Democracy’s Near Misses

Bibliographic Data

ID6286330
AuthorsT Ginsburg (0000-0003-3128-3392), Aziz Z Huq (0000-0003-1490-8434), Aziz Huq
Year2018
Volume29
Issue4
Pages16-30
Publication date2018-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of democracy (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1045-5736 • E-ISSN: 1086-3214
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/jod.2018.0059
OpenAlexW2896775657
LanguageEN
Citations received27
References cited10

Democracies can collapse or erode beyond repair, but they can also suffer substantial yet "non-fatal" deterioration in the quality of democratic institutions, and then experience a rebound. Such "near misses" have received little or no attention in the new wave of scholarship on why democracies die (or survive). This article develops the concept of a democratic near miss. It first considers numerical metrics of democratic quality as a means of identifying near misses, but finds that these metrics provide inconsistent and conflicting guidance. Instead, this essay uses a case study method—focusing on Finland in 1930, Colombia in 2010, and Sri Lanka in 2015—to capture the dynamics of democratic near misses. These cases suggest that nonmajoritarian actors, including political-party elites and unelected judges and bureaucrats, have a critical role to play in averting democratic erosion

Democracy · Development economics · Economics · Epistemology · Near miss · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Quality (philosophy · Scholarship · Sociology · Law · Political Conflict and Governance · Politics and Conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Middle East · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies

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