Since the late 1980s and the collapse of communist, military, and race-based regimes across the world, the euphoria over democracy's triumph has given way to the practical question of how to enhance the viability of democratic constitutional government. That is the subject of this book, with particular attention to the following questions: -- What are the strengths and weaknesses of the available models of democratic governance and how adaptable are they to other societies? (Joel Aberbach; Bert Rockman; Gregory S. Mahler); -- What are the most effective mechanisms for ensuring the accountability of public officials? (Fred W. Riggs; James L. Sundquist); -- How does legislative structure enhance or diminish the prospects for democratic stabilization? (Abdo I. Baaklini); -- What can transitional societies learn from the experience of India, Turkey, and Russia? (T.V. Sathyamurthy; Ersin Kalaycioglu; Erik P. Hoffmann); -- How does the need for economic adjustment impact democractic consolidation? (Diane Ethier); -- How has globalization complicated the task of democratic state-building? (Philp G. Cerny).
Since the 1980s and the collapse of communist, military, and race-based regimes across the world, the euphoria has given way to the question of how to enhance the viability of democratic constitutional government. This text covers this issue.
A theoretical work on how democracy can be improved when people are disenchanted with government. It summarizes four current approaches to policy theory - pluralism, policy sciences, public choice, and critical theory - and shows how none offer more than a partial view of policy design.
Democratic design is increasingly seen as the key to crafting stability in the fragile states of the developing world. Getting the democratic institutions right may not guarantee success but getting them wrong has led to violent collapse in many socially divided states. The Architecture of Democracy brings together both theory and case study evidence to provide the reader with an excellent overview of the cutting edge of academic debate and its practical implications for democratic design in the 21st century. The discipline of constitutional engineering reached maturity in the 1990s with theories of ethnic polarization and democratic conflict management being applied in trouble spots across the globe. Andrew Reynolds brings together the leading lights of the discipline to discuss the successes and failures of constitutional design. The two icons of modern constitutional design, Arend Lijphart and Donald Horowitz, lead off by debating their own contributions to the field. Then Olga Shvetsova, Timothy Frye, and José Antônio Cheibub, present important new evidence from Europe, the Central and Eastern Europe/Asia, and Latin America. Steven Solnick, Yash Ghai, Pippa Norris, and Rein Taagepera analyze the effects of presdential and parliamentary systems, issues of federalism and autonomy, and the varying impact of electoral systems. The book concludes with Brij Lal's case study of Fiji, Brendan O'Leary on Northern Ireland, Bereket Habte Selassie on Eritrea, William Liddle on Indonesia, Rotimi Suburu and Larry Diamond on Nigeria, and David Stuligross and Ashutosh Varshney on India. The Architecture of Democracy is the culmination of the study of constitutional engineering in the third wave of democracy and sets parameters for this crucial research as democracy diffuses across the world.
Designing Democracy in a Dangerous World addresses a question at the heart of contemporary global politics: how does one craft democracy in fragile and divided states? In Iraq and Afghanistan, spiraling conflict was driven in large part by the mistakes of institutional design in the immediate post-conflict period. The future hopes for peace and stability in those, and other cases, rest on a well designed political system which can bring legitimacy to elected leaders andoffer reassurances to minorities.Designing Democracy fills gaps in knowledge in three ways. First, it develops a theoretical framework for assessing what type of democracy will best serve a nation. Second, it offers a behind the scenes look at the intricacies of democratic design in a number of focus cases. Third, the book pulls together lessons for policymakers by surveying patterns of success and failure over the last forty years. Reynolds tests his framework by drawing on extensive quantitative and qualitativeevidence, gathering data from 66 cases to analyze the relationship between democracy and stability and a nation's demographic, socio-political, historical, and economic features, and previous levels of instability. To this mix are added institutional variables: electoral systems, decentralization, levels ofexecutive inclusion, and executive type. For a qualitative focus the book draws on the author's experience as a constitutional adviser during the last fifteen years in democratizing nations such as South Africa, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Burma, Lebanon, Sudan, and Iraq.There are very few places in the world today where the majority of people do not desire some degree of choice, accountability over their leaders, and the rule of law. The key is to craft a democracy that is home grown and appropriate to a given society. By bringing new evidence and arguments to bear on the topic of promoting democracy, Designing Democracy contributes to both foreign policy and academic debates.Comparative Politics is a series for students, teachers, and researchers of political science that deals with contemporary government and politics. Global in scope, books in the series are characterised by a stress on comparative analysis and strong methodological rigour. The series is published in association with the European Consortium for Political Research. For more information visit: www.essex.ac.uk/ecprThe Comparative Politics Series is edited by Professor David M. Farrell, School of Politics and International Relations, University College Dublin, Kenneth Carty, Professor of Political Science, University of British Columbia, and Professor Dirk Berg-Schlosser, Institute of Political Science, Philipps University, Marburg.
Constitution-making for democracy has always been a highly political and contested process. It has never been more ambitious, or more difficult, than today as politicians and experts attempt to build democratic institutions that will foster peace and stability in countries torn by violent conflict. The extended investigation out of which this book has grown has ranged across three continents. It has examined such apparently intractable cases as Bosnia-Herzegovina, Sri Lanka and Fiji, as well as apparent 'success stories' like South Africa, Ghana and Uganda. Three groups of questions are explored: * How and by whom were democratic institutions (re)designed? * How have they functioned in practice: what has been the relationship between democratic institutions and democratic politics? * How have they measured up to the pressures placed on them by ongoing violence, poverty, globalization and democratization itself? The authors, while regarding democracy as a general entitlement, refuse to subscribe to a triumphalist view which sees it as a universal panacea. Instead they seek to understand how democratic institutions actually facilitate (or sometimes fail to facilitate) improved governance and the management of conflict in a variety of national settings. This thoughtful and empirical set of explorations is highly relevant to other societies wrestling with similar problems of institutional design in situations of democratic transition and/or deep-seated social conflict.
