Abstract
In the debate on a legitimacy crisis of established democracies, globalization is a buzzword that appears frequently. The notion that globalization poses an imminent and serious threat to democracy is very widespread—not only among political scientists but also in a wider public. Yet, the evidence brought forward in this regard is often merely impressionistic and only rarely empirically founded. Furthermore, social sciences seem to disagree on the question whether how and through which mechanisms globalization is affecting the quality of national democracies: Whereas several authors have argued that globalization is accountable for a hollowing out of democracy, others claim that internationalization has mainly positive effects on democratic quality. In this chapter, I use the Democracy Barometer, an index of democratic quality, as a starting point for a theoretical and empirical assessment of the question whether globalization is a threat or rather a benefit for democracy. Drawing on three democratic principles—freedom, equality and control—I analyze the impact of globalization processes on the quality of national democracies. Globalization is disentangled into three different currents—economic, political and social denationalization—and measured by the KOF index for globalization. The empirical analysis covers 30 democratic countries in the period from 1990 to 2012. The results of multilevel regression models suggest that different forms of globalization also diverge in their impact on democracy and that the three democratic principles, freedom, equality, and control, are not equally strongly affected.
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Notes
- 1.
KOF stands for the Swiss Economic Institute (Konjunkturforschungsstelle) of the ETH Zürich.
- 2.
This concept is also the basis for the Democracy Barometer (DB).
- 3.
Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Costa Rica, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
- 4.
For a list of all variables used as well as the data sources, see Table 10.5 in the Appendix.
- 5.
GDP per capita based on purchasing power parity (PPP). PPP GDP is gross domestic product converted into international dollars using purchasing power parity rates. The data can be found in the World Development Indicators (WDI).
- 6.
Inflation as measured by the annual growth rate of the GDP implicit deflator shows the rate of price change in the economy as a whole (Source: WDI).
- 7.
I use the mean of the logged population size between 1990 and 2010 (Source: WDI). Age of democracy is based on a corresponding variable in the Polity IV database. I also use the mean for the period 1990–2010.
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Heyne, L. (2018). Globalization and Democracy: Does Denationalization Affect the Quality of Democracy?. In: Merkel, W., Kneip, S. (eds) Democracy and Crisis. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72559-8_10
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