The Study of Democratization in the Era of Globalization
Paper presented at the Fourth Annual Kent State University Symposium on Democracy
For the past five decades, political scientists have been interested mostly in issues of political development, such as why regime transformation from authoritarian to democratic polity occurs in some countries but not in others; what factors cause regime change; when does regime transformation take place; and how does the process of such political change advance.1 In the Western hemisphere, modernization theory has long been one of the most prominent schools of thought in the study of political development. Modernization theory, associated with Seymour Martin Lipset and expanded by subsequent scholars, has started a discussion about the impact of socioeconomic development on politics. By comparing the mean values and extents of socioeconomic development across groups of countries, modernization scholars are fascinated by a positive linear relationship between levels of socioeconomic development and democratic practice.2 The idea that economic prosperity brings about political democracy is shared by many Western scholars who are optimistic about the prevalence of Western democratic thoughts and practices in the process of globalization. To them, the safe way to achieve successful political development for those less democratic countries is to follow the footprints of the advanced democracies in the world—the Western, industrialized, capitalist world. Indeed, many Western political leaders believe that whether or not a state can be labeled as “civilized” should be judged according to the universal standards of the West’s liberal democratic system and capitalist market economy.
To many Westerners, the end of the Cold War is often viewed not just as simply the defeat of the communist regime, but also as the ultimate triumph of the superiority of the West’s political, capitalist ideology. Such appraisal of Western values system and practices as the universal standard is presented by Francis Fukuyama’s most optimistic view of the Western economic and political liberalism that marks the end of history.3 As Fukuyama has stated with great enthusiasm, “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”4
Although I would like to share the optimistic view of those who believe in the superiority of the Western values system and political practices, my past study of political development does not allow me to do so for two reasons. First, I believe that political development is an open-ended process and the political achievement of having a liberal representative democratic system of governance in many human communities may well be a middle point in the human history of development. There will always be room for further political development that is far beyond people’s imagination. Second, we need to consider that each country has its own distinctive social and political institutional arrangements under the influence of national legacy and domestic and external contexts that in turn affect political actors’ interactions within the political system. As Lucian W. Pye has long argued, in different times and places people have thought of the relations either between the state and the society or between the leaders and the people in very different ways, “and it is precisely these differences that are the governing factors in determining the diverse path of political development.”5 Therefore, it may be wrong to assume that the processes of political development in various states will follow the same and the only route toward democracy—the Western way. It may also be too early to claim the end of history even when every human community in the world has reached a procedural democracy in which the liberal representative democratic system of governance is adopted.
In general, this essay suggests that there may be more than one form of democracy. Currently, the highest human achievement in political development, namely, the liberal representative procedural democracy, is only the starting point of the next round of mankind’s search for new meaning of democracy. Moreover, this essay argues that due to their differences in national legacies, contexts, and institutional settings, countries will choose different paths in reaching a liberal representative procedural democracy from which they may well take diverse paths toward the search for a more advanced meaning and form of democratic system of governance.
In the subsequent sections, I will first address several issues that are central to the study of political development in a conceptually “globalized” world, yet have been neglected, which reveal a series of shortcomings. As I suggest, the study of democratization has been crippled by its tendency of: (1) treating liberal, representative democracy as the end point of political development; (2) becoming historically myopic and insensitive to cultural differences; (3) conducting only partial examination of the process of democratization across countries; and (4) indulging in one-dimensional analysis. Consequently, this essay suggests that today’s scholars and students of political science need to apply a multidimensional framework toward the study of political development in various countries, a more comprehensive approach that pays attention to the variation in national legacies, contexts, and institutional settings across countries.
Some Shortcomings in the Study of Democratization
Regarding the clarity of the concept of democracy, the study of regime transformation has faced the difficulty of defining what democracy is and what it ought to be. To many scholars, the highest human achievement in political development is equated with the establishment of a liberal representative system of governance through open competitive elections. Nonetheless, such a concept has been challenged constantly by the more progressive ideas of participatory democracy and democratic autonomy. In addition, while scholars conduct their research they inevitably fall into the trap of Western-centered ethnocentrism and omit the impact of cultural differences and contexts faced by those non-Western human communities in the course of political development. Finally, previous research on democratization has offered only partial explanation of the phenomenon of regime transformation, solely examining either transition or consolidation stages or simply building a single-dimensional analytical framework and discarding other explanatory factors as insignificant. In this section, I will provide a brief review of these conceptual shortcomings.
Political Democracy as the End of Political Development
An open, competitive, liberal, and representative democratic system is neither the end point nor automatically the ultimate goal of political development.6 In fact, political development is an open-ended process in which achieving a procedural or liberal representative democratic system of government is just the beginning for further political development.
Democracy is a form of government in which people are sovereign and supposed to have the final say in politics, but there has been intensive debate for centuries about what democracy is and what it ought to be. Today, political scientists and politicians have long been accustomed to the narrow, yet pragmatic, definition of Western democracy in accordance with the notion of “procedural democracy” or “electoral democracy,” which states that democracy is simply a method or mechanism for choosing political leadership. Legislative bodies and executive heads at each level of government are subject to full electoral competitions in which citizens have unrestricted and equal rights in political participation. There are no arbitrary laws on civil organizations that ban the formation of political parties. There exists no censorship that restricts people’s freedom of speech and publication.7
Yet, a broader and more comprehensive notion of democracy, suggested by David Held, argues that democracy must be considered not only in political affairs but also in social and economic life. Real democracy should incorporate the concept of democratic autonomy, for without a high degree of accountability and responsibility by both the state and a civil society, there will be no equal opportunity for participation and for discovering citizens’ preferences in a polity. For those proponents of equal opportunity for political participation, the inherent nature of a capitalist system regarding resources, wealth, and status has created social and economic inequality among citizens, and the social, economic, and political liberties of those have-nots are systematically deprived and disrupted because they have less resources and time to invest in voicing their preference.8
As an idealist, I believe that once a polity achieves the state of procedural or liberal representative democracy, it should engage in reordering civil society and political practices to achieve the real principle of popular sovereignty. Further political development that goes beyond the procedural, representative, democratic system of government should aim at searching for social and economic equality with the intervention of the political hand and social justice to ensure adequate resources for citizens’ political participation. Therefore, it is too early to assume that the universalization of Western liberal representative democratic system of governance is the final form of human government and to predict that “the end of history” will soon arrive. A real democratic system of government has to deal with equity not only in political rights but also in social and economic issues.
Historical Myopia and Insensitivity to Cultural Differences
Even in the course of political development toward a procedural democracy, the national legacy and value system shared by the members of a human community have played an important role in determining its fate, directly or indirectly. As we observe history, democracy, in both theory and practice, is considered to be an experience and a product growing out of the European traditions, created in a specific part of the world and out of specific needs or human interactions over a long period of time. In contrast, political developments taking place in the rest of the world have occurred and are continuing to occur over a relatively short period of time that is more compressed and full of uncertainty.9 To those proponents of the universal merits of Western values, this has posed a puzzle about why political developments in other regions have been delayed or failed to establish a completely open, competitive political system. To others, it also asks a fundamental question about whether using a system drawn by and from Western experiences and values as lens or standards to view and evaluate political development in other regions is appropriate.10
Furthermore, the existing
literature on political development or regime transformation has largely
centered on regions such as Latin America and
Treating the cultural variable as the absolute determinant is out of date in present political science; yet, it is important to understand that cultures have played a crucial role in the context of political developments in various countries. Although cultural variables cannot be quantified, many political sociologists have long argued that cultural differences are decisive in the course of political development.11 As Helgesen and Li suggest, “every political system is a unique socially constructed creation within the confines of a cultural context, which to a greater or lesser degree shape the pattern of human interaction in the system.”12
In every polity people’s beliefs and sentiments about politics affect the process of development, and political elites cannot choose the course of development as freely as they wish. To mobilize popular support or legitimize their action, political elites must choose the course of political development in accordance with the basic values and norms recognized and practiced among people whom they rule as sound aspects of the nation’s tradition.13 In addition, not only is every political system a unique socially constructed creature, but such national traditions or cultural systems are also a human creation. Every polity establishes its own interpretation of the past to serve the present needs. And such interpretations are more than a recording of facts but include a collective body of intentionally selected historical events and social norms and values to justify the behavior of those in power.14 Political scientists should take into account such cultural and historical contextual differences affecting each country’s political development. Every country has its own tradition, which is the product of centuries, though with a series of modifications, that will not soon disappear or converge into a universally unified belief system. Therefore, we can expect that the courses and outcomes of political development will vary across countries.15
In short, we need to realize that historical, socioeconomic, and political contexts under which the advanced Western democracies developed their political systems are far different from other countries in the world. There may be more than one road that a state can take toward a democratic system of governance, as many scholars observe various modes of regime transformation (top-down reform or bottom-up rupture) taking place in every part of the world, which lead to different political outcomes.16 And there may be more than one form of democratic system of governance (presidential, parliamentary, or semi-presidential), forms that are more reflective of national traditions and conditions and people’s expectations.
Partial Examinations of the Process of Regime Transformation
For the past half century the study of regime change has employed a variety of theories or models to examine the process of political development across countries; however, the results are disappointing because most research projects focus on examining either the stages of democratic transition or the conditions conducive to democratic consolidation. As a result, less effort has been poured into a complete examination of the whole process of political development toward an open, competitive democratic system of governance.17
Regime transformation, from no democracy to democratic rule, is a complex process involving several, but often overlapping, phases. Dankwart A. Rustow, one of the leading scholars of the study on regime transformation, suggests a simple model to describe some of the main elements in various stages in the process of democratization. The model begins with an emphasis on a crucial background condition—national unity, which must be in place before the transition process starts.18
According to Rustow’s dynamic model of democratic transition, the first phase in the democratic transition is the preparatory stage in which a prolonged and inconclusive political struggle is the necessary element that generates various forms of challenges to the nondemocratic rulers and the regime as well. The second phase is the decision stage in which the ruling elites decide to institutionalize some critical democratic practices, procedures, and rules. The final phase of the process is the habituation stage, in which both political actors and the population habituate to the established democratic rules and procedures.19 Later, Juan J. Linz defines the three phases of regime transformation toward democratic polity as liberalization, transition, and consolidation, which become the familiar terms in the study of regime transformation.20
The study of regime transformation at the present time is replete with theories of either democratic transition or democratic consolidation. Such partial examinations of political developments in various countries, concentrating on either the stages of democratic transition or the process of democratic consolidation, may well result from the notion, or the scholarly presumption, that the factors responsible for the end of a nondemocratic regime may differ significantly from those that lead to the consolidation of a democratic one.21 Or, it may simply be because previous studies of political development have aimed at countries that have not yet completed the process of regime transformation. Now, in the beginning of the twenty-first century, when many countries in what Huntington calls the third wave of democratization have consolidated their democratic political systems, it is not only possible but also necessary to examine regime transformation, starting from authoritarian rule, via the process of democratic transition (liberalization and democratization), to full-fledged, consolidated representative democracy. Moreover, in so doing, scholars should offer explanations about why some countries have transformed their political system successfully while others have not.
In general, this essay advocates a thorough examination of the whole process of regime transformation, from the formation of the authoritarian regime, via the softening of such regime and the establishment of democratic political principles, rules, and procedures, to the consolidation of a democratic regime. As I believe, by a closer examination of those successful cases through various stages of political development, we may find out whether there are factors responsible for the end of authoritarian regimes, the successful transition process, and the consolidation of a democratic political system.
A Fixation with One-Dimension Analytical Frameworks
Previous research framework on regime transformation has concentrated overwhelmingly on either macro- or microlevel analyses.22 The macrolevel approach mainly emphasizes that socioeconomic structural factors have played a critical role in facilitating or hindering regime transformation, while the microlevel approach stresses the importance of strategic interactions among political actors that determine the modes and outcomes of regime transformation. Unfortunately, all the analytical frameworks built in the past oversimplify what happens in the real world.
Since the late 1950s, the study of political development was first led by modernization and social mobilization literature that addressed regime transformation taking place in the developing countries and has been related to their levels of socioeconomic development, political participation, and institutional development.23 However, many scholars have argued that although such approaches have proven that levels of socioeconomic development have had a highly significant correlation to the process of political development, these approaches fail to establish a causal relationship between socioeconomic development and political democratization.24 The literature also fails to explain why some least developing countries, such as India, have established a competitive, representative democratic system, while some economically better-off countries have remained under authoritarian rule, such as South Korea and Taiwan in the 1980s.25
From another theoretical angle,
dependency theory argues that a state’s position in the global economic system
and its domestic socioeconomic structures are the determinants for the
direction of a state’s political development. In the 1970s, many scholars took
Marxist traditions into account and sought to explain regime changes in
Later, the political economy theory of regime transformation has linked regime changes with policy performance, especially that of economic policies and government performance. Many scholars conclude that there exists a strong correlation between the economic performance of different types of regimes and their persistence.28 For them, politics are important only in their ability to cope with economic crisis. If the state is unable to deal with economic crisis, political crisis ensues and thus certain kinds of regime change will occur toward either an authoritarian or a democratic regime. However, this approach suffered severely by its oversimplified assumption that is characterized as economic determinism. As Nancy Bermeo and others have indicated, sequences of economic and political developments that occurred in various countries are not uniform. Moreover, economic crisis did not always lead to regime transformation across countries.29 These variations in case studies have implied that there may be other unexplained variables that have an impact on regime transformation rather than economic performance.30
The intellectual response to the failure of macrolevel, socioeconomic structural approaches in explaining regime transformation since the late 1970s has been a search for an alternative explanation that is mainly built on a microlevel, process-driven analytical framework—the strategic-choice model. Although many strategic-choice theorists admit that economic and political constraints should not be overlooked, they do not link political changes with shifts in international economy, domestic socioeconomic structures, and class struggles. Rather, these scholars assume that regime transformations are dependent on the choice of particular political elites and special historical conjunctures.31 As Collier and Norden indicate, the role played by political actors and the state of uncertainty in the process of regime transformation is essential where no absolute forces, neither economic factors nor societal and political institutions, can fully constrain political actors’ goal-directed choice and the final outcome is derived from the interaction among different political actors’ strategic choice.32
However, the shift from macrolevel approaches to the microlevel, political actors’ strategic-choice model has not resolved the challenges posed by a variety of outcomes in regime transformations taking place in the world. Several questions need to be answered, such as, What factors will be relevant to the shaping of political actors’ preferences? Will the preferences of political elites change under specific circumstances? Or, why do the ruling elites choose to make compromises and what is their motivation? In addition, the strategic-choice theorists have shared an interesting, yet contradictory, logic. As Karen L. Remmer indicates, the model assumes that “the rise of democracy corresponds to accident and human choice, but its demise (alternately defined as a lack of democratic consolidation or as the emergence of authoritarianism) reflects institutional and structural forces.”33 At its worst, the strategic-choice model merely offers a picture as if political elites “seem to float above society, manipulating events, resisting change, entering into pacts, or otherwise shaping outcomes, apparently unconnected to their followers and unrestricted in their political options by larger social forces.”34
In summary, the study of political development has been crippled by a variety of one-dimension analytical frameworks, either emphasizing the importance of socioeconomic factors or assuming that political elites’ strategic interaction is the most critical element in examining the processes and explaining the outcomes of regime transformation.35 I believe today the study of political development really needs a multidimensional research approach that incorporates those factors proven to be relevant to regime transformation by the past research.
Institutions and Contexts Matter
To amend the aforementioned shortcomings, this essay proposes a new ground bringing institutions and contextual factors “back-in” to the study of political development toward a procedural democracy. Such an approach will examine changes in the relationships between the state and the civil society under the influence of various domestic and external factors, which establish a research time frame that goes far back to the predemocratization and extends to the consolidation of a liberal representative democratic system of governance.
In this multidimensional approach, a state’s domestic socioeconomic conditions, and the political attitude of and the interaction among the political actors are treated as short-term factors, since they may alter principally in a short period of time.36 In addition, national legacy, the old regime, formal institutional setting (for example, political and societal institutions, socioeconomic structures) as well as informal principles, norms, rules, and procedures institutionalized in the political community and the society are seen as long-term factors because the effect they bring upon the real world can only be altered through a long period of time. Finally, equal attention needs to be paid to the international factors (for example, international political and economic variables) that may have affected a state’s domestic politics directly or indirectly. To be sure, social scientists will never be able to develop a model or a theory that covers all the factors and fully examines the phenomenon of democratization taking place in various countries; however, I believe that a multidimensional research approach will certainly be able to offer a more thorough examination of regime transformation than that of any single-dimensional analysis.
In the following section, I will provide a brief discussion of the significant role played by various institutional and contextual factors in the process of political development. Although I recognize that political actors and their interactions are equally important in establishing authoritarian regime and the subsequent stages of democratic transformation, due to page limitations, I will discuss such factors elsewhere.
Political and Societal Institutions
Conventionally speaking, regime change fundamentally involves changes in institutional arrangements and the relationships between the state and the society. Institutions matter because they are created, under specific contexts and circumstances, to prescribe the relations between the state and the society as well as between the society and the people. Institutions are human creations in response to certain external conditions or internal needs. Institutions situate between individual persons and the physical world; they channel and sometimes mediate responses from both sides. Moreover, institutions are not static but dynamic. They are subject to change when the contexts, the physical world, or the people’s needs change.
Political Institutions
Among the institutionalist school, the historical institutionalist approach to the study of regime transformation may be extraordinarily useful in that it is attentive to the impact of political struggles on institutional outcomes and the way such institutional changes in turn shape further rounds of political struggles over issues and institutional settings and rules. 37 It suggests the important aspect of unintended and intended consequences of political interaction and the impact of such interaction on the determination of strategic choice and goal-concession of individual actors. Analytically, the historical institutional approach is attentive to structural factors, individual actors, and the interplay between them, though with a greater emphasis on the role of structures than on individual persons. In short, by incorporating macro- and micro-factors, the approach is powerful in explaining institutional change, especially that of regime transformation.
To be sure, the historical institutionalist approach has its own shortcomings, which in part come from its practitioners’ exclusive focus on formal institutions and organizations. In other words, it faces an either extensive-inclusion or selective-inclusion dilemma in defining institutions. Scholars acknowledge, “Historical institutionalists work with a definition of institutions that includes both formal organizations and informal rules and procedures that structure conduct,” but “just where to draw the line on what counts as an institution is a matter of some controversy in the literature.”38
Indeed, from the late 1980s, many scholars interested in the comparative study of political regimes became aware of the important role played by institutional factors or agents in mediating the relations between the state and the society throughout the process of regime transformation.39 However, most of these scholars have focused extensively on formal political institutions, such as electoral laws, constitutional rules, and party systems.40 They overlook the fact that societal institutions (both formal and informal) and informal political practices have also played an important role in a state’s political affairs. As the political culture school has argued for years, every political system is embedded in a particular pattern of orientation to political actions and such specific orientation gives meaning to the polity, discipline to institutions, and social relevance to individual acts.41
Societal Institutions
Scholars from other disciplines, sociologists in general and political sociologists in specific, have been attentive to the cultural variable and its “embeddedness” in the society. Powell and DiMaggio argue that institutions are not merely rules, procedures, organizational structures, and governance structures but also conventions and customs. Individual actors, for these political sociologists, are not free to choose institutions, rules, procedures, and norms; they associate certain actions with certain situations by “rules of appropriateness.”42 Thus, although Thelen and Steinmo prefer a narrower definition of institutions, it is undeniable that the widely accepted social institutions such as social norms, rules, and conventions have played an important role in shaping human conduct and belief, which, in turn, has an impact on the interaction among political actors, formal institutional designs, and to the broadest sense the relationships between state and society. Therefore, we need to take an extensive look at what constitute societal institutions.
Traditions, customs, and other social norms and rules may be transmitted through the process of socialization; they can persist for a long period of time (used to be several generations); and they may be resistant to change. However, the persistence of traditions and other special norms depends on the effect of different degrees of the way they are embedded into a society.43 Cultural variables are constructed realities; they are not static but subject to dynamic change. Throughout written history, every polity or society has its own interpretation of the past to serve the present needs. A particular cultural or social context may be a constructed tradition or a set of social norms established to serve the political needs of the elite layer of a society.
Other societal institutions or groups (for example, students, intellectuals, farmers associations, unions) have also played an important role in the process of political development. Although such institutions and their interaction with the state may be restricted by the authoritarian regime, we cannot assume that even in the old regime they have no impact on politics. Moreover, such societal institutions and their leading figures have played a greater-than-ever role during the process of democratization, either directly confronting or negotiating with the ruling elites.
In summary, the historical institutionalist approach is useful in explaining political change because it incorporates both structural and individual variables in its analytical framework. However, it is also necessary to treat cultural variables and organized social groups of the many societal institutions in explaining political change. As Koelble suggests, “in order to explain general phenomena, structure, culture, and action all have a place.”44
Contextual Factors
Besides the
tendency of overlooking the formal and informal institutions, previous research
has, by and large, overlooked or totally dismissed the effect of the ancien régime (old regime) on the process of
regime transformation and the effect of the early democratic transitional
processes (for example, the stages of political liberalization and democratic
transition and modes of transition) on the phase of democratic consolidation.
In his oft-cited article, Rustow has long argued that
any study on political development “must cover, for any given country,
a time
period from just before until just after the advent of democracy.”45
That is, for many years, political scientists have concentrated on “short-term
contexts,” which include the interactions among the political elites and
the
socioeconomic structural conditions, but they largely overlooked the effect
brought about on regime transformation by the long-term contexts. Only recently
have scholars such as
Today, the study of regime transformation needs to consider “the defining features of the non-democratic regime from which a transition departs and, going even further back, the practices during the period before the origins of the authoritarian regime.”47 However, the old regime and its historical background constitute only parts of the long-term context to which we should be attentive. Broadly defined political and societal institutional settings, national legacy, and other indigenous contextual or extrainstitutional factors (for example, external threats, domestic cleavages) should be given equal attention in the study of political development.
External contextual factors, such as a state’s relations with international actors and changes in world politics and international economy, should also be taken into account. In the past, the growing division of labor within academia has created artificial obstacles to the study of regime transformation, namely, the claimed incompatibility between the subfield of comparative politics and the subfield of international relations. It is crucial that scholars be attentive to the increasing relevance of external forces for domestic political development. For instance, a change in world politics and/or economy will provide constraints or opportunities for a country’s political and economic development. As Remmer indicates:
The global system has changed in ways that offer new incentives and opportunities for democratic outcomes by buttressing or even creating new sets of prodemocratic actors, undercutting national militaries and other traditional obstacles to compromise, raising the costs of elite subversion, and penalizing or threatening to penalize regime reversals. . . . With the international system operating as a third-party enforcer, bargains have also become a more viable basis for political democracy.48
Conclusion
In this essay, I have indicated several conceptual issues in the study of political development. Indeed, the process of globalization has intensified economic, social, political, and cultural interactions across states’ borders. As Robert Dahl has noted, “Never in recorded history have state leaders appealed so widely to democratic ideas to legitimate their rule.”49 Yet, the date of celebrating the end of political development in mankind’s history has not arrived and even may not arrive in the foreseeable future. As the past research on regime transformation has proven, countries around the world have taken different routes toward different types of democratic political systems.
This essay suggests incorporating societal and political institutions (formal and informal), contextual factors (domestic and external), and political actors and their interaction as independent variables to explain the variation in the process of regime transformation, the dependent variable. All these short-term and long-term factors and the interplay among them, from my perspective, are the explanatory variables that affect the processes of political development across countries, regardless of (1) whether democratization can take place, (2) what mode of transition the authoritarian or opposition leaders will choose, or (3) how a democratic system of government can be consolidated.
As observers and researchers of political development in mankind’s history, we are obliged to provide a more comprehensive insight of the regime transformation in the late twentieth century. We should be cautious about being unconsciously captured by the arrogance of single-dimensional presumption. We should be aware of cultural differences among various human communities, whether we called them states or nations of people. More important, we should not become an accomplice in fashioning political myth that equips our political leaders’ daily rhetoric in how good our political ideal and system are while bashing others as uncivilized—simply because they have not become one of “us.”
Notes
1. The term “political development” has several meanings that can be clustered into two categories: one related to governing capacity; the other related to democratic development. The former defines political development as an increase in government’s capability of promoting people’s well-being as well as the effectiveness of general performance of the government and the polity as a whole. For the latter, political development means the advance of liberty and popular sovereignty in a country. In this essay, I treat political development in accordance with the latter, the narrower meaning of regime transformation toward democratic polity. Thus, the term “regime transformation” or “regime change” is used instead of political development in some occasions.
2.
3. See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free, 1992).
4.
5. Lucian W. Pye, Asian Power and Politics: The Cultural Dimensions of Authority (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1985), viii. Pye indicates many changes taking place in some Asian countries have frequently challenged Western theories and ideas that claim to be universal. These countries are modernizing in “ways that are different from the Western experience.”
6. The early model of liberal democracy came to existence in the early nineteenth century, however, the democratic ideas could be traced back to ancient Greece, and developed further by the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, and John Stuart Mill, to name a few. Democratic liberalism stands for the creation of civil society without state intervention that replaces the medieval monarchies who claimed their rule under the divine power. It also claims that the power and authority possessed by the state are based on the will of the sovereign people. See David Held, Models of Democracy (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1987), 2, 28–33, 41, 69, 86, 94, 100–104, 248–52; C. B. Macpherson, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), 13, 35–39, 60–64; Georg Sorensen, Democracy and Democratization: Processes and Prospects in a Changing World, 2d ed. (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1998), 5–9.
7. For the notion of the elitist view of liberal, procedural, representative, democratic system, see Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1943; repr., London: Allen and Unwin, 1976), 260. Taking a more pluralist view of democracy, Dahl stresses the importance of a democratic system that is responsive to the preferences of its people and provides institutional guarantees of political equality among its citizens to formulate and to voice their preferences. Robert A. Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1971), 3.
8. See David Held, Models of Democracy, 271, 285. Also see the term “postliberal democracy” in Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Democracy and Capitalism: Poverty, Community, and the Contradictions of Modern Social Thought (New York: Basic, 1986), 177–81, 183–87, 203–13.
9. Samuel P. Huntington categorizes
the history of political development toward democratic system into three waves
of democratization. The first wave of democratization has taken place in
Western Europe and the
10. We need to note that modern
ideas of liberal democracy emerged in the nineteenth century and took shape in
the context of the development of modern society and an industrial, capitalist
society in the Western world. Yet, recent cases of political development toward
democracy differ from the classical democratic transitions taking place in the
Western hemisphere in many ways: the actors, the old (authoritarian) regime,
and the contexts. Gerardo L. Munck, “Democratic
Transitions in Comparative Perspective,” Comparative
Politics 26, no. 3 (Apr. 1994): 355. Most countries that came into
existence after the Second World War had to deal with the issue of state
building and economic development at the same time. Most of them were hindered
by relative, if not absolute, poverty and greater social and political
inequality. These latecomers came into a world in which democratic ideas and
practices were already becoming prominent; as a result, these countries were
expected to mimic the Western established examples, by their own people and
their Western counterparts, without the necessary economic resources and the
timing of the gradual, evolutionary process of development enjoyed by the
Western advanced democracies. See J. Hollifield and
C. Jillson, “The Democratic Transformation: Lessons
and Prospects in Pathways to Democracy,” in The
Political Economy of Democratic Transitions, ed. J. Hollifield
and C. Jillson (
11. Lucian W. Pye, introduction to Political Culture and Political Development, ed. Lucian W. Pye and Sidney Verba (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1965), 3–26, and Sidney Verba, “Comparative Political Culture,” ibid, 512–60.
12. Geir Helgesen and Li Xing, “Democracy or Minzhu: The Challenge of Western versus East Asian Notions of Good Government,” Asian Perspective 20, no. 1 (Spring–Summer 1996): 98.
13. Ibid., 98–100.
14. Dennis Hart, “Proclaiming Identity, Claiming the Past: National Identity and Modernity in North and South Korean Education,” Asian Perspective 24, no. 3 (2000): 135–58.
15. Pye, Asian Power and Politics, vii; Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilization?” Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (1993): 25.
16. Juan Linz, “Transitions to Democracy,” Washington Quarterly 13, no. 3 (1990): 150–52. Linz defines two ways of democratic transition. The first one is reform in which the ruling elites take the lead in initiating peaceful political change. The other is rupture in which opposition forces take the initiative; consequently the old regime is destroyed by such mass-led movement. These two modes of transition are equivalent to what Terry Lynn Karl calls “transition from above” and “transition from below.” But Karl suggests that there may be some borderline cases, such as what happens in Peru and Argentina. See Terry Lynn Karl, “Dilemmas of Democratization in Latin America,” Comparative Politics 23, no. 1 (Oct. 1990): 1–21. Scott Mainwaring goes beyond Linz’s two modes of transition and suggests that there can be three modes of transition: transition through transaction, transition through regime defeat, and transition through extrication. The modes of transition through transaction and transition through regime defeat are corresponding to Linz’s transition through reform and transition through rupture. But Mainwaring suggests a mode of transition through extrication, between the two modalities, is possible. In transition through transaction, political change takes place without the rules of the old regime having been broken; whereas in transition through extrication the rules of the ancien régime are abandoned but the rulers retain sufficient power to negotiate their retreat from power. See Scott Mainwaring, Guillermo O’Donnell, and J. Samuel Valenzuela, eds., Issues in Democratic Consolidation: The New South American Democracies in Comparative Perspective (South Bend, Ind.: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1992), 74–75, 317–26.
17. Regarding the research on democratic transition, see O’Donnell, Philippe C. Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead, eds., Transition from Authoritarian Rule (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1986), a more straightforward analysis based on the strategic-choice model to explain the phenomena of democratic transition in democratizing countries in Latin America and Southern Europe; Huntington, who has taken a historical comparative approach combined with a developmental model to analyze democratic transitions in thirty-five countries in The Third Wave; and James M. Malloy and Mitchell A. Seligson, eds., Authoritarians and Democrats: Regime Transition in Latin America (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1987). Regarding the studies of democratic consolidation, see Mainwaring, O’Donnell, and Valenzuela, eds., Issues in Democratic Consolidation; John Higley and Richard Gunther, eds., Elites and Democratic Consolidation in Latin America and Southern Europe (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992); and Enrique Baloyra, ed., Comparing New Democracies: Transition and Consolidation in Mediterranean Europe and the Southern Cone (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1987).
18. For Dankwart A. Rustow, national unity is an important requisite. As he indicates that there may well be various social cleavages (including ethnic cleavage) among groups in a state, but it is only when such social cleavages lead to the question of who is included in the nation that the problem must be resolved; otherwise, a transition toward democracy becomes less possible. See Rustow, “Transitions to Democracy: Toward a Dynamic Model,” Comparative Politics 2, no. 3 (Apr. 1970): 337–65.
19. Ibid., 352–61. Although the three stages of regime transformation seem to be in sequential order, Rustow states clearly that transition does not flow automatically from the background and preparatory conditions. He indicates that there may be the possibilities of a top-down political reform initiated by benevolent ruling autocracy as alternative solutions to a prolonged political struggle in a state or within a political community. Rustow also suggests that the process of democratic transition is not lineal. There may be a continuation of stalemate or a backsliding to authoritarian rule.
20. Linz, “Transitions to Democracy,” 143–64.
21. Huntington, “Democracy’s Third Wave,” Journal of Democracy 2, no. 2 (1991): 12–34.
22. See Lipset, “Some Social Requisites of Democracy,” 69–105, and Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1968), which takes socioeconomic structural factors into account in explaining the failure or success of democratic political institutions to take root in various countries. Also see O’Donnell, Modernization and Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism: Studies in South American Politics (Berkeley, Calif.: Institute of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 1973), which explicitly takes a neo-Marxist, structuralist perspective to explain the rise of authoritarianism and offers a plausible path toward future democratic transition, by a social revolution to overthrow the capitalist class and its collaborator, the government. In part as a reaction to the structuralist perspective, Linz emphasizes neither class conflicts nor socioeconomic structural constraints but the behavior of particular political actors who fail to perform adequate leadership in conducting political affairs that cause the breakdown of the system ultimately. See Linz and Alfred Stepan, eds., The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Crisis, Breakdown, and Reequilibration (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978).
23. See John J. Johnson, Political Change in Latin America: The Emergence of the Middle Sectors (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1958), 69–105; Lipset, “Some Social Requisites of Democracy,” and Deutsch, “Social Mobilization and Political Development,” 493–514; Cutright, “National Political Development,” 253–64; and Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies.
24. Rustow, “Transitions to Democracy,” and Huntington, “Will More Countries Become Democratic?” Political Science Quarterly 99, no. 2 (1984): 193–218.
25. Yen-yuan Ni, Dong ya wei chuang cheng ti chi chuan shing: bi jiao Taiwan yu South Korea de mingchu hua li cheng [East Asian authoritarian regime transformation: a comparison of Taiwan’s and South Korea’s democratization] (Taipei, Taiwan: Yuedan chubanshe, 1995).
26. The dependencia (dependency) school can be traced back to Paul Baran as he emphasized the conflict of interest between the advanced (mature) capitalists and the periphery’s capitalists in La Economia Politica del Crecimiento (Mexico City: FCE, 1969). Also see O’Donnell, Modernization and Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism; David Collier, ed., The New Authoritarianism in Latin America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1979); and Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Dependency and Development in Latin America (Berkeley, Calif.: Univ. of California Press, 1978).
27. See Peter Evans, Dependent Development: The Alliance of Multinational, State, and Local Capital in Brazil (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1979); Robert Wade, Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of Government in East Asian Industrialization (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1990); and Yen-yuan Ni, Dong ya wei chuang cheng ti chi chuan shing.
28. Larry Diamond and Juan Linz, “Politics, Society, and Democracy in Latin America,” introduction to Democracy in Developing Countries, vol. 4, Latin America, ed. Larry Diamond, Juan Linz, and Seymour Martin Lipset (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1989), 44; Stephan Haggard and Robert Kaufman, The Political Economy of Democratic Transition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1995); Hyug Baeg Im, “The Rise of Bureaucratic Authoritarianism in South Korea,” World Politics 39 (Jan. 1987): 231–57.
29. In general, the political economy theory of regime transformation fails to provide a firm direction about whether political or economic reform should take priority in countries that need to undergo political and economic development. In fact, various case studies suggest three models adopted by countries around the world: political-reform-goes-first model, economic-reform-goes-first model, and dual-transition model; and each model experienced successes and failures. See Genero Arriagada Herrera and Carol Graham, “Chile: Sustaining Adjustment during Democratic Transition,” in Voting for Reform: Democracy, Political Liberalization, and Economic Adjustment, ed. Stephan Haggard and Steven Webbs (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994), 242–89; Nancy Bermeo, “Rethinking Regime Change,” Comparative Politics 22, no. 3 (Apr. 1990): 359–77; Bermeo, “Sacrifice, Sequence, and Strength in Successful Dual Transition: Lessons from Spain,” Journal of Politics 56 (Aug. 1994): 619–23; Omar G. Encarnacion, “The Politics of Dual Transitions,” Comparative Politics 28, no. 4 (July 1996): 489 Thomas Gold, State and Society in the Taiwan Miracle (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1986); Simon Johnson and Marzena Kowalska, “Poland: The Political Economy of Shock Therapy,” in Voting for Reform, ed. Haggard and Webb, 185–241; and Robert Wade, Governing the Market.
30. Nancy Bermeo and Jose Garcia-Duran, “Spain: Dual Transition Implemented by Two Parties,” in Voting for Reform, ed. Haggard and Webb, 89–127.
31. See Karen L. Remmer, “New Wine or Old Bottleneck? The Study of Latin American Democracy,” Comparative Politics 23, no. 3 (July 1991): 479–95.
32. David Collier and Deborah L. Norden, “Strategic Choice Models of Political Change in Latin America,” Comparative Politics 24, no. 2 (Jan. 1992): 229–30.
33. Karen L. Remmer, “New Wine or Old Bottleneck?” 484.
34. Ibid., 485.
35. See Richard Snyder and James Mahoney, “The Missing Variable: Institutions and the Study of Regime Change,” Comparative Politics 32, no. 1 (Oct. 1999): 103.
36. Political actors may interact strategically in a polity, but their preferences and strategic calculations are bounded by the contextual factors and the institutional settings in which they interact with one another. Borrowing the notion of bounded rationality, March and Olsen argue that the behavioralism of the 1960s and the rational-choice theory have eliminated the important role played by institutions in explaining political outcomes. They indicate that human rationality is bounded and any human action is an attempt to fulfill expectations that are context specific and influenced by cultural, socioeconomic, and political structures. See James G. March and John P. Olsen, Rediscovering Institutions: The Organizational Basis of Politics (New York: Free, 1989), 9–19.
37. In the field of comparative politics, while the rational-choice institutionalist approach has incorporated contextual and institutional factors into the analytical framework, it maintains that individual persons should be the center of any social science research. Institutions matter, for these rational-choice theorists, only because they set parameters to an individual actor’s choice; they do not determine choice, but they influence it by setting limits; institutions provide certainty under the conditions of uncertainty and thereby help foster cooperative or compromising behavior.
Historical institutionalists, such as Thelen and Steinmo, reject the notion that individual action is guided primarily by utility-maximization calculation and preferences. They argue that although political actors may attempt to calculate according to their preference and the utility functions and then to maximize preferences, outcomes are shaped by a number of structural and institutional factors that are beyond individual calculation or control. Regarding the role played by individual actors in politics, unlike those rational-choice institutionalists, historical institutionalists believe that institutions are not just another variable; institutions not only shape political actors’ strategies but also influence their goals and mediate their interactions. This implies that institutions directly or indirectly structure political situations and affect the outcomes of politics. Kathleen Thelen and Sven Steinmo, “Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics,” in Structuring Politics: Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Analysis, ed. Sven Steinmo, Kathleen Thelen, and Frank Longstreth (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992), 7–9.
38. Ibid., 3.
39. See Charles G. Gillespie, “From Authoritarian Crises to Democratic Transition,” Latin American Research Review 22 no. 3 (1987): 165–84; Daniel H. Levine, “Paradigm Lost: Dependency to Democracy,” World Politics 40 (Apr. 1988): 377–94; Bermeo, “Rethinking Regime Change,” 359–77; and Stephanie Lawson, “Conceptual Issues in the Comparative Study of Regime Change and Democratization,” Comparative Politics 25, no. 2 (Jan. 1993): 183–205.
40. Linz and Arturo Valenzuela, eds., The Failure of Presidential Democracy (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1994); Arend Lijphart and Carlos H. Waisman, eds., Institutional Design in New Democracies: Eastern Europe and Latin America (Boulder, Col.: Westview, 1996); Scott Mainwarring and Timothy R. Scully, eds., Building Democratic Institutions: Party Systems in Latin America (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1995); Scott Mainwarring and Matthew S. Shugart, eds., Presidentialism and Democracy in Latin America (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997). All these authors have taken political institutions into account, to greater or lesser extent, in their analyses of regime transformation.
41. Pye, introduction to Political Culture and Political Development; and Asian Power and Politics.
42. Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell, introduction to The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis, ed. Walter W. Powell and Paul J. DiMaggio (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1991), 8–10. Regarding “embeddedness,” see Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston, Mass.: Beacon, 1944). However, such sociological institutionalist perspective may have overemphasized the role played by social institutions (that is, conventions, norms) and excluded the equally important role played by other institutional variables (that is, formal political institutions and informal political practices), the impact of political actors’ choice, and contextual factors—both external and internal ones.
43. D. H. Zimmerman and M. Pollner, “The Everyday World as a Phenomenon,” in Understanding Everyday Life, ed. J. Douglas (Chicago: Aldine, 1970), 33–65.
44. Thomas A. Koelble, “The New Institutionalism in Political Science and Sociology,” Comparative Politics 27, no. 2 (Jan. 1995): 243. Also see Aaron Wildavsky, “Why Self Interest Means Less outside of a Social Context,” Journal of Theoretical Politics 6 (Apr. 1994): 131–59.
45. Rustow, “Transitions to Democracy,” 346.
46. Huntington, The Third Wave, 113. However, in his study of more than thirty countries in the third-wave democratization, Huntington should have been able to provide a detailed examination of each country’s complex contextual factors; instead, he clusters thirty-five cases of regime change into several categories according to his typology of previous authoritarian regimes and modes of democratic transition in a fairly simplistic analysis.
47. Munck, “Democratic Transitions in Comparative Perspective,” 371.
48. Karen L. Remmer, “New Theoretical Perspectives on Democratization,” Comparative Politics 28, no. 1 (Oct. 1995): 118.
49. Robert Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1989), 313.
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