Sharun Mukand and Dani Rodrik — The political economy of liberal democracy

There are more democracies in the world today than non-democracies, according to data from Polity IV.1 Yet, few of those are what we would call liberaldemocracies – regimes that go beyond electoral competition and protect the rights of minorities, the rule of law, and free speech and practice non-discrimination in the provision of public goods.

Hungary, Ecuador, Mexico, Turkey, and Pakistan, for example, are all classified as electoral democracies by the Freedom House.2 But in these and many other countries, harassment of political opponents, censorship or self-censorship in the media, and discrimination against minority ethnic/religious groups run rampant. Fareed Zakaria coined the term ‘illiberal democracy’ for political regimes such as these that hold regular elections but routinely violate rights (Zakaria 1997). More recently, political scientists Steve Levitsky and Lucan Way (2010) have used the term ‘competitive authoritarianism’ to describe what they view as hybrid regimes between democracy and autocracy.…

Freedom House and Fareed Zakaria are tipoffs of false narrative.

More ideological musings by economists pontificating beyond their field using selective sources that agree with their views.

This post is only interesting for the title. Too bad that they did not do justice to this important subject that is also timely in current affairs, but rather took a neoliberal view of it.

Vox.eu
The political economy of liberal democracy
Sharun Mukand, Professor of Economics, University of Warwick, and Dani Rodrik, Albert O. Hirschman Professor at the School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study; and CEPR Research Fellow