Alvarez et al. discusses the different classifications, under different circumstances to which democracy exists in the conceptual sense, and the regime sense. They state, that democracy comes from the consequence of having contested people take seats in office, as a consequence of an electoral vote. Puzzling, how members who would in theory represent the good of the ‘many’ be such a consequence. These authors have a minimalist view of democracy, but honestly who doesn’t?

They throw around the terminology- dictatorship and democracy rather interchangeably, where one could cause the latter- and vice-verse. They discuss scholars definitions of democracy such as Dalh’s contestation of democracy. Arguably competition, or contestation exists in elements of democratic regimes, where interests vary from party or person. Arguably, this articles goes through and measures this conceptual theory and apply it to early regimes demo/dictor in different regions. As such, they are measuring competition and how it looks (functions) with the data they know about the political situation in different periods. For example, contestation would act differently with a dictatorship/ monarchy than it would a bi-partisan or partisan democracy. Arguably contestation exists when opposition to gain office occurred  As such “democracy is a system in which parties lose elections” this is how Przworski defines the political regime. Then we could say that we would measure how accurate a democracy is- based on how parties competed and lost. furthermore, the probabilities of party election outcomes can be measured accuratly, however there is room for random error or random probabilities of outcomes.

This leads to the most important question can we predict/ meausre outcomes of elections accurately, and can we predict whether a non democractic regime could cause a democracy- when would we see the shift. This is what Alvarez et al. discusses further on. What is interesting about the article is the way that the authors look at measurements of elections from regions- and determine by the outcomes whether it was conceptually democratic at all. However, most important about the measurement of contestation- is the element for it to repeat itself- in order to deterime its nature of poltical origin. It is truly a contestation- a electoral democracy if repetition occurs. Sounds a lot like Validity.

“Democracy now!”

http://www.democracynow.org/2013/1/30/headlines#1300

Is a fabulous, yes fabulous blog/tv news reel about fast/hot topics about mostly the states about democratic issues in the current system.

Something that has been a big topic of discussion, is the illegals problems that exist in the states. Some 11 million illegal undocumented workers exist among Americans. In recent news, he started his new term in office with a old new bi-partisan immigration reform plan. Stating that the previous mentality America held about illegals wasnt creating an efficient democracy. Those in the republican party that had previously diminished past reform bills, and the 2008 “Dream Act” that proposed to solve the problem- now; as Obama stated, those in congress, and senate need to replace the old “us versus them” mentality of late in order to save democratic practices.

Obama states: “But for comprehensive immigration reform to work, it must be clear from the outset that there is a pathway to citizenship…a lot of folks forget that most of ‘us’ used to be ‘them.’ We forget that. And it’s really important for us to remember our history. Unless you’re one of the first Americans, a Native American, you came from someplace else. Somebody brought you.”

Arguably, this is quite controversial  because the amount of illegals affects the electoral system/ the economy and the strength of the country. And yet, the majority of those in the senate and congress have denied allowing these illegals to become citizens claiming they would more or less affect things. However, the fact they are not citizens, are working illegally is weakening the poverty, encourages employers to cheat and hire those for less- rather than actual ‘america citizens.’ Nevertheless, Obama finally said it simply, it is more undemocratic to continue to deny these 11 million citizenship- rather than have citizens of America suffer more from unemployment loss and a weak economy. Moreover, this new bipartisan reform bill is the most democratic immigration policy- while adhering to the republican’s harsh border control demands.

Mc Clain’s Magazine,

There is a snippet of this article I thought was anecdotal in a sense. Andrew Coyne stated That Canadian Democracy is like: “Mostly it’s about incentives, and culture. Incentives, in the context of a minority Parliament, certainly, but a minority Parliament in a system that was built to deliver majorities. And yes, I’m talking about first past the post here. Whatever stability it may once have promised breaks down in the kind of regionalized Parliament we now have.” He debates that arguably, That parliament will exist as a bad institution in our electoral system. Just thought this was interesting.

http://www2.macleans.ca/2009/09/18/canadian-democracy-is-broken/2/

I chose with some consideration, that Central America and Caribbean countries, will be the regional topic to which I will analyze the different levels of democracy, or lack there of in the different states.

IDEA states that “throughout Central America and the Caribbean the task of consolidating democratic institutions in the wake of decades of conflicts is complicated by corruption scandals, citizen discontent and persistent social problems.”

http://www.idea.int/americas/central/index.cfm

As such, I feel as though democratization has been fairly recent in Central America. I’m not entirely sure why, but I’m going to speculate. It could be that so much effort was placed on containing communism from Russia and China that the big powers spent little attention on the America’s- until recently the corruption level of politics in central america had gone relatively unnoticed. IDEA says that implementation of stable democracies started around 1997. Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama,  have been the focus of UN and International IDEA attempting to solve “electoral Democratic” issues of this region.

It took awhile, but I think I finally grasp which ways, and under which circumstances we measure democracy. It took until today, when professor owen did a probabiltiy exercise with us, to determine the probability percentges of democractic/non democractic states participating in coups. The data was complete bogus, because our 50/50 probability was based on coin flippage- but it got me  thinking how we conceptually see the process in which a + b= c in democracy.

Moreover, I took a look at a data result article where it measures how democracy causes differences in the economy. In other words, but looking at our economy we could measure and gauge the strength and weakness of democracy- and vice versa. It would be also helpful to measure the economy the highs and lows, and see how the different variationso economy could cause new party majority, new government, government coup etc. Overall testing how the economy hold up in a democracy- if a poor economy equals a less democractic state.

As previously stated, these data results, summerized in this article http://ias.sagepub.com/content/15/4/393.abstract

This study measures the debate whether democracy enhances growth or not,

Their hypothesis is based from methodological research

“democracy reduces economic growth is refuted by recent studies; second, the hypothesis that democracy has no effect on growth, although still widespread in the academic community, seems less plausible today than it did 10 or 20 years ago. Several recent studies show that democracy has positive effects on growth, although these effects are ‘indirect’ in the sense that democracy affects growth through, for example, enhancing human capital or strengthening the protection of property rights.”

As previously stated the two things being measured is the gauge of economic growth caused by different levels of democracy, a casual relationship

“Improving Data Quality: Actors, Incentives, capabilities.”

validity: complicated way of saying, we get results of what we intended to measure as social scientists, and not the embarrassing latter of getting unintended results. Interestingly this article is trying to say (to me anyways) that the balance of qualitative and quantitative is marginally smaller than previously thought. In fact if we do empirical research, it will help redefine and better our qualitative concepts of social science then can be re measured to make our quantitative and qualitative research symbiotic.

“Preliminary empirical work  may help in the initial formulation of concepts.”

One problem however, that the article discusses is the margin of error that empirical measurements can cause.

Consequences in data can cause errors in the dependent variables in the measurements. Sometimes, these errors can cause problems in cross country polling. In democracy we can have too many dependent variables that can measure democracy, cross-states, cross- countries to see the relationships between democracies. Arguably, it appears this article says that the errors in research can cause dire biases and drastic misrepresentations of data in democracy. then there is the question if the data is good quality, apart from the errors the dependent variables have to properly measure the qualitative aspects of empirical data.Meaning, if we have errors in the huge data sets, then the research quality diminishes. What causes errors, to me missing information in global statistics about countries GDP and etc. and at the smaller scale, missing data of citizens at a country’s census data.

The article didnt exactly make sense to me, however I usually freeze up when we start comparing empirical research. I think they are saying in a fancy way that comparing democracy from country to country whether its comparing elections, economies, national incomes creates a sphere where data error can occur easily- and it can help if we redefine, and go in depth of conceptual experiments/theories about democracies….perhaps?

week 4:

Here is the usual democratic results of elections where a party and politician gain the majority…but they really don’t. In Israel, Netanyahu’s Likud claims victory in general elections Israel narrowly gains victory, however has lost a quarter of his seats in house. Why is this the case for a lot of democratic elections? Is party politics too weak to succeed mass majority? Likud stated: “I intend on leading these changes, and to this end we must form as wide a coalition as possible and I have already begun talks to that end this evening.” Howcome, if we for example win the majority, and win the majority of seats, a coalition still needs to take place in order for change to be seen in society, if in a democracy, citizens vote, they deserve to have their leader be able to have majority of house in order to pass bills? What is wrong with parliamentary elections? Voter turnout is low, (38%, 2009) Party plurality is vast and uneven, and once elected the house is so divided, there might as well not have been a democratic election in the first place.

http://www.europeanforum.net/news/1600/netanyahu_rsquo_s_likud_claims_victory_in_general_elections_israel

Week 5:

McClain’s magazine in 2009 called Canadian Democracy broken….

http://www2.macleans.ca/2009/09/18/canadian-democracy-is-broken/

Whos fault is this? And how can we fix it? -we havent come up with the how yet, we are too concerned with the why.

the article writes, “Elections about nothing, parties that have been reduced to leadership cults, a permanently deadlocked Parliament, record-low voter turnout, and overlaying everything an atmosphere of coarseness, cynicism and mindless partisanship. And that’s the good news! The impotence of ordinary MPs, the irrelevance of Parliament, the near dictatorial powers of the Prime Minister: if we were writing about a Third World country with a system like ours, we would be careful to refer to the “largely ceremonial” Parliament and “sham” elections.”

I have one theory brought on by a class I took last professor with Professor Owen, Public Policy Issues in Canadian politics. Arguably, democracy worked relatively well back when politics were a hereditary norm, where engaging in politics was seen as a duty and expression of freedom and rights. Arguably, the movement has changed with our generation where our political engagement mainly happens here, (online, blogs, think tanks) if at all. Its no longer seen as duty to engage, protest and vote in politics- especially in canada there is rarely a spike in political hot topics…if we measured it, looked at a graph politics have been relatively balanced since the fall of the soviet union (with the exception of 9/11) in Canada

So how do we fix it? One arguement of the articles states we should work from the middle to the outside. Start with the “flawed” house of commons and go from there.

Last month in Raleigh North Carolina, there was a conference held to better engage citizens in democratic practices…by “bringing together national leaders in the fields of policy, technology, and design to discover new way forward for our democracy…” Firstly, the fact that the US is holding conferences to better their democratic regime is startling to me, considering they figure the US has the leading model of democracy. Perhaps, they measured democracies in several countries and found that their regime was far more dormant than those of the EU. Is citizens democratic practices dormant in the US because more american citizens vote for american idol than the presidential election? perhaps, perhaps though somewhere along the way, they measured that, Americans no longer actively participated in democracy, causing the us to be somewhat less democratic as of late. In fact the Institute of Emerging issues which held this conference created a twitter feed for american citizens to actively brainstorm new reforms for democracy…For some reason that appears really wrong to me, that you can tweet your opinion to a bureaucracy of the government about democracy… Is that where democracy is headed? to a place where political scientists measure democracy based on the number of votes they receive on twitter?

http://www.ncsu.edu/iei/index.php/news-events/redesigning-democracy-summit?utm_source=twitter%2B&utm_medium=tweet&utm_campaign=socialmedia

I read the twitter feed about redefining democracy, and something that came up, is if political agendas, elections should be accessible to citizens through social media, and to tweet policy agendas to keep democracy engaged…Interesting.

It is interesting to me that the Schumpter was a lesser fan of popular democracy than socialism. It got me thinking, what is in the name? Socialism, the word has a pure fear based mentality with the concept that has been brought on by the stereotypes for socialism. When we think of Democracy, our notion is relatively positive. Altogether not knowing the full content of a nations political internal workings, if we asked what political association is your country and they answer “Democracy” we are generally happy with the answer and ask for no further details…in theory. However, if you strip away the meaning of the word, like Schumpter one can see that democracy, and socialism if set up improperly can have the same negative effects, but if you call socialism, democracy  people will see it as acceptable. So the question that Schumpter appears to be asking is if we do not live in fictional “popular” democracy- that we just live in the allusion of a democratic state then would’nt it be the same as calling it socialism?

“He says there is usually no will of the people nor common
good, and when there is then autocracy often better realizes both.” (129) He says that we cannot have the true origin of democracy, because he no longer believes to be a common good, or a popular good of the people to properly elect representatives to enable democracy.

this may have worked once upon an ancient Greece, but now, he argues that democracy reformed itself to look like:

“modern doctrine of democracy, that democracy is only about the competition of leaders for votes. Democracy is just a  method, neither valuable in itself nor tending to right action or good ends.The will of the people, usually, is not genuine, but is manufactured by the
leader.” (129) Now arguably, this is a lot like calling capitalism democracy. Now is Schumpter really a minimalist like Mackie hints him to be? or is he a realist stripping down the old political concepts and showing them for their hybrid-modern self? Or maybe democracy has just changed from “popular democracy” to “representative democracy” like Mackie describes.

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