Democracy: Thought and Practice (Syllabus) (original) (raw)
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Does Islam hinder democracy? This question has become especially pressing in the wake of the Third Wave of democratization, the September 11 attacks, the Arab Spring, and the mix of recent elections and political instability in the African Sahel. This course gives students the opportunity to evaluate the growing body of research on Islam's (in)compatibility with democracy. They will learn how to design independent research projects on Islam in politics, critically appraise leading scholarship on the issue, and develop country-specific knowledge of cases central to this debate. More broadly, students will assess the roles that Islam plays in the domestic politics, social policy, and international relations of both Muslim-majority and Muslimminority countries.
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, individual scholars and research institutes have conducted numerous public opinion surveys to monitor how global citizenries react to the process of democratization taking place in their own countries and elsewhere. This article reviews the various issues surrounding the divergent conceptions of democracy among political scientists and ordinary citizens, and synthesizes significant findings of the conceptual and empirical research based on these surveys. It also raises a set of new questions that future surveys should address to broaden and deepen our knowledge about citizen conceptions of democracy. All too often, we bring rose-colored glasses when we look at democracy, glasses handed to us from the dead hands of Enlightened thinkers. (Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartel, 2016: 328) In newly democratic or democratizing countries, where people are just beginning to learn the arts of self-government, the question of citizen competence possesses an obvious urgency. (Robert A. Dahl, 1992: 45) Studying people's aspiration toward democracy without carefully examining what democracy means to them would cause researchers to reach inaccurate conclusions about the relationship between people's support for democracy, regime change, and democratic consolidation. (Tianjian Shi, 2014: 220) * Some of our research questions and their preliminary analyses were reported online in a short essay contributed to Oxford Research Encyclopedias (Shin, 2017).
This work expands on the growing ideational institutionalist literature by proposing that institutional change and stability are influenced most substantially by changes to the underlying ideational network which link core societal ideas. These core ideas create the framework on which institutions are built and in which form they are fashioned. Changes to the ideational network lead to adaptive changes in institutions, but the difficulty in completely removing core ideas from these networks protects the institutions from substantial change. The theory is demonstrated using the case of the surprising stability of ethnic democracy in Israel in the wake of the substantial changes to the country’s economic and security realities. Small adaptive changes in the institution of ethnic democracy are traced back to changes in the balance between three core ideas: democracy, Jewish identity, and security. The overall stability of the institution, however, is linked to the enduring linkages of the three core ideas even as they experienced changes in their individual meanings.