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Most research about the pre-conditions for and influences shaping liberal democracies’ development still focuses on some tens or dozens of macro-institution variables – such as the kind of electoral system being used, the number of parties in the party system, the level of ‘consensus’ in legislatures or executive government or the fiscal decentralisation of government. Yet in recent years the advances made by institutionalist analysis have seemed to taper off, and I argue here that this reflects an over-focusing on relatively few macro-institutions that form the standard repertoire of political science. It’s an approach that argues for the importance of a country’s institutions and their evolution in shaping its political development, as opposed to alternative causes – such as sociological or cultural influences, or political economy changes, or the abstract working of ‘rational man’ imperatives, to name but three. Institutionalism has been a big movement in political science over the last two decades.
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Drawing on a new book, Patrick Dunleavy explains why these developments mean that political science has to get a lot more granular and sophisticated, instead of focusing just on ‘toy models’. By contrast, semi-democracies keep only the façade of macro-institutions, subverting a range of critical micro-institutions so as to make political competition and popular control a hollow sham.
What is a liberal in politics definition free#
Liberal democracies combine core ‘macro-institutions’ (like free elections and control by legislatures) with swarms of supportive ‘micro-institutions’.