Participatory Budgeting Within the Framework of Open Government

Participatory budgeting is a public policy and management instrument as well as a mechanism to help develop citizen participation and transparency. This chapter examines participatory budgeting from its origins, evolution, and the way in which it has contributed to make management transparent at the local government level, appropriately guiding the use of financial resources while contributing to the fight against corruption. This work demonstrates how the Dominican Republic is implementing participatory budgeting policies and their impact on the administration of local municipalities, quality of life improvements, and citizen participation as a core democratic principle of direct open government. This chapter presents a strong case, based on the example of municipal-level governments in the Dominican Republic, that participatory budgeting at the local level is one of the most important direct democratic instruments of Open Governments after the right to vote to create a solid foundation for good governance at the local level.

International Legitimacy

Wight defined international legitimacy as ‘the collective judgment of international society about rightful membership of the family of nations’. International legitimacy derived mainly from prescription and dynasticism, the customary rule of hereditary monarchs, until the American and French Revolutions instituted the popular and democratic principle of the consent of the governed. The increasing reliance on popular politics led to the triumph of national self-determination in the 1919 peace settlement, with certain exceptions, notably the decision not to conduct a plebiscite in Alsace-Lorraine. New principles, such as territorial contiguity and integrity, influenced decisions about the legitimacy of the frontiers of the states formed from the breakup of European colonial empires after the Second World War. India, for example, referred to the principle of territorial integrity to justify the acquisition of Hyderabad and Goa. Critics of colonial arrangements have regarded them as illegitimate and unacceptable by definition. A state seeking independence via secession can succeed in its bid for self-determination only if it can gain sufficient external support. Therefore Biafra’s bid failed while that of Bangladesh succeeded. Communist principles of legitimacy emphasize the self-determination of the proletariat under the guidance of the Communist party. Legitimacy principles are subject to pragmatic constraints, and in practice governments generally recognize whoever controls state power.

Unequal inequalities? How participatory inequalities affect democratic legitimacy

Democratic theorists have long emphasized the importance of participatory equality, i.e. that all citizens should have an equal right to participate. It is still unclear, however, whether ordinary citizens view this principle as central to democracy and how different violations of this principle affect subjective democratic legitimacy. The attitudes of citizens are imperative when it comes to the subjective legitimacy of democratic systems, and it is therefore important to examine how participatory inequalities affect these attitudes. We here contribute to this research agenda with survey experiments embedded in two surveys (n=324, n=840). We here examine 1) whether citizens consider participatory inequality to be an important democratic principle, and 2) how gender and educational inequalities affect subjective legitimacy and the perceived usefulness of the participatory input. The results show that citizens generally consider participatory inequalities to be important, but only gender inequalities affect subjective legitimacy and usefulness. Hence it is important to consider the type of inequality to understand the implications.

De-Russification of Government as a Factor in the Disintegration of the USSR

In the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1990, the political inequality of the nationalities’ representation in institutions of governance was overcome, non-Russians’ participation in the power structures increased, and Russians’ role in administration correspondingly decreased. The increased non-Russian percentage in governance was mainly due to the introduction of the democratic principle in government formation, according to which ethnicities should participate in proportion to their number. By 1990 in the USSR overall, Russians had a slight majority in all power structures, corresponding roughly to their higher share in the country’s population. In the union republics, however, the situation was different. Only in the RSFSR did all peoples, Russian and non-Russian, participate in government administration in proportion to their numbers, following the democratic norm. Elsewhere, Russians were underrepresented and therefore discriminated against in all organs of power, including the legislative branch. Representatives of non-Russian titular nationalities, who on average filled two-thirds of all administrative positions, predominated in disproportion to their numbers. Given these representatives’ skill majority in legislative bodies, republican constitutions permitted them to adopt any laws and resolutions they desired, including laws on secession from the USSR; and the executive and judicial authorities, together with law enforcement, would undoubtedly support them. Thus, the structural prerequisites for disintegration were established. Thereafter, the fate of the Soviet Union depended on republican elites and the geopolitical environment, because of the Center’s purposeful national policy, aimed toward increasing non-Russian representation among administrative cadres and the accelerated modernization and developmental equalization of the republics.

Evolution of Spanish tax policy (1975-2021)

The article considers the evolution of the Spanish tax system during the most important period of its historical development: the transition from Francoism to democracy. As the main economic function of the state, the tax system traditionally reflects its social structure, the nature of economic relations and managerial decisions of the ruling class, fundamental processes of social development. Unlike most European countries, the tax policy of the Spanish state until the last quarter of the 20th century was characterised by extreme anachronism, due to the long existence of Franco’s political system. Spain entered the path of democracy and europeanization of the Franco tax legislation only in the second half of the 70s, having gone through two stages of its modification: from state dirigism to neoliberal model. The main goal of the first stage was declared to achieve a fairer redistribution of the tax burden and narrowing the gap in the level of taxation between the most and the poorest strata of the population in accordance with the democratic principle "who receives the most income pays more to the budget". In the course of the second stage of tax reform the emphasis was done on stimulating business, its innovative, foreign economic and competitive potential, curtailing the functions of the Welfare state. Pandemic Covid-19 sums up the negative consequences of the neoliberal policy, largely due to the existing tax model. Its serious modification is the main direction in the complex of socioeconomic reforms of the Spanish government for the coming years.

Democracy in the Firm

The problem of collective decision-making arising from market failures is addressed using the democratic principle applied within the assembly of shareholders. A basic requirement is imposed (the Pareto principle): collective choices should not be at odds with the interests of all shareholders, as expressed by their preferences. This requirement puts bounds on what the collective can choose: it should remain within the set of averages of what the shareholders want. Further refining these bounds, a notion of political stability is proposed; it is defined with respect to (super) majority voting. One searches for the smallest rate of super majority for which a stable collective choice exists. This optimal rate is reviewed under classical assumptions from the social choice literature. It is shown how the dimensionality of the collective decision-making problem and the polarization of the electorate critically impact political stability, and hence the optimal rate of super majority.

Global Governance and the WHO’s Mandate Post-COVID-19 Crisis

The COVID-19 has renovated the debate about global health governance. A number of scholars have proposed that the World Health Organization should assume the position of a central coordinator with hierarchical powers, demanding nation-states to “share their sovereignty”. This article presents four main objections to this project. First, when international institutions receive leverage, they use to impose “one-size-fits-all” policies, which conflicts with the characteristic heterogeny across countries. Second, geopolitical questions and the distribution of power in multilateral institutions put developing countries in a position of vulnerability within a hierarchical order. Third, the risk of crowding out parallel initiatives, especially from non-state actors. Fourth, decisions about health can have a major impact on countries, which may thwart the internal democratic principle. A Pareto improvement would be possible by strengthening the WHO’s operational capacity and its ability to issue technical guidance and coordinate with countries. To test this hypothesis, this study analyses the possible influence of the WHO’s guidance in the first year of the coronavirus health crisis, from January 2020 to January 2021, in 37 countries reported in the World Values Survey Wave 7 (2017-2020). The OLS regression performed shows a statistically significant negative relationship between the trust in the WHO, assumed as a proxy for the level of the organization's penetration, and the number of cases of COVID-19 (per million people) in the countries of the sample. These findings reinforce the hypothesis that there is a valid case for the countries to strengthen the WHO’s mandate post-COVID-19, but they should enhance the operations of provision of reliable information and support. Nation-states, in particular the developing ones, should eschew the temptation to create a hierarchical global health structure, which may not only fail due to countries’ asymmetries but is likely to create losers in the process.

Political Equality and Substantive Representation by Interest Groups

The interest group literature has long struggled with how to empirically approach the normative idea of a non-biased group system. While most previous attempts have focused on the descriptive representation of different types of groups, this article argues that substantive representation of citizens' attitudes is closer to the democratic principle of equal effective participation. It develops a methodological approach that captures substantive representation with respect to agenda priorities and policies by surveying interest groups on how much time they spend on lobbying in different policy areas, and in which direction they lobby on salient policy issues. The responses are compared with opinion data to estimate the level of political (in)equality. The findings from the case of Sweden – where relatively high levels of equality would be expected, but striking levels of inequality based on socio-economic status are instead found – highlight the perseverance of what Schattschneider once called the upper-class bias of the pressure system.

Autocratization Verity: Insights from Democratic Setbacks in Africa

This study builds on extant literature on autocratization by critically analyzing democratic setbacks, arising from widespread incidents of electoral and political violence in democratic processes in Africa. The study leverages on frustration-aggression propositions to analyze the politico-electoral dynamics in autocratization trends in climes where the incentives to use violence as power acquisition strategy have become a dominant norm either by the ruling elites who seek to remain in power (sometimes by all means – both legal and, mostly, illegal) or by the opposition groups seeking to dislodge the former. As a qualitative research, the study squarely relies on available documented textual materials and rich datasets developed by reputable international research institutes. The analysis of data reveals that autocratization is real, gradual and subtle in Africa, and it is fostered by weak electoral institutions that are helpless in checkmating the use of violent strategies to win an election, which is the most visible element of modern democracy. Based on these findings, deliberate efforts should be made to build and/or strengthen electoral institutions that will rise above group interests and group control and ensure equal playing ground for all political groups in the contestation for state power. This will guarantee stable democratic growth within the context of the democratic principle of equal political opportunity premised on one man, one vote in Africa.

The marketisation of education and the democratic deficit

This article deals with the question of what has happened to ‘the public’ in the Swedish education system during the last three decades. In our search for an answer we illuminate and discuss how the process of marketisation, together with the learnification and individualisation of education, replaced ‘the public’ from public education with the logic of the market place. To shed some further light on the current discourse on Swedish education, we contrast two principles in education and teaching, the aristocratic principle and the democratic principle. According to the aristocratic principle, education is about fixating and reproducing existing power relations as the cornerstone of a well-ordered society. According to the democratic principle of education, equality is the cornerstone of a well-ordered democratic society. Considering the shift in the very infrastructure of the Swedish educational system, we arrive at the conclusion that the principles in education and teaching are characterised by the aristocratic principle, rather than those we have characterised as democratic principles. The educational message is clear: upcoming generations are to accept the rules of the market economy and play the game accordingly.