American Democracy and Democracy Promotion

As America inaugurates its 43rd president it enters a period of reflection. The danger is that an emphasis on voting procedure will silence a long-standing and ultimately more significant criticism of American democracy and its policy of democracy promotion. The separation of economics from politics and the promotion of so-called 'market democracy' does a disservice to the wider democratic project and is potentially self-defeating. This article reviews three books to argue that America's declining international reputation can be traced to its own democratic shortcomings. It explores the possibility of a popular working-class movement to address these failings and examines the implication this may have on the liberal international order.
Books reviewed:
John B. Judis, Paradox Of American Democracy: Elites, Special Interests And The Betrayal Of Public Trust
Michael Zweig, The working class majority: America's best kept secret
Ruy Teixeira and Joel Rogers, America's forgotten majority: why the white working class still matters     

After-Hours Lessons in Democracy

Book reviewed:
Petra Goedde. GIs and Germans: Culture, Gender, and Foreign Relations , 1945 – 1949. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. xi + 280 pp. Index. $35 (hardcover).     

现代化进程中的民主与威权--对巴西1964年军事政变经济根源的个案研究

根据传统的西方现代化理论,欠发达社会的现代化进程中,经济发展与政治民主是同步发展、相互促进的。但20世纪60年代以来非西方国家的政治发展现实对这一观点提出了挑战。在巴西,经济现代化带来了威权主义,而非民主政治。其原因在于巴西的现代化模式进口替代工业化的发展过程中,必然出现通货膨胀和国际收支危机,经济的进一步发展要求首先实行经济紧缩,而经济上的紧缩则要求政治上的权威。巴西1964年的政变虽只是一个个案,但它表明,不能用西方现代化“和谐的”、“直线的”道路来分析第三世界国家的现代化。     

Australia in Asia

Anthony Milner (ed). Australia in Asia. Comparing Cultures. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Anthony Milner and Mary Quilty (eds). Australia in Asia. Communities of Thought. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Anthony Milner and Mary Quilty (eds). Australia in Asia. Episodes. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1998.     

Democracy and Disenchantment

The victory of democracy in its ideological battle with communism has coincided with widespread voter disaffection in established democracies and with the rapid emergence of disillusion in recently 'democratised' societies. These developments raise at least two more general problems concerning the democratic dream of a self-governing community. First, there is the problem of democratic deficit: the fact that democratic arrangements are invariably constrained by arrangements of a non-democratic kind. Second, there is the problem of corruption. While such problems arise for any form of politics they have a particular significance for regimes which claim to be democratic. Following the recent victories of democracy in much of the world, it is now more difficult to appeal to the remedy of a more inclusive political system. Those of you who come in with me now will get big pieces of pie. Those who come in with me later will get smaller pieces of pie. Those who dont come in at all will get-Good Government.1 (attributed to Huey Long, Governor of Louisiana)     

Democracy and Technology

Richard P. Hiskes, Democracy, Risk, and Community: Technological Harardr and the Evolution of Liberalism .
Sheila Jasanoff, Science at the Bar: Law, Science, and Technology in America .     

Democracy and Instrumentalism

The fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of state socialism, among other factors, has led to a renewed interest in a certain conception of democracy as a fundamental organising principle for political debate and decision-making. Yet there are good reasons to suppose that the concept of democracy is severely limited in the role it can play here. This article examines some of these limits. In the first section we summarise a number of arguments from the 'revivalist' democratic literature and the conception of democracy presented within it. In doing so, we identify a conception of democracy-a conception we refer to generically as 'the democratic ideal'-that is defined both in relation to certain structural features and also in terms of a set of progressivist and socially ameliorative ends to which that ideal is seen as being especially conducive. In this reason our interest is not in any one version of the democratic idealalthough we do take many contemporary forms of the ideal in question to combine two central strands-as in the promotion of that ideal as instrumental in furthering certain economic and social ends. In the second section we call this ideal into question through a discussion of some of the problems associated with democratic forms of governance. We conclude with a discussion of the way in which the appeal to the democratic ideal in political debate and decision-making may actually depend on ignoring or suppressing the very politics that it aims to address.