Essay on Democracy: Democracy and New Political Institutions

Submitted By TonnyMuthomi
Words: 2065
Pages: 9

Question one:
Third wave Democracies:
Third-wave democracies have been hit by emergence of controversial social forces, uneven incorporation of social sectors, actually these new political institutions troubled by movements rallying against the failure of states to universalize democratic practices and achieve political autonomy. For instance ethnic movements have strongly stood to contest the foundations and contours of contemporary democratic and liberal institutions, thus arising of fundamental political debates over territorial autonomy, legal pluralism, citizenship, representation and multiculturalism. For example, these movements are mostly standing out in countries with large populations such as Colombia, Chile and Brazil (Becker, 2010, p.29-36).
They have largely engaged in mass mobilizations, roadblocks, electoral campaigns and policy negotiations. These movements do not seek to but rather not only looking to reform democracy but exert lot of pressure on it (Becker, 2010, p.40). Politicization of ethnic cleavages prevents realization of theoretical expectations of the democratic consolidation literature.
In addition to, efforts of democratic consolidation are greatly hindered by the fact that it has weakly institutionalized party systems. The merit of this distinctive characteristic of party systems in the third-wave democracies has not been keenly recognized (Mainwaring, 1998, p.68-80).
Significance of democracy for Latin American nations:
Since retreat of democracy for instance in Venezuela is that there has been conducting and sustained voting which usually occur in a competitive, free and fair presidential elections in 1998, and since them elections have been fluent (Hunter, 2006,p.151-154). This has been confirmed clear in Venezuela which held four presidential, four regional, three legislative and two municipal elections, in addition to six national referenda and one election for delegates to a constituent assembly. The remarkable most recent on this list were the presidential elections of 7 October 2012, in which the terminally ill Chavez was reelected to a fourth six-year term (Mainwaring, 1998,p.81).
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights submitted specific report on the deteriorating human rights so has to uphold/regulate them which included; addressed on the judicial independence, limits on freedoms of speech and the press including physical attacks on journalists and obstacles to accessing public information and reporting on events of public interest, citizen insecurity severe enough to decouple on the right to life, the use of military to perform public-safety tasks, protection from the assaults on the political rights of opposition voters, candidates, and elected officials, protection from gross mistreatment of prison inmates, threats against human right defenders,jailings,beatings and murders of trade-union leaders and human-rights violations targeting indigenous people (Hunter, 2010, p.156).

Reason for Democracy not collapsing: As clearly seen, most democracies face a lot of challenges as they fight for democracy throughout the world. In this case of Latin, America, there have been a lot of political battles and movements that these democrats go through in their desire for democracy. These third wave democrats have been exposed to implementation of neoliberal citizenship that are complete and as a result most of them are of the idea that there should be more complex political geography that defines units and places for democratic governance and representation (Yashar, 1999,p.76).
The contemporary democracies in Latin America restored electoral politics reviving and reforming democratic rule throughout the region these not only led to new electoral institutions but also led to radical shift in the content of citizenship that set state-society relations along a new phase. The changing content of citizenship also has been followed by a change in the primary modes of interest intermediation