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The current situation in Libya has the power to make me doubt about the human capacity of learning from previous errors. The “responsibility to protect” is emerging in the world of international relations but when the time comes to take action, hesitation wins and thousands of people pay the price.

I cannot recall when the debate about a “no-fly” zone started, but probably very quickly after the repression itself, however no decision has been taken yet. I thought that events like Rwanda would have made things change but it seems like not. As mentioned by this article,  it is not event clear if a no-fly zone is the solution and it might clearly be insufficient but it looks like countries took it as a pretext to debate endlessly. People are being killed on the ground.

Because of abuses of “humanitarian interventions” or fights for democracy that have made big breaches of sovereignty and let western powers appears as imperialist like in Iraq, when the international community really needs to take urgent action to prevent a potential genocide, nobody or almost nobody wants to take the risk of the initiative.

I feel sorry for the people who believed that we supported democracy no matter the price. I know that it’s hard to have clear rules of what to do when something like that happens but I always feel that when people are getting killed there is no time to go over discussion of principles.

Erik Gartzke makes the claim that capitalism leads to peace. I must admit that it’s hard for me to accept the evidence made by his research. I feel that I do not understand enough the measurement issues to discuss its validity. I do not really understand how he differentiate properly democracy and capitalism. Do we have cases of democracies that are not capitalists and that went to war with each other?

What about the fact that conflicts are not always between two states? What if capitalism raised inequalities inside a country and lead to more domestic conflicts?

I think that it is hard for me to accept that the quest for profit is behind peace, but it’s just maybe because I am a very idealistic person who believes too much in moral principles. Furthermore, I tend to adopt the constructivist point of view which says that moral norms matters in world politics and that it could also be a factor that leads to peace.

Concerning Oneal and Russett I don’t really know what to get from their article as it confirms so many different claims: “Democracy, economic interdependence, and involvement in international organizations reduce the incidence of militarized interstate disputes” (34). But then, “realist influences also reduced the likelihood of disputes” (35). So what? I am a little bit skeptical because it is a combination of different factors and it is hard to distinguish what really matters. But maybe this complex combination is closer to reality. My view would be that it seems very difficult to identify only one reason why countries don’t fight each other.

However, I feel I need more explanations about those articles before discussing them in depth. Maybe after next class things will be more clear!

If it’s true that Egypt pulled off a so-called Facebook revolution, then the nation is about to confront a status change in its relationship with democracy: “It’s complicated.” Very.

As soon as I read the introduction I loved the article. It expresses essential questions about the process of democratization. Are the 40 million people ready to vote in the referendum ? Should a new constitution be written instead of trying to improve the old one? What are the electoral rules that underlie those amendments and who are they in favor of?

This brings the important question of where to start during the transition process to actually build democratic structures. I guess the people are not ready, but when will they be when they never experienced democracy in their whole life? Who is legitimate to write the amendments when there is no officially elected authority to do so yet?

It is not surprising that the “relationship status” of egypt with democracy is very complicated when we think about how long it took to “older” democracies to become ones! As mentioned in the readings this week, everyone needs to learn how to behave in a democracy. The people need to understand how to vote because voting is not only a matter of checking a box. People need to be aware that their voice is worth something. Politicians need to learn how to discuss and make compromises. However, as mentioned at the end of the article, the process is going to be even more complicated by the fact that 22% of the population is still illiterate. It seems like so much needs to be done at the same time. Education is definitely a necessary basis for democracy.

Good luck Egypt.

“We do not know whether democracy fosters or hiders economic growth”. That’s the conclusion of Przeworski and Limongi when assessing if democracy has an impact on economic growth. I recognize that falsifying an assertion equals getting closer to the truth, however it is somewhat frustrating to only know that we don’t know.

However, in that case, their article and observation is a stepping stone on which authors like Gerring, Bond, Barndt and Moreno (GBBM) could draw to assess this relationship further. In fact, it is a revolution  to doubt about the fact that democracy fosters economic growth.(I don’t know if they were the first to call it into question). Therefore, it seems essential before digging deeper into the question to let this doubt emerge and to justify it.

GBBM offer a new concept to think about this relationship in a statistically significant way. The concept of democratic stock, which measures  a “country’s accumulated stock of democracy rather than its level of democracy at a particular moment in time” (325). Their hypothesis is that “the longer a country remains democratic, the greater will be its physical, human, social and political capital- and the better its growth performance” (325). There are numerous assumptions and I will not discuss all of them, but I will focus on two aspects, one positive and one negative about their theory.

First, despite the difficulties to measure it I found extremely relevant the addition of the concept of “political capital”. This concept, divided in two dimensions – learning and institutionalization- is essential in my opinion to understand the consolidation of democracy. In fact, when studying political sociology back in Switzerland I have bee taught that democracy is not only a an electoral regime but also a set of practical know-hows that need to be learned by both the population and the politicians. If people don’t know how to make their voice be heard by those who are supposed to represent them it is unlikely that their interests will be taken into account. Furthermore, as GBBM argue “economic voting appears only as the electorate develops trust in new institutions and begins to treat elected politicians as guardians of the economy” (332). Those processes take time and argue in favor of a concept of democracy that makes a difference between old and newly established democracies.

However, one thing I would like to question is the usefulness of the results. Once we understood that it might take time for a democracy to foster economic growth and that prior democratic experience matters, how is that going to affect reality? How many years of democracy are necessary to achieve economic growth and how are we going to explain to the population that they have to be patient? When people are unsatisfied with the economic performance of a regime they might want to change it, and they usually have short-terms expectations. What could explain the differences between cases where people agree to wait and cases where not? Economic growth? Where does it start then? Good performances lead to good performances and it is a reinforcing circle where democracy fosters democracy?

I know that theses questions have more to do with politics than with political theory but as people’s perception is an important factor in consolidating democracy I think it is important to raise them.

I felt terribly angry when I realized that I had not realized a major bias in the definition of democracy. Until now we have been discussing democracy through the glasses of a Western White Male!I ignored the half of the population I belong to because I was too focused on making my mind about gradated or dichotomous measures as well as measurement issues! But how is that more important than one of the three basic dimensions of democracy, aka inclusiveness?!

It is some consolation to know that all the countries in the region I studied where granted the right to vote to women way before the period we had to assess. In fact, compared to other “old democracies” like Switzerland, which gave the right to vote to women only in 1971, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay, all did between 1932 (Brazil and Uruguay) and Paraguay (1962).

Therefore, I found that the articles by Paxton and Doorenspleet allowed to go back to “basics” by realizing that when assessing democracy, before entering into complicated details about measurement, one should make sure that the concept and further operationalization of the concept do include WOMEN and also indigenous or other ethnical groups.  When asking anyone to define democracy, inclusiveness is always one, if not the major dimension mentioned. However, as shown by both authors, it is clearly not concretely applied when measuring democracy!

This observation does not only prevent a sexist measure of democracy, but also a western ethnocentrism which classifies western countries as being early more democratized then others. When observing the data, only for Latin America, it is however clear that some western countries were achieved a “complete” democracy relatively late in comparison to others.

Finally, and this argues in favor of Elkins showing the advantages of gradated measures, a dichotomous measure would make it impossible to distinguish properly between different types of democracy. How could we distinguish a country like Switzerland that in 1965 was democratic in every aspect but the women right to vote and Argentina since 1983, which is democratic and give the women the right to vote but severely restricts some of their essential civil liberties?

Therefore, what I conclude of those three articles is that we need a gradated definition of democracy, which allows us to categorize the different steps of democracy that are achieved by a country without any White Western Male bias.

I thank them for eventually helping me take a side in that endless debate.