The Democratic Regression
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Regression of Democracy?
Author: Gero Erdmann
language: en
Publisher: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften
Release Date: 2011-08-16
Democratization since the implosion of the communist bloc displays a mixed balance. While the neo-democracies in Central Eastern European Countries can be seen as largely consolidated, many other processes of democratization in other parts of the world such as Africa, Asia and Latin America got stuck as unconsolidated or became defective democracies, some ‘regressed’ into hybrid regimes or were even turned into autocracies. While transitology dealt with the transition from authoritarian rule, the reverse process, the transition from democratic rule, remained almost completely outside the scholarly attention. This special issue will address the problems of the regression of democracy and aims at closing the gap between research on democracy and democratization on one side and the emergence of authoritarian regimes on the other. The contributions of this volume analyse the different phenomena in which decline of democracy fans out: the loss of quality, which means a silent regression; the backslide into hybrid regimes (hybridization); and the breakdown of democracy.
The Democratic Regression
There is a tendency in public debate to downplay the significance of populism by attributing its rise to the inadequacies of those who vote for populist leaders and parties. But this way of thinking prevents us from seeing that the rise of populism may be linked to problems and shortcomings in the way our democracies work. In this important book, Armin Schäfer and Michael Zürn argue that the rise of authoritarian populism is rooted in two developments that are specifically political in character: first, the unequal responsiveness of parliaments towards less privileged citizens; and second, the growing political role of non-majoritarian institutions, like central banks and international institutions, that remove decisions from public debate and entrust them to experts. Contemporary democracy is increasingly perceived as lacking openness and representativeness. More and more citizens come to feel that politics is made by a closed political class oblivious to the concerns of ordinary people, and those who share this view are more likely to vote for authoritarian populists. Although contemporary populists keep rubbing salt into the wound of liberal democracy, their responses fail to solve the problems of democratic politics. On the contrary, wherever authoritarian-populist parties have come to power, they have damaged democracy rather than expanding it or reducing existing inequalities.
Democracy and Brazil
Eleven experts on Brazil discuss the de-democratization process underway in contemporary Brazil. The relative political stability that characterized domestic politics in the 2000s ended with the sudden emergence of a series of massive protests in 2013, followed by the controversial impeachment of Dilma Rousseff in 2016 and the election of Jair Bolsanaro in 2018. Brazil's current political crisis cannot be understood without reference to the continual growth of a new right-wing discourse, on the one hand, and to the neoliberal ideology that pervades the minds of large parts of the Brazilian elites, on the other