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Two related historical facts welcomed liberal democracy or the liberal-democratic state. On one hand, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, social contract theory imposed a major setback to the divine legitimacy of political rulers. On the other hand, the capitalist revolution–embracing the mercantile, the industrial, and the liberal revolutions–changed the basic way of appropriating the economic surplus. This no longer depended on the state’s control but increasingly depended on the realization of profits in the market. For the first time in history, authoritarian regimes ceased to be a necessary condition for the ruling classes’ survival. Democracy turned gradually into synonym of the good state. Eventually, with the acknowledgement of political rights–specifically of universal suffrage––liberal democracy emerged. This process took one century–the time for the bourgeois ruling class to stop fearing expropriation by the poor who democracy entitled to vote.

Analyses democracy promotion as part of America's ‘liberal grand strategy’, i.e. the notion that the US is better able to pursue its interests, reduce security threats, and foster a stable political order when other states are democracies. It provides answers to the following questions: What are the elements of the liberal grand strategy? Why has it been so persistent? Which groups support it within the foreign policy community? How significant is the liberal democratic orientation in current American foreign policy?

This is the second of two chapters on preference democracy. It points out that theories of liberal democracy necessarily require systematic responsiveness to popular wishes, in ways that make them fundamentally ‘preference‐respecting’, but that there are many different kinds of preferences and correspondingly many different ways of respecting them. Different models of democracy are better at providing certain sorts of respect for certain sorts of preferences than others, and which model of democracy liberal democrats want to adopt therefore depends on which sorts of preferences they want to accord which sort of respect. The central claim of this chapter is that the author's preferred model of ‘democratic deliberation within’ is preference‐respecting in the right way, and that it therefore deserves a key role in any larger system of democratic accountability. The different sections of the chapter are: Respecting Preferences, Not Just Recording Them; Permissible Paternalism; Assessing Alternative Models of Preference‐Respecting Democracy; The Virtues of Sporadic Assessments: Preference‐Respecting Arguments for Indirect Democracy; and Combining ‘Democratic Deliberation Within’ and Trustee‐style Representative Democracy.

Pierre van den Berghe has argued that democracy in divided societies can take five different forms: Herrenvolk democracy, ethnic democracy, liberal democracy, multicultural democracy, and consociational democracy. This chapter argues that each of these five ostensible versions of democracy, or relatives of them, has been experimented with in pre-partition Ireland and Northern Ireland. While all have clear limits, the one that is most suited to Northern Ireland's conditions is consociational democracy. The chapter discusses some limits of the consociational approach, but also defends it against common criticisms.

This chapter maps out the key arguments, theoretical approaches, analytical assumptions, and methodology that shape this study. The emerging sub-discipline of comparative political theory is discussed and an argument is advanced as to why this book should be viewed as a contribution to this new discipline of political science. Furthermore, the intellectual context that has informed the academic and intellectual debate both on the relationship between religion and democracy in general and Islam and liberal democracy in particular is discussed with special attention to the post-Cold War and post-September 11, 2001 context. A definition of terms such as religion and liberal democracy is provided along a discussion of the theoretical tensions between the two. A detailed chapter overview and summary appears along with a concluding discussion about the salience of this inquiry for our world today.

Explores the gap between rhetoric and practice in the American policy of promoting democracy. It attributes it to the US, promoting two inconsistent goals at the same time: democratization and free market capitalism. This is not because the US responds only to corporate interests. Instead, this policy mix stems from America's image of its own success: at the time of its foundation, democratic development was compatible with economic individualism due to extraordinary socio–economic circumstances. However, given the contemporary socio–economic circumstances of new democracies, it would be more appropriate to promote social democracy rather than liberal democracy.

This chapter examines how a more realistic and historically accurate understanding of religion and democracy can increase the effectiveness of U.S. foreign policy in influencing the natural desire of peoples for freedom. It begins with a discussion of the nature of democracy and what makes it stable and lasting. It asks how and why U.S. diplomacy has ignored the connections between religion and democracy, and how the deficit might be remedied. It surveys America's understanding of religion at the founding and beyond. It describes concepts vital to a refurbishing of American diplomacy in an age of faith: religious pluralism and the free market, the “twin tolerations,” and social and spiritual capital. It analyzes the history of Protestant and Catholic experiences with liberal governance and provides insights into the larger question of how religious societies might accommodate themselves to democracy.

This chapter focuses on the question whether affluent liberal democracies can cope with the challenge to their survival that weapons of mass destruction, harmful climate change, and environmental destruction pose. The nations of the European Union, the United States of America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are affluent liberal democracies that face this challenge. A fully liberal state is a state in which every citizen has equal rights and liberties, which are as extensive as they could be consistently with all others having the same rights and liberties. In these states this equality of rights and liberties coexists with a considerable socio-economical inequality. This raises questions about the extent to which these states are just and can be called true democracies. These questions are however beyond the scope of this book.

The ongoing philosophical debate over minority rights has three distinct stages. The first stage views minority rights as a communitarian defence against the encroachment of liberalism. The second stage revolves around the question: what is the possible scope for minority rights within liberal theory? The third stage views minority rights as a response to majority nation-building, rather than a deviation from ethnocultural neutrality.

King argues that liberal democratic policies assume illiberal characteristics insofar as they violate what he views as two core principles of liberalism: equality of treatment and respect for individual freedom. King asserts that such illiberal policies are usually justified within a threefold typology; first, through ‘liberal unreason’, the notion that government must make judgements about the mental competence and reasoning powers necessary for citizenship. Second, through ‘liberal amelioration and collectivism’, an idea by which governments have applied collectivist solutions to social problems. Finally, King contends that under the premises of a ‘liberal coercive contract’, governments have required specific activities of welfare recipients.

The concluding chapter identifies a set of variables responsible for the enormous impact of external factors on democratic consolidation in Eastern Europe: (1) the historical legacy, (2) the liberal‐democratic ideological paradigm, and (3) the forces of globalization. Next, it conceptualizes the interplay of external and internal factors impinging upon democracy and assesses positive and negative kinds of external impacts on democracy. The chapter concludes with an evaluation of the conscious Western effort to craft or engineer democracy in Eastern Europe. Despite inconsistent signals and the lack of a broader strategic design for Europe, the West has succeeded in creating an environment conducive to democratic reform in the post‐communist arena. Linking membership of western institutions to democracy and other reforms has been a characteristic feature of this crafting effort.

This paper argues that liberal democratic values provide clear markers for acceptable approaches to minority policies, which is lacking in East Central European countries. Two main trends are evident in the elaboration of international legal standards for handling ethnic diversity: the elaboration of new instruments on minority rights, and the half-hearted acceptance of this effort by ‘old’ and ‘new’ democracies. Simply put, although nation-states realize the urgency of addressing these issues, they are not eager to undertake serious obligations towards their minorities.

Considers what sorts of cultural adaptations may be expected of immigrants to a liberal democratic state by looking at the case of Quebec. Quebec is an interesting test case for this issue because it has an explicit political project of protecting and promoting a culturally distinct society. Nevertheless, Quebec's announced expectations of immigrants are remarkably modest: learn French and accept pluralism and democracy as the norms of public life. The chapter contends that Quebec's language policies and its official expectations of immigrants are morally defensible from the perspective of justice as evenhandedness because these are the sorts of demands that go hand in hand with a commitment to providing immigrants and their children with equal opportunities in Quebec and with the other rights and freedoms that a liberal democratic political community should provide to its members.

This chapter explores the relationship between political secularism and liberal democracy. The historical roots of secularism as a political concept are investigated. The various political models of secularism and types of liberal democracy, primarily the Anglo‐American and French traditions are discussed. In seeking out a detailed grasp of the precise relationship between secularism and liberal democracy the writings of two famous political philosophers are explored: Alexis de Tocqueville and Richard Rorty. Seeking a deeper grasp of the relationship between religion, secularism and democracy, the recent theoretical contributions by Alfred Stepan on the “Twin Tolerations” and the world's religious traditions are examined and then related to the debate on Islam and democracy.

This chapter examines why Western liberal theories of minorities rights have not been adopted in Japan. It argues that while the Japanese state is relatively liberal, Japanese society is not. Although the state, particularly local governments, has adopted more enlightened policies towards minorities, Japanese society is often discriminatory towards minorities. This social conservatism and illiberalism limits the sorts of minority policies that the state can adopt.