drawing on interviews with Rwandan civil society activists, government representatives and key bilateral and multilateral donors, the paper explores the often-overlooked impacts of these strategies on the Batwa, Rwanda's smallest ethnic group. Rwanda has been praised for its achievements in creating stability, relative security and a degree of competitive politics in a divided society that is needed to prevent the recurrence of large scale violence. And though the government explains its attempts to manage identity narratives as part of a wider effort to create an inclusive national identity, promoting 'Rwandan-ness', it is suggested that the effects of this policy for the Batwa have been negative and exclusionary. Whatever the potential virtues of such a strategy, the paper argues that there is little room for effective representation and accordingly for a political voice for the indigenous Batwa in such a tightly managed system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

US democracy promotion is integral to the pursuit of the grand project of the American Mission. By promoting democracy America makes its role one of international engagement as opposed to one of isolation. The first part of this paper examines the political and cultural aspects of US democracy promotion in the post-Cold War era through the bi-polar framework of the case-specific versus one-size-fits-all. To better understand USAID's democracy promotion policy, the second part takes this framework and applies it to its political reform strategy in Bosnia under the Clinton administration from 1995 to 2000 and Afghanistan under the Bush administration from 2001 to 2008. This paper confirms that America's democracy promotion simultaneously employed both the case-specific and one-size-fits-all approaches. USAID programmes and projects did at times respond to local conditions but nevertheless appear to employ a blueprint design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Democracy promotion through economic sanctions has become commonplace. Previous studies argue that an important challenge to the effectiveness of democratic sanctions is the contravening support of black knights. However, these studies underestimate conflicting interests between the target and its black knight. In this paper, I propose a bargaining model for understanding how targets obtain support from black knights. The target's main source of bargaining power is its threat to defect from the black knight and obtain support from an international rival. However, the credibility of this threat decreases with democratic sanctions because they hinder cooperation with a likely source of support, namely the sender. Therefore, targets take steps towards democracy to improve their bargaining position relative to the black knight. To probe my argument, I conduct a deep single case study of EU sanctions against Belarus between 2004 and 2016 with Russia as a black knight. Sanctions should have no effect in this paradigmatic case of black knight support. Yet, there is substantial evidence that democratic sanctions have increased the cost of electoral fraud and state repression in Belarus. This indicates that the conflicting interests of targets and their black knights provide windows of opportunity for democracy promotion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While scholars have shed light on our understanding of elections in less and nondemocratic countries, the incentives behind electoral participation in these countries remain unexplored. This paper sets out to investigate how regime structure is associated with voters' incentives of habitual voting. We assert that the formation of voting habits is associated with the relationships of citizens with the state and their expectations about it. Thus, habitual voting reflects voters' understandings about, perceptions of, and concerns with their political environment and system. In democracy, habituated voting behavior is strongly associated with respondents' support for the regime because their sense of civic duty encourages them to vote. In authoritarian regimes, knowing that their ballots are the adornments of the authoritarian government, habitual voting simply reveals citizens' short-term support for the government or their concerns with the vertical accountability of the government. We further test the hypotheses against Asian Barometer Survey data and the analysis evidences our assumptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When individual civil society organizations (CSOs) in autocracies act collectively to campaign for a particular cause, they are more likely to succeed in pressuring an incumbent autocrat enact liberalizing reforms or resist democratic erosion. Under what conditions do CSOs engage in collective action for political reform in autocracies? The article argues that CSOs are more likely to act collectively for political reform when public interest in political reform and public support for CSOs is high. High public interest and support provides psychological motivation for collective action, psychological immunity from autocratic repression, and material immunity from a reliance on state funding. Increased salience and publicity from collective action further generates greater public interest and support. A positive collaborative equilibrium among CSOs ensues. However, when public interest and support is low, CSO leaders demur from collective action for fear of provoking the authoritarian state. A disinterested public demotivates CSO leaders, resulting in a negative collaborative equilibrium. We demonstrate this argument through a controlled comparison of divergent collaborative equilibriums for political reform in Malaysia and Singapore, utilizing original interviews with civil society activists in the two countries supported by public opinion data from the Asian Barometer and the World Values Survey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Democratic backsliding in many world regions has prompted scholars to study how democracies can resist and push back against autocratization, and many accounts suggest that a unified, pluralist opposition is key to mobilize voters against democratic backsliding. However, pluralist ideology is not necessarily associated with higher awareness of and opposition to backsliding, as evaluations of democratic erosions are highly contingent on political context. We illustrate this point with the case of Indonesia, a country where a pluralist government coalition has deepened democratic erosion by harshly repressing an anti-pluralist Islamist opposition. Using data from a national survey, we document that Islamist Indonesians are systematically more likely than pluralist individuals to believe that democracy has worsened: Resistance to democratic erosion is thus concentrated in the most ideologically illiberal citizens. Rethinking the pluralist/anti-pluralist dichotomy has implications for how we conceptualize democratic backsliding and assess democratic resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In divided-executive patronal systems, legislatures have been sites of resistance to the centralization of power in a single patronal pyramid. Kyrgyzstan is an anomaly among divided-executive patronal systems when between 2010 to 2020, the Kyrgyz parliament was neither a site of opposition nor did it demonstrate legislative agency vis-à-vis the executive. Instead, following another uprising in 2020, a unified single patronal pyramid was re-established. Adopting an approach rooted in the semiotics of meaning making and drawing on a dataset of interviews with parliamentary deputies and a range of documentary sources, this article complements existing institutional approaches to explaining weak legislative agency by revealing a series of dialogical relationships between deputy meaning making and broader institutional and cultural constraints which shaped the Kyrgyz's parliament's overall quality and strength. These relationships pertain to legislative initiative, the protection of private interests and representation, with the interplay between the ascribed meaning and its constitution within broader institutional and cultural context contributing to the diminishment of legislative agency vis-à-vis the presidency. Kyrgyzstan illustrates the value of meaning making as an approach to understanding legislative-executive relations in non-democratic contexts, and its impact in conjunction with cultural and institutional constraints in shaping legislative agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines why regime survival rates vary across young democracies. The literature offers competing claims regarding the effect of the mode of transition on the duration of post-transitional democracy. This study reconciles these claims by proposing three modes of democratic transitions – military dominance (MD), popular sanction (PS), and consensual power transfer (CPT) – arguing that CPT leads the subsequent democracies to last longer than MD and PS. MD fails to incorporate the military into democratic systems, making it more likely for the ensuing democracies to suffer a coup, whereas PS enables regime insiders to change democratic rules without hindrance or outsiders to gain power through an organized armed conflict. CPT shapes a strong electoral performance by authoritarian successor parties, which provide checks and balances in post-authoritarian politics, thus decreasing the likelihood of collapse. This study verifies these hypotheses using data on nascent democracies between 1945 and 2022. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Democracy aid has been a major foreign policy instrument over the past 30 years. However, it is not clear whether such aid has any meaningful effect on democratic development in recipient countries, as previous studies have yielded somewhat contradictory results. We contribute to the burgeoning literature on the effectiveness of democracy aid by arguing that recipient countries' history of conflict constitutes an important moderator in the relationship between democracy aid and democratic development. Specifically, we develop a theoretical framework which examines the effects of two different types of democracy aid – top-down and bottom-up assistance – on democratic development in post-conflict recipient countries. Analysing data on 147 recipients over a period of 19 years (2002–2020), we find that while neither type has a significant general effect on democracy levels in recipient countries, bottom-up democracy assistance does have a positive and significant effect in post-conflict contexts, which suggests that post-conflict periods pose an opportunity for domestic pro-democracy actors and their international supporters to nudge their countries towards democratic development. These findings have implications for the literatures on democracy aid and conflict as well as policymakers interested in fostering democratic development abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The past three decades have witnessed a rapid global uptake of digital media. Does an increase in internet access lead to more anti-government protests globally, in both democracies and non-democracies? Has the role of the internet changed over time from benefiting the opposition to benefiting the regime? We use time-series cross-national data and negative binomial regressions to model protest data in 151 countries from 1990 to 2020. By leveraging change in the development of digital information globally, the results show that increases in internet penetration and mobile cellular subscription rates increase the number of anti-government protests in non-democracies in the period from 1990 to 2010, but not among a subsample of democracies. After 2010, increases in internet penetration rates did not affect the number of protests in either democracies or non-democracies. The use of cellular internet continues to have a small positive effect on protest frequency after 2010. We also test the government's internet censorship efforts as a mechanism for decreasing information access and diminishing mobilization. Results suggest authoritarian regimes modified their strategies over time, more effectively using information and communications technologies (ICTs) to quell anti-government protests using digital repression and information control consistent with the theory of informational autocracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Authoritarian regimes frequently reach across borders to repress against exiled dissidents. Existing scholarship has investigated the methods and effects of transnational repression. Yet, we lack knowledge of the role that the political context of a host country and its relations to the origin country of diasporas play in incidents of transnational repression. Addressing this gap, we use a Freedom House dataset on physical acts of transnational repression (2014–2020) to study how the regime type of the host country and the regional ties between the host and origin country influence the likelihood and type of transnational repression incidents. Conducting a logistic regression analysis with yearly directed dyads, we find that to target exiles in autocratic host states perpetrators primarily rely on the cooperation of authorities, whereas in democratic host states they resort more often to direct attacks. We also show that authoritarian cooperation on transnational repression is regionally clustered: it often occurs when home and host state are situated within the same authoritarian neighbourhood, and partly also when they are members in the same regional organization. Our article reveals some of the host state conditions and relational dynamics that shape the decisions and strategies of transnational repression perpetrators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article claims that the state and, more precisely, whether the state has a rational-legal or a patrimonial public administration, affects (1) the extent to which democratic standards are met and (2) the costs of abandoning office and the support leaders unwilling to accept electoral defeat can expect to have within the state and their party. Further, this argument is elaborated so as to account for the typical political regime in contemporary Latin America, durable poor-quality democracies. Latin America's semi-patrimonial states are held to determine this outcome through two mechanisms: selective collusion and political opportunism. The plausibility of the theory about mechanisms is gauged. Additionally, implications for the field of comparative democracy studies are spelled out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do mutually reinforcing cleavages harm democracy? Evidence from specific cases suggests that autocratization can be related to the predicament of ethnic groups, if ethnicity is politicized and involves resource distribution. However, we know little about whether this is a cause of autocratization more broadly. The article demonstrates that, with increasing inequalities between ethnic groups, a country experiences a decline in its level of democracy and higher propensity to start autocratizing. The analysis thus advances previous contributions, focusing on individual inequalities and power-sharing institutions as explanations of democratization or democratic quality, in two ways. First, isolating autocratization as downturns in democracy levels and the onsets of related timespans (autocratization episodes), and comparing the impact of (economic, political, and social) types of inequalities between ethnic groups. Second, adopting a global sample of (democratic and non-democratic) countries since 1981, with an original data collection integrating expert surveys with survey data. Quantitative evidence confirms most expectations, particularly on economic inequalities between ethnic groups, and – although less precisely – economic, political and social dimensions combined. The findings have important implications for political regime and ethnic studies, showing that preventing the mutual reinforcement of sociocultural and economic cleavages is key to stabilize democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Democratization in Uganda may be seen as a form of policy transfer where the meaning of a multi-party system is significantly altered as a reflection of both the domestic political context, and the interests of the international donors. In making this argument, this paper provides three case studies of conflict between Uganda's parliament and executive branch over banking reform, central bank independence and electricity sector reform, between 1996 and 2006. Despite taking place in the no-party system, the executive oversight that the legislature provided constituted a particular form of substantive or 'thick' democracy, where parliament functioned as an effective opposition. This, in turn, created an incentive for Uganda's executive branch to promote the 2005 shift to a multi-party system, in order to produce a formal-legal or 'thin' form of democracy in which the executive branch could control parliament. This shift was supported by a donor community more interested in pursuing neo-liberal reforms in recipient states than in defending existing forms of substantive democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cameroon's President Paul Biya has weathered the transition from a single-party to a multi-party system, dramatically strengthening his control over the political apparatus in recent years. While many have noted the tendency of Africa's new 'democrats' to consolidate their authority by removing various constitutional restraints on their power, this paper argues that Paul Biya has adapted more subtly to the various opportunities provided by open political competition and international discourse on minority rights. Beyond the sadly predictable fraud in electoral counting, he has manipulated electoral boundaries to his party's advantage, while at the same time prohibited voting access to citizens who would likely vote for the opposition. In addition, he has acceded to constitutional changes to recognize minorities in compliance with international and domestic pressures, which is in reality yet another useful tool to marginalize the opposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After decades of military rule, Nigeria finally returned to 'elected' civilian rule in 1999. However, this paper raises critical questions about the quality and depth of the resulting democracy in Nigeria by examining successive elections in 2003 and 2007. It suggests that since the transition elections of 1999, a post-military political elite has subverted democracy and has removed electoral power from the Nigerian people through a host of devices, including the manipulation of electoral processes, political institutions, and security agencies. In spite of reports by local monitors and international election observers regarding the flawed nature of both post-1999 elections, the response of the international community has ranged between symbolic and feeble protests to an ambivalent stand, to open tolerance of such 'elected dictatorships'. In conclusion, the paper sums up the factors behind the crisis of electoral democracy in Nigeria, its implications, and the prospects of Nigerians effectively organizing to win back the right to choose their political representatives and leaders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the increasing use of power-sharing arrangements to manage a wide range of political crises over the past five years it is more important than ever to turn a critical eye on the dynamics and outcomes of unity governments. This paper argues that two key factors shape the way that power-sharing functions in Africa: the distribution of violence (that is, whether any one party has a monopoly on victimhood or whether all parties have committed, and retain the capacity to commit, atrocities) and the level of elite cohesion (whether political leaders have developed norms of mutual accommodation that render it easier to find areas of common-ground). The first half of the paper identifies four main power-sharing dynamics in Africa based on different combinations of the distribution of violence and the level of elite cohesion: the politics of distrust, the politics of collusion, the politics of partisanship and the politics of pacting. The second-half of the paper then draws on evidence from Angola, Burundi, the DRC, Kenya, South Africa and Zimbabwe to illustrate how such variations in the practice of power-sharing shape the prospects for reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the light of the successful and peaceful outcome of the December 2008 elections in Ghana, inclusive of the second transfer of power between political parties since the return to democratic rule in 1992, this paper considers whether Ghana can now be regarded as a consolidated democracy. To undertake this assessment, Linz and Stepan's multidimensional framework of democratic consolidation is adopted, and their three dimensions and five arenas of democratic consolidation are explored. Findings demonstrate that although significant progress has been made towards democratic consolidation in Ghana, there are aspects of consolidation that remain weak. Thus it would be premature to state that democratic consolidation has been achieved in Ghana. With regard to the prospects for sustained consolidation, the closeness that Ghana came to political violence during the fraught election period is highlighted, indicating a latent threat to future democratic stability. Additionally, a number of constraints and challenges are identified in various arenas of consolidation, inclusive of the limited policy influence of civil society organizations, the marginalization of women, excessive executive/presidential powers, the adverse impact of external actors on democratic sovereignty, and the implications for democratic sustainability of a continued failure to address gross socio-economic inequalities. Without addressing such issues, Ghana's democratic gains may turn out to be a rather hollow triumph. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1997 and 2013, more than 5000 recall referendums were activated against democratically elected authorities from 747 Peruvian municipalities (45.5% of all municipalities). This makes Peru the world's most intensive user of this mechanism of direct democracy which is designed to remove elected authorities from office before the end of their term. What are the reasons for this extensive use of recall referendums in Peru and, more importantly, what consequences do they have in terms of democratic legitimacy and government efficiency? This paper sets out to answer these questions by comparing the Peruvian case against the background of other countries in the Andean region. It proposes an explanation for the intensive activation of recall procedures through the combination of two factors: first, the features of the institutional design of the mechanism, which affect the probability of a successful activation of recall referendums, and second, the degree of institutionalization of political parties, which influences the incentives of political actors to gain power between regular elections. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents a perspective on the issues discussed in the paper "The Eclipse of Consociationalism in South Africa's Democratic Transition," by Michael Kelly Connors. According to the author, the paper asserted that 1994 interim constitution of the country comprised just a semi-constitutional factor. He also noted that the 1996 African constitution discarded consociational democracy of power-sharing. Furthermore, the author indicated that Connors has debated the alleged downfall of the power-sharing system is a favorable development due to an unsuitable foreign constitutional model.

The linkage between liberal democracy and income inequality has been the subject of considerable empirical research. However, the literature has largely ignored advances in the techniques for measuring income distribution which help to improve and strengthen the robustness of research findings in this field. By drawing upon recent developments in data collection and formal analyses, this paper explores inequality trends in selected Western democracies over the 1970s and 1980s. The results indicate that the gap between rich and poor is widening in some countries but not in all, thus pointing to the role of national policies in the redistribution of income. Conventional models grounded on demand driven policies persuasively explain declining income inequality, yet fail to account for the rising trends in the 1980s. Reasons for this failure are the omission of political ‘slack’ as a key dimension in redistributive options and the fallacy of linearity. The article shows that despite significant progress, we are still not in a position to be confident of our theories and methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media presents a contradictory relationship with democracy. Once, it was regarded as a tool for democracy, providing alternative sources of information and coordinating social movements for democratization. Later it also became a tool for authoritarian regimes to control information and spread propaganda to stay in power. This mixed perception suggests that both democratic and authoritarian forces can use social media to influence public opinion. This presents a puzzle to the relationship between social media use and democratic understanding. Does social media promote or erode understanding of democracy? This study argues that the effect of social media use on understanding of democracy depends on higher education. The relationship also differs between democracies and non-democracies. Using the newest wave of the World Values Survey (wave 7, 2017–2020), this study analyses the influence of social media use on understanding of democracy in non-democracies and democracies. The findings suggest that social media use positively affects understanding of democracy in democratic countries. However, the democratic effect of social media is nullified in non-democracy unless it interacts with higher education. The findings offer implications for the relationship between social media, higher education, and understanding of democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article empirically assesses competing perspectives of the relationship between democracy and political trust. We conduct multilevel analyses on a cross-national panel dataset of 82 countries for the period 1990–2020. The findings suggest that there is a strong, negative relationship between democracy and political trust that cannot easily be dismissed as an artifact of model misspecification or response bias. Moreover, we re-examine the critical citizens thesis by disaggregating political trust into trust in partisan and "non-partisan" institutions to test the claim that well-functioning democracies contain and channel distrust into the more partisan political institutions to keep distrust from generalizing to the entire political system. The results fail to find a statistically significant difference of the effect of democracy on trust between partisan and non-partisan institutions, suggesting that low political trust within democracies may be a more acute problem than much of the literature suggests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The proliferation of democratic rule in Africa has been accompanied by external involvement in fostering democracy. The African Union along with various regional organizations have included clauses in their treaties calling for member-state adherence to democratic governance. Moreover, African regional organizations have used punishments such as membership suspension, sanctions, and military force to motivate states experiencing democratic reversals to change course. However, despite these trends, there has been no investigation into how Africans perceive external involvement in fostering democracy. This study remedies this gap by evaluating public attitudes toward such external pressure using the sixth round of the Afrobarometer survey. Specifically, the study explores how individual assessment of electoral practice and a country's and its neighbours' history of unconstitutional changes of government influence approval of external democracy promotion. This article lays the foundation for further investigating the roots of legitimacy of actions taken by international organizations aimed at promoting good governance and democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Civil society is a bulwark against autocratic rule; its erosion contributes to democratic recession worldwide. Scholars and activists are calling attention to repressive laws non-democratic governments enact to undermine civil society organizations (CSOs). Yet, non-democratic governments do not only enact repressive laws; they also enact permissive, quasi-democratic legal rules. Evidence from case studies suggests that non-democratic governments enact such rules as part of a broader strategy to stabilize the regime. This article adds a within-case comparative study of Kenya's four CSO regulators to the growing evidence showing that non-democracies can choose to manipulate civil society rather than repress it. The government's words and documentation provide evidence: I triangulate elite interviews with elected officials and bureaucrats with archival data from government libraries and four CSO regulators. I find that the government enacts permissive legal rules and then uses several control and consultation tactics collectively, separately, and episodically to manipulate CSOs and legitimise the regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a hypothesis for understanding democratic stability based on the distinction between politicized and meritocratic bureaucracies. We argue that in a politicized administration, the professional careers of large numbers of government officials depend directly upon which party wins the elections. This increases the likelihood that the government will take opportunistic actions aimed at surviving in office at any cost; that is, benefiting core supporters at the expense of other groups. In turn, this may foster pre-emptive actions from the opposition, such as military coups. Conversely, in democracies with meritocratic administrations, incumbents are credibly constrained from undertaking partial policies because their hands are tied in terms of managing the staff policy of the state apparatus. Consequently, countries with meritocratic bureaucracies have greater prospects for democratic stability. Empirically, we illustrate the mechanisms with two well-documented cases of democratic transitions that enshrined a politicized administration – Spain (1876–1936) and Venezuela (1958–1998) – and one transition that kept a meritocratic bureaucracy, Spain (1975–). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In an age of transnational flows and interdependencies, democratic citizenship can no longer be conceptualized exclusively within national boundaries. This paper presents a conceptual map that allows tracing emerging and proposed forms of citizenship within and beyond the nation state in a comprehensive and differentiated way. We disentangle two anchor points: membership in a political community as the fundament of citizenship and the arena of political decision-making as the focal point of citizenship rights, identities and practices. For the former we differentiate between a single national community, the universal community of humankind and multiple (national) communities. For the latter we distinguish the national, supra-national and transnational arena. Our typology thus consists of nine different forms of democratic citizenship. It is used to provide a brief overview over normative proposals and empirical findings leading to the following insights: while membership in a particular national community still dominates the reality in all three political arenas, in the normative discourse it is perceived as deficient. Membership in the universal community of humankind is widely endorsed in the normative discourse, but almost nonexistent. In contrast, membership in multiple communities is not only a growing reality but also normatively promising for democratizing a transnationalizing world. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Public support has long been considered crucial for the vitality and survival of democracy. Although the determinants of citizens' support for democracy have been extensively studied, current literature puts emphasis on domestic factors. While another body of scholarship has documented the propensity of political diffusion, most studies focus on aggregate outcomes, and citizens' attitudes within this tendency have received less attention. Extending the research on the influence of domestic performance on public attitudes and verifying the micro-foundation underlying political diffusion, we argue that economic performance of other countries can similarly shape citizens' support for democracy. Using a sample of more than 90 democratic countries across the globe over the past three decades, we find that citizens in democratic countries are more likely to view democracy as the ideal regime type when there is a positive correlation between the level of democracy and economic growth across proximate countries, either geographically or culturally defined. We also show that the effects of proximate foreign democracies' economic performance in boosting democratic support are particularly evident in countries where citizens have greater access to external information, as they are more aware of the political systems and economic conditions of foreign countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While it may be necessary to secure elite buy-in to peaceful competition, the literature is pessimistic about the long-term effects of a power-sharing settlement on the quality of democracy. Designing institutions to guarantee political inclusion is commonly thought to undermine vertical and horizontal accountability by incentivizing rent-seeking over responsiveness to voters. This study employs data from the Varieties of Democracy project to test arguments about the pernicious institutional effects of political power-sharing settlements in post-conflict democracies, relying on a panel dataset of 28 conflict-prone states in Sub-Saharan Africa since the onset of democracy's Third Wave (1990–2021). The analytical technique is a time-series linear regression distinguishing between upturns and downturns across a range of continuous measures of accountability. The results show that, in line with much of the literature, political power-sharing settlements are associated with increasing executive corruption and fewer improvements in the rule of law. However, none of the other proposed mechanisms linking political power sharing to poor accountability outcomes finds consistent or significant support in the cross-national sample. Overall, these findings suggest that the relatively undemocratic institutional concessions designed to resolve conflict may not pose the serious barrier to democratic deepening and consolidation as previously assumed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Democracy is under threat across the globe and a third wave of autocratization manifests in democratic regression and authoritarian hardening. However, although universities have been important pro-democracy hotbeds, the nexus between academic freedom and autocratization has generated little scholarly attention. This article presents the first systematic investigation of the influence of academic freedom on the onset of autocratization. In particular, it reveals how academic freedom protects regimes from an onset of autocratization and argues that more academic freedom reduces the risk of autocratization by imprinting a pro-democracy bias on students and researchers. This article's research design combines two studies. Study I tests whether graduates that were socialized under more academic freedom develop more democratic support, which I analyse using data from the World Values Surveys and linear fixed effects models. Study II tests whether more academic freedom reduces the onset probability of autocratization using V-Dem data and binomial-response GLMs. This article finds evidence that while high levels of academic freedom reduce the probability of an onset of autocratization, low levels also reduce the probability of an onset. Overall, the article highlights the crucial role of academic freedom for democracy, especially in times of severe threats to democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much speculation exists regarding how social media impacts the health of democracies. However, minimal scholarly research empirically examines the effect social media has on democracy across multiple states and regions. Thus, this article analyses the effect social media and disinformation transmitted over social media have on democracy. The findings from a cross-national, time-series analysis of 158 states from 2000–2019 indicate that different types of social media usage have varying effects on democracy. General social media consumption, the presence of diverse political viewpoints on social media, and the use of social media in political campaigns bolster democracy. However, social media disinformation, online political polarization, and the use of social media to organize offline violence reduce overall levels of democracy. In addition, a mediation analysis is conducted to identify the precise linkages between social media disinformation and democracy and indicates that government and political party disinformation impact democracy by weakening key democratic norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper captures an emerging African phenomenon in which the form of democracy is brazenly used to invalidate its very substance. Drawing on particulars from Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Nigeria, we articulate the re-ascendance and re-invigoration of anti-democratic forces across Africa, and weigh up the challenge that violent erasure of the electoral sovereignty of citizens constitutes to democratic theory and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the restoration of multi-party democracy in Kenya in 1991, elections have witnessed intra-party violence during the primaries for selecting parliamentary and civic seats candidates. This article addresses the question of why electoral violence occurs during party primaries in Kenya and argues that violence is an outcome of the organization of political parties, which has revolved around personalities identified with ethno-regional interests rather than institutionalism. The upshot has been the absence of party institutionalization to establish structures for recruitment of members and organization of primaries. Such organizational weaknesses have denied parties the capacity to match the intense competition for tickets of ethnoregional dominant parties that guarantees nominees to win seats in their strongholds. Intra-party violence has followed. The article submits that intra-party electoral violence in Kenya is a function of the politics of clientelism and ethnicity, both of which have severely hampered the institutionalization of political parties and their capacity to cope with the stiff competition for the tickets of ethno-regional dominant parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two key themes of this special issue are: how violence challenges democracy and how democratic politics might, over time, diminish violence. This paper explores how violence(s) embedded in Latin America's state formation process are multiplied rather than diminished through democratization, generating a securitizing logic which fundamentally distorts democratic principles. Known for its high levels of historic violence(s), Latin America today is second only to Southern Africa in levels of homicide in the world. Some see contemporary violence in the region as a rupture from the past: 'new violence' characterized by its urban and social nature in contrast to the rural and political nature of the past. Violence, however, has a reproductive quality, by which it is transmitted through space as well as time. This article argues that rather than reflecting a rupture with the past, violence in Latin America has merely accelerated its complex reproduction in many forms across (gendered) spaces of socialization. The paradox is that the proliferation of this violence has occurred alongside democratic transitions. Although the state is not directly responsible for all the violence which is taking place, this article argues that in many countries it is the very trajectory of the state-formation process which has facilitated this rapid reproduction of violence. I call this process 'perverse'. Democracy is increasingly subject to the fears and insecurities of the population, enabling the state to build its authority not on the protection of citizens' rights, but on its armed encounters and insidious collusions with violent actors in the name of 'security provision'. Categories of people become non-citizens, subjected to abuse by state, para-state and non-state violent actors. If this process continues, democracy will ultimately be securitized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article outlines campaigns to promote democracy in Belarus. It discusses the limited impact of the domestic opposition and the West in attaining major changes within the Lukashenka regime. It also offers an analysis of Belarus' relations with Russia, noting how in recent years, Minsk has adopted a more independent path, raising hopes for more cooperation with Europe, most recently through the Eastern Partnership Programme. The international recession has halted the most redeeming aspect of an authoritarian government: impressive economic growth and relatively high living standards. With these new circumstances in place, the paper examines three key questions. What level of democratization will satisfy the European Union (EU)? Was the policy of the United States (and formerly the EU) to isolate Belarus misguided? Has the Lukashenka administration undergone fundamental changes in recent years or are the changes introduced to date mainly cosmetic? Finally, it suggests that the question of democratization is no longer the key item on the agenda concerning the EU's attitude toward Belarus because it has been superseded by strategic partnerships with states in the non-Russian neighbourhood of the former Soviet Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]