Review: The Construction of Democracy
| Date | 01 June 2009 |
| DOI | 10.1177/002070200906400219 |
| Author | Jeffrey Kopstein |
| Published date | 01 June 2009 |
| Subject Matter | Review |
| Reviews |
| 592 | Spring 2009 | International Journal |
THE CONSTRUCTION OF DEMOCRACY
Lessons from Practice and Research
Jorge Domínguez and Anthony Jones, editors
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. 272 pp, US $50.00 cloth
(ISBN 978-0801885952)
This book draws together papers and smaller contributions to a conference
on democratic consolidation held in Madrid in the fall of 2001, several weeks
after the terrorist attacks of 11 September. The editors of the volume note that
the event was “planned long before those terrible events” and so “the
organizers of the conference went ahead as scheduled, in part to affirm the
value of constitutional democracy as it faced yet another dramatic peril” (5).
The meeting was a combination of an academic conference of p rofessors
and political summit of former presidents and prime ministers of countries
that had moved away from authoritarianism since the 1970s. After the
meeting, several of the political leaders organized the “club of Madrid,” an
NGO devoted to “strengthening democracy around the world.” Madrid itself
became the site of the next major terrorist attack, on 11 March 2004, and it
is understandable that with so much world historical substance on the line,
the club decided to commemorate the event by sponsoring a volume.
I mention the background to the book because it is important for
understanding its otherwise unconventional structure. Eight solid chapters
written by academics in the idiom of political science are followed by six
much shorter commentaries by former and sitting presidents, prime
ministers, and members of government from Latin America, Europe, and
India. The academic chapters are useful summarizes about what we know
about various aspects of democracy-building and democratic consolidation.
Some take on the voice o f advic e to the prince but most have a deep
appreciation for the gap between comparative politics as a vocation and the
real world of political judgment.
In a thoughtful contribution on public participation in new democracies,
Grzegorz Ekiert and Anna Grzymala-Busse discuss the kinds of dilemmas
involved in constructing a robust pluralism. For example, research has
shown that a highly mobilized and active civil society can be used to
consolidate and to destabilize democracies. In Poland, contentious politics
contributed to speedy economic reform and democratic accountability when
the parliamentary and party institutions were still relatively weak. Whether
popular mobilization and participation is good or bad for democracy depends
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