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Democracy in the Developing World: Challenges of Survival and Significance

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Abstract

The study of political development over the past half century has been heavily influenced by the ebb and flow of democracy in the global South. The global experience has demonstrated that the geographic, economic, and cultural range of democratic regimes is far more expansive than often assumed half a century ago, forcing major theoretical reassessments of democracy’s political origins and social correlates. At the same time, the challenges of constructing effective representative and participatory institutions to stabilize democracy and make it more “consequential” have become increasingly apparent. The tensions between democracy’s rapid spread and its oftentimes shallow reach have fostered a wide range of experiments with new representative and participatory channels, creating a fluid democratic landscape in much of the developing world.

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Notes

  1. Implicit in Schmitter’s critique is a conceptualization of democracy as a political regime defined in procedural terms rather than substantive outcomes. Such a conceptual distinction is the norm in empirical studies of democracy, in part because it makes it possible to analyze—as Schmitter does—whether specified regime rules, institutions, and procedures actually do have substantive effects in influencing desired outcomes. I adopt this convention and, following Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens (1992: 43), define democracy as a regime characterized by “regular, free and fair elections of representatives with universal and equal suffrage,” “responsibility of the state apparatus to the elected parliament,” and “the freedoms of expression and association as well as the protection of individual rights against arbitrary state action.”

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Roberts, K.M. Democracy in the Developing World: Challenges of Survival and Significance. St Comp Int Dev 51, 32–49 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12116-016-9216-8

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