The last fifteen years have witnessed a "democratic recession."
Democracies previously thought to be well-established—Hungary,
Poland, Brazil, and even the United States—have been threatened
by the rise of ultra-nationalist and populist leaders who pay
lip-service to the will of the people while daily undermining the
freedom and pluralism that are the foundations of democratic
governance. The possibility of democratic collapse where we least
expected it has added new urgency to the age-old inquiry into how
democracy, once attained, can be made to last. In Democracy in Hard
Places, Scott Mainwaring and Tarek Masoud bring together a
distinguished cast of contributors to illustrate how democracies
around the world continue to survive even in an age of democratic
decline. Collectively, they argue that we can learn much from
democratic survivals that were just as unexpected as the democratic
erosions that have occurred in some corners of the developed world.
Just as social scientists long believed that well-established,
Western, educated, industrialized, and rich democracies were
immortal, so too did they assign little chance of democracy to
countries that lacked these characteristics. And yet, in defiance
of decades of social science wisdom, many countries that were
bereft of these hypothesized enabling conditions for democracy not
only achieved it, but maintained it year after year. How does
democracy persist in countries that are ethnically heterogenous,
wracked by economic crisis, and plagued by state weakness? What is
the secret of democratic longevity in hard places? This book—the
first to date to systematically examine the survival persistence of
unlikely democracies—presents nine case studies in which
democracy emerged and survived against the odds. Adopting a
comparative, cross-regional perspective, the authors derive lessons
about what makes democracy stick despite tumult and crisis,
economic underdevelopment, ethnolinguistic fragmentation, and
chronic institutional weakness. By bringing these cases into
dialogue with each other, Mainwaring and Masoud derive powerful
theoretical lessons for how democracy can be built and maintained
in places where dominant social science theories would cause us to
least expect it.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
