Wolfgang Merkel
Biographic Data
| ID | 267307 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Wolfgang Merkel |
| GIVEN NAMES | Wolfgang |
| FAMILY NAME | Merkel |
| SIGNATURE | MERKEL W |
| AFFILIATIONS | WZB Berlin Social Science Center |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 72 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 578 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 62 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 10 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1991 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
What is democratic resilience
Emancipation Against All Odds? The Conservatism Charge to Deliberative Democracy Reconsidered
Although deliberative democracy has been conceptualized as an emancipatory project, it has since been accused of producing conservative outcomes. This article provides a critical and comprehensive review of the conservatism charge by asking: Does deliberative democracy’s mechanisms systematically undermine its emancipatory claim? What are the persistent and emerging obstacles to the realization of deliberative democracy's emancipatory potential? …
Resilience of Democracy: Responses to Illiberal and Authoritarian Challenges
Emancipation or Reaction: How Conservative Is Deliberative Democracy?
Resilience of democracies: Responses to Illiberal and Authoritarian Challenges
Illiberalism and authoritarianism have become major threats to democracy across the world. In response to this development, research on the causes and processes of democratic declines has blossomed. Much less scholarly attention has been devoted to the issue of democratic resilience. Why are some democracies more resilient than others to the current trend of autocratization? What role do institutions, actors and structural factors play in this re…
Who Governs in Deep Crises: The Case of Germany
The Berlin Republic of today is neither Weimar (1918–1932) nor Bonn (1949–1990). It is by all standards the best democracy ever on German soil. Nevertheless, during the COVID-19 crisis there was a shift from democracy as a mode of governance to what the controversial legal theorist Carl Schmitt (1922) affirmingly described as a “state of exception”; a state that is desired and approved by the people (through opinion polls). It was the hour of the…
The Handbook of Political, Social, and Economic Transformation
Political, social, and economic transformation is a complex historical phenomenon. It can be adequately analysed only by a multidisciplinary approach. This Handbook brings together an international team of scholars who are specialists in their respective research fields. They introduce the most important areas, theories, and methods in transformation research. Most attention is placed on the historical and comparative dimension. Although focusing…
Transformation and Transition Research: An Introduction
Social institutions and governmental regimes are systems of action structured by values and norms. Within these systems, self-conscious actors communicate with each other using different material and symbolic resources. The systems develop and change in response to new knowledge, altered allocations of resources, and changes in values and institutions. ‘Transformation’ analyses radical systemic change from the intentional policy point of view whi…
Handbook of Political, Social, and Economic Transformation
The Struggle Over Borders: Cosmopolitanism and Communitarianism
analyzes globalization-related conflict in the UNGA and the European Parliament. These two ‘strong publics’ feature debates on issues related to the permeability of borders and are directly tied to important centers of decision-making in global governance. The findings show a powerful cosmopolitan presence in both assemblies. The EP also features more communitarian counter voices. An indepth analysis of the partisan nature of debate in the EP and…
Challenge or Crisis of Democracy
Challenges of Inequality to Democracy
Democracy, as we understand it, is a process of collective decision- making among persons, which issues in collectively binding norms for the society of those persons. It is a process of decision- making in which persons participate as equals in determining the legal and conventional norms that bind them and in which the group of persons, taken collectively, are sovereign. Democracy can be understood as a descriptive term, referring to political …
Is Capitalism Compatible with Democracy?
Democracy and Crisis: Challenges in Turbulent Times
Die Legitimität direkter Demokratie
Demokratie, Diktatur, Gerechtigkeit
Die Legitimität Direkter Demokratie: Wie Demokratisch Sind Volksabstimmungen?
Kosmopolitismus versus Kommunitarismus: Ein neuer Konflikt in der Demokratie
The challenge of capitalism to democracy: Reply to Colin Crouch and Wolfgang Streeck
Democracies and Their Crises Reconsidered
Editors’ introduction to the interview Democracy, says Wolfgang Merkel, is not in as deep of an acute crisis as many today think it to be. An examination, for example, of OECD democracies over the last 50 years does not reveal democracy’s wholesale crisis but rather crises in certain sectors of democracy – ones that change over time as the state institutions affected by crises adapt to them and in some manner resolve them. Take, for instance, the…
Freedom and equality in democracies: Is there a trade-off
In political philosophy, economic theory and public discourse, there is a seemingly endless debate on what the essence of equality and freedom is and what relation between the two is essential to a good political order. Views range from the conviction that too much socio-economic equality jeopardises freedom to the position that a certain level of equality is necessary for the proper realisation of freedom. Building on these conflicting normative…
Die Herausforderungen der Demokratie
Transformation und Transformationsforschung: Zur Einführung
Handbuch Transformationsforschung
Demokratie und Krise: Zum schwierigen Verhältnis von Theorie und Empirie
Embedded and defective democracies
In the literature on democratization the mainstream of theoretical and empirical consolidology uses the dichotomy autocracy versus democracy. Democracy is generally conceived of as 'electoral democracy'. This simple dichotomy does not allow a distinction between consolidated liberal democracies and their diminished sub-types. However, over half of all the new electoral democracies represent specific variants of diminished sub-types of democracy, …
Resilience of democracies: Responses to Illiberal and Authoritarian Challenges
Illiberalism and authoritarianism have become major threats to democracy across the world. In response to this development, research on the causes and processes of democratic declines has blossomed. Much less scholarly attention has been devoted to the issue of democratic resilience. Why are some democracies more resilient than others to the current trend of autocratization? What role do institutions, actors and structural factors play in this re…
The Democracy Barometer: A New Instrument to Measure the Quality of Democracy and its Potential for Comparative Research
Measuring characteristics of democracy is not an easy task, but anyone who does empirical research on democracy needs good measures. In this article, we present the Democracy Barometer, a new measure that overcomes the conceptual and methodological shortcomings of previous indices. It allows for a description and comparison of the quality of thirty established democracies in the timespan between 1995 and 2005. The article examines its descriptive…
Are dictatorships returning? Revisiting the ‘democratic rollback’ hypothesis
Since 2007 an increasing number of articles have diagnosed 'freedom in retreat' and predicted a 'return to the authoritarian great powers'. Highly distinguished scholars warn against the 'democratic rollback', and articles on the resilience of authoritarian regimes have appeared in the best journals of political science. Is the tide of democratization turning, and do we have to expect a new reverse wave of autocratization? This article argues tha…
The consolidation of post‐autocratic democracies: A multi‐level model
The mainstream of theoretical and empirical 'consolidology' speaks of consolidated and non‐consolidated democracies. This crude dichotomy does not allow for more differentiated judgments about the stage of consolidation of newly democratized political systems. To overcome this shortcoming, a multi‐level model of democratic consolidation is proposed, consisting of four interdependent levels. The particular configuration of each has specific impact…
Introduction: Democratization in the Early Twenty-First Century
Hardly any other subject in the last quarter of the twentieth century has influenced the research agenda of political science more than the transformation of authoritarian and ‘totalitarian’ political regimes into pluralist democracies. However, to the same extent that the third wave of democratization unfolded, beginning in 1974, which initially encompassed southern Europe and Latin America and then eventually included eastern Europe, Asia and A…
Conclusion: Good and Defective Democracies
Transitology’ and ‘consolidology’ have only rarely emphasized the importance of defining democracy in a normatively and theoretically sophisticated manner. Almost without discussion they accepted the parsimonious definition and elegant but simple concepts of Schumpeter, Dahl and Przeworski. 1 They reduced democracy to the question of free and general electoral competition, vertical accountability and the fact that the most powerful political and …
Is There a Crisis of Democracy
Democracy seems to be inextricably linked to crisis. This is true since the ancient writings of Plato and Aristotle. More recently, the debate over the crisis of democracy goes on under the heading of “postdemocracy.” This article addresses the question of whether the crisis of democracy is an invention of theoretically complex but empirically ignorant theorists who adhere to an excessively normative ideal of democracy, on three levels: first, on…
Does Heterogeneity Hinder Democracy
Research linking heterogeneity and democracy usually focuses on one single dimension of heterogeneity, such as the distribution of power resources, income inequality, gender inequality, or ethnic fractionalization. Empirical results have so far been inconsistent. This article attempts a sound conceptualization of the phenomenon of heterogeneity. In order to assess whether and how heterogeneity hampers democracy, we will first define what 'heterog…
Who Governs in Deep Crises: The Case of Germany
The Berlin Republic of today is neither Weimar (1918–1932) nor Bonn (1949–1990). It is by all standards the best democracy ever on German soil. Nevertheless, during the COVID-19 crisis there was a shift from democracy as a mode of governance to what the controversial legal theorist Carl Schmitt (1922) affirmingly described as a “state of exception”; a state that is desired and approved by the people (through opinion polls). It was the hour of the…
War and Democratization: Legality, Legitimacy and Effectiveness
Promotion of democracy in post-war and post-conflict societies became a hot topic during the 1990s. External actors linked their peace-building efforts to the promotion of democracy. Four modes of promotion of democracy by external actors can be distinguished: first, enforcing democratization by enduring post-war occupation (mode 1); second, restoring an elected government by military intervention (mode 2); third, intervening in on-going massacre…
Hard times and regime failure: Autocratic Responses to Economic Downturns
Scholars rank problems in economic performance among the most important reasons for the collapse of autocratic regimes. This study forms no exception and explores the effect of economic misfortune on autocratic regime failure using a sample of 160 authoritarian regimes between 1981 and 2008. Moreover, this article introduces repression and co-optation as political variables which have the potential to mediate the adverse effects of economic misfo…
Soziale Gerechtigkeit und die drei Welten des Wohlfahrtskapitalismus
Freedom and equality in democracies: Is there a trade-off
In political philosophy, economic theory and public discourse, there is a seemingly endless debate on what the essence of equality and freedom is and what relation between the two is essential to a good political order. Views range from the conviction that too much socio-economic equality jeopardises freedom to the position that a certain level of equality is necessary for the proper realisation of freedom. Building on these conflicting normative…
Democracy through War
This article brings together three strands of democracy research which have thus far seldom been informed by one another: the empirical research associated with the ‘democratic peace’ thesis, the juridical-normative questions of legality, and moral-philosophical reasoning about just war. Linking the statistical analysis of the democratic peace to the findings of comparative research on democratization and to the normative debates occurring in law…
Institutionen und Reformpolitik: Drei Fallstudien zur Vetospieler-Theorie
What is democratic resilience
Democracies and Their Crises Reconsidered
Editors’ introduction to the interview Democracy, says Wolfgang Merkel, is not in as deep of an acute crisis as many today think it to be. An examination, for example, of OECD democracies over the last 50 years does not reveal democracy’s wholesale crisis but rather crises in certain sectors of democracy – ones that change over time as the state institutions affected by crises adapt to them and in some manner resolve them. Take, for instance, the…
Die Politik zur deutschen Einheit: Probleme, Strategien, Kontroversen
Die Politik zur deutschen Einheit: Probleme -- Strategien -- Kontroversen
Restriktionen und Chancen demokratischer Konsolidierung in postkommunistischen Gesellschaften. Ostmitteleuropa im Vergleich
Theorien der Transformation: Die demokratische Konsolidierung postautoritärer Gesellschaften
Betrachtet man die Evolution sozialwissenschaftlicher Theorien als eine darwinistische Selektion, in der nur jenes Paradigma überlebt, das einen "Erklärungsüberschuß" (Lakatos 1974: 173) gegenüber den konkurrierenden Paradigmen nachweisen kann, wird die sich bisweilen manifestierende Hybris sozialwissenschaftlicher Großtheorien, komplexe gesellschaftliche Phänomene exklusiv und umfassend erklären zu können, schon aus dem eigenen Überlebenswillen …
Struktur oder Akteur, System oder Handlung: Gibt es einen Königsweg in der sozialwissenschaftlichen Transformationsforschung?
Die beiden großen Paradigmen sozialwissenschaftlicher Theoriebildung, System und Akteur bzw. Struktur und Handlung, prägten auch und gerade die Transformationsforschung der letzten 35 Jahre. Dabei beeinflußten sie selten gemeinsam und gleichgewichtig die theoretische und empirische Forschung, sondern schienen sich in ihrer Einflußwirkung geradezu im Kuhnschen Sinne abzulösen. Folgte die theorieorientierte Transformationsforschung der fünfziger un…
Institutionalisierung und Konsolidierung der Demokratie in Ostmitteleuropa
Die großen soziologischen Paradigmen System und Akteur beherrschten in wechselnden Konjunkturen die Theoriebildung und empirischen Analysen der sozialwissenschaftlichen Transformationsforschung. Thesen und Antithesen der jeweils anderen Seite prallten, wenn sie wechselseitig überhaupt wahrgenommen wurden, am Schutzschild der monistischen Ästhetik der jeweils anderen Großtheorie ab (Merkel 1994a: 303). Syntheseversuche und Verknüpfungsanstrengunge…
Systemwechsel 1: Theorien, Ansätze und Konzepte der Transitionsforschung
Einleitung: Die Institutionalisierung der Demokratie
Es ist die von Machiavelli aufgeworfene Problematik der Herrschaftsgründung und Herrschaftssicherung einer neuen politischen Ordnung, die im Mittelpunkt des 2. Systemwechselbandes steht. Allerdings geht die analytische Blickrichtung weit über die Fokussierung des Florentiners auf den Problemkreis der Herrschaftssicherung hinaus. Der Blick ist auf die Begründung, Legitimierung und Konsolidierung postautoritärer demokratischer Ordnungen gerichtet. …
Systemwechsel 3
Die Bedeutung von Parteien und Parteiensystemen für die Konsolidierung der Demokratie: Ein interregionaler Vergleich
In dem abschließenden Kapitel dieses Bandes über Parteien und Parteiensysteme soll nun die intraregionale Perspektive der Einzelbeiträge durch eine intraregionale Vergleichsanalyse überwölbt, also im bewahrenden wie überschreitenden Sinne aufgehoben werden. Dabei will ich mich im Kern auf die in diesem Band vorgelegten empirischen Regionalanalysen stützen und sie dadurch vergleichbar machen, daß ich die systematischen Fragestellungen, wie sie in …
The consolidation of post‐autocratic democracies: A multi‐level model
The mainstream of theoretical and empirical 'consolidology' speaks of consolidated and non‐consolidated democracies. This crude dichotomy does not allow for more differentiated judgments about the stage of consolidation of newly democratized political systems. To overcome this shortcoming, a multi‐level model of democratic consolidation is proposed, consisting of four interdependent levels. The particular configuration of each has specific impact…
Systemtransformation
Von der Diktatur zur Demokratie
Von der Diktatur zur Demokratie. Transformationen, Erfolgsbedingungen, Entwicklungspfade.
Formale und informale Institutionen in defekten Demokratien
Die Dritten Wege der Sozialdemokratie ins 21. Jahrhundert
Soziale Gerechtigkeit und die drei Welten des Wohlfahrtskapitalismus
Social justice and the three worlds of welfare capitalism
This essay relates the normative discussion about social justice in political philosophy to empirical results from social policy analysis, thus linking two lines of discussions that have hitherto run mostly separately. The argument will be developed by answering four questions. The normative question: what regulative ideas of social justice does the debate about justice in political philosophy supply? The action-theoretical question: what criteri…
Institutionen und Reformpolitik: Drei Fallstudien zur Vetospieler-Theorie
Defekte Demokratie: Theorie
Institutionen und Reformpolitik: Drei Fallstudien zur Vetospieler-Theorie
Embedded and defective democracies
In the literature on democratization the mainstream of theoretical and empirical consolidology uses the dichotomy autocracy versus democracy. Democracy is generally conceived of as 'electoral democracy'. This simple dichotomy does not allow a distinction between consolidated liberal democracies and their diminished sub-types. However, over half of all the new electoral democracies represent specific variants of diminished sub-types of democracy, …
Introduction: Democratization in the Early Twenty-First Century
Hardly any other subject in the last quarter of the twentieth century has influenced the research agenda of political science more than the transformation of authoritarian and ‘totalitarian’ political regimes into pluralist democracies. However, to the same extent that the third wave of democratization unfolded, beginning in 1974, which initially encompassed southern Europe and Latin America and then eventually included eastern Europe, Asia and A…
Conclusion: Good and Defective Democracies
Transitology’ and ‘consolidology’ have only rarely emphasized the importance of defining democracy in a normatively and theoretically sophisticated manner. Almost without discussion they accepted the parsimonious definition and elegant but simple concepts of Schumpeter, Dahl and Przeworski. 1 They reduced democracy to the question of free and general electoral competition, vertical accountability and the fact that the most powerful political and …
Die Reformfähigkeit der Sozialdemokratie: Herausforderungen und Bilanz der Regierungspolitik in Westeuropa
Political science (50 works) · Social Policy and Reform Studies (30 works) · Politics (29 works) · Law (28 works) · Sociology (27 works) · Democracy (26 works) · Philosophy (20 works) · Economics (17 works) · Law (17 works) · Political economy (17 works)