Example research essay topic: Democratic Institutions Dependent Variable - 1,320 words

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Stable Democracies I show that the problem of democratic stability is in large part one of incentives: do political officials have the appropriate incentives to honor the rights of citizens and the rules of democracy? To see the importance of incentives for our question, notice that stable democracy requires two conditions: first, electoral losers must have incentives to step down; and second, those out of power must be willing to eschew force as a means of taking control of the government. If either of these conditions fail, democracy is clearly unstable. Drawing on the recent literature on democracy, I will show that an important part of our answer to the fundamental question concerns whether citizens have the ability to act in concert against political leaders who violate democracy. This ability provides a powerful deterrent: leaders are more likely to adhere to the rules when they fear being forced from office when citizens withdrawal political support. But what determines when citizens have this ability?

We show that this depends in part on the types of political institutions -that is, whether constitutions have the appropriate properties. In most countries, the onset of democracy began with compromises called pacts, agreements among contending -and often previously warring -elites that end hostilities, create new democratic institutions, and other rules restricting the nature of public decision making. For example, in Great Britain critical pacts include the Revolution Settlement following the Glorious Revolution of 1689 and the various reform acts in the 19 th century; in the United States, the Constitution and the Compromises of 1820, 1850, and 1877; in Spain, the various pacts surrounding democratization in 1975 - 78; in France creation of the third, fourth, and fifth republics; and in the European Union, the various treaties creating new, pan-European institutions. As we will see, pacts of this sort not only create democratic institutions, such as elections; they also create other political institutions and, critically, align incentives of political elites. I will first develop an abstract approach to the theory of democratic stability.

I then apply this approach to four cases: the controversies in seventeenth century England, the unsteady road of American democracy leading up to the Civil War, the successful transition to democracy in Spain in the late 1970 s, and the 1973 Chilean coup followed by successful return to democracy in the late 80 s and early 90 s. To understand and analyse the "transitions to democracy" from the angle of the proletarian revolution, we should first deal with a methodological issue. This represents the culmination of US imperialism's foreign policy, and its use of the banner of "democracy" all along the 20 th century to disguise its own rapacious nature, and also cover up the worst crimes against the masses worldwide. This feature has been the hallmark of US imperialism, ever since its birth, its hegemony and right through to its decline -one related to the particular conditions of its development.

Trotsky claims that: "In its very essence, US Imperialism is mercilessly tough, predatory -in the whole sense of the world- and criminal. However, due to the specific conditions of its development, it has the chance to disguise itself in the robe of pacifism. It does not do so in the way the parvenu imperialists from the Old World do, where everything is clear. Due to the specific conditions of the US's development, its bourgeoisie and its government, this pacifistic mask seems to be adhered to the imperialist face in such a way that it cannot be torn up. " Thus, at the beginning of the century, the US arose as an imperialist power using the banner of democracy, as it was clear in Woodrow Wilson's "Fourteen Points" after World War I. During World War II, the US fought for world hegemony with rival imperialist powers such as Germany and Japan, a struggle depicted as a one between "democracy" and Fascism.

In the post-war years, the US played the card of formal "de colonisation" so as to undermine the old European powers. The campaign against the totalitarian regimes in the East was the ideological justification for the "Cold War." It was used as a prop to consolidate its hegemony, bringing both its sphere of influence and its own proletariat under control -as during McCarthy's anti-Communist hysteria- while supporting dictatorships like Suharto's in Indonesia. During the last 25 years -when the US share of the world's GNP has went from 50 down to nearly 30 %- the "democratic counter-revolution" policy is the way US imperialism tries to buttress the historical decline of its hegemony. Such policy was made possible in the post-war period by buying-off the counter-revolutionary leaderships in the working class and mass movements -the Stalinist bureaucracy and its system of states in particular, the Communist and Social Democratic parties and, last but not least, the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalist leaderships in the semi colonial world. It was the role played by them -as we shall see below- that enabled imperialism to recover from defeat in Vietnam and then launch a counter-offensive from the 1980 s onwards. The people, legitimately influenced during an election, choose representatives who promise certain policies, and afterwards the people legitimately influence the elected official.

There is universal suffrage in the election, and approximate equality in both the influencing of the people during the election and their subsequent influencing of those elected representatives. The society's actual policies are chosen by the representatives in accord with their promises, and the policies do take effect. (Honderich) To briefly summarize these thoughts one would have to say that democracies incorporate the idea of legitimacy based on popular determination, elected governments, accountability, limited government, and guaranteed civil rights and freedoms. Some theorists hypothesize that a stable, effective democracy requires a relatively homogeneous population. A homogeneous population is a society that shares common beliefs, ancestry, background, religion, economic interests, and similar political outlooks. The more things people have in common in society, the more likely they are to sustain democratic institutions and make effective governmental decisions. Democracy rests on cooperation, thus the more a group of people have in common the more likely they are to work together to form a stable democracy.

Social diversity in democracy can be expected to cause collapse or inefficiencies of that society. So, for a democracy to be effective and stable, the society's population would have to be homogenous. We will call this hypothesis the homogeneity hypothesis. We will let the dependent variable be an unstable and ineffective democracy.

The independent variable is the heterogeneous population. The question to be asked is does a heterogeneous population lead to an unstable and ineffective democracy? This is a nomothetic causal explanation; it means that we believe that variation in the independent variable will be followed by variation in the dependent variable. (Schutt) The research design that is most appropriate for my research question would be non-experimental longitudinal design. The reason I chose to use a non-experimental longitudinal design to test my hypothesis is because the data for my hypothesis is collected at two or more points in time, and so identification of the time orders of effects are straightforward.

It would also be expensive to run tests on the democracies in a global context. The most reasonable thing for us to do is to look back in history at former democracies and see what contributed to the demise of them. We can also look at present democracies and compare the homogeneity of that state to the stability and effectiveness of the democracy in that state. Our measures take into account records of earlier democracies. There are five criteria that should be met in deciding whether a causal connection exists. Bibliography: 1.

James Petra's, criticising the bourgeois view calls these regimes "electoral neo-authoritarian regimes", (Democracy and capitalism. Democratic transition or neo-authoritarianism). Zondervan, 1999; 2. Leon Trotsky, Trade unions in the epoch of decay of Imperialism. The Economist, Aug- 29 - 1987.

Research essay sample on Democratic Institutions Dependent Variable