Minding the gap between Democracy and Governance

Journal of Democracy

Volumn 23, Issue 2, 2012, Pages 62-73

  Emmerson, Donald K ^a  

^a STANFORD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84859977219     PISSN: 10455736     EISSN: 10863214     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jod.2012.0030     Document Type: Article

References (22)

1. Danielle N. Lussier and M. Steven Fish, "Indonesia: The Benefits of Civic Engagement," Journal of Democracy 23 (January 2012): 71.
2. Freedom House (FH) does not claim to be scaling "liberal democracy." Yet, taken together and applied to any given country, the 27 questions that they ask-12 about "political rights" and 15 on "civil liberties"-do measure the extent to which that country is both democratic (including the accountability of its government vertically in elections and horizontally in a separation of powers) and liberal (including freedoms of speech and association). FH "does not rate governments or government performance per se"
3. see FH, "Methodology," www.freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world-2012/methodology. In contrast, the measure of "government effectiveness" devised by the World Bank (WB) "captures perceptions of the quality of public services, the quality of the civil service and the degree of its independence from political pressures, the quality of policy formulation and implementation, and the credibility of the government's commitment to such policies"
4. see http://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi/pdf/ge.pdf. The closest that these two measures come to overlapping is in FH's inclusion of an independent judiciary among the elements of liberal democracy and the WB's inclusion of an independent civil service among the elements of effective governance.
5. Freedom House, "Table of Independent Countries [2010]," available at www.freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/inline_images/TableofIndependentCountries-FIW2011.pdf.
6. A systematically causal analysis over time would need to assess the contrary logic as well: that faced with such a large negative gap, the country's people would remain satisfied with their high-quality democracy as a moral end in itself and not expect it to improve bad governance. The population might also not know how abysmally its government was performing relative to good governance in neighboring states, despite the likely erosion of such ignorance by the globalization of information and communication.
7. UN Development Programme, "Human Development Index (HDI)-2011 Rankings," http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics/
8. "High Inflation Threatens East Timor: IMF," Agence France-Presse, 2 February 2012
9. Petroleum Fund of Timor-Leste, Quarterly Report no. 26, 31 December 2011, 1, available at www.bancocentral.tl/Download/Publications/Quarterly_report26_en.pdf
10. Transparency International, "Corruption Perceptions Index 2011," http://cpi.transparency.org/cpi2011/results/
11. "Corruption Perceptions Index 2010," www.transparency.org/policy_research/surveys_indices/cpi/2010/results.
12. Hanan Nugroho, "Energy and Economic Growth," Jakarta Post, 15 July 2010, www.thejakartapost.com/news/2010/07/15/energy-and-economic-growth.html.
13. Justin Doebele, "Indonesia's 40 Richest," 24 December 2007, www.forbes.com/global/2007/1224/049.html
14. "Indonesia's 40 Richest: #30 Aburizal Bakrie," Forbes.com, www.forbes.com/lists/2011/80/indonesia-billionaires-11_Aburizal-Bakrie_0J8F.html;
15. "I'm Ready for 2014: Bakrie," Jakarta Globe, 19 February 2012, www.thejakartaglobe.com/politics/im-ready-for-2014-bakrie/499072.
16. An ongoing instance of such baggage is the world's biggest mud volcano, which erupted in East Java in 2006. Apparently triggered by negligent drilling for gas by a Bakrie family-owned company, this catastrophe has already rendered unusable a 3-square-mile area, killed 13 people, and displaced 13,000. Homes, schools, and croplands have been buried to depths as great as 60 feet. Despite the judgment of experts that Bakrie's company was probably responsible for the disaster, he blames an earthquake that occurred 174 miles away. The flow of muck is expected to continue and remain unmanageable until 2037.
17. "Mud Volcano Eruptions Likely to Continue for a Quarter of a Century," News and Events, Durham University, 28 February 2011, www.dur.ac.uk/news/newsitem/?itemno=11636.
18. Arguably related to the weight of such baggage was Bakrie's philanthropic decision to endow a chair in Southeast Asian studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C.
19. Keyko Ranti Ramadhani, "Fed Up with Politicians, More Indonesians Won't Vote: CSIS," Jakarta Globe, 13 February 2012, www.thejakartaglobe.com/news/fed-up-withpoliticians-more-indonesians-wont-vote-csis/497834. Indonesians express rising confidence in their own personal economic circumstances, however
20. see Debnath Guharoy and Roy Morgan, "Analysis: 240 Million Reasons for a Confident Future," Jakarta Post, 21 February 2012, www.thejakartapost.com/news/2012/02/21/analysis-240-million-reasonsa-confident-future.html.
21. Interviewed by the author on 2 February 2012.
22. "Is Suu Kyi Heading for a Cabinet Position?" Irrawaddy, 29 February 2012, www.irrawaddy.org/article.php?art_id=23125.