| Kommentar |
Approaches to the Study of Transformation, Democratization and Governance
After a long wave of economic dominance, political systems re-entered centre-stage in the study of development during the 1990s and have remained there ever since. Yet the euphoria over democratic transformations, that was widespread in the immediate post-Cold War period, has given place to concerns over incomplete transitions and a re-consolidation of authoritarian regimes on the one hand and civil war, weak states and state failure on the other. Political science has devoted more efforts than ever before to analysing correlations and causal links between different types of political order and developmental outcomes. At the same time, the discipline is still struggling to explain which circumstances give rise to which types of order and how these processes can be influenced from outside. The class discusses the most influential strands of the debate, linking salient issues of international development with both classical and recent contributions to political science theory. |
| Literatur |
Basic reading:
Acemoglu, Daron, and James A. Robinson (2006): Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Hadenius, Axel, and Jan Teorell (2007): Pathways from Authoritarianism, in: Journal of Democracy 18 (1), 143–57
Linz, Juan J., and Alfred Stepan (1996): Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe, London: The Johns Hopkins University Press
North, Douglass C. (1993): Institutional Change: A Framework of Analysis, in: Sven-Erik Sjöstrand (ed.), Institutional Change: Theory and Empirical Findings, New York: ME Sharpe, 35–46
Olson, Mancur (1993): Dictatorship, Democracy, and Development, in: American Political Science Review 87 (3), 567–576 |
