- Viewpoints and Horizons
- classification of regime families graph-ically along a one-dimensional continuum of "democraticness"
- We might say, tentatively, that those who are concerned with democratic stability and try to avoid regressions to either [End Page 94] nondemocratic or semidemocratic regimes support "negative" notions of democratic consolidation, while those who are concerned with democratic advances and try to attain progress toward either liberal or high-quality democracy sponsor "positive" notions of democratic consolidation. In a way, this contextual and perspective-dependent approach tries to reconstruct the concept's teleological core
- I think there is nothing inherently wrong with teleology, provided that three conditions are met:
- we have to avoid veiling or obscuring it; hidden teleology is indeed bad teleology.
- we have to dissociate teleology from any belief in inevitable progress: supporting some telos, some normative goal or practical task, is one matter; assuming "some kind of automatic or 'natural' progression" toward that goal is quite another
- Avoiding Democratic Breakdown
- Once a transition from authoritarian rule in a given country has reached a point where (more or less) free, fair, and competitive elections are held, democratic actors usually cannot afford to relax and enjoy the "bounded uncertainty" of democratic rule. More often than not, regime threatening "unbounded uncertainties" persist, and the democrats' fundamental concern shifts from establishing democracy's core institutions to securing what they have achieved. For these actors, consolidating democracy means reducing the probability of its breakdown to the point where they can feel reasonably confident that democracy will persist in the near (and not-so near) future
- In accordance with its focus on the danger of coups, this first notion of democratic consolidation is concerned above all with deviant or antisystem actors who harbor antidemocratic motives
- Avoiding Democratic Erosion
Many new democracies do face the threat of illegal or pseudo-legal overthrow by antidemocratic forces. But in addition to the risk of breakdown--of dramatic, sudden, and visible relapses to authoritarian rule--many new democracies have to contend with the danger of decay, of less spectacular, more incremental, and less transparent forms of regression. While the former provokes a radical discontinuity with democratic politics (leading to open authoritarianism), the latter implies a gradual corrosion leading to fuzzy semi-democracy, to a hybrid regime somewhere between liberal democracy and dictatorship - Completing Democracy
Which are the basic actors, conflicts, and sites of democratic completion? It depends on the type of "electoral democracy" in place - there are those countries where the outgoing authoritarian regime was able to write certain non-democratic rules into the constitution. In such cases of constitutional defects, full democratization requires these formal authoritarian legacies to be removed
- Another kind of semidemocracy that has raised peculiar challenges of democratic consolidationas-completion is the hegemonic-party system in crisis. The Latin American cases are (or were) Mexico and Paraguay. In essence, the problem is how to tell at what point (authoritarian) hegemonic parties have become (democratic) dominant parties. Hegemonic parties, given their reliance on state patronage, media control, repression, and ("in the last instance") electoral fraud,do not and cannot lose elections
the constitutional legacies of military regimes as well as the structural legacies of hegemonic-party systems pose formidable "threshold problems" to democratizers - Deepening Democracy
The notion of democratic consolidation just discussed--completing the democratic transition by traveling from electoral to liberal democracy--represents one progress-oriented, "positive" version of democratic consolidation. Moving further on the "continuum of democracy"--by deepening liberal democracy and pushing it closer to advanced democracy-- represents a second positive version
Most authors who write about democratic consolidation either think about our very first notion of democratic consolidation, the stabilization of democracy, or about this last notion of democratic consolidation, the deepening of democracy. These two concepts of democratic consolidation are by far the most popular ones. In fact, the academic popularity of the former comes as no surprise. Most of Latin America's aging new democracies still have to worry about their long-term survival. As rule, however, this is no longer an immediate concern, but just one issue among many others that command political attention. Today, issues of democratic quality tend to be much more salient in everyday politics than issues of democratic survival - Organizing Democracy
In an uneasy intermediate position, a "neutral" usage of democratic consolidation, which comprehends democratic consolidation as the "organization" of democracy.
this concept of consolidation turns its attention from the procedural minima that define democratic regimes to the concrete rules and organizations that define various forms of democracy - Post-Transitional Blues
the consolidation of democracy emerges as an omnibus concept, a garbage-can concept, a catch-all concept, lacking a core meaning that would unite all modes of usage. If it is indeed the case that it provides the foundation for what Schmitter has called "an embryonic subdiscipline" of political science, this discipline shares neither a substantive concern nor a methodological core. It is held together by no more than a shared domain of application. It covers all new democracies (including semidemocracies), which by definition enter the "phase of democratic consolidation" (or at least face the "problems of consolidation") as soon as they complete some sort of democratic transition. In this sense, "consolidology" is no more than a label for the study of new democracies. - Back to the Roots
the concept of a "consolidated democracy" should describe a democratic regime that relevant observers expect to last well into the future--and nothing else - Why should one restrict the use of "democratic consolidation" in this particular way and not another?
- the process (and the challenge) of putting a partial, blocked, derailed, or truncated transition back on track falls within the purview of transition studies. There is no need to confuse matters and introduce another term for it. In addition, in semidemocracies which face the task of democratic completion, any talk about "the consolidation of democracy" is misleading. It suggests that a democratic regime is already in place (and only needs to be "consolidated") when in fact the issue at hand is constructing a fully democratic regime
- the development of democracy's subsystems, collective actors, and working rules is clearly a timely and relevant topic. But confounding the consolidation of "partial regimes" with the consolidation of democracy as a whole deprives us of an important analytic distinction. It binds together by definition two things that in fact are only loosely coupled
- the association of democratic consolidation with improvements in the quality of
democracy or with democratic deepening represents the most popular "positive" notion of
democratic consolidation. But it also seems to be the most problematic one
if we associate democratic consolidation with democratic deepening, we get a concept of democratic consolidation that is open and boundless as well. In this sense, no democracy will ever be "fully consolidated,"
覺得這篇文章想要討論什麼?
討論Democratic Consolidation可能牽涉到的概念，以及在學術討論上應該如何使用該字彙
我覺得這篇文章有哪些重點?或是我的心得?
偏學術界內的呼籲，叫大家把這個字弄清楚
