Jan 25 2011
Mini-Assignment 3: Adjectives and Democracy
There has been much talk about what will happen to Tunisia’s government after the protests that led the president to resign. A few articles have mentioned the demand for a “genuine democracy” by Tunisians. This article suggests that Tunisian protesters want a new and genuine democracy.
I think, in this case the word “genuine” being used with democracy could be a diminished subtype, one of the strategies Collier & Levitsky touch upon. Diminished subtypes identify attributes that are missing and perhaps in the case of Tunisia, “genuine” refers to an honest, uncorrupt democracy.
While this adjective is wishy-washy as it’s already difficult enough to summarize an undisputed definition for democracy, it does avoid conceptual stretching as it’s not claiming to be a complete democracy therefore also moving down the ladder of differentiation and away from the root of “democracy”. However, the authors also suggest “for countries that are less than fully democratic … the questions arises as to whether it would be better to avoid identifying them as subtypes of democracy” (p.441).
Another example I found is about Western-style democracy in Cote d’Ivoire. Here Western-style democracy (characterized by multi-party elections) is being used to create a concept that moves down the ladder of differentiation and would probably fit closely to parliamentary democracy. Here, the concept has more conceptual differentiation and can be applied to less cases therefore giving it more defined attributes.
From here, Western-style democracies can be considered “classical” subtypes of democracies that are also considered as “full instances of the root definition of democracy” (p.435). Therefore Western-style democracy would be considered definitely democratic which could create problems. A perfect example is this case of Cote d’Ivoire which has yet to witness the results of multi-party elections. Cote d’Ivoire still lacks well-founded rules concerning presidential elections or other political dealings and there are still possibilities for elections to be rigged and powerful conflicts based on ethic, religious and regional differences.