State Or Democracy First? Alternative Perspectives on the State-Democracy Nexus
Author | : Sebastián Mazzuca |
Publisher | : |
Total Pages | : 0 |
Release | : 2014 |
ISBN-10 | : OCLC:1375239931 |
ISBN-13 | : |
Rating | : 4/5 ( Downloads) |
Download or read book State Or Democracy First? Alternative Perspectives on the State-Democracy Nexus written by Sebastián Mazzuca and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper addresses the nexuses between democracy, understood in minimal procedural terms, and three key aspects of the state: the state as a political center with a monopoly of the use of violence over a population within a given territory, the state as a political center which rules over a population that has a sense of nationhood, and the state as a political center that delivers public goods beyond political order, such as economic and social welfare. We consider two perspectives on these state-democracy nexuses: one that holds that, to ensure that democratization is successful and democracy enduring, various challenges pertaining to the state must be tackled before the democracy question is addressed; another that posits that the challenges pertaining to the state can be addressed in the course of a process of democratization or through democratic procedures. And we conclude that the oft-repeated proposition “no state, no democracy” is at best only partially true and many of its derivations are false. Indeed, “no democracy, no state” is a more plausible claim and one that is especially relevant in the contemporary period.