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| Srl | Item |
| 1 |
ID:
187731
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| Summary/Abstract |
Third-wave democracies have massively adopted mechanisms of judicial review, notably constitutional courts, considered key institutions of successful democratic transitions. By preventing abuses of the constitution and safeguarding people’s rights, they act as a bulwark against the claims of potential autocrats. In Thailand, the 1997 democratic transition led to the adoption of a powerful constitutional court tasked with safeguarding democracy from the threats of populism, corruption, and authoritarianism. Yet since its inception, the court’s record has been puzzling. It has dissolved most, if not all, of the pro-democracy, anti-military political parties, dismissed all elected prime ministers, and paved the way for two military coups. In short, against established theories linking constitutional courts to democratization, the introduction of constitutional review in Thailand has led to democratic breakdown. To make sense of this puzzle, this article will investigate three variables of the court—strategic interests, ideologies, and institutional design—within the larger bureaucratic structure of the Thai state, to account for the anti-democratic behaviour of Thailand’s Constitutional Court. This piece considers materials in Thai and English.
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| 2 |
ID:
098409
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| Publication |
2010.
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| Summary/Abstract |
The hypothesis that democratization triggers political violence has been proposed repeatedly in the quantitative literature, but it remains controversial with respect to both interstate and civil wars. Current empirical research continues to be afflicted by methodological and data problems related to the measurement of democracy and the task of detecting changes in such scores. In order to gain further clarity into the link between democratization and civil war, the current study introduces a new period-finding algorithm that is able to detect periods of democratization and autocratization. This allows for a more flexible way of finding directional changes in governance indicators than is possible with the rigid lag structures commonly employed in previous studies. When regressed on various measures of civil-war onset, the indicator for the initiation of a period of democratization has a strong and robust effect on conflict even in the presence of static measures of regime type. The same applies to autocratization, but its impact is much more sudden than that of democratization. Moreover, we find that the democratization effect is limited to governmental rather than territorial conflicts. Further research will be needed to confirm these results in terms of the relevant causal mechanisms, especially in ethno-nationalist civil wars.
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| 3 |
ID:
190696
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| Summary/Abstract |
Turkey has experienced a radical political transformation within the last decade. The promising reforms of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in its early years have gradually given way to autocratic politics. The transition to a presidential regime has further widened the executive’s control over the institutional checks and bureaucratic accountability mechanisms. Yet, the Court of Auditors – Turkey’s supreme audit institution – has continued to publish audit reports on numerous institutions, including AKP-run municipalities and private companies owned by AKP supporters, and revealed corruption, waste and irregularities in public spending. This article argues when certain domestic conditions (censored public servants, co-opted mainstream media, and suppressed opposition) are met, bureaucracy can function in autocratizing regimes since it does not generate political power costs for the government, but instead provides legitimacy to the incumbents in the international institutions of the liberal democratic order.
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