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This article compares rural support for authoritarian populism in the new democracies in western Europe and Latin America. Literature on mass-based peasant revolutions sees the rural poor as revolutionaries, but an earlier, Marxist view saw them as counter-revolutionary. What can we expect of rural people in new democracies? The article examines four cases of rural support for authoritarian populism and contrasts them with patterns of peasant leftism. Two factors explain the difference: (1) background factors (economic and social relations, the nature of land tenure) and (2) foreground factors (political leadership, organizational style, and rhetoric). The article considers these conclusions for the contemporary international context and draws implications for democratization today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we assess three explicit strategies (based on three logics of political integration) as possible solutions to the European Union's legitimacy problems. The first strategy amounts to a scaling down of the ambitions of the polity-makers in the European Union (EU). The second strategy emphasizes the need to deepen the collective self-understanding of Europeans. These two modes of legitimation figure strongly in the debate on aspects of the EU, but both have become problematic. The third strategy concentrates on the need to readjust and heighten the ambitions of the polity-makers so as to make the EU into a federal multicultural union founded on basic rights and democratic decision-making procedures. Taking stock of the ongoing constitution-making process, the authors ask how robust such an alternative is and how salient it is, as opposed to the other two strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigates the role of public support on the effective functioning of a democratic regime in Europe. Factors prompting scholars to mismeasure support by relying on idealist measures; Satisfaction of citizens on democratic governance; Validity of different measures of democracy.