32513

SoSe 18: Political Theories on the Crisis of Democracy

Matteo Laruffa

Comments

The object of this course is to help those who are planning to undertake an inquiry or research in political science with a focus on democracy and its crisis, to familiarize with the methodology and the primary factors of this phenomenon while observing the case study of the U.S.A. The most illuminating account of expansion of democracy’s historical trajectory was put forward by Huntington (1991) in his book “The Third Wave: Democratization in the late Twentieth Century.” Huntington found that democracy’s advances have occurred primarily in three waves, as periods in which the number of democratic regimes has risen substantially, with transitions to democracy considerably outpacing breakdowns of democracy. Since 1974, after the end of the regime of the Estado Novo in Portugal, the Third Wave spread worldwide from Southern Europe to Latin America and then swept through Asia and moved across the former Soviet bloc. At the beginning of the Third Wave, there were about 46 democracies in the world, but soon, as Huntington noted: “democracy seemed to take on the character of an almost irresistible global tide moving on from one triumph to the next.” Huntington never did pinpoint exactly the end of the Third Wave and this matter is still debated among scholars. He only posed a crucial question about the future: “to what extent would the Third Wave go beyond the first and the second wave?” Many changes on the global democracy map happened since the publication of Huntington’s book and the principal sets of macro-political data show the end of the optimistic long-term scenario for the expansion of democracy to those areas of the world which have been organized as non-democratic regimes. According to Larry Diamond (2015) there has been a democratic recession, with a decline in aggregate Freedom House scores since 2006 and similar results are reported by other indexes (i.e. the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Index of Democracy). Indeed, in the last decade the performance of democracy has been disappointing. As Thomas Carothers (2015) describes “Democracy’s travails in both the United States and Europe have greatly damaged the standing of democracy in the eyes of many people around the world.” New conditions of dissatisfaction and distress risk to undermine the legitimacy of democratic institutions. This phenomenon is mainly related to the European states and the United States of America, as a general feature of contemporary politics in advanced industrial democracies. Many scholars contemplate it as the beginning of a new phase characterized by the absence of democratic progress with the emerging power of new global counter-democratic actors as China, Iran and Russia. The rise of a new category of polity - Steven Lewitsky and Lucan Way (2015) call it “hybrid regimes” - has forced observers to go back and re-evaluate the record of democratisation since the Third Wave. Today, we observe the emergence of a new type of contemporary polities, which represents a challenge for the stability of our institutions and their democratic nature. Finally, populism is threating many democracies and the radicalization of politics poses important questions that still need answers: Why are our democracies changing so extremely? Why are our democracies under threats from movements that proclaim themselves opposite to everything our societies proclaim to believe in? Implied here are many other underlying questions: which democracies are in crisis and why? which democracies are more capable to overcome crises? One of Alexis de Tocqueville’s lessons is actually very important for our times. As the French political scientist and author of the famous book Democracy in America (1835) realized, new forms of despotism can develop themselves from the dysfunctions of modern representative democracy. close

13 Class schedule

Regular appointments

Mon, 16:00 - 18:00 13 Class schedule

Mon, 2018-04-16 16:00 - 18:00

Lecturers:
Matteo LaRuffa