Abstract
We deepen our understanding of democratic deconsolidation by understanding the legal-administrative responses to a security crisis. We expand prior “democratic breakdown” studies through a legal-administrative review of three countries which have experienced a security crisis: Peru, South Africa, and the United States. Using Freedom House and Polity IV scores, we discuss the initial crisis and the state’s legal-administrative responses. Different state responses offer a unique micro-political and administrative perspective on when, where, and why deconsolidation may or may not occur.
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Notes
The Freedom House and Polity IV indicators are imperfect (Gastil 1990; Giannone 2010). We acknowledge reviewer concerns that Freedom House “favors” or are “uncritical of” various “installed or subservient regimes”. We agree that it is one task to measure electoral democracy and quite another to measure democratic quality. In the latter effort, validity and reliability concerns are as important as factor inclusion and factor weights. In countries considered electorally democratic, liberal democratic performance varies widely (Foweraker & Krznaric, 2000). Such performance differences drive our research. We suggest index inabilities to reliably reflect legal-administrative shifts lessens our ability to empirically predict democratic deconsolidation and to theorize about which declines in liberal democratic performance are more or less likely to lead away from not only a high-performing democracy but perhaps also one which has been electorally democratic.
America is an electoral democracy. We use the US case in our paper to ask when and where liberal democratic performance can ebb and flow. Nonetheless the US has historically struggled with the full implementation of liberal democratic values for all. The question becomes when do individualized failures to provide full liberal democracy to all citizens become sufficiently significant to threaten overall democratic quality or even electoral democracy? We acknowledge a resurgence in critiques focused on liberal democratic values and rising inequality (Thompson and Smeeding 2013), concerns about corporate influence in our electoral process (Citizens United v. Federal Electoral Commission), and even claims, by some, that America is evolving into a “plutocracy” (Drum 2011; Freeland 2011).
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Moloney, K., Krislov, S. Legal-Administrative Responses and Democratic Deconsolidation. Public Organiz Rev 16, 17–37 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11115-014-0291-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11115-014-0291-x