What are the key variables that determine the success of democratic reforms in the Third World? Are they the same as found in Western democracies? What elements are critical in fostering a multi-party democracy? The global wave of democratisation over the past two decades has been far from a uniform process. Why have some countries remained electoral democracies while others have lapsed into authoritarianism?
This article, from the journal Democratization, takes an empirical look at questions central to the relationship between political parties and democratisation in countries that have experimented with democracy in the 1990s. The basic question this paper addresses is whether the democratisation in Third World countries is extricable in terms of factors related to the party systems of these countries. Taking the form of a scientific paper, a series of independent variables, including ‘party system stability’ and ‘one-party dominance’ are tested against an appraisal of the level of democracy evident in a system. The initial results indicate that, in both presidential and parliamentary systems, democratic development is insensitive to variations in party system characteristics.
After further refinement of the variables to unearth statistical differences, the following findings are made:
- Party system characteristics have an impact on democratic development, but only in certain institutional settings
- Generally, the electoral system is more important than the form of government in determining democratic development. For example, it is reasonable to assume that high levels of party system fragmentation are more likely to affect the stability of the political system in countries with plurality electoral systems than in countries with proportional ones
- In proportional electoral systems, high levels of party system fragmentation are not considered an imminent threat to the democratic form of government, since people rarely expect that one party could form a majority government anyway
- Overall, however, the most striking finding of the article was that party system characteristics could not explain variations in democratic development. Factors that have been found to possess considerable explanatory power concerning the stability of democracy in the West seem of little importance for the development of democracy in the Third World. It is suggested that this may have something to do with the nature of democratic consolidation itself.
Policy implications that are drawn from this study include:
- Studies on the nature of Western democracies may be of little relevance in the context of promoting democracy in Third World countries
- The potential for democratic development in a country is highly reliant on specific contextual issues. While electoral systems seem to have more bearing on the development of democracy than does the form of government, careful consideration must be given to the balance of both in order to encourage the possibility of maintaining democratic systems.
