Democracy and Its Fragility

Mapping the Unstable Equilibrium
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-032-84390-2
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 370 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 453 g

Reihe: Routledge Research in Comparative Politics

This book explores democratic fragility, an underdeveloped concept in the analyses of contemporary political regimes. Diagnoses of fragility commonly occur when states are brought to the brink of the abyss. Democracy and Its Fragility: Mapping the Unstable Equilibrium builds on the premise that fragility is an inherent trait of democracy that expresses its exposure to disintegration yet does not foretell its death.

Employing a novel conceptual lens that seeks to scrutinize the stability of contemporary democratic regimes across the world, the book offers a twofold contribution that provides new leverage for analysis. Theoretically, it refines the notion of fragility, making it a complementary variable to the latest research on robustness and resilience. Empirically, the volume engages with an overview of fragility indicators featured in indices mapping the quality of democracy and an assessment of their limitations. What follows are in-depth qualitative case studies zooming into the struggles for democratic regime maintenance and response to a variety of unfavourable conditions in 13 countries across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Southern Europe and the Americas.

Addressing issues that are both conceptually advanced and highly accessible, Democracy and Its Fragility: Mapping the Unstable Equilibrium will attract academics and students of democracy studies, politics and government, and comparative politics.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate and Undergraduate Advanced

Autoren/Hrsg.

Zdeb, Aleksandra

Sawicka, Monika

Gruszczak, Artur

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Internationale Beziehungen
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politische Systeme Demokratie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction: the ‘super-election’ year and the timeliness of democratic fragility.  Chapter 1. Democracy: the contemporary understandings.  Chapter 2. Democracy: a fragile notion.  Chapter 3. A fool’s errand? Quantifying democratic fragility.  Chapter 4. Declining press freedom as a source of democratic fragility in Japan.  Chapter 5. Causes and sources of South Korea’s fragile democracy.  Chapter 6. Screening Indian democratic fragility: the question of press freedom.  Chapter 7. Fragility of post-conflict consociational democracies: Bosnia and Herzegovina and North Macedonia in the quest for democratic stability.  Chapter 8. Black chronicle: criminal state capture and democratic fragility in Montenegro.  Chapter 9. Endemic fragility? The case of consociational power-sharing in Lebanon.  Chapter 10. Pressure from new churches and the fragility of Kenyan democracy.  Chapter 11. Dwindling democratic dividends and democratic fragility in Nigeria.  Chapter 12. Societal cracks expressed through la grieta. Political polarization and democratic fragility in Argentina.  Chapter 13. Fake news and fragility. Bolsonaro and the Supreme Federal Court in the pendulum of Brazilian democracy.  Chapter 14. Criminal governance and democratic fragility in Mexico.  Chapter 15. Polarization, partisanship, and democratic fragility in the United States of America.  Conclusions

Über Autor(innen)

Monika Sawicka is Assistant Professor at the Institute of American Studies and Polish Diaspora, Jagiellonian University. Her research interests include Brazilian foreign policy, contemporary Brazilian politics, role theory and democratic fragility in Latin America. Her recent publications include the monograph Brazil’s International Activism. Roles of an Emerging Middle Power (Routledge 2023) and paper “The Curious Case of Vandals: Brazil’s Environmental and Regional Policies in the Bolsonaro Years” in Third World Quarterly (2024).

Artur Gruszczak is Professor of Social Sciences and Chair in National Security at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. His research areas include postmodern warfare, democratic governance, migration and internal security in the EU. His recent publications include the Routledge Handbook of the Future of Warfare (co-edited with Sebastian Kaempf, Routledge 2024), Technology, Ethics and the Protocols of Modern War (co-edited with Pawel Frankowski, Routledge 2018) and Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Regional and Global Security (co-edited with Pawel Frankowski, Palgrave Macmillan 2018).

Aleksandra Zdeb is Assistant Professor at the University of the National Education Commission in Krakow and Visiting Researcher at the Queen’s University Belfast. She holds a PhD in law and politics from the University of Graz and was a post-doc at the Queen’s University Belfast where she worked on topics of excluded groups and good governance in post-conflict societies. She is author of An Ordinary Demonstration of Power. On the Management of the Conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina (in Polish, Universitas 2022) and papers on post-conflict reconstruction and state-building processes in journals including Ethnopolitics, Nationalities Papers, Representation, Social Inclusion, Swiss Political Science Review.