Bolivia and the paradoxes of democratic consolidation

In Bolivia from the 1990s on, two presidents were ousted by popular protests, and protests were rampant. The protests expressed a growing discontent not only with successive administrations and their policies but with politics itself. The polity failed to built trust in democracy, ignored or repressed protests, and thus contributed to a process of democratic "deconsolidation." The main factors were corruption and the reluctance of the traditional political parties to discuss the neoliberal economic model. As a result, the current administration of Evo Morales faces two challenges: to change economic policies and to repair the support for democracy

Social media in democratic transitions and consolidations: what can we learn from the case of Tunisia?

© 2018, © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. The aim of this paper is to analyse the use of social media in the stages of uprising, democratic transition and democratic consolidation using the case study of Tunisia. While the impact of social media in uprisings has been widely documented in past research about the MENA region, Tunisia provides new evidence to the use of Internet in the processes of democratisation. Consequently, this research focuses in detail on the benefits but also the pitfalls of social media in transitions and consolidations. Data collection was based on interviews with Tunisian social media activists. The analysis is valuable to social media practitioners and researchers alike

Liberalization, globalization and the dynamics of democracy in India

In the closing decades of the twentieth century there has been an almost complete intellectual triumph of the twin principles of marketization (understood here as referring to the liberalization of domestic markets and freer international mobility of goods, services, financial capital and perhaps, more arguably, labour) and democratization . A paradigm shift of this extent and magnitude would not have occurred in the absence of some broad consensus among policymakers and (sections of) intellectuals around the globe on the desirability of such a change. There seems to be a two-fold causal nexus between marketization and democracy. The first is more direct, stemming from the fact of both systems sharing certain values and attitudes in common. But there is also a second more indirect chain from marketization to democracy, which is predicated via three sub-chains (i) from marketization to growth, (ii) from growth to overall material development welfare and (iii) from material development to social welfare and democracy. We examine each of these sub-links in detail with a view to obtaining a greater understanding of the hypothesized role of free markets in promoting democracies. In the later part of the paper we examine the socio-economic outcomes governing the quality of democracy in a specifically Indian context