Embedded and Defective Democracies

Prof. Wolfgang Merkel, born in 1952, studied Political Science, History, International Relations and Sports in Heidelberg and Bologna. He has taught and conducted research at the universities of Bielefeld, Mainz, Harvard, Madrid and Heidelberg. Since 2004, he has been the director of the research unit, "Democracy: Structures, Performance, Challenges", at the Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB), as well as a professor of Political Science at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. The subjects of focus of his research are political regimes, democracy and transformation, parties and party systems, comparative public policy, social justice and reform of the welfare state

Prof. Merkel is also Deputy Chairman of the Fachkollegium Sozialwissenschaften in der DFG (Review Board for the Social Sciences of the German Research Foundation), a member of the Wissenschaftlicher Beirat beim Bundesministerium für wirtschaftliche Zusammenarbeit und Entwicklung (Advisory Council of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development) since 2004, and a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities since December 2007.

He recently coauthored Social Democracy in Europe (Routledge, 2008); Defekte Demokratien (Defective Democracies), 2 vols., (Leske + Budrich, 2006), and Special Issues of Democratization: War and Democratization: Legality, Legitimacy and Effectiveness (with Sonja Grimm, Routledge, 2008).

In the literature on democratization, the mainstream of theoretical and empirical consolidology uses the dichotomy, autocracy versus democracy. Democracy is generally conceived of as “electoral democracy.” This simple dichotomy does not allow a distinction between consolidated liberal democracies and their diminished subtypes. However, over half of all the new electoral democracies represent specific variants of diminished subtypes of democracy, which can be called defective democracies. Starting from the root concept of embedded democracies, which consists of five interdependent partial regimes (electoral regime, political rights, civil rights, horizontal accountability and effective power to govern), I distinguish between four diminished subtypes of defective democracy: exclusive democracy, illiberal democracy, delegative democracy and tutelary democracy. It can be shown that defective democracies are by no means necessarily transitional regimes. They tend to form stable links to their economic and societal environment and are often viewed by considerable segments of the elite and the population as an adequate institutional solution to the specific problems of governing “effectively.” As long as this equilibrium between problems, context and power is maintained, defective democracies will survive for protracted periods of time.

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