Differentiating the democratic performance of the West
Differentiating the democratic performance of the West
复制标题
区分西方的民主表现
DOI：
10.1111/1475-6765.00085
复制
发表时间：
2003
影响因子：
5.3
通讯作者：
R. Krznaric
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
J. Foweraker;R. Krznaric
.西方老牌民主国家的民主表现与地球仪上其他民主国家相比，既一致又上级，这是比较政治学的一个老生常谈。这种老生常谈既反映又强化了民主的主流措施，如自由之家或政体三，这些措施未能区分西方的民主表现。本文通过部署新构建的自由民主绩效数据库中包含的民主绩效指标来研究这一常见问题，并使用描述性统计（均值和方差）来比较个别西方民主国家的绩效，以及西方整体与“其他”。该数据库的设计是为了比主流措施更广泛地反映业绩的规范范围，并表明西方的业绩在各方面既不统一，也不上级，特别是在公民权利和少数民族权利方面。这些调查结果得到了探索和证实的比较案例研究的少数群体在刑事司法系统的西方民主国家往往表现最差的这方面。最后，我们认为这些发现可能会开始改变我们对经济增长与民主、政治文化与民主、甚至宪政设计与民主之间关系的看法。
. It is a commonplace of comparative politics that the democratic performance of the established democracies of the West is both uniform and superior to that of other democracies across the globe. This commonplace both reflects and reinforces the mainstream measures of democracy, like those of Freedom House or Polity III, that fail to differentiate the democratic performance of the West. This article examines this commonplace by deploying the measures of democratic performance contained in the newly constructed Database of Liberal Democratic Performance, and uses descriptive statistics (means and variance) to compare the performance of individual Western democracies, as well as the West overall with the ‘rest’. The Database is designed to capture a wider normative range of performance than the mainstream measures, and shows that the performance of the West is neither uniform nor superior in every respect, especially with regard to civil and minority rights. These findings are explored and confirmed by comparative case studies of minorities in the criminal justice systems of those Western democracies that tend to perform worst in this respect. In conclusion, it is suggested that the findings may begin to change the way we view the relationships between economic growth and democracy, political culture and democracy, and even constitutional design and democracy.