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As every other social construct, democracy is under constant pressure to adapt to societal change. The increasing complexity of economic, social and political problems and their solutions, or the growth of critical citizens with different expectations and demands from ‘their’ governments are important challenges that established democracies have to face.
Many politicians as well as scientists fear that established democracies are not apt to handle these challenges. Based on empirical findings concerning the loss of confidence in political elites and the citizens’ declining support for democracy (Dalton, 2005), democratic nations are believed to experience veritable crises of legitimacy (Pharr & Putnam, 2000).
Usually, globalization is identified as the culprit in the story of the crisis of democracy. Globalization – understood as the economic and financial integration of market societies, the political de-nationalization of established democracies in terms of supra-nationalization and regionalization as well as the spread of main stream culture – is seen as the main source of several obstructions of democracy: reduced autonomy in national policy-making (Cox, 1997; Schmitter, 1996), the emergence of domestic losers resulting in rising income inequality and increasing public discontent (Cox, 1996; Longworth, 1998), the blurring of governmental transparency (Gill, 1995), or a degradation of the concept of citizenship (Sassen, 1996). Thus, several basic elements of a democratic system are thought to be constricted by globalization.
Of course, the crisis argument is not unchallenged in the scholarly debate on the impact of globalization on democracy. Another view suggests the opposite: globalization can even be an opportunity for democracy and enhance its quality (Eichengreen & Leblang, 2008), e.g. by reducing information costs (Diamond, 1992), by enlarging the scope of action for nation states (Gilpin, 1987; O’Riain, 2000), or by the expansion of the electoral marketplace through denationalization (Sassen, 1996). A third view expects no impact of globalization on democracy at all (Fligstein, 2001) or considers the effect of globalization to be overstated (Hirst & Thompson, 1996).
Most of the previous studies who analyzed the relationship between globalization and democracy focused on the impact of economic globalization (in terms of openness of national markets) on democratization, using large country samples which include established democracies as well as autocracies (Brune & Garett, 2005; Eichengreen & Leblang, 2008). In this contribution, I analyze the impact of globalization in terms of economic market integration and political internationalization on the quality of established democracies. I argue that established democracies deal with the challenges of globalization differently and that their success or failure in doing so is reflected in the changes of their quality over time.