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Overview
Democracy is not just a matter of constitutions, parliaments, elections, parties, and the rule of law. In order to see if or how democracy works, we must attend to what people make of it, and what they think they are doing as they engage with politics, or as politics engages them. This book examines the way democracy and democratization are thought about and lived by people in China, Russia, and eleven other countries in the post-communist world. It shows how democratic politics (and sometimes authoritarian politics) works in these countries, and generates insights into the prospects for different kinds of political development. The authors explore the implications for what is probable and possible in terms of trajectories of political reform, and examine four roads to democratization: liberal, republican, participatory, and statist. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of comparative politics, political theory, and post-communist studies.Synopsis
Examines the way democracy is thought about and lived by people in the post-communist world.
Foreign Affairs
What the people of a country make of democracy will presumably have something to do with whether or not democracy is possible. Yet most scholars have been preoccupied with institutional design, the politics of reform, and theories of transition; few have bothered to study the views of those the new order is to be "of, by, and for." Dryzek and Holmes fill the void. They reveal the way crucial attitudes toward democracy are distributed among the populations of countries ranging from China to Poland, including Russia and a number of post-Soviet states. These multipart profiles offer useful and sometimes surprising insights into this grassroots dimension of democratization: for example, in authoritarian Belarus the different mindsets may be less of an obstacle to democracy than commonly assumed, and Bulgaria ranks with Poland and the Czech Republic as among the most favored. Their study, however, concerns the content and configuration of attitudes, not their relative popularity — hence an important piece of the puzzle remains to be added.