POL337 Saint Cloud Technical College Democratic Recession Review Writing Assignment #2Write a 5-6 page (12 point font, double spaced) review of one of the

POL337 Saint Cloud Technical College Democratic Recession Review Writing Assignment #2Write a 5-6 page (12 point font, double spaced) review of one of the two following articles POL 337
Fall, 2019
Writing Assignment #2
Write a 5-6 page (12 point font, double spaced) review of one of the two following articles: (1)
Larry Diamond, Facing Up to the Democratic Recession (2) Wendy Hunter and Timothy J. Power
Bolsonaro and Brazil’s Illiberal Backlash. (these articles are posted on D2L)
Your essay should answer the following questions:
1. What is the purpose of the authors?
2. What is the author’s main argument?
For example, according to Wendy Hunter, what factors contributed to the election of Jair
Bolsonaro in Brazil? Or, in the case of Larry Diamond’s article, what is the democratic recession
and what is causing a global rollback of democracy?
3. What evidence does the author use to make his or her argument?
Due:
In class on Wednesday, December 4 2019
General Guidelines
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•
•
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Your essay should be between 5 and 6 pages (standard 12 point font, double spaced).
The essay should contain an introductory paragraph informing the reader of the
argument you intend to make. It should also have a concluding paragraph summarizing
your argument.
Grammar is important.
Your essay should demonstrate evidence of having read the article.
Facing Up to the
Democratic Recession
Larry Diamond
Larry Diamond is founding coeditor of the Journal of Democracy, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Freeman Spogli Institute
for International Studies at Stanford University, and director of Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.
The year 2014 marked the fortieth anniversary of Portugal’s Revolu-
tion of the Carnations, which inaugurated what Samuel P. Huntington
dubbed the “third wave” of global democratization. Any assessment of
the state of global democracy today must begin by recognizing—even
marveling at—the durability of this historic transformation. When the
third wave began in 1974, only about 30 percent of the world’s independent states met the criteria of electoral democracy—a system in which
citizens, through universal suffrage, can choose and replace their leaders
in regular, free, fair, and meaningful elections.1 At that time, there were
only about 46 democracies in the world. Most of those were the liberal
democracies of the rich West, along with a number of small island states
that had been British colonies. Only a few other developing democracies
existed—principally, India, Sri Lanka, Costa Rica, Colombia, Venezuela, Israel, and Turkey.
In the subsequent three decades, democracy had a remarkable global
run, as the number of democracies essentially held steady or expanded
every year from 1975 until 2007. Nothing like this continous growth in
democracy had ever been seen before in the history of the world. While
a number of these new “democracies” were quite illiberal—in some
cases, so much so that Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way regard them as
“competitive authoritarian” regimes2—the positive three-decade trend
was paralleled by a similarly steady and significant expansion in levels
of freedom (political rights and civil liberties, as measured annually by
Freedom House). In 1974, the average level of freedom in the world
stood at 4.38 (on the two seven-point scales, where 1 is most free and
7 is most repressive). It then gradually improved during the 1970s and
Journal of Democracy Volume 26, Number 1 January 2015
© 2015 National Endowment for Democracy and Johns Hopkins University Press
142
Journal of Democracy
1980s, though it did not cross below the 4.0 midpoint until the fall of
the Berlin Wall, after which it improved to 3.85 in 1990. In 25 of the 32
years between 1974 and 2005, average freedom levels improved in the
world, peaking at 3.22 in 2005.
And then, around 2006, the expansion of freedom and democracy in
the world came to a prolonged halt. Since 2006, there has been no net
expansion in the number of electoral democracies, which has oscillated
between 114 and 119 (about 60 percent of the world’s states). As we see
in Figure 1, the number of both electoral and liberal democracies began
to decline after 2006 and then flattened out.3 Since 2006, the average
level of freedom in the world has also deteriorated slightly, leveling off
at about 3.30.
There are two ways to view these empirical trends. One is to see
them as constituting a period of equilibrium—freedom and democracy have not continued gaining, but neither have they experienced
net declines. One could even celebrate this as an expression of the
remarkable and unexpected durability of the democratic wave. Given
that democracy expanded to a number of countries where the objective
conditions for sustaining it are unfavorable, due either to poverty (for
example, in Liberia, Malawi, and Sierra Leone) or to strategic pressures (for example, in Georgia and Mongolia), it is impressive that
reasonably open and competitive political systems have survived (or
revived) in so many places. As a variant of this more benign interpretation, Levitsky and Way argue in this issue of the Journal that democracy never actually expanded as widely as Freedom House perceived
in the first place. Thus, they contend, many of the seeming failures of
democracy in the last ten to fifteen years were really deteriorations or
hardenings of what had been from the beginning authoritarian regimes,
however competitive.
Alternatively, one can view the last decade as a period of at least
incipient decline in democracy. To make this case, we need to examine
not only the instability and stagnation of democracies, but also the incremental decline of democracy in what Thomas Carothers has termed the
“gray zone” countries (which defy easy classification as to whether or
not they are democracies),4 the deepening authoritarianism in the nondemocracies, and the decline in the functioning and self-confidence of
the world’s established, rich democracies. This will be my approach in
what follows.
The debate about whether there has been a decline in democracy
turns to some extent on how we count it. It is one of the great and probably inescapable ironies of scholarly research that the boom in comparative democratic studies has been accompanied by significant disagreement over how to define and measure democracy. I have never felt that
there was—or could be—one right and consensual answer to this eternal
conceptual challenge. Most scholars of democracy have agreed that it
Larry Diamond
143
Figure 1—The Growth of Democracies in the World,
1974–2013
70%
57%
60%
50%
61%
59%
45%
40%
30%
58%
34%
37%
41%
29%
30%
20%
21%
24%
33%
40%
35%
26%
10%
0%
Liberal Democracies
Electoral Democracies
makes sense to classify regimes categorically—and thus to determine
which regimes are democracies and which are not. But democracy is in
many ways a continuous variable. Its key components—such as freedom of multiple parties and candidates to campaign and contest; opposition access to mass media and campaign finance; inclusiveness of suffrage; fairness and neutrality of electoral administration; and the extent
to which electoral victors have meaningful power to rule—vary on a
continuum (as do other dimensions of the quality of democracy, such as
civil liberties, rule of law, control of corruption, vigor of civil society,
and so on). This continuous variation forces coders to make difficult
judgments about how to classify regimes that fall into the gray zone of
ambiguity, where multiparty electoral competition is genuine and vigorous but flawed in some notable ways. No system of multiparty competition is perfectly fair and open. Some multiparty electoral systems
clearly do not meet the test of democracy. Others have serious defects
that nevertheless do not negate their overall democratic character. Thus
hard decisions must often be made about how to weight imperfections
and where to draw the line.
Most approaches to classifying regimes (as democracies or not) rely
on continuous measurement of key variables (such as political rights,
in the case of the Polity scale, or both political rights and civil liberties, in the case of Freedom House), along with a somewhat arbitrary
cutoff point for separating democracies from nondemocracies. 5 My
own method has been to accept the Freedom House coding decisions
except where I find persuasive contradictory evidence. This has led to
my counting two to five fewer democracies than Freedom House does
144
Journal of Democracy
for most years since 1989; for some years, the discrepancy is much
larger.6
The Democratic Recession: Breakdowns and Erosions
The world has been in a mild but protracted democratic recession
since about 2006. Beyond the lack of improvement or modest erosion of
global levels of democracy and freedom, there have been several other
causes for concern. First, there has been a significant and, in fact, accelerating rate of democratic breakdown. Second, the quality or stability of
democracy has been declining in a number of large and strategically important emerging-market countries, which I call “swing states.” Third,
authoritarianism has been deepening, including in big and strategically
important countries. And fourth, the established democracies, beginning
with the United States, increasingly seem to be performing poorly and
to lack the will and self-confidence to promote democracy effectively
abroad. I explore each of these in turn.
First, let us look at rates of democratic breakdown. Between 1974 and
the end of 2014, 29 percent of all the democracies in the world broke
down (among non-Western democracies, the rate was 35 percent). In the
first decade and a half of this new century, the failure rate (17.6 percent)
has been substantially higher than in the preceding fifteen-year period
(12.7 percent). Alternatively, if we break the third wave up into its four
component decades, we see a rising incidence of democratic failure per
decade since the mid-1980s. The rate of democratic failure, which had
been 16 percent in the first decade of the third wave (1974–83), fell to
8 percent in the second decade (1984–93), but then climbed to 11 percent in the third decade (1994–2003), and most recently to 14 percent
(2004–13). (If we include the three failures of 2014, the rate rises to over
16 percent.)
Since 2000, I count 25 breakdowns of democracy in the world—not
only through blatant military or executive coups, but also through subtle
and incremental degradations of democratic rights and procedures that
finally push a democratic system over the threshold into competitive authoritarianism (see Table). Some of these breakdowns occurred in quite
low-quality democracies; yet in each case, a system of reasonably free
and fair multiparty electoral competition was either displaced or degraded to a point well below the minimal standards of democracy.
One methodological challenge in tracking democratic breakdowns
is to determine a precise date or year for a democratic failure that results from a long secular process of systemic deterioration and executive
strangulation of political rights, civil liberties, and the rule of law. No
serious scholar would consider Russia today a democracy. But many
believe that it was an electoral democracy (however rough and illiberal) under Boris Yeltsin. If we score 1993 as the year when democ-
Larry Diamond
145
Table—Breakdowns of Democracy, 2000–2014
Year of
Breakdown
Country
Year of
Return
Type of Breakdown
2000
2000
2001
Fiji
Russia
Central Af. Rep.
–
–
–
Military coup
Executive degradation, violation of opposition rights
Military rebellion, violence, human rights abuses
2002
Guinea-Bissau
2005
Executive degradation, violation of opposition rights
(military coup the following year)
2002
2004
2005
2006
2007
2007
2007
2008
2009
Nepal
Venezuela
Thailand
Solomon Islands
Bangladesh
Philippines
Kenya
Georgia
Honduras
2013
–
2011
–
2008
2010
–
2012
2013
Rising political instability, monarchical coup
Executive degradation, violation of opposition rights
Military coup, then military constraint
Decline of democratic process
Military “soft coup”
Executive degradation
Electoral fraud and executive abuse
Electoral fraud and executive abuse
Military intervention
2009
Madagascar
–
Unconstitutional assumption of power by opposition;
suspension of elected parliament
2009
Niger
2010
2010
2011
Presidential dissolution of Constitutional Court and
National Assembly to extend presidential rule
Burundi
Sri Lanka
–
–
Electoral fraud, opposition boycott, political closure
Executive degradation
2010
Guinea-Bissau
–
Military intervention, weakening civilian control,
deteriorating rule of law
2012
2012
2011
Maldives
Mali
Nicaragua
–
2014
–
Forcible removal of democratically elected president
Military coup
Executive degradation
2012
Ukraine
2014
Electoral fraud (parliamentary elections), executive
abuse
2014
2014
2014
Turkey
Bangladesh
Thailand
–
–
–
Executive degradation, violation of opposition rights
Breakdown of electoral process
Military coup
racy emerged in Russia (as Freedom House does), then what year do
we identify as marking the end of democracy? In this case (and many
others), there is no single obvious event—like Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori’s 1992 autogolpe, dissolving Congress and seizing unconstitutional powers—to guide the scoring decision. I postulate that
Russia’s political system fell below the minimum conditions of electoral
democracy during the year 2000, as signaled by the electoral fraud that
gave Vladimir Putin a dubious first-ballot victory and the executive degradation of political and civic pluralism that quickly followed. (Freedom
House dates the failure to 2005.)
The problem has continuing and quite contemporary relevance. For
a number of years now, Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party
(AKP) has been gradually eroding democratic pluralism and freedom in
the country. The overall political trends have been hard to characterize,
because some of the AKP’s changes have made Turkey more democratic
by removing the military as an autonomous veto player in politics, ex-
146
Journal of Democracy
tending civilian control over the military, and making it harder to ban
political parties that offend the “deep state” structures associated with
the intensely secularist legacy of Kemal Atatürk. But the AKP has gradually entrenched its own political hegemony, extending partisan control
over the judiciary and the bureaucracy, arresting journalists and intimidating dissenters in the press and academia, threatening businesses with
retaliation if they fund opposition parties, and using arrests and prosecutions in cases connected to alleged coup plots to jail and remove from
public life an implausibly large number of accused plotters.
This has coincided with a stunning and increasingly audacious concentration of personal power by Turkey’s longtime prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdo¢gan, who was elected president in August 2014. The
abuse and personalization of power and the constriction of competitive
space and freedom in Turkey have been subtle and incremental, moving with nothing like the speed of Putin in the early 2000s. But by now,
these trends appear to have crossed a threshold, pushing the country
below the minimum standards of democracy. If this has happened, when
did it happen? Was it in 2014, when the AKP further consolidated its
hegemonic grip on power in the March local-government elections and
the August presidential election? Or was it, as some liberal Turks insist,
several years before, as media freedoms were visibly diminishing and
an ever-wider circle of alleged coup plotters was being targeted in the
highly politicized Ergenekon trials?
A similar problem exists for Botswana, where a president (Ian Khama)
with a career military background evinces an intolerance of opposition
and distaste for civil society beyond anything seen previously from the
long-ruling Botswana Democratic Party (BDP). Increasing political violence and intimidation—including assaults on opposition politicians, the
possible murder of a leading opposition candidate three months before
the October 2014 parliamentary elections, and the apparent involvement
of the intelligence apparatus in the bullying and coercion of the political
opposition—have been moving the political system in a more authoritarian direction. Escalating pressure on the independent media, the brazen
misuse of state television by the BDP, and the growing personalization
and centralization of power by President Khama (as he advances his own
narrow circle of family and friends while splitting the ruling party) are
further signs of the deterioration, if not crisis, of democracy in Botswana.7
Again, Levitsky and Way had argued a number of years ago that Botswana
was not a genuine democracy in the first place.8 Nevertheless, whatever
kind of system it has been in recent decades, “respect for the rule of law
and for established institutions and processes” began to diminish in 1998,
when Khama ascended to the vice-presidency, and it has continued to
decline since 2008, when the former military commander “automatically
succeeded to the presidency.”9
There are no easy and obvious answers to the conundrum of how to
Larry Diamond
147
classify regimes in the gray zone. One can argue about whether these ambiguous regimes are still democracies—or even if they ever really were.
Those who accept that a democratic breakdown has occurred can argue
about when it took place. But what is beyond argument is that there is a
class of regimes that in the last decade or so have experienced significant erosion in electoral fairness, political pluralism, and civic space for
opposition and dissent, typically as a result of abusive executives intent
upon concentrating their personal power and entrenching ruling-party
hegemony. The best-known cases of this since 1999 have been Russia and Venezuela, where populist former military officer Hugo Chávez
(1999–2013) gradually suffocated democratic pluralism during the first
decade of this century. After Daniel Ortega returned to the presidency in
Nicaragua in 2007, he borrowed many pages from Chávez’s authoritarian playbook, and left-populist authoritarian presidents Evo Morales of
Bolivia and Rafael Correa of Ecuador have been moving in a similar direction. In their contribution to this issue, Scott Mainwaring and Aníbal
Pérez-Li~nán assert that democratic erosion has occurred since 2000 in
all four of these Latin American countries (Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and Ecuador) as well as in Honduras, with Bolivia, Ecuador, and
Honduras now limping along as “semidemocracies.”
Of the 25 breakdowns since 2000 listed in the Table, eighteen have
occurred after 2005. Only eight of these 25 breakdowns came as a result
of military intervention (and of those eight, only four took the form of
a conventional, blatant military coup, as happened twice in Thailand).
Two other cases (Nepal and Madagascar) saw democratically elected
rulers pushed out of power by other nondemocratic forces (the monarch
and the political opposition, respectively). The majority of the breakdowns—thirteen—resulted from the abuse of power and the desecration
of democratic institutions and practices by democratically elected rulers. Four of these took the form of widespread electoral fraud or, in the
recent case of Bangladesh, a unilateral change in the rules of electoral
administration (the elimination of the practice of a caretaker government before the election) that tilted the electoral playing field and triggered an opposition boycott. The other nine failures by executive abuse
involved the more gradual suffocation of democracy by democratically
elected executives (though that too was occurring in several of the instances of electoral fraud, such as Ukraine under President Viktor Yanukovych [2010–14]). Overall, nearly o…
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