Abstract
Considering the transformation of political systems globally, it is not surprising that scholars have attempted to explicate and predict the causes, processes, and consequences of the global democratization trend. Experts have produced an impressive amount of scholarly work on various aspects of democratic transition and consolidation, ranging from elite strategies, socioeconomic structure, institutional design, and political culture to constitutional arrangements, presidential and parliamentary systems, electoral and party systems, civil—military relations, ethnic and regional cleavages, and international factors.1
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Notes
For examples, see Guillermo O’Donnell, Philippe Schmitter and Laurence Whitehead, eds., Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Prospects for Democracy (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986);
Alfred Stepan, Rethinking Military Politics: Brazil and the Southern Cone (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988);
Larry Diamond, Juan J. Linz and Seymour M. Lipset, eds., Democracy in Developing Countries: Comparing Experiences with Democracy (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1995);
Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens and John D. Stephens, Capitalist Development and Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992);
Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991);
John Higley and Richard Gunther, Elites and Democratic Consolidation in Latin America and Southern Europe (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992);
Scott Mainwaring, Guillermo O’Donnell and J. Samuel Valenzuela, eds., Issues in Democratic Consolidation: The New South American Democracies in Comparative Perspective (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992);
Larry Diamond and Marc F. Plattner, eds., The Global Resurgence of Democracy (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1993);
Richard Gunther, Politics of Democratic Consolidation (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). For a review of these works, see
Gerardo L. Munck, “Democratic Transitions in Comparative Perspective,” Comparative Politics 26 (1994): 355–75.
Guillermo O’Donnell, “The Perpetual Crises of Democracy,” Journal of Democracy 18, no. 1 (January 2007): 8–9.
W. B. Gallie, “Essentially Contested Concepts,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (Blackwell Publishing 1955): 167–98.
Laurence Whitehead, quoted in Larbi Sadiki, Rethinking Arab Democratization: Elections without Democracy (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 2.
Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper, 1947). Other scholars, most notably Adam Przeworski and his collaborators (Alvarez et al. 1996; Przeworski et al. 2000), have also maintained a more minimalist definition that centers on contested elections and electoral turnover.
Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 4. For further discussion about democracy’s definition, see
Philippe C. Schmitter and Terry Lynn Karl, “What Democracy Is . . . and Is Not,” Journal of Democracy 2, no. 3 (Summer 1991): 75–89;
Larry Diamond, Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 7–15. Also see
Samuel P. Huntington, “The Modest Meaning of Democracy,” in Democracy in the Americas: Stopping the Pendulum, ed. Robert Pastor (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1989);
Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 5–13;
David Collier and Steven Levitsky, “Democracy with Adjectives: Conceptual Innovation in Comparative Research,” World Politics 49, no. 3 (April 1997): 430–51;
Scott Mainwaring, Daniel Brinks and Aníbal Pérez Liñan, “Classifying Political Regimes in Latin America, 1945–1999,” Studies in Comparative International Development 36, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 37–65.
The most articulate assessment of this view comes from Nader Hashemi, Islam, Secularism, and Liberal Democracy: Towards a Democratic Theory for Muslim Societies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
Huntington, The Third Wave. For a theoretical assessment of democratization, see Laurence Whitehead, Democratization: Theory and Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
Huntington, The Third Wave, 21–6; Larry Diamond, “The Globalization of Democracy,” in Global Transformation and the Third World, ed. Robert Slater, Barry Schultz and Steven Doerr (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1993), 32–8;
Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Higley and Gunther, Elites and Democratic Consolidation; Mainwaring, O’Donnell and Valenzuela, eds., Issues in Democratic Consolidation;
Larry Diamond and Marc F. Plattner, Democratization in Africa: Progress and Retreat (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010);
Michael Bratton and Nicholas van de Walle, Democratic Experiments in Africa: Regime Transitions in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
For useful typologies of transition from authoritarianism, see Scott Mainwaring, Transitions to Democracy and Democratic Consolidation: Theoretical and Comparative Issues, Working Paper #130 (Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies, University of Notre Dame: 1989);
Terry Karl, “Dilemmas of Democratization in Latin America,” Comparative Politics 23 (1990): 1–21;
Terry Karl and Philippe Schmitter, “Democratization around the Globe: Its Opportunities and Risks,” in World Security: Trends and Challenges at Century’s End, ed. Michael T. Klare and Dan Thomas (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993).
Francis Fukuyama, End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 2006).
Andreas Schedler, Electoral Authoritarianism: The Dynamics of Unfree Competition (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2006), 3–7.
Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, eds., The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Crisis, Breakdown, and Reequilibration (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1978).
Thomas Carothers, “The End of the Transition Paradigm,” Journal of Democracy 13, no. 1 (January 2002): 5–21.
Daniel Brumberg, “The Trap of Liberalized Autocracy,” Journal of Democracy 13, no. 4 (2002): 56–68.
Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2003).
For a discussion of hybrid regimes, see Terry Lynn Karl, “The Hybrid Regimes of Central America,” Journal of Democracy 6, no. 3 (July 1995): 72–87; Collier and Levitsky, “Democracy with Adjectives,” 430–51;
Andreas Schedler, “Elections Without Democracy: The Menu of Manipulation,” Journal of Democracy 13, no. 2 (April 2002): 36–50;
Andreas Schedler, “The Nested Game of Democratization by Elections,” International Political Science Review 23, no. 1 (2002): 103–122; Schedler, Electoral Authoritarianism;
Nicolas van de Walle, “Elections Without Democracy: Africa’s Range of Regimes,” Journal of Democracy 13, no. 2 (April 2002): 66–80. Also see
Larry Diamond, “Thinking about Hybrid Regimes,” Journal of Democracy 13, no. 2 (April 2002), 21–35;
Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, “The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism,” Journal of Democracy 13, no. 2 (April 2002), 51–65;
Marina Ottaway, Democracy Challenged: The Rise of Semi-Authoritarianism (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2003).
Amr Hamzawy, “The Key to Arab Reform: Moderate Islamists,” in Policy Brief 40 (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2005), 4.
David Epstein, Robert Bates, Jack Goldstone, Ida Kristensen and Sharyn O’Halloran, “Democratic Transitions,” American Journal of Political Science 50, no. 3 (July 2006): 551–69.
Recent example of normative work is M. A. Muqtedar Khan, ed. Islamic Democratic Discourse: Theory, Debates, and Philosophical Perspectives (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006);
Abdelwahab El-Affendi, Who Needs an Islamic State? (London, Malaysia Think Tank, 2008);
Abdelwahab A. El-Affendi, “The Islamism Debate Revisited: In Search of ‘Islamist democrats,’” in Europe, the USA, and Political Islam: Strategies for Engagement, ed. Michelle Pace (London: Palgrave, 2010), 125–38;
Abdelwahab A. El-Affendi, “The Modern Debate(s) on Islam and Democracy,” in Islam and Democracy in Malaysia: Findings from a National Dialogue, ed. Ibrahim Zein (Kuala Lumpur: International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilization, 2010), 3–68;
Abdelwahab A. El-Affendi, “On the State, Democracy, and Pluralism,” in Islamic Thought in the Twentieth Century, ed. Suha Taji-Farouki and Basheer M. Nafi (London: I.B. Taurus, 2004), 172–94;
Abdelwahab A. El-Affendi, David Beetham and Neil Walker, “Democracy and the Islamist Paradox,” in Understanding Democratic Politics: An Introduction, ed. Ronald Axtmann (London: Sage, 2003), 311–20;
Abdelwahab A. El-Affendi, “The Elusive Reformation,” in Islam and Democracy in the Middle East, ed. Larry Diamond, Marc F. Plattner and Daniel Brumberg (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 252–7.
The conceptual debate about democracy in the Middle East is nicely outlined in Ghassan Salame’s Democracy without Democrats?: The Renewal of Politics in the Muslim World (London: I.B. Taurus, 1994). His survey of the region takes a nuanced look at the problems of democratization and links them to the social changes of the last three decades. A contrasting theoretical perspective is provided in Rex Brynen, Bahgat Korany and Paul Noble, Political Liberalization and Democratization in the Arab World (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1995). Also see
Muhammad Muslih and Augustus Richard Norton, “The Need for Arab Democracy,” Foreign Policy 83 (Summer 1991);
Dale Eickelman and James Piscatori, Muslim Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). A most significant contribution is
Richard Norton, ed., Civil Society in the Middle East, 2 vol. (New York: E. J. Brill, 1995). The work’s primary task is to define “civil society” in that particular context so that the extent of its usefulness (descriptively rather than merely prescriptively) can be established in each country. In terms of specific case studies, the most notable are
Sheila Carapico, Civil Society in Yemen (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998) and
Denis Sullivan, Private Voluntary Organizations in Egypt: Islamic Development, Private Initiative, and State Control (Gainsville: Florida University Press, 1994). Carapico refutes the argument that Muslims cannot be civil and encourages a dynamic rather than static view of how people organize their social lives. Sullivan examines the relationship between charitable associations and the Egyptian government by analyzing whether these associations support or threaten the current regime’s underlying legitimacy.
Iftikhar Malik, State and Civil Society in Pakistan (London: MacMillan Press, 1997);
Eva Bellen, “Civil Society in Formation: Tunisia,” in Civil Society in the Middle East, ed. Augustus Richard Norton (New York: E. J. Brill, 1995), 120.
Jillian Schwedler ed., Towards Civil Society in the Middle East? (Boulder: Lynne Reinner, 1995).
Robert W. Hefner, ed., Shari’a Politics: Islamic Law and Society in the Modern World (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2011), 4.
Azzam S. Tamimi, Rachid Ghannouchi: A Democrat within Islamism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
For further reading on this view, see Abdolkarim Soroush, Reason, Freedom, and Democracy in Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
Bernard Lewis, “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” Atlantic 266 (September 1990): 47–54, 56, 59, 60;
Bernard Lewis, “Islam and Liberal Democracy,” Atlantic 271 (February 1993): 89–94;
Elie Kedourie, Democracy and Arab Political Culture (Washington, DC: Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy, 1992);
Martin Kramer, “Islam vs. Democracy,” Commentary 95, no. 1 (January 1993): 35–42.
Irfan Ahmad, Islamism and Democracy in India: The Transformation of Jamaat-e-Islami (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 11.
Humeira Iqtidar, Secularizing Islamists? Jama’at-e-Islami and Jama’at-ud-Da’wa in Urban Pakistan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 13.
Ernest Gellner, Muslim Society (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981);
Ernest Gellner, “Islam and Marxism: Some Comparisons,” International Affairs 67, no. 1 (1991): 1–6;
Ernest Gellner, Postmodernism, Reason and Religion (London: Routledge, 1992);
Ernest Gellner, Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and Its Rivals (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1994). Referenced in Ahmad, Islamism and Democracy in India 11.
Sayyid Qutb, Ma’alim fi’l-Tariq (Cairo: Kazi Publications, 1964). Also see
Sayyid Qutb, Social Justice in Islam (Oneonta, NY: Islamic Publications International, 1953).
While Qutb is often cited as a prime example of an antidemocratic Islamist thinker, Taqi al-Deen al-Nabhani (founder of Hizb al-Tahrir), Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi (a contemporary Jordanian Salafist-jihadist theoretician), and others have detailed why they reject democracy. Furthermore, Qutb’s ideas on divine sovereignty were influenced by such South Asian Islamist thinkers as Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi and, to a lesser extent, Abul Hasan Ali Nadwi. See Barbara Zollner, The Muslim Brotherhood: Hasan al-Hudaybi and Ideology (London: Routledge, 2008). It should be noted that Maududi eventually went from supporting theo-democracy to embracing democracy, especially since he signed off on the 1973 Pakistani constitution, crafted by a secular democratic government, as being in line with Islamic precepts.
Iqtidar, Secularizing Islamists?. Also see Ellen Lust-Okar and Amaney A. Jamal, “Rulers and Rules: Reassessing the Influence of Regime Type on Electoral Law Formation,” Comparative Political Studies 35, no. 3 (April 2002): 336–66.
Giacomo Luciani, “The Oil Rent, the Fiscal Crisis of the State and Democratization,” in Democracy without Democrats? The Renewal of Politics in the Muslim World, ed. Ghassan Salamé (London: I.B. Tauris, 1994), 130–55; Also see
Giacomo Luciani, “Allocation vs. Production States: A Theoretical Framework,” in The Arab State, ed. Giacomo Luciani (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 65–84;
Giacomo Luciani, “Economic Foundations of Democracy and Authoritarianism: The Arab World in Comparative Perspective,” Arab Studies Quarterly 10, no. 4 (1988): 457–75.
Christian Welzel, “Theories of Democratization,” in Democratization, ed. Christian W. Haerpfer, Patrick Bernhagen, Ronald F. Inglehart and Christian Welzel (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009), 80.
For further elaboration, see, Elie Kedourie, Democracy and Arab Political Culture (Washington, DC: Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy, 1992); Lewis, “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” 47–54, 56, 59, 60 and Lewis, “Islam and Liberal Democracy,” 89–94;
Martin Kramer, “Islam vs. Democracy,” Commentary 95, no. 1 (January 1993): 35–42.
Much of the discussion on democracy and democratization was informed by the analysis on secularism in relation to the west in Iqtidar, Humeira. 2011. Secualrising Islamists? Jama’at-e-Islami and Jama’at-ud-Dawa in Urban Pakistan. University of Chicago Press, pp.12–17. For further elaboration on Ghannouchi’s understanding of democracy within the Muslim context see Tamimi, Azzam. 2001. Rachid Ghannouchi: A Democrat Within Islamism. Oxford University Press.
Abdolkarim Soroush, Reason, Freedom, and Democracy in Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
Saba Mahmood, “Is Liberalism Islam’s Only Answer?” in Islam and the Challenge of Democracy, ed. Khaled Abou El Fadl (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
Graham Fuller, “Islamists and Democracy,” in Uncharted Journey: Promoting Democracy in the Middle East, ed. Thomas Carothers and Marina Ottaway (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Democracy, 2005).
Robert W. Hefner, ed., Remaking Muslim Politics: Pluralism, Contestation, Democratization (Princeton, NJ and Oxford, UK: Princeton University Press, 2005), 26.
For a detailed discussion please see Louay Safi, “Islam and the Secular State: Explicating the Universal in Formative Islamic Political Norms” (paper delivered at the 2nd annual conference of the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy, Washington, DC: 2001).
Stepan’s “Twin Toleration” model gives due credit to religion’s role in a democracy. Alfred Stepan, “The Multiple Secularisms of Modern Democracies and Autocracies,” in Rethinking Secularism, ed. Craig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
As referenced in Hefner, ed., Shari’a Politics, 4; John L. Esposito and Dalia Mogahed, Who Speaks for Islam: What a Billion Muslims Really Think (New York: Gallup Press, 2007);
Moatazz A. Fattah, Democratic Values in the Muslim World (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2006);
Riaz Hassan, Faithlines: Muslim Conceptions of Islam and Society (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2002); Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press).
Emmanuel Sivan, Radical Islam: Medieval Theology and Modern Politics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985).
Eberhard Kienle, “More Than a Response to Islamism: The Political Deliberalization of Egypt in the 1990s,” Middle East Journal 52, no. 2 (Spring 1998): 227.
International Crisis Group interview, Deputy General Guide Muhammad Habib, Cairo, March 2008. “Islamism in North Africa II: Egypt’s Opportunity,” Crisis Group Middle East/North Africa Briefing 13 (April 20, 2004).
Observer, January 19, 1992; John Esposito and John Voll, Islam and Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). For further reading on Ghannoushi’s thoughts, see Tamimi, Rachid Ghannouchi.
Ellen Lust-Okar, “Elections under Authoritarianism: Preliminary Lessons from Jordan,” Democratization 13, no. 3 (June 2006): 459.
Larbi Sadiki, “Bin Ali’s Tunisia: Democracy by Non-Democratic Means,” British Journal of Middle East Studies 29, 1 (2002): 57–78. Also see
Mark Gasiorowski “The Failure of Reform in Tunisia,” Journal of Democracy 3, no. 4 (1992): 85–97.
Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age: 1798–1939 (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
Nathan Brown, Amr Hamzawy, and Marina Ottawa, Islamist Movements and the Democratic Process in the Arab World: Exploring the Gray Zones (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2006), 5–6.
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© 2013 Kamran Bokhari and Farid Senzai
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Bokhari, K., Senzai, F. (2013). Theoretical Framework: Democratization and Islamism. In: Political Islam in the Age of Democratization. Middle East Today. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137313492_3
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