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Article
Author(s)
José Álvaro Moisés
Full-Text PDF XML 744 Views
DOI:10.17265/2160-6579/2019.01.004
Affiliation(s)
University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
ABSTRACT
In the last three decades of the 20th century, important
political changes occurred in all regions of the world, making the institutions
of many existing political systems closer to the ideals of democracy. But as happened
in other moments of history, those processes of democratization, even when successful,
always occurred through advances and retreats. Thus, contemporary political practices,
procedures, and institutions embody democratic ideals only partially. In many nations,
in the present, the rule of law, civil, and political rights, and institutional mechanisms for citizens’ control
of governments remain ineffective or underdeveloped. Thus, a double concern prevails among analysts: on the one hand, the regression
to authoritarianism in some countries after the processes of political changes—Russia,
Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Turkey being the paradigmatic examples; the
emergence of semi-democracies, i.e., hybrid or illiberal regimes, which have provoked
a new interest in the study of patterns of institutional design, the critical role
of civil society, different political-cultural developments, authoritarian legacies
in the context of the new democracies, competitive authoritarianism and new dictatorships.
On the other hand, the acknowledgement of intrinsic limits of the historical development
of the democratic regime even in the case of old democracies, i.e., the fact that
political equality, active citizen participation, and effective control of abuse of power have never been fully realized in
practice. This is the general context in which many analysts and part of the public
opinion sustain that there is a crisis of democracy. The general diagnosis refers
to the decreasing trust in political elites, political parties, parliaments, governments,
and to the dissatisfaction with the regime among democrats; it refers also to the
weaker and sometimes erratic performance of democratic institutions and particularly
to the failure of the representative system. The picture is completed with the growing
rates of partisan misalignment, electoral volatility, and declining civic participation. All this seems to indicate that democracy
is inconceivable without crisis. This chapter discusses this scenario. The crisis
of democracies is examined from a critical perspective, and the main objective is
to understand the different dimensions of its nature and its consequences.
KEYWORDS
democratization, crisis, quality of democracy, semi-democracy, illiberal regime, authoritarianism, populism
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