collected snippets of immediate importance...


Monday, May 2, 2011

tutu vanhanen, the process of democratization

(3-4): stress on 'objective environmental factors'--as power resources are better distributed, political structures likely to reflect this [makes sense--but an evolutionary model?!]

(40): Lipset hypothesis--more well-to-do (education, urbanization, etc.), more likely to sustain dem. Vanhanen saying, unlike Aristotle, Lipset forgets about condition of equality.

(41): moderately positive correlation between ec. development and dem. but causality is different story.

(42): Dahl mentioning that dispersal of means of violence/coercion necessary

(43): O'Donnel rebuttal to Lipset that modernization --> authoritarianism (but, of course, we've had redemocratization in the 80s, so this needs to be checked)

(44): Gastil and 'ideas' [hah]

(45): Linz and 'leaderhship's importance', parliamentarism/presidentialism, etc., etc.

(45): Huntington's several factors: (1) well-being; (2) absence of extreme inequalities; (3) pluralism;, w/ bourgoeisie; (4) market-oriented economy; (5): dem states?; (6): tolerant culture. but no testable hypothesis.

(45): Berg-Schlosser's agrarian structure--small-scale farming enables democratic structrues

(46): Diamond/Lipset/Linz offer no theory, just enumerate factors

(48): darwinian theory!?

(50-51): argument--concentration of power resources leads to autocratic structures [of course, all will depend on operationalization of 'power resources']. democracy is a compromise between competing groups of equal strength.

(52): the IPR

(56-57): imp-- concentrated landownership as barrier [see cited literature]. Vanhanen using 'family farms'

(61): a measure of economic centralization/decentralization -- means of production controlled by relatively independent groups (becomes public sector, foreign sector, concentrated private sector) [hmm]

(65): he gets his IPR by combining an IOD, IKD, and DER

(77-79); table of correlations, 1980 -- int. that many of the contradictory cases do become democracies, soon after

(88-92): account of changes through the 1980s, many of which support the general hypothesis here [clearly there is something to the claim, of course--but the question of specific causality is much murkier than he wants to make it seem]

(92): Pakistan contravenes hypothesis, not ready to be dem by IPR calc

(109): against ethnic cleavages/homogeneity as a meaningful variable












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