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Democratization is a major political phenomenon of the age and has been the focus of a burgeoning political science literature. This book considers democratization across a range of disciplines, from anthropology and economics, to sociology, law and area studies. The construction of democratization as a unit of study reflects the intellectual standpoint of the inquirer. The book highlights the use of normative argument to legitimize the exercise of power. From the 1950s to the 1980s, economic success enabled the authoritarian governments of South Korea and Taiwan to achieve a large measure of popular support despite the absence of democracy. The book outlines what a feminist framework might be and analyses feminist engagements with the theory and practice of democratization. It also shows how historians have contributed to the understanding of the processes of democratization. International Political Economy (IPE) has always had the potential to cut across the levels-of-analysis distinction. A legal perspective on democratization is presented by focusing on a tightly linked set of issues straddling the border between political and judicial power as they have arisen. Classic and contemporary sociological approaches to understanding democracy and democratization are highlighted, with particular attention being accorded to the post-1989 period. The book displays particularities within a common concern for institutional structures and their performance, ranging over the representation of women, electoral systems and constitutions (in Africa) and presidentialism (in Latin America). Both Europe and North America present in their different ways a kind of bridge between domestic and international dimensions of democratization.
social interaction. My empirical work highlights the use of normative argument to legitimize the exercise of power. The focus on normative discourse highlights the realm of narrative practices, but to become meaningful these must be situated – and studied empirically – within the concrete matrices of social action. The demand for self-reflection implies incessant interrogation of one’s own relationship to the value-claims of the observed actors. Although no transcendental authority is claimed for this version of anthropology, it reflects concerns common to the
argument might appear to sustain the claim that in these parts of the world representative democracy is now a privileged form of government, relatively immune to serious difficulties. This conclusion, however, would be misleading. First, if democracies in western Europe contained the consequences of the post-Bretton Woods international economy in a way that suggests that rule in democracies is not as demanding, or as likely to fail, as it once was, this simply reinforces the truth that representative democracy is a form of rule that is dependent on the exercise of power
shaping cross- border cooperation and diplomacy in the Arctic? By illustrating relations of deference, plumbing episodes of controversy, and highlighting the quiet ‘work’ of various kinds involved in sustaining and expanding cooperation 1 2 Arctic governance in the Arctic, I hope to show how dynamic and layered with power relations Arctic cooperation itself is. Acknowledging the exercise of power without positing the existence of open conflict allows us to consider how Arctic cooperation is constantly shored up through various kinds of context- specific
are all combined, a White House press conference becomes a powerful and authoritative act of truth creation in society – even if the ‘facts’ being discussed can later be shown to be false. Political discourses are constructed and employed for specific purposes, most importantly, the creation, maintenance and extension of power. Discourses are an exercise of power; that is, they
reality the structures of English early modern government made such a dialogue between rulers and ruled a political necessity throughout the period. Out of that dialogue, the ruled derived legitimation for a political agency otherwise denied them by a state that proscribed popular action and a Church that preached passivity in the face of hardship. In early modern England, crowd actions were, of course, one of the most powerful ways in which the ruled could negotiate the exercise of power. But ‘riot’, itself a lazy shorthand for the complexity within crowd actions, is
wealth and industrial power. Whether his views on political economy informed or even shaped his views of imperialism (or vice versa) is uncertain, but the similarity between them is striking. In both cases, FDR criticized the exercise of power and control as a form of subjugation of the weak and powerless by a small cabal of elites. Rhetorically, the image of big business as imperial helped
articulations of power which operated in multiple directions, directed at indigenous peoples and settlers on the one hand and at members of the domestic population on the other. The exercise of power in each case was, of course, very different, but both were vital to the continuing existence and extension of the imperial project. Such a comparative approach to imperialism has been relatively rare, but is surely
metaphysical archetypes and images through which this most material of practices engaged Elizabethan knowledge and culture. It is part of my purpose to recall that the discourse of early modern (if not modern) warfare almost invariably turns on a religious axis – at bottom, the rhetoric of crusade – on the paradoxical premise that the exercise of power over life and death is human
the contrary: the critical theory elaborated in this book, which seeks to provide impetus for the emergence of the third generation, analyses arguments in favour of checks and balances and related constitutional provisions for holding power accountable to democratic control and ensuring, where applicable, that 152 Critical theory and sociological theory the exercise of power is subject to the control of citizens with the appropriate training. The book seeks to disentangle these arguments from those which, although they may also be expounded in the name of