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- 2022 (2) (entfernen)
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- Institut für Politikwissenschaft (IPW) (2) (entfernen)
Considering the recent success of right-wing populist candidates and parties in the United States and across Europe, there has for some years now been talk among scholars (and the wider public) about a worldwide democratic recession. The younger generations appear to be especially unsupportive of democracy’s liberal principles and more willing to express support for authoritarian alternatives. What these authors overlook, however, is that the publics of advanced industrial societies have experienced an intergenerational value shift. In fact, populations in industrial democracies have become more liberal overall, but not everyone’s mindset is changing at the same speed. It is mainly – but not exclusively – the members of the lower classes that do not keep up. While societies have generally become more liberal, there is increasing alienation between the social classes over these liberal values. Drawing on a more recent trend in social class research with a social cognitive approach, this dissertation contributes to the study of growing anti-democratic tendencies around the world by analyzing the interplay between inequality dynamics and value orientations. The focus lies on investigating the effect socio-cultural polarization (i.e., ideological polarization between social classes) has on civic culture in the mature democracies of the West. The findings suggest that it is not ideological polarization between the social classes that has the greatest negative effect on civic culture, or general civic attitudes and behavior, for that matter. It is the increasing dissent in society about whether the country’s elites are still to be trusted with making the right decisions to increase the average citizen’s quality of life. This difference in opinion manifests itself in a decline in some civic attitudes.
Increased international compliance with human rights and democracy standards is a core issue for both human rights and democratizing actors as well as for victims of human rights abuse. International human rights organizations (IHROs) are expected to make positive contributions to this end, even though they possess low levels of authority. This authority has been renegotiated multiple times in various reform processes. An oversimplified expectation would have us assume that democracies would want to strengthen IHROs, and that autocracies would seek to weaken them. As the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) was reformed in 2006, 2007, 2010, and 2011, some autocracies strived to abolish parts of the UNHRC. Other autocracies aimed "merely" to weaken them. Democracies displayed an even larger variance. The question that drives this research work is how we can explain the broad variety of state preferences for strengthening or weakening IHROs. Previous research has mostly concentrated on democracies, leaving autocracies understudied. It also treated countries as black boxes. To account for such shortcomings, first, the author systematically tests the relationship between the UNHRC and its authoritarian and democratic members by means of inferential statistics. Second, he analyzes a bottom-up process inherent to New Liberalism. It scrutinizes the role of domestic societal actors, domestic institutions, as well as pressures on the international stage. The results reveal that societal actors, along with the interplay of wealth and regime type in the international realm, figure as the most important predictors of delegation preferences voiced by autocracies and democracies during the reform of the monitoring bureaucracy Special Procedures of the UNHRC. Societal actors play a more important role in democracies than in autocracies. Institutionalized domestic oversight mechanisms help societal actors to conduct effective lobbying at the domestic level. Oversight mechanisms are more important than the rule of law and electoral institutions. Regarding international coalition building, authoritarian regimes turn out to be better organized than democracies. The author concludes that supporters of strong IHROs shall 1. empower domestic societal actors; 2. disrupt cohesive delegation preferences of authoritarian regimes; and 3. invest in independent domestic oversight mechanisms.oversight mechanisms.