Andreas Schedler
Biographic Data
| ID | 767366 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Andreas Schedler |
| GIVEN NAMES | Andreas |
| FAMILY NAME | Schedler |
| SIGNATURE | SCHEDLER A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2821-613X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 48 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1723 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 44 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 16 |
Rethinking democratic subversion
The literature on democratic subversion has been actor centric. It has laid much emphasis on the causal weight of actors. At the same time, it has been ignoring the perspective of actors themselves. In this chapter, I bring participant perspectives back into the picture by looking at democratic subversion. By putting ourselves in the shoes of actors, I propose, we can shed fresh light on some basic questions: What are the limits of structural app…
Cuántas palabras vale una vida? Cobertura mediática y contexto local de homicidios en México
Dada la magnitud de la violencia del crimen organizado en México, los medios de comunicación masiva no pueden cubrir sus víctimas salvo de manera selectiva. Pero ¿cuáles son sus criterios de selectividad? En este análisis cuantitativo exploratorio, examinamos un posible factor explicativo poco estudiado: el clasismo, es decir, la posible indiferencia hacia las víctimas pobres. Concretamente, nos enfocamos en si la atención mediática a la violenci…
Rethinking Political Polarization
The comparative study of political polarization has been central to current debates on the global crisis of democracy. It has been built on uncertain conceptual foundations, though. Established uses of the concept lack a distinctive semantic core as multiple meanings compete against each other. On the basis of a broad reading of the comparative literature, I seek to circumscribe the use and reconstruct the core of political polarization as an ins…
Minimalist Storytelling
During the first two decades of the twenty-first century, Mexico’s so-called drug war claimed around a quarter of a million lives. Adapting to this enduring epidemic of violence, the print media have adopted a minimalist reporting style that gives only thin, formulaic accounts of violent events. As I argue, established journalistic minimalism does more than provide little information about violence. With practised impassiveness, it frames violenc…
Temps et démocratie
Le temps, avec les nombreux rôles qu’il joue et ses différentes facettes, constitue un enjeu majeur dans le champ de la politique. Mais ni la science politique en général ni les études sur la démocratie en particulier n’y ont jusqu’à aujourd’hui prêté une attention explicite et systématique. Le présent article ébauche de façon exploratoire certaines questions de fond qui pourraient (et devraient) être traitées dans le cadre de recherches futures …
Making Sense of Electoral Violence
Since the inauguration of Mexican democracy in 2000, organised criminal violence had been leaking into the political arena. Yet, it escalated in the 2018 elections, when dozens of local candidates were killed. In most of these cases, the concrete perpetrators and motives remained in the dark. How did Mexican society make sense of this opaque, unprecedented wave of electoral violence? On the basis of a qualitative content analysis of over 1,200 ne…
An ambiguous tool of demos accountability
Even before the invention of modern democracy, political theorists have warned about the dangers of ‘majoritarian tyrannies.’ While the concept has been perennially suspicious of serving as an antidemocratic stratagem, I propose to revalue it as an antipopulist tool of horizontal accountability among citizens (‘demos accountability’). Subverting the populist narrative of popular unity and virtue, it allows aggrieved minorities to call their major…
Borrón sin cuenta nueva? La injusticia transicional en guerras civiles económicas
Ante la persistencia de la violencia criminal organizada en México, se ha discutido la posibilidad de superarla usando medidas de justicia transicional. ¿Qué tan viable sería su aplicación? Tratamos de responder a esta pregunta en dos pasos. Primero, trazamos un mapa conceptual de la violencia societal organizada que nos permite identificar la llamada narcoviolencia como una guerra civil económica y distinguirla de las guerras civiles políticas. …
Democratic Reciprocity
Reciprocity, the two-sided social norm of fairness that involves a duty to return favors, as well as the permission to return injuries, is widely recognized as a fundamental norm "not only for primitive but for all societies."1 Similarly, "[r]eciprocity is widely recognized as a core principle of democracy."2 Modern democracy is a system of conflict resolution that rests on reciprocal restraints: norm compliance by all actors is mutual and contin…
The breaching experiment. Donald Trump and the normative foundations of democracy
Is US president Donald Trump a threat to democracy? Alerting against his manifold transgressions of democratic norms, many comparative political scientists have thought so. Their practical worries, however, have been inconsistent with prevalent theories of democratic stability. As careful examination shows, his main democratic norm violations have been discursive, and they have revealed him to be, not an ideological enemy of democracy, but a self…
Electoral Authoritarianism
Electoral authoritarian regimes practice authoritarianism behind the institutional facades of representative democracy. They hold regular multiparty elections at the national level, yet violate liberal‐democratic minimum standards in systematic and profound ways. Since the end of the Cold War, they have turned into the most common form of nondemocratic rule in the world. Responding to the empirical expansion of nondemocratic multiparty elections,…
Communicating authoritarian elite cohesion
In this paper, we develop a theoretical framework to analyse the communicative imperatives authoritarian regimes face as a consequence of their self-inflicted opacities. The most important facts about the actors and factors that sustain authoritarian rule are unobservable. To demonstrate their power, authoritarian rulers have to render them visible. They have to dramatize their power and present on the front stage what they want people to know ab…
The Criminal Subversion of Mexican Democracy
Threats to the integrity of electoral democracy are manifold. The comparative literature has focused on "vertical" threats: the manipulation of elections by central governments. This article, by contrast, draws attention to "horizontal" threats: the societal subversion of democratic elections by criminal violence. It analyzes the so-called drug war in Mexico to illustrate the chilling effects private organized violence has on electoral democracy.…
The Politics of Uncertainty
Electoral authoritarian regimes practice authoritarianism behind the institutional facades of representative democracy. They hold multiparty elections, yet violate democratic minimum standards in systematic and profound ways. Today, they have turned into the most common form of dictatorship in the world. The Politics of Uncertainty studies their internal dynamic. Grounded in a general theory of authoritarianism, it develops a theory of regime str…
Judgment and Measurement in Political Science
Standard methodological advice in political science warns against the distortion of measurement decisions by judgmental elements. Judgment is subjective, common wisdom asserts, it produces opaque, biased, and unreliable data. This article, by contrast, argues that judgment is a critical intersubjective ingredient of political measurement that needs to be acknowledged and rationalized, rather than exorcised
The Measurer’s Dilemma
Over the past decades, (mostly) private actors have been providing the public good of cross-national political data in a decentralized, uncoordinated, and unregulated fashion. They have been successful in generating an incessant supply of data. However, the success of current practices of data production has been masking severe structural limitations: the systematic undersupply of data and the systematic inefficiency of data generation. Both prob…
Introduction
We live in an era of unprecedented abundance of cross-national political data. The study of comparative politics disposes of more quantitative information than anytime before, and year by year number of cross-national datasets keeps expanding. Even if we still lack data for innumerable research questions, many areas of inquiry host not just one, but several competing datasets. We thus face luxury, and necessity, of choice-a choice, however, for w…
Data Usage in Quantitative Comparative Politics
The quantitative study of comparative politics is often described as a data-driven enterprise. Employing an original dataset of comparative politics articles published in leading academic journals between 1989 and 2007, this article offers the first empirical analysis of data usage in comparative research. Tracing potential biases induced by data dependence, it assesses the structure of quantitative comparative research (by year, research design,…
Democracy's Past and Future
The new electoral authoritarian regimes of the post–Cold War era have formally adopted the full panoply of liberal-democratic institutions. Rather than rejecting or repressing these institutions, they manipulate them
Inconsistencias contaminantes
Cuando partidos o candidatos derrotados rechazan el resultado de una elección, casi invariablemente aseveran haber sido víctimas de fraude. La democracia les exige aceptar su derrota, el fraude los libera de esta exigencia. En muchos casos, es difícil para ciudadanos y observadores evaluar la veracidad de sus acusaciones. Como argumenta el presente ensayo, la presencia de inconsistencias en el ámbito de la gobernación electoral tiende a alimentar…
Electoral Authoritarianism
The Mexican Standoff
The 2006 presidential elections pushed Mexico’s fledgling democracy from relative stability into a period of tension and uncertainty. Left-wing candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador lost by a razor-thin margin to the conservative Felipe Calderón. He claimed fraud, took his followers to the streets in massive protest, and finally declared himself the “legitimate president” of Mexico. The article examines the contingent and structural sources of th…
Democrats with adjectives
Major cross‐national surveys measure popular support for democracy through direct questions about democracy in the abstract. Since people may entertain competing democratic ideas and ideals, however, the academic community ignores the extent to which standard questions capture citizen support for liberal democracy. To solve the validity problems associated with direct measures of democratic support, this article proposes linking them to more conc…
The Logic of Electoral Authoritarianism
Electoral Authoritarianism
Elections Without Democracy
The idea of democracy has become so closely identified with elections that we are in danger of forgetting that the modern history of representative elections is a tale of authoritarian manipulations as much as it is a saga of democratic triumphs. Historically, in other words, elections have been an instrument of authoritarian control as well as a means of democratic governance
What is Democratic Consolidation
What is Democratic Consolidation? Andreas Schedler (bio) During the past quarter-century, the "third wave" of global demo-cratization has brought more than 60 countries around the world from authoritarian rule toward some kind of democratic regime. 1 This is no small achievement, of course, but it has also become apparent that sustaining democracy is often a task as difficult as establishing it. In the immediate aftermath of all these democratic …
Anti-Political-Establishment Parties
A specter is haunting contemporary party politics: the specter of anti-political-establishment parties. In old as well as in new democracies, fears run high and the literature is booming. Specters are evasive, however. Political scientists have tried to get hold of this one under labels like protest, populist or extremist parties. Yet the `anti-political' ideology which is central for many of these outsider parties has not received the systematic…
Democrats with adjectives
Major cross‐national surveys measure popular support for democracy through direct questions about democracy in the abstract. Since people may entertain competing democratic ideas and ideals, however, the academic community ignores the extent to which standard questions capture citizen support for liberal democracy. To solve the validity problems associated with direct measures of democratic support, this article proposes linking them to more conc…
The Nested Game of Democratization by Elections
In developing an analytical framework for the comparative study of processes of democratization by elections, this article first lays out the techniques of electoral manipulation authoritarian rulers employ to control electoral outcomes. It argues next that manipulated elections tend to trigger two-level games in which electoral competition is “nested” inside electoral reform, and outlines the causal interaction and strategic interdependence of t…
The Comparative Study of Electoral Governance—Introduction
Electoral governance is a crucial variable in securing the credibility of elections in emerging democracies, but remains largely ignored in the comparative study of democratization. This article develops some basic analytical tools to advance comparative analysis and understanding of this neglected topic. It conceptualizes electoral governance as a set of related activities that involves rule making, rule application, and rule adjudication. It id…
Democracy's Past and Future
The new electoral authoritarian regimes of the post–Cold War era have formally adopted the full panoply of liberal-democratic institutions. Rather than rejecting or repressing these institutions, they manipulate them
Rethinking Political Polarization
The comparative study of political polarization has been central to current debates on the global crisis of democracy. It has been built on uncertain conceptual foundations, though. Established uses of the concept lack a distinctive semantic core as multiple meanings compete against each other. On the basis of a broad reading of the comparative literature, I seek to circumscribe the use and reconstruct the core of political polarization as an ins…
Judgment and Measurement in Political Science
Standard methodological advice in political science warns against the distortion of measurement decisions by judgmental elements. Judgment is subjective, common wisdom asserts, it produces opaque, biased, and unreliable data. This article, by contrast, argues that judgment is a critical intersubjective ingredient of political measurement that needs to be acknowledged and rationalized, rather than exorcised
The Normative Force of Electoral Promises
At elections, voters choose among substantive programs and correspondingly, endow winning parties with determinate policy mandates. The article inquires into a neglected side of this `mandate theory' of elections: it explores the normative foundations of democratic mandates. The general norm, which demands that parties honor their campaign promises, is quite uncontroversial. The essay therefore reconstructs the controversial logic of norm applica…
The Democratic Revelation
On 2 July 2000, Mexican citizens threw out the world's longest-reigning political party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which had held power in Mexico for most of the twentieth century. In recent years, there has been heated debate about whether Mexico qualified as an electoral democracy; now, it is clear and beyond dispute. Mexico has reaffirmed its membership in the international democratic community. Yet the democratic fiesta of …
Measuring Democratic Consolidation
Taking Uncertainty Seriously
The temporal boundaries of democratization are often fuzzy and controversial. Yet students of regime change have paid little systematic attention to issues of temporal delimitation, despite their profound methodological as well as political implications. Scholars routinely define, but almost never study, processes of democratic transition and consolidation in terms of institutional uncertainty. This article, by contrast, proposes to take uncertai…
The Criminal Subversion of Mexican Democracy
Threats to the integrity of electoral democracy are manifold. The comparative literature has focused on "vertical" threats: the manipulation of elections by central governments. This article, by contrast, draws attention to "horizontal" threats: the societal subversion of democratic elections by criminal violence. It analyzes the so-called drug war in Mexico to illustrate the chilling effects private organized violence has on electoral democracy.…
Democracy and Time
Time with its many roles and faces is a major player in the field of politics. But up to now, neither political science in general nor studies of democracy in particular have taken explicit and systematic notice of it. The present explorative article outlines some core questions that could (and should) be addressed by future research on political time: the construction of democratic time horizons (future and past), the nature of democracies' curr…
Communicating authoritarian elite cohesion
In this paper, we develop a theoretical framework to analyse the communicative imperatives authoritarian regimes face as a consequence of their self-inflicted opacities. The most important facts about the actors and factors that sustain authoritarian rule are unobservable. To demonstrate their power, authoritarian rulers have to render them visible. They have to dramatize their power and present on the front stage what they want people to know ab…
The Measurer’s Dilemma
Over the past decades, (mostly) private actors have been providing the public good of cross-national political data in a decentralized, uncoordinated, and unregulated fashion. They have been successful in generating an incessant supply of data. However, the success of current practices of data production has been masking severe structural limitations: the systematic undersupply of data and the systematic inefficiency of data generation. Both prob…
The Mexican Standoff
The 2006 presidential elections pushed Mexico’s fledgling democracy from relative stability into a period of tension and uncertainty. Left-wing candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador lost by a razor-thin margin to the conservative Felipe Calderón. He claimed fraud, took his followers to the streets in massive protest, and finally declared himself the “legitimate president” of Mexico. The article examines the contingent and structural sources of th…
Data Usage in Quantitative Comparative Politics
The quantitative study of comparative politics is often described as a data-driven enterprise. Employing an original dataset of comparative politics articles published in leading academic journals between 1989 and 2007, this article offers the first empirical analysis of data usage in comparative research. Tracing potential biases induced by data dependence, it assesses the structure of quantitative comparative research (by year, research design,…
Democratic Reciprocity
Reciprocity, the two-sided social norm of fairness that involves a duty to return favors, as well as the permission to return injuries, is widely recognized as a fundamental norm "not only for primitive but for all societies."1 Similarly, "[r]eciprocity is widely recognized as a core principle of democracy."2 Modern democracy is a system of conflict resolution that rests on reciprocal restraints: norm compliance by all actors is mutual and contin…
Introduction
We live in an era of unprecedented abundance of cross-national political data. The study of comparative politics disposes of more quantitative information than anytime before, and year by year number of cross-national datasets keeps expanding. Even if we still lack data for innumerable research questions, many areas of inquiry host not just one, but several competing datasets. We thus face luxury, and necessity, of choice-a choice, however, for w…
Civil Society and Political Elections
After a long history of electoral fraud and especially after the fraudulent and conflictive presidential elections of 1988, Mexicans entered the 1990s with deep skepticism toward political elections. In the present decade, however, government and opposition parties have agreed to several profound electoral reforms that have succeeded in bringing fraud under control. How have Mexican citizens reacted to these institutional changes? Have they hiber…
Arguing and Observing
How should we study democratic consolidation
Much of the literature on ‘democratic consolidation’ has adopted a forward‐looking, future‐oriented perspective. Rather than studying past regimes, it tries to assess the life expectancies of contemporary ’third wave’ democracies. The article contends that authors have usually been unaware of the methodological complexities this choice of time perspective involves. If we want to reach reasonable judgements about the chances of democratic survival…
Distrust Breeds Bureaucracy
In contemporary Mexico, political parties have subjected electoral authorities to tight legal regulation. Their reliance on “bureaucratic” control sheds light on a crucial premise of “postbureaucratic” approaches—that deregulation presupposes trust. This article describes distrust-driven regulation in three areas: record keeping, the identification of voters and ballots, and time rules. It concludes with reflections on the potential costs of bure…
Anti-Political-Establishment Parties
A specter is haunting contemporary party politics: the specter of anti-political-establishment parties. In old as well as in new democracies, fears run high and the literature is booming. Specters are evasive, however. Political scientists have tried to get hold of this one under labels like protest, populist or extremist parties. Yet the `anti-political' ideology which is central for many of these outsider parties has not received the systematic…
The End of Politics? Explorations into Modern Antipolitics
The End of Politics
Since communism collapsed we have witnessed the emergence of numerous political actors - neopopulists, neoliberals, fundamentalists, nationalists, and others - who share one ideological leitmotif: the
Democracy and Time
Time with its many roles and faces is a major player in the field of politics. But up to now, neither political science in general nor studies of democracy in particular have taken explicit and systematic notice of it. The present explorative article outlines some core questions that could (and should) be addressed by future research on political time: the construction of democratic time horizons (future and past), the nature of democracies' curr…
The Normative Force of Electoral Promises
At elections, voters choose among substantive programs and correspondingly, endow winning parties with determinate policy mandates. The article inquires into a neglected side of this `mandate theory' of elections: it explores the normative foundations of democratic mandates. The general norm, which demands that parties honor their campaign promises, is quite uncontroversial. The essay therefore reconstructs the controversial logic of norm applica…
What is Democratic Consolidation
What is Democratic Consolidation? Andreas Schedler (bio) During the past quarter-century, the "third wave" of global demo-cratization has brought more than 60 countries around the world from authoritarian rule toward some kind of democratic regime. 1 This is no small achievement, of course, but it has also become apparent that sustaining democracy is often a task as difficult as establishing it. In the immediate aftermath of all these democratic …
How should we study democratic consolidation
Much of the literature on ‘democratic consolidation’ has adopted a forward‐looking, future‐oriented perspective. Rather than studying past regimes, it tries to assess the life expectancies of contemporary ’third wave’ democracies. The article contends that authors have usually been unaware of the methodological complexities this choice of time perspective involves. If we want to reach reasonable judgements about the chances of democratic survival…
The Self-Restraining State
Conceptualizing Accountability
Civil Society and Political Elections
After a long history of electoral fraud and especially after the fraudulent and conflictive presidential elections of 1988, Mexicans entered the 1990s with deep skepticism toward political elections. In the present decade, however, government and opposition parties have agreed to several profound electoral reforms that have succeeded in bringing fraud under control. How have Mexican citizens reacted to these institutional changes? Have they hiber…
Common Sense without Common Ground
In contemporary Mexico, political elections have turned into fundamentally free, fair, competitive, and clean contests. Yet, in political debate, the idea prevails that the country's transition to democracy is still on its way. How can we explain this apparent divergence? First, as the article argues, empirical disagreements over the state of democratization persist due to the veiled nature of the Mexican transition. Second, normative disagreemen…
The Democratic Revelation
On 2 July 2000, Mexican citizens threw out the world's longest-reigning political party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which had held power in Mexico for most of the twentieth century. In recent years, there has been heated debate about whether Mexico qualified as an electoral democracy; now, it is clear and beyond dispute. Mexico has reaffirmed its membership in the international democratic community. Yet the democratic fiesta of …
Tiempo y democracia, nubes y tierra
Comment observer la consolidation démocratique
L’auteur s’interroge sur les possibilites d’observation de la consolidation democratique. Il repartit les differentes regles d’observation utilisees implicitement par les chercheurs, selon la metaphore medicale de la sante et de la maladie des democraties, en 4 modes: la “logique des symptomes”, la “logique de mise a l’epreuve”, la “logique preventive” et la “ logique de l’auto-perception”
Measuring Democratic Consolidation
Taking Uncertainty Seriously
The temporal boundaries of democratization are often fuzzy and controversial. Yet students of regime change have paid little systematic attention to issues of temporal delimitation, despite their profound methodological as well as political implications. Scholars routinely define, but almost never study, processes of democratic transition and consolidation in terms of institutional uncertainty. This article, by contrast, proposes to take uncertai…
Distrust Breeds Bureaucracy
In contemporary Mexico, political parties have subjected electoral authorities to tight legal regulation. Their reliance on “bureaucratic” control sheds light on a crucial premise of “postbureaucratic” approaches—that deregulation presupposes trust. This article describes distrust-driven regulation in three areas: record keeping, the identification of voters and ballots, and time rules. It concludes with reflections on the potential costs of bure…
The Nested Game of Democratization by Elections
In developing an analytical framework for the comparative study of processes of democratization by elections, this article first lays out the techniques of electoral manipulation authoritarian rulers employ to control electoral outcomes. It argues next that manipulated elections tend to trigger two-level games in which electoral competition is “nested” inside electoral reform, and outlines the causal interaction and strategic interdependence of t…
The Comparative Study of Electoral Governance—Introduction
Electoral governance is a crucial variable in securing the credibility of elections in emerging democracies, but remains largely ignored in the comparative study of democratization. This article develops some basic analytical tools to advance comparative analysis and understanding of this neglected topic. It conceptualizes electoral governance as a set of related activities that involves rule making, rule application, and rule adjudication. It id…
Elections Without Democracy
The idea of democracy has become so closely identified with elections that we are in danger of forgetting that the modern history of representative elections is a tale of authoritarian manipulations as much as it is a saga of democratic triumphs. Historically, in other words, elections have been an instrument of authoritarian control as well as a means of democratic governance
Arguing and Observing
La incertidumbre institucional y las fronteras borrosas de la transición y consolidación democráticas
Una revista científica, con revisión por pares, que publica investigación empírica y contribuciones teóricas en sociología, antropología, sociodemografía, y disciplinas afines. Nuestra misión es presentar los resultados de la investigación de la más alta calidad, con énfasis en América Latina, pero con proyección y alcance global
The Logic of Electoral Authoritarianism
Electoral Authoritarianism
The Mexican Standoff
The 2006 presidential elections pushed Mexico’s fledgling democracy from relative stability into a period of tension and uncertainty. Left-wing candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador lost by a razor-thin margin to the conservative Felipe Calderón. He claimed fraud, took his followers to the streets in massive protest, and finally declared himself the “legitimate president” of Mexico. The article examines the contingent and structural sources of th…
Political science (44 works) · Law (38 works) · Politics (36 works) · Democracy (29 works) · Sociology (29 works) · Law (26 works) · Political economy (19 works) · Political Conflict and Governance (18 works) · Economics (17 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (13 works)