Democracy Paradox

Let us get past the surface level topics which Continental Divide revolves. It is easy to become distracted in Lipset’s depiction of Canada and America. He recognized both societies had undergone dramatic change throughout the twentieth century that transformed their political images. The book is now thirty years old. It’s almost as old as I…

As populism and polarization have become part of the common vocabulary of political writings, their meaning has become less provocative. There is a general acceptance of its existence which no longer shocks the senses. But anti-system retains a powerful emotive force for the political scientist. It catches the reader off guard and gains their immediate…

The line between political science and philosophy is not always clear. Sometimes I find I pretend I am a political philosopher, while other times I imagine I am a political scientist. Political theory is perhaps a delicate balance between the two. And yet there are some who focus more on philosophy and others who rely…

Robert Dahl is the great theorist of democracy. Late in his career he wrote about the intellectual challenges to democracy. Among these critiques, the most significant was what he described as Guardianship. Plato’s Republic gave the leadership of the state to a group who was chosen through their innate talent for an education designed to…

American exceptionalism was never simply about the culture of the American people. It places a fundamental focus on American institutions and a faith in the American political process. Indeed, Tocqueville recognized in the nineteenth century the importance of the political system in shaping a peculiar and unique American culture. It is not culture which defines…

There is no more important work in comparative politics in the last ten years than Competitive Authoritarianism. Its ideas completely disrupted conceptual expectations about democracy. Some of the intellectual currents existed before its publication. Indeed, Levitsky and Way had published an article which outlined their ideas as early as 2002 in the Journal of Democracy.…

Schumpeter never intended to offer a landmark definition of democracy. It was an accident of fortune. In the preface to the first edition he admits, “The problem of democracy forced its way into the place it now occupies in this volume because it proved impossible to state my views on the relation between the socialist…

It is impossible to study the subject of democracy without coming across Huntington’s Third Wave. It is a landmark study of democratization. Moreover, it has a scholarly thoroughness which is rarely matched. Every author has a distinctive style. Dahl has an awkward optimism. Fukuyama has a teacher’s approach where he tries to bring complex subjects…

Let me begin with an introduction of Duncan McCargo. It is easy to simply describe him as a scholar of Thai politics. But this description leaves out so much. In some ways he is an ethnographer who prides himself on field work where he examines the politics, institutions and reactions in a direct and personal…

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA The end of the Cold War marked the clear end of a political era. As the Second World War ended, it became evident there was a tension between the American and Soviet world views. The collapse of the Soviet Union represented a clear victory for the American perspective. Democracy and capitalism became…