Democracy in Flux

Author: Zho Kou Xiaodeng (editors), Lin Meng (translators)
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-01-01
Features: As a proven set of guidelines for handling political and social life, democracy is gaining increasingly widespread acceptance, while the challenges it faces are becoming increasingly prominent. On one hand, countries undergoing democratic transitions are grappling with a multitude of pressing issues; on the other hand, many nation-states are rejecting universal democratic models on the grounds of their unique development paths. This book compiles detailed analyses of these issues by a group of renowned political scholars, including Juan Linz, Zho Kou Xiaodeng, and Blondel, among others. It also explores the relationships between democracy and religion, culture, media, civil society, and globalization, and examines the possibility of extending democracy from the national level to the level of international organizations. Since the late 1980s, many have hailed the Western democratic model as the ultimate model of human civilization. However, this excessive optimism was soon met with a heavy blow from reality. Regardless of the progress made by democratic systems in the 1980s and 1990s, the old and new problems they faced continued to surface: within newly established democracies that adopted the Western model, democracy not only failed to resolve the conflicts between the old regime and the public but also exacerbated various socio-economic issues. On the other hand, the traditional view of the universality of the democratic model has been strongly challenged by theories emphasizing the specificity of national development. Democracy has not become a standardized global model, and the challenges it faces are unprecedented. This book addresses the numerous issues faced by democratic systems during their development and transformation. The authors are all well-known scholars in the field of comparative politics, possessing solid analytical skills in political studies and, for the most part, having academic backgrounds that blend Eastern and Western perspectives, enabling them to keenly grasp the various problems faced by democratic systems and gain insights into the fundamental patterns of the evolution of the Western democratic model.