Tuesday, December 18, 2012

NEVIS REVIEW NO 6 , Section II, Ref # 6.2

NEVIS REVIEW NO 6
Section II
 Ref # 6.2
Dec 17, 2012

Abstract of the article by Lisa Blaydes and James Lo, titled " One man, one vote, one time? A model of democratization in the Middle East", Journal of Theoretical Politics
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The protests associated with the 2011 Arab Spring represent a serious and sustained challenge to autocratic rule in the Middle East. Under what conditions will Arab protest movements translate
into a full-fledged ‘fourth wave’ of democratization­? We argue that questions about the commitment of Islamic political opposition to democracy beyond a country’s first free election may hinder Middle Eastern democratization­. We extend Przeworski’s canonical model of political liberalization as described in Democracy and the Market (1991) and find that transition to democracy
is only possible under two conditions. First, uncertainty regarding the preferences of key elite actors is a necessary condition for democratic transition. Second, the repressive capacity of the
state must lie above a minimum threshold. Given these conditions, democracy can occur when two types of political actors meet – regime liberalizers who prefer democracy to a narrowed
dictatorship, and civil society elite who honor democratic principles. While a series of influential studies have argued that authoritarian elites block democratic transition because of their fear of the economic redistributive preferences of the median voter, this study suggests that regime liberalizers in the Middle East suspect political openings could become a vehicle for Islamists to seize power through free elections only to deny the median voter another chance to express their will.
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For full article, follow this link. http://­www.stanford.edu­/~blaydes/­Democracy.pdf