Democratization

trend towards democratic norms in a society

Democratization is the transition to a more democratic political regime. It may be the transition from an authoritarian regime to a full democracy, a transition from an authoritarian political system to a semi-democracy or transition from a semi-authoritarian political system to a democratic political system.

The democratic process in governing a country is not necessarily enhanced by democratizing subsidiary parts of the process.
- Robert A. Dahl, 1970.
CONTENT : A - F , G - L , M - R , S - Z , See also , External links

Quotes edit

Quotes are arranged alphabetically by author

A - F edit

  • That democratization has never closely approached its theoretical limits, either in the government of the state or in the government of other institutions, is revealed in the three great historical movement toward democratizing the state.
  • The democratic process in governing a country is not necessarily enhanced by democratizing subsidiary parts of the process.
  • Even in a democratic country, it appears, nondemocratic forms of authority might sometimes be tolerable, perhaps actually desirable
  • “Behold the beautiful land which the Lord thy God hath given thee.” Behold the land, the rich and resourceful land, from which for a hundred years its best elements have been running away, its youth and hope, black and white, scurrying North because they are afraid of each other, and dare not face a future of equal, independent, upstanding human beings, in a real and not a sham democracy. To rescue this land, in this way, calls for the Great Sacrifice. This is the thing that you are called upon to do because it is the right thing to do. Because you are embarked upon a great and holy crusade, the emancipation of mankind, black and white; the upbuilding of democracy; the breaking down, particularly here in the South, of forces of evil represented by race prejudice in South Carolina; by lynching in Georgia; by disfranchisement in Mississippi; by ignorance in Louisiana and by all these and monopoly of wealth in the whole South. There could be no more splendid vocation beckoning to the youth of the twentieth century, after the flat failures of white civilization, after the flamboyant establishment of an industrial system which creates poverty and the children of poverty which are ignorance and disease and crime; after the crazy boasting of a white culture that finally ended in wars which ruined civilization in the whole world; in the midst of allied peoples who have yelled about democracy and never practiced it either in the British Empire or in the American Commonwealth or in South Carolina.
  • Can the international monetary history of the second half of the twentieth century be understood as the further unfolding of Polanyian dynamics, in which democratization again came into conflict with economic liberalization in the form of free capital mobility and fixed exchange rates? Or do recent trends toward floating rates and monetary unification point to ways of reconciling freedom and stability in the two domains?
  • A third innovation followed: the globalization of democratization. By one count, the number of democracies quintupled during the last half of the 20th century, something that would not have been expected at the end of the first half. The circumstances that made the Cold War a democratic age remain difficult to sort out, even now. The absence of great depressions and great wars had something to do with it: the 1930s and early 1940s showed how fragile democracies could be when they were present. Policy choices also helped: promoting democracy became the most visible way that the Americans and their Western European allies could differentiate themselves from their Marxist-Leninist rivals. Education too played a role: levels of literacy and years spent in school increased almost everywhere during the Cold War, and although educated societies are not always democratic societies—Hitler's Germany revealed that—it does appear that as people become more knowledgeable about themselves and the world around them, they also become less willing to have others tell them how to run their lives.
  • Talked at lunch with a gentleman just returned from Japan, who told me some disturbing things about the influences behind our policies of extreme democratization and de-concentration of economic life in Japan.
    Of all the failures of United States policy in the wake of World War II, history will rate as the most grievous our failure to approach realistically the responsibilities of power over the defeated nations which we ourselves courted by the policy of unconditional surrender.

G - L edit

  • Liberalization and democratization are in essence counter-revolution.
    • Andrei Grechko Quoted in "Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse" - Page 58 - by Stephen Kotkin - History - 2001
  • The influx of thousands of new amateurs at the close of the nineteenth century and the accompanying expansion of amateur clubs, societies and organizations, produced great unrest among amateur writers and spokesmen. Between 1890 and 1910, manifestos, critiques, rebuttals and arguments dominated society meetings and filled the pages of photography journals. What were the proper goals of photographic practice? What should its standards be? The democratization of photography presented a challenge to previous notions about practice, decorum, aesthetics and appropriate subject matter. A deepening tension grew between an amateur establishment intent on promoting photography as a serious art form and the waves of newcomers who seemed to threaten that legitimization.
    • Griffin (1987, 122) as cited in: Jay Ruby (1999). The world of Francis Cooper. p. 75
  • I’m looking for people to help connect me to more fans, because I believe fans will leave a tip based on the enjoyment and service I provide. I’m not scared of them getting a preview. It really is going to be a global village where a billion people have access to one artist and a billion people can leave a tip if they want to. It’s a radical democratization. Every artist has access to every fan and every fan has access to every artist, and the people who direct fans to those artists. People that give advice and technical value are the people we need. People crowding the distribution pipe and trying to ignore fans and artists have no value. This is a perfect system.
    • Courtney Love From "Courtney Love does the math", a speech given on the corruption of the music industry, from Salon.com (June 14, 2000)

M - R edit

  • The question concerning the role of the state in preserving territorial integrity is raised by the recent events in the former Soviet Union and former Yugoslavia: why do some multinational states survive the collapse of the authoritarian regime while others do not? Except in Spain, democratization occurred until recently in countries where the integrity of the state was not problematic. The breakup of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia raises a new set of issues because there democratization unleashed movements for national independence; indeed, for some political forces, democratization is synonymous with national self-determination and the breakdown of the multinational state that was maintained by authoritarian rule. Under such conditions, Hobbes's first problem - how to avoid being killed by others - is logically and historically prior to his second problem - how to prevent people within the same community from killing one another.
  • Democratization of commerce is based on everyone having the right to exercise their roles as micro consumers, micro producers, micro entrepreneurs, micro investors, and micro innovators. Access to information removes the first impediment to building this brave, new world. Information asymmetry has always been at the heart of poverty.
    • C.K. Prahalad, (2009) The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Revised and Updated 5th Anniversary Edition: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits. p. 22
  • In Mannheim’s post-Enlightenment, post-Romantic conception of democratization, social machinery that is maximally emancipatory, both over time and at any given historical moment, comes into being in a sustainable way only in a permanently revolutionary situation. That situation is one in which groups negotiate for power in a manner that continuously brings new leadership into positions for influencing or making choices for the community. The political process that Mannheim advocates in response to Fascism admits and institutionalizes the need for perpetual instability and uncertainty in order to make freedom possible; without uncertainty, or what Iser calls indeterminacy, is no freedom. Mannheim's political process is a democratized version of Trotsky's idea of "permanent revolution"…

S - Z edit

See also edit

External links edit

 
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