[DOWNLOAD] "Political Freedom and the Stability of Economic Policy." by The Cato Journal # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Political Freedom and the Stability of Economic Policy.
- Author : The Cato Journal
- Release Date : January 22, 2004
- Genre: Politics & Current Events,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 239 KB
Description
Most of the regime shifts in democracies occur through the electoral defeat of the incumbents, while most dictatorships relinquish power only through violence. Democracy requires consent of the citizenry, and consent requires political legitimacy. Therefore, violent popular opposition is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for a democratic breakdown. Thus, it seems that to the extent that democratic authority is rooted in the popular consent, political violence poses less of a threat to democracies than it does to dictatorships. However, recent experiences in Africa and Latin America indicate that democratic decay and political delegitimization coupled with disastrous economic performance shortened the life span of many democratic regimes. It is therefore not clear whether democracies are more or less resilient than dictatorships. Nevertheless, it is possible that democratic regimes are characterized by more stable economic policies than nondemocratic regimes and therefore the type of the political regime may be important, not for just being democratic or dictatorial but for the stability of its policies. By focusing on poor indicators of instability such as coups, revolutions, and political assassinations, the current literature has failed to differentiate between the collapse of democratic and authoritarian rules or whether democratic regimes collapse for the same reasons as do authoritarian regimes. The current literature is silent on whether democracies are more fragile or less susceptible to economic and political breakdowns. Using a number of political and policy instability variables, this article examines whether political freedom (a proxy for democracy) has any effect on the stability of political regimes. Regimes can be characterized as unstable if they are susceptible to violent and unexpected turnover of the political leaders.