Embedded and Defective Democracies. In: Democratization, Vol.11, No.5, December 2004, pp.33–58 (original) (raw)

In the literature on democratization the mainstream of theoretical and empirical consolidology uses the dichotomy autocracy versus democracy. Democracy is generally conceived of as ‘electoral democracy’. This simple dichotomy does not allow a distinction between consolidated liberal democracies and their diminished sub-types. However, over half of all the new electoral democracies represent specific variants of diminished sub-types of democracy, which can be called defective democracies. Starting from the root concept of embedded democracies, which consists of five interdependent partial regimes (electoral regime, political rights, civil rights, horizontal accountability, effective power to govern), the article distinguishes between four diminished subtypes of defective democracy: exclusive democracy, illiberal democracy, delegative democracy and tutelary democracy. It can be shown that defective democracies are by no means necessarily transitional regimes. They tend to form stable ...