Challenges to Democracy in the 21st Century series

The series “Challenges to Democracy in the 21st Century” was initiated by

the Swiss National Center of Competence in Research NCCR Democracy, an
interdisciplinary research program launched by the Swiss National Science
Foundation and the University of Zurich in 2005. The program examines
how globalization and mediatization challenge democracy today (www.nccr-
democracy.uzh.ch).

Series Editor: Hanspeter Kriesi, University of Zurich, Switzerland

Democracy faces substantial challenges as we move into the 21st Century. The
West faces malaise; multi-level governance structures pose democratic challenges;
and the path of democratization rarely runs smoothly. This series examines
democracy across the full range of these contemporary conditions. It pub-
lishes innovative research on established democracies, democratizing polities and
democracy in multi-level governance structures. The series seeks to break down
artificial divisions between different disciplines, by simultaneously drawing on
political communication, comparative politics, international relations, political
theory, and political economy.

Series Editorial Board:

Marc Bühlmann, University of Berne, Switzerland

Claes de Vrese, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Frank Esser, University of Zurich, Switzerland
Herbert Kitschelt, Duke University, USA
Sandra Lavenex, University of Lucerne, Switzerland
Jörg Matthes, University of Zurich, Switzerland
Gianpietro Mazzoleni, University of Milano, Italy
Wolfgang Merkel, WZB-Berlin, Germany

Titles include:

Laurent Bernhard
CAMPAIGN STRATEGY IN DIRECT DEMOCRACY
Hanspeter Kriesi, Sandra Lavenex, Frank Esser, Jörg Matthes, Marc Bühlmann,
and Daniel Bochsler
DEMOCRACY IN THE AGE OF GLOBALIZATION AND MEDIATIZATION
Hanspeter Kriesi
POLITICAL COMMUNICATION IN DIRECT DEMOCRATIC CAMPAIGNS
Enlightening or Manipulating?
Maija Setälä and Theo Schiller (editors)
CITIZEN’S INITIATIVES IN EUROPE
Procedures and Consequences of Agenda-Setting by Citizens

Challenges to Democracy in the 21st Century

Series Standing Order ISBN 978–0–230–30487–1 (hardback) and
978–0–230–30488–8 (paperback)
(outside North America only)
You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a
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Democracy in the Age
of Globalization and
Mediatization
Hanspeter Kriesi
Chair in Comparative Politics, European University Institute, Florence

Sandra Lavenex
Professor of International Politics, Department of Political Science, University
of Lucerne

Frank Esser
Professor of International and Comparative Media Research, Department
of Communication, University of Zurich

Jörg Matthes
Professor, Department of Communication, University of Vienna

Marc Bühlmann
Director of the Swiss Political Yearbook, Institute of Political Science, University
of Berne

Daniel Bochsler
Associate Professor of Democratisation, NCCR Democracy, University of Zurich
© Hanspeter Kriesi, Sandra Lavenex, Frank Esser, Jörg Matthes,
Marc Bühlmann and Daniel Bochsler 2013
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Contents

List of Illustrations vii

Preface ix

Acknowledgments xi

Notes on Contributors xii

1 Introduction – The New Challenges to Democracy 1

Hanspeter Kriesi

Part I Democracy, a Moving Target of Great

Complexity and Variability
2 Democracy as a Moving Target 19
Hanspeter Kriesi

3 Models for Democracy 44

Marc Bühlmann and Hanspeter Kriesi

4 Varieties of Democracy 69
Daniel Bochsler and Hanspeter Kriesi

Part II The Challenges of Globalization

and Mediatization
5 Globalization and the Vertical Challenge to Democracy 105
Sandra Lavenex

6 Globalization and the Horizontal Promotion of Democracy 135

Sandra Lavenex

7 Mediatization as a Challenge: Media Logic Versus

Political Logic 155
Frank Esser

8 Mediatization Effects on Political News, Political Actors,

Political Decisions, and Political Audiences 177
Frank Esser and Jörg Matthes

v
vi Contents

9 Conclusion: An Assessment of the State of Democracy

Given the Challenges of Globalization and Mediatization 202
Hanspeter Kriesi

References 216

Index 242
Illustrations

Tables

4.1 Results of exploratory factor analysis: n = 50 79

4.2 The quality of democracy as assessed by the Polity IV,
Freedom House, and Democracy Barometer, explained by
our five dimensions, unstandardized regression
coefficients and t-values, for average values during the
period 1990–2007 95
5.1 Multilevel model of internationalization 114
6.1 Three models of democracy promotion 144
7.1 The three constituents of political logic 165
7.2 The three constituents of news-media logic 167

Figures

3.1 A simple model of representative democracy 46

3.2 A model of representative democracy 58
4.1 Liberal vs. illiberal and consensus vs. majoritarian
democracies 81
4.2 (a) Liberal vs. illiberal democracies and fiscal
centralization (b) Liberal vs. illiberal and federalist vs.
centralized democracies 83
4.3 Lijphart’s typology – consensus–majoritarian vs.
federalist–centralized democracies (a) Replication of
Lijphart with his own data 1971–1996, n = 24
(b) Replication of Lijphart with our data 1995, n = 24
(c) Replication of Lijphart with our data, 1990–2007,
N = 50 85
4.4 Hendrik (2010): consensus–majoritarian and
direct–representative democracies 87
4.5 Representative–direct and federalist–centralized
democracies 88
4.6 Federalist–centralized democracies and inclusiveness.
Curvilinear relation at the 95% significance level 88

vii
viii List of Illustrations

4.7 Proportionality of representation and

consensus–majoritarian democracies. Correlation: −0.87 90
4.8 Issue congruence and consensus–majoritarian
democracies. Correlation: −0.17; after exclusion of
South Africa and Canada: −0.34 91
4.9 Direct democracy and representative democracy.
Correlation without CH: −0.39 92
4.10 Liberal–illiberal democracies and judicial review.
Correlation: −0.43, without outliers: −0.27 93
Preface

This volume represents a sort of mission statement for the National

Competence Centre for Research (NCCR) Democracy, a Swiss research
program on democracy funded by the Swiss National Science Founda-
tion (SNF) since 2005. We elaborate our particular approach to democ-
racy research and what we see as the main challenges of democracy
today. This new perspective on democracy and its challenges consti-
tutes the basis of the research conducted in more than two dozen
projects in our program. The present volume summarizes the results
that have been published in more detail in a series of NCCR working
papers (http://www.nccr-democracy.uzh.ch/publications/workingpaper/
challenges-to-democracy-in-the-21st-century), in monographs, and in
journal articles (http://www.nccr-democracy.uzh.ch/publications).
The volume comprises two parts. In Part I we lay the groundwork for
our view of democracy and the way we wish to approach democratic
processes: we discuss the preconditions of democracy and democrati-
zation, we present a model for the key mechanisms linking citizens
and politicians in a representative democracy, and we show the empir-
ical variety of established representative democracies across the globe.
Against the background of the fundamental concepts and empirical facts
introduced in Part I, we discuss in Part II the challenges of mediatization
and globalization, which we consider to be the most important ones for
democracy under contemporary circumstances.
We come from different fields in two related social sciences – political
science (international relations and comparative politics) and commu-
nication science (political communication and media effect studies).
But although we are all social scientists and we are all trying to test
theoretical insights with empirical research, it took considerable time
to find a common conceptual meeting ground and to agree upon a
shared understanding of democracy research. It has taken us several
years to arrive at the cross-disciplinary conceptualizations and find-
ings the reader will encounter in this volume, and we certainly do not
pretend that the theoretical and empirical tool kit we present here rep-
resents in any way a complete and authoritative view. But we hope

ix
x Preface

that our approach to the study of democracy and democratization

will prove to be helpful to our readers and stimulate further research
on denationalization and mediatization processes and their impact on
democracy.

Zurich, July 2012

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the members of the project teams of NCCR

Democracy, on whose work we have drawn freely in establishing
this summary statement. In particular, we would like to thank the
project leaders of phases I and II (in alphabetical order): André
Bächtiger, Thomas Bernauer, Heinz Bonfadelli, Daniele Caramani, Lars-
Erik Cederman, Francis Cheneval, Patrick Donges, Cédric Dupont,
Frank Esser, Thomas Gautschi, Fabrizio Gilardi, Heinz Hauser, Simon
Hug, Kurt Imhof, Otfried Jarren, Vally Koubi, Daniel Kübler, Andreas
Ladner, Jens Lucht, Frank Marcinkowski, Wolfgang Merkel, Yannis
Papadopoulos, Frank Schimmelfennig, Pascal Sciarini, Gabriele Siegert,
Marco Steenbergen, Josef Trappel, Anke Tresch, Claes de Vreese, Andreas
Wenger, Thomas Widmer, Werner Wirth, Vincenz Wyss, and Béatrice
Ziegler. We would like to extend our thanks to Miriam Hänni for her
help with the preparation of the data for the analysis in Chapter 4, and
to Yvonne Rosteck and Barbara Cavegn for their administrative support.
This volume would not have been possible without insistent prodding
by the expert committee that has been evaluating this research program
on behalf of the SNF since its beginning. Our colleagues in the commit-
tee kept asking us to elaborate our approach along the lines presented
here. We are grateful for their critical assessment of our work. Last but
not least, we would like to thank the SNF and the University of Zurich,
the leading house of our program, as well as all the host institutions
of NCCR Democracy projects – ETH Zürich, the universities of Bern,
Luzern, Lausanne, St Gallen, and Geneva, the University of Applied Sci-
ence in Winterthur, Idheap Lausanne, WZB Berlin, and the Zentrum
für Demokratie Aarau – for their most generous support of our research
program.

xi
Contributors

Daniel Bochsler is Assistant Professor in Democratisation at NCCR

Democracy at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. His research deals
with elections and representation in ethnically divided countries,
democratization, and the quality of democracy, and he is particularly
interested in Central and Eastern European politics.

Marc Bühlmann has published in the fields of political partic-

ipation, methods, social capital, democratic theory, and compar-
ative politics. In NCCR Democracy he has led a project that
aims to measure the quality of democracy. He currently works
at the Institute of Political Science at the University of Bern,
Switzerland, where he is Executive Director of the Swiss Political
Yearbook.

Frank Esser is Professor of International and Comparative Media

Research at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and a co-director of
NCCR Democracy. He publishes cross-national research on news, jour-
nalism, political communication, and media systems, and has co-edited
the books Comparing Political Communication and Handbook of Compara-
tive Communication Research.

Hanspeter Kriesi holds the Stein Rokkan Chair in Comparative Pol-

itics at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. Pre-
viously he taught at the universities of Amsterdam, Geneva, and
Zurich. His wide research interests include the study of various
aspects of democracy, political communication, political mobilization,
and opinion formation. He was Director of NCCR Democracy until
fall 2012.

Sandra Lavenex is Professor of International Politics at the Univer-

sity of Lucerne, Switzerland, and a visiting professor at the College of
Europe in Natolin, Warsaw, Poland. She holds a PhD from the European
University Institute in Florence, Italy, and works on democratization

xii
 Notes on Contributors xiii

in the international realm, EU external relations, and international

migration policy.

Jörg Matthes is a professor in the Department of Communication at

the University of Vienna, Austria. His research interests include political
communication, political behavior, and advertising research.