Democratic Transition
Pertaining to the topic of Democratic Consolidation, Smith and Sells put great emphasis on the importance of elections. In chapter 7, they described the electoral system as the “hallmark of democracy”. I agree with the authors in regard to this…
Delegative Democracy, A Failure of Consolidation
Guillermo O’Donnell in his publication of “Delegative Democracy,” takes an alternative viewpoint as to why certain democracies fail to consolidate. While in previous readings the emphasis has been on the way transitions from authoritarian regimes to democracies have been handled, in…
Normality and Delegative Democracy
The readings for this week pose a very interesting variation to all the cases we have seen from the aftermaths of the transition. Even if the case is, as we saw during the last couple of weeks – that there…
Democratic Consolidation
O’Donnell and Schmitter describe that a transition is over when “abnormality” is no longer a central role in the political arena. Normality that the describe is where actors obey a set group of rules to govern. However, as they continued…
Are Political Parties Key to Democracy?
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-36028117 The reading by Juan Pablo Luna uses O’Donnell’s essays to form an argument that is quite intriguing for the reasoning behind Latin Americas lack of success. Luna uses O’Donnell’s ideas of a horizontal and vertical accountability. O’Donnell states that…
Latin American Democracy and You
After having read the articles for week seven regarding the emergence of democracy in Latin America, I can say with some certainty that I have not thought of the quality of democracy in terms of its trajectory. Being an American,…
Is Delegative Democracy Possible?
The article Delegative Democracy by Guillermo O’Donnell discusses the subset of democracies that aren’t quite representative, but are not authoritarian regimes dubbed delegative democracies. O’Donnell explains that these democracies are not consolidated (institutionalized), are not completely representative, yet are not…
Week #7 (Grades of Democracy)
Both accounts by O’Donnell highlight the fact that the development of democratic outlooks in the political systems of nations in Latin America has been associated with the development of different grades of democracy. There is no single theory that can…
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