Facing up to the democratic recession

Journal of Democracy

Volumn 26, Issue 1, 2015, Pages 141-155

  Diamond, Larry ^a  

^a STANFORD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84920934480     PISSN: 10455736     EISSN: 10863214     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jod.2015.0009     Document Type: Article

References (19)

1. Larry Diamond, The Spirit of Democracy: The Struggle to Build Free Societies Throughout the World (New York: Times Books, 2008), 20–26.
2. Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); see also their essay in this issue.
3. I count as liberal democracies all those regimes that receive a score of 1 or 2 (out of 7) on both political rights and civil liberties.
4. Thomas Carothers, “The End of the Transition Paradigm,” Journal of Democracy 13 (January 2002): 5–21.
5. Freedom House classifies all the world’s regimes as democracies or not from 1989 to the present based on whether a) they score at least 7 out of 12 on the “electoral process” dimension of political rights; b) they score at least 20 out of 40 overall on the raw point scale for political rights; c) their most recent parliamentary and presidential elections were reasonably free and fair; d) there are no significant hidden sources of power overriding the elected authorities; and e) there are no recent legal changes abridging future electoral freedom. In practice, this has led to a somewhat expansive list of democracies—rather too generous in my view, but at least a plausible “upper limit” of the number of democracies every year. Levitsky and Way suggest in this issue that a better standard for democracy would be the Freedom House classification of Free, which requires a minimum average score of 2.5 on the combined scales of political rights and civil liberties. But I think this standard excludes many genuine but illiberal democracies. Note
6. My count of electoral democracies for 1998–2002 was lower than that of Freedom House by 8 to 9 countries, and in 1999, by 11 countries. For example, I dropped from this category Georgia in 1992–2002, Ukraine in 1994–2004, Mozambique in 1994–2008, Nigeria in 1999–2003, Russia in 2001–2004, and Venezuela in 2004–2008. Note
7. Amy R. Poteete, “Democracy Derailed? Botswana’s Fading Halo,” AfricaPlus, 20 October 2014, http://africaplus.wordpress.com/2014/10/20/democracy-derailed-botswa-nas-fading-halo/.
8. Levitsky and Way, Competitive Authoritarianism, 20.
9. Kenneth Good, “The Illusion of Democracy in Botswana,” in Larry Diamond and Marc F. Plattner, eds., Democratization in Africa: Progress and Retreat, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 281.
10. The comparisons here and in Figure 2 are with the reconfigured political-rights and civil-liberties scales, after the subscales for transparency and rule of law have been removed (see endnote 11 below). Note
11. I created the scale of transparency and rule of law by drawing subscales C2 (control of corruption) and C3 (accountability and transparency) from the political-rights scale and the four subscales of F (rule of law) from the civil-liberties scale. For the specific items in these subscales, see the Freedom in the World methodology, www.freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world-2014/methodology#.VGww5vR4qcI. Note
12. Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014). See also his essay in this issue of the Journal of Democracy.
13. Miriam Lanskoy and Elspeth Suthers, “Putin versus Civil Society: Outlawing the Opposition,” Journal of Democracy 24 (July 2013): 74–87.
14. Andrew Nathan’s essay “China’s Challenge” on pp. 156–70 of this issue.
15. Christopher Walker and Robert W. Orttung, “Breaking the News: The Role of State-Run Media,” Journal of Democracy 25 (January 2014): 71–85.
16. Carl Gershman and Michael Allen, “The Assault on Democracy Assistance,” Journal of Democracy 17 (April 2006): 36–51;
17. William J. Dobson, The Dictator’s Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy (New York: Doubleday, 2012).
18. Darin Christensen and Jeremy M. Weinstein, “Defunding Dissent: Restrictions on Aid to NGOs,” Journal of Democracy 24 (April 2013): 77–91.
19. Larry Diamond and Marc F. Plattner, Liberation Technology: Social Media and the Struggle for Democracy (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2012) and the ongoing trailblazing work of the Citizen Lab, https://citizenlab.org/.