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HYPOTHESIS AND THEORY article

Front. Polit. Sci.
Sec. Peace and Democracy
Volume 6 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpos.2024.1379699
This article is part of the Research Topic Non-Western Democracies – Theories, Conceptual Analyses, Case Studies View all articles

Configurations of democracy -Empirical and methodological insights from a comparison of Singapore, Ghana, and Ireland

Provisionally accepted
Norma Osterberg-Kaufmann Norma Osterberg-Kaufmann 1Toralf Stark Toralf Stark 2*Christoph Mohamad-Klotzbach Christoph Mohamad-Klotzbach 3
  • 1 Humboldt University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany
  • 2 University of Duisburg-Essen, Duisburg, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
  • 3 Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Bavaria, Germany

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    This article presents and proofs an alternative concept of democracy that seeks to overcome the limitations of rigid universalist, liberal-proceduralist conceptions by emphasizing the fundamental principles of democracy rather than combining them with culturally individualistic features. The approach presented here focuses on the fundamental principles of democracy. Democratic configurations assume that citizens' political self-efficacy of the people is a potential basic principle behind any institutionalization of democratic order. Therefore, this article refers on a discussion of the theoretical implementation of self-efficacy in the three models of democracy: liberalism, republicanism and communitarianism (Osterberg-Kaufmann et al. 2022). Ultimately, every political system must be studied by whether the established institutions serve this basic principle. The article illustrates the proposed approach through case studies of Singapore, Ghana, and Ireland. The empirical examples show how different institutional settings and their adjustments strengthen and hinder political self-efficacy. Therefore, this new bottom-up-approach of studying configurations of democracy may help to get better insights on the democraticness of political systems and other institutional settings.

    Keywords: political self-efficacy1, configurations of democarcy2, democratic theory3, liberalism4, communitarianism5, republicanism6

    Received: 31 Jan 2024; Accepted: 01 Aug 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Osterberg-Kaufmann, Stark and Mohamad-Klotzbach. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Toralf Stark, University of Duisburg-Essen, Duisburg, 47057, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany

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