Perspectives on Democratic Practice

Can groups effectively link citizens to political institutions and policy processes? Are groups an antidote to emerging democratic deficits? This book will prompt senior students, researchers and seasoned scholars to think critically about the claim that groups can contribute to repairing democratic deficits.

This book explores the contribution of different Christian traditions to the waves of democratization that have swept various parts of the world in recent decades. Written in an accessible style, it will appeal to students of politics, sociology and religion, and prove useful on a range of advanced undergraduate and postgraduate courses.

This book examines the importance of international factors in determining the initiation, development and outcome of transitions to democracy. More specifically, the book analyses the failed Algerian transition in light of its international environment explaining the failure through a complex relationship between domestic and external actors.

Provides a critical investigation of the ‘global justice movement’. Drawing upon three case studies – a peasant farmers’ network, a trade union network, and the social forum process – the authors argue that the role of key geographical concepts of space, place and scale are crucial to an understanding of the operational dynamics of these networks.

Using Romania as a case study, this book develops a fresh perspective on the transition from communism to capitalism by arguing that transition and democratisation studies should turn their attention towards processes of illusion formation and disillusionment as key to understanding the shift from one ideological framework to another.

This book examines whether it is possible to support the development of generalised trust through public action and education. It analyses political efforts in Palermo to break the Mafia's territorial and mental control and to turn a tradition of non-co-operation and distrust into trust and co-operation.

Published in association with the United Nations, this book builds on the existing body of literature on gender and democratization by looking at the relevance of national machineries for the advancement of women.

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. Democratization is a major political phenomenon of the age and has been the focus of a burgeoning political science literature. This book considers democratization across a range of disciplines, from anthropology and economics, to sociology, law and area studies. The construction of democratization as a unit of study reflects the intellectual standpoint of the inquirer. The book highlights the use of normative argument to legitimize the exercise of power. From the 1950s to the 1980s, economic success enabled the authoritarian governments of South Korea and Taiwan to achieve a large measure of popular support despite the absence of democracy. The book outlines what a feminist framework might be and analyses feminist engagements with the theory and practice of democratization. It also shows how historians have contributed to the understanding of the processes of democratization. International Political Economy (IPE) has always had the potential to cut across the levels-of-analysis distinction. A legal perspective on democratization is presented by focusing on a tightly linked set of issues straddling the border between political and judicial power as they have arisen. Classic and contemporary sociological approaches to understanding democracy and democratization are highlighted, with particular attention being accorded to the post-1989 period. The book displays particularities within a common concern for institutional structures and their performance, ranging over the representation of women, electoral systems and constitutions (in Africa) and presidentialism (in Latin America). Both Europe and North America present in their different ways a kind of bridge between domestic and international dimensions of democratization.

This new edition examines some of the philosophical and theoretical issues underlying the ‘democratic project’ which increasingly dominates the fields of comparative development and international relations. The first concern presented here is normative and epistemological: as democracy becomes more widely accepted as the political currency of legitimacy, the more broadly it is defined. But as agreement decreases regarding the definition of democracy, the less we are able to evaluate how it is working, or indeed whether it is working at all.

The second issue is causal: what are the claims being made regarding how best to secure a democratic system in developing states? To what extent do our beliefs and expectations of how political relations ought to be governed distort our understanding of how democratic societies do in fact emerge; and, conversely, to what extent does our understanding of how democracy manifests itself temper our conception of what it ought to be?

The volume will be of interest to those in international development studies, as well as political theorists with an interest in applied ethics.