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The Quality of Democracy: Why the Rule of Law Matters
Abstract
Abstract: High-quality democracy requires a truly democratic rule of law that ensures political rights, civil liberties, and mechanisms of accountability which in turn affirm the political equality of all citizens and constrain potential abuses of state power. How may the democratic rule of law ( état de droit, estado democrático de derecho, Rechsstaat ) be conceptualized and, insofar as possible, empirically gauged? By exploring a set of variables within the rule of law we can understand what makes it effective and how it relates to other aspects of the performance of democratic countries. This essay focuses on contemporary Latin America (especially Argentina and Brazil) where national-level democratic regimes often effectively coexist with undemocratic sub-national regimes—so-called “brown areas.”
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Citations
Cited by
Beyond Legalism: Towards a Thicker Understanding of Transitional Justice
McEvoy, K. (2007) · Journal of Law and Society · doi:10.1111/j.1467-6478.2007.00399.x · Cited by 601
Backsliding: Democratic Regress in the Contemporary World
Haggard, S., & Kaufman, R. (2021) · doi:10.1017/9781108957809 · Cited by 464
Good Governance: Concept and Context
Addink, H. (2019) · doi:10.1093/oso/9780198841159.001.0001 · Cited by 105
Metadata
- Authors
- O’Donnell, G.
- Venue
- Journal of Democracy
- Publisher
- Project MUSE
- Published
- 2004-10
- Volume
- 15
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 32-46
- ISSN
- 1045-5736 (ISSN-L)
- 1086-3214
- OpenAlex
- W2128373942
- Cited by
- 649
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 57.92
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- O’Donnell, G. (2004). The Quality of Democracy: Why the Rule of Law Matters. Journal of Democracy. https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2004.0076
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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
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