Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Good question; interesting answers

The Monkey Cage was a blog started by a friend and his colleagues who wanted to give a public voice to analysis by political scientists. The blog has been adopted by The Washington Post.

This post is by Diego Von Vacano, a professor of political theory at Texas A&M.

Is democracy a Western idea?

In the last few months, events in Turkey, Egypt, Brazil and North Korea have strained many people’s faith in democracy. Corruption scandals surrounding Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan; the banning of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt; mass street protests in Brazil over expensive World Cup soccer stadia; and the apparent consolidation of the ruthless dictatorship of Kim Jong Un make us ask whether democracy, and especially liberal democracy, is simply a Western value that cannot take root in other cultures.

Democracy is about free institutions and elections. At the same time, it entails values and normative claims, which are the focus of political theory. A nascent field within this area of political science, called comparative political theory, aims to see what (if anything) we can learn about politics from intellectual traditions outside the West. New research in this field… discussed whether central democratic values — such as equality, freedom, representation and religious toleration — have a strong enough presence in the history of political ideas of these regions to provide for the autochthonous growth of democracy. What do their findings tell us?

In Middle Eastern and specifically Islamic thought, there is ground for optimism, despite the deep tensions that exist in a tradition where one particular religion plays a cardinal role in public life…

Andrew March explored the tensions between accounts of divine and popular sovereignty in Islamic thought. In some senses, divine and popular sovereignty co-exist but remain distinct. Popular sovereignty is authorized concretely and discretely by God’s law, or steps in where God’s sovereignty appears silent and inert…

In the field of Chinese political thought, Confucian ideas play a central role. Here, the findings of Sor-Hoon Tan and Leigh Jenco paint a complicated image. Tan argued that among the reasons that many people believe Confucianism is incompatible with democracy is the view that Confucianism supports social hierarchy and rejects the value of equality that is central to theories of democracy…

For Peter Rutland, the failure of democracy in Russia can be attributed to many causes, including the lack of experience with democratic institutions, the economic collapse of the 1990s (which discredited the new political system) and the oil curse…

Maintaining that flexibility and responsiveness also demands that a democratic government be aware of the unpredictable preferences of individuals in the community and respond to them rather than purge those behavior as is often the case in many African states like Egypt, Libya, Somalia and DRC. For Lawrence Hamilton, African freedom can only be possible if basic needs are met and actual political representation exists…

The consolidation of democratic rule in Latin America has inaugurated a lively debate about the nature and potentials of democracy. For Enrique Peruzzotti, two contrasting views dominate the debate: a liberal/republican understanding of representative government and the advocates of populism as radical democracy…

The prospects for democracy, at home and abroad, seem mixed. The conference showed us that many of the problems of democratization in the developing world are also with us in the U.S. It also presented the reality that, for the Middle East, Islam plays a largely hegemonic role in the public sphere, which may contradict some key elements of a liberal kind of democracy…

Democracy seems to be an idea that is found not just inside the “West” (a contested term in itself), but its road to success is littered with obstacles.