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The first of three chapters on the implications of electoral politics and the design of political institutions for welfare state adjustment. Swank first provides an overview of two key domestic and international pressures on developed welfare states: domestic fiscal stress and international capital mobility. He then outlines the theoretical argument that democratic institutions fundamentally determine government responses to domestic and international structural change, focusing on formal and informal institutions and drawing on and fusing insights from ‘power resources’ theory, the new institutionalism, and new cultural arguments about the determinants of social policy in advanced capitalist democracies. The next two sections utilize new data on social welfare effort, national political institutions, and internationalization to provide an econometric assessment of the social policy impacts of domestic fiscal stress and capital mobility during the period 1965 to 1995, looking first at the direct impacts of rises in public sector debt and in international capital mobility on social welfare provision, and second at the welfare state effects of fiscal stress and global capital flows across nationally and temporally divergent democratic institutional contexts; the initial focus is on total social welfare effort and then the analysis is shifted to changes in cash income maintenance and social services. The conclusion assesses the implications of the arguments and findings for the future course of social policy in developed democracies, and potentially bolsters the evidence for the central assertion that domestic institutions systematically determine the direction of welfare state restructuring.

A major conclusion of this book is that there are few consistent trends in popular support for the political community but there is high and perhaps even growing support for democratic values and declining support for regime institutions and political leaders. Earlier chapters have traced these patterns with respect to democracy worldwide, and, in particular, regions of the world. This one focuses specifically on the role of public policy in shaping popular support for democratic institutions among OECD countries. The data are aggregate indicators across twenty‐four of the twenty‐nine member countries of the OECD in 1997, as well as individual‐level data from the same twenty‐four countries based on the 1990–1 World Values Survey. The different sections of the chapter are: Explaining Institutional Confidence; Evidence for Trends in Institutional Confidence; The Role of Democratic Experience; Policy Outputs and Confidence: A Macro Analysis; Policy Outputs and Confidence: A Micro Analysis; and Discussion and Conclusions.

Taking the example of unified Germany, this chapter examines how a democratic culture can develop among people who have lived for decades in an autocratic state. The first section outlines the theoretical framework, starting with the concept of political support, and going on to consider various normative models of democracy in order to understand what type of democracy people in West and East Germany ultimately prefer. Discusses the formation of democratic attitudes within state‐socialist systems, comparing demonstration and socialization hypotheses on the influence of the social structure on political attitudes. On this basis, expectations about attitudes towards democracy among the East German population are formulated. Develops the empirical analysis further by examining trends in democratic attitudes among West and East Germans—including the commitment to democratic values and principles, support for democratic institutions, and satisfaction with democratic performance. The conclusion summarizes the most important findings and considers their consequences for the prospects of democracy in a unified Germany.

Describes the Western influence on the democratic consolidation in Hungary in the 1980s and the 90s, focusing primarily on problems and conflicts, yet pointing out the historically unprecedented task of successful democratic consolidation. The West provided the Hungarian political and economic elite with an attractive democratic pattern as early as the 1980s. The chapter shows that democratic consolidation has proceeded more easily in Hungary than in most East European countries. In 1989, the Hungarian political and economic elite was relatively well prepared to establish democratic political institutions and to introduce a market economy. New reforms introduced between the 1960s and 1989 contributed to the establishment of a ‘social compromise’ reached between the political leadership and the nation. The increasing deficit in Hungary's balance of payments in the 1980s as a result of the oil crises, meant that the country had to obtain Western loans and became increasingly dependent on Western political decision makers, who used this opportunity to apply the policy of conditionality.

This concluding chapter considers four common claims that are made concerning the consequences of any erosion of confidence in the institutions of representative democracy and. the growth of critical citizens.

First, growing cynicism about government may deter conventional political participation, thus discouraging electoral turnout, political activism, and civic engagement; second, alienation with the regime may affect protest politics, fostering unconventional activism, support for anti‐state extremist movements, and even occasional incidents of urban terrorism; third, a deep reservoir of public trust is generally thought to encourage voluntary compliance with the law, thus enhancing the ability of governments to pass and implement effective legislation and raise revenues, without the need for coercion; and lastly, growing tensions between ideal and reality may undermine the stability of regimes, increasing the pressures for political reform in established democracies and hindering the consolidation process in newer democracies. A critical examination is made of support for and against these claims, and the implications for strengthening transitional, consolidating, and established democracies are considered.

The origins and evolution of international peacebuilding in international politics are explored in Chapter 2. By citing relevant theoretical arguments and empirical data from ten peacebuilding operations, the United Nations and other international actors are shown to be adept at creating the conditions for the establishment of capable governing institutions legitimized through democratic legal authority. None of the cases presented further exhibit signs of returning to full-scale and sustained conflict in the near future. However, research from nine peacebuilding operations indicates that, alongside successful initiatives, many weaknesses and failures permeate efforts to promote democracy after war. Nevertheless, by taking stock of recent trends and incorporating relevant theoretical insights and statistical analysis, the existing international peacebuilding literature reinforces the defense of my study's first major proposition: institutionalizing democratic legal authority can create the conditions and framework necessary to mediate competing domestic interests and to address the root causes of a conflict peacefully.

This chapter demonstrates how a plebiscitarian commitment to a politics of candor shapes a distinctive approach to reforming democratic institutions. Sections 6.2 through 6.5 explore the consequences of making candor the primary value in democratic reform, by analyzing three practices of contemporary mass democracy: leadership debates, public inquiries of leaders, and press conferences. Section 6.6 concludes by summarizing the logic of putting candor first.

This chapter provides a basis for a pragmatist account of democracy. It specifies three features—fallibilism, anti-skepticism, and consequentialism—as central to pragmatism understood as a philosophical position. The chapter also makes two further claims that are distinctive. First, pragmatism has important political consequences and that those sustain a commitment to robust democratic politics. Second, insofar as pragmatists are committed to democratic politics, they necessarily are committed not just to an ethos or ideal but to the analysis of democratic institutions. Each of these arguments will come as a surprise not just to those who come to pragmatism from the outside but to many who consider themselves pragmatists.

This concluding chapter returns to the metaphor of the maze and the masses introduced in the first chapter and addresses a few concerns about the possibility of democratic “unreason.” Introducing the dimension of time and reflection over time, the chapter suggests, first, that democracies can learn from their mistakes and, second, that certain democratic institutions and norms serve as cognitive artifacts that help the people control for or correct their potential cognitive failures. Those cognitive artifacts at the level of society include institutions and norms that embody the collective intelligence of the people distributed across both space and time. Democratic reason thus includes the wisdom of the past “many” crystallized into social cognitive artifacts that help reduce democratic unreason. Because of the synchronic and diachronic collective intelligence tapped by democratic institutions, democracy, this chapter concludes, is a gamble worth taking.

This chapter turns to the increasingly active role of constitutional courts. These courts have established themselves—not without reservations and challenges—as an essential vector of the push for greater reflexivity. For a long time the United States, India, and the German Federal Republic stood out as exceptions because of their traditional emphasis on judicial review. Now, however, constitutional courts of one sort or another are at the heart of democratic government everywhere. Indeed, some scholars go so far as to discern a veritable “resurrection” of constitutional thought. It is noteworthy that these new constitutional courts on the whole receive strong support from the public, as numerous comparative surveys have shown, and they count among the most legitimate of democratic institutions.

The striking puzzle at the heart of international lending has long been known as the “enforcement problem” of cross-border debt contracts: clearly there is some kind of cross-border enforcement at work, but the precise mechanism through which it operates is not immediately observable, and economists still do not understand how exactly it works. This chapter discusses the four conventional explanations of debtor compliance found in the economics literature, and assesses their validity in light of the available evidence. The four explanations center on (1) the borrower's long-term reputation; (2) legal and trade sanctions; (3) democratic institutions; and (4) spillover costs.

This chapter proposes a conception of democracy based on a system of shared liability and that captures the moral value of democratic institutions in a way that is more purely nonconsequentialist than ordinarily supposed. In this approach, citizens relate to each other horizontally and vertically—as cosubjects of the law and coauthors sharing authority over the coercive terms of our state. In Thomas Hobbes's elegant picture, we have to understand ourselves as simultaneously “makers” and “matter.” The chapter argues that what we ultimately value about democratic practice is that it makes possible for us to stand in a certain kind of relation with others—a relationship that recognizes them as mutually accountable, free, and rational persons. This is the sense in which democracy places us in an infrastructure of mutual liability.

This chapter addresses the question of whether human rights require democracy. Human rights and democracy have grown up to meet quite different needs. Human rights grew up to protect what we see as constituting human dignity: the life, autonomy, and liberty of the individual. Democratic institutions grew up in our need for a decision procedure for groups — a procedure that is stable, manages transfer of power well, appropriate to a society whose members are more or less equal in power or worth, reconciles losers in social decisions to the basic structures of the society, and tends to promote the commonweal — that is, order, justice, security, and prosperity. Much more comes into democracy, both into the idea itself and into its major duties and functions, than can be got out of human rights. It is unsurprising that fairness should enter into what can count as a democracy, and also that the promotion of a large variety of social ends should enter into its major duties and functions. One cannot derive a requirement of fair political procedures from human rights alone, though one may be able to derive it from morality as a whole.

This chapter examines how the state might best live up to its obligation to be accountable. It first considers the notion of one ground being embedded in another, noting that since states are embedded in other grounds, principles not tied to shared membership in states also apply to states. It then outlines a list of principles that apply to the state and looks at the notion of accountability, focusing on whether agents are accountable to those in the scope of principles toward whose realization they have duties, and what such accountability implies. The chapter proceeds by distinguishing different forms of accountability and argues that agents with duties toward realizing principles of justice are accountable to those in their scope. It concludes by rejecting the suggestion that we ought to build global democratic institutions.

This chapter describes the dawn of a new “age of particularity” which has changed what citizens expect from politics and fostered the emergence of new democratic institutions. More specifically, the chapter looks at the 1980 collapse of dual legitimacy, upon which democratic institutions had depended up until that point, as well as the social, political, and economic changes that emerged from and also helped to facilitate the aforementioned collapse. In a society of particularity, the whole idea of administration—management on the basis of fixed rules—loses its central role. Its emergence has coincided with a perception that hierarchical, centralized bureaucracies have had to evolve in important ways.

This chapter introduces the main concepts discussed in the rest of the book, explains the contribution of the book to the relevant literatures in political science and economics, and provides a road map for the rest of the book. The chapter provides a succinct overview of what access points are and how Access Point Theory fits into a new trend in the study of institutions that identifies underlying features that can characterize multiple institutions. The chapter then describes the concepts of policy bias and policy complexity, explaining how these general concepts have been previously investigated and how Access Point Theory adds to our understanding of the policymaking process.