I am grateful to Nicole Bolleyer for her praise and thoughtful critique of my book, Democracy from Above? Both of our books ask important questions about how national legal frameworks can condition, constrain, and motivate citizen participation in democratic systems. These questions are especially vital to explore now as democracy is increasingly under attack.
It is rare to have this opportunity to reflect on Bolleyer’s commentary about the logic and evidence in my book. She notes that a discussion of systemic properties, such as rule of law or levels of democracy, would improve my analysis of why some nationally mandated participatory reforms—the focus of my book— do not live up to their promise. This is something that I certainly considered when I began writing. However, at the time, there were data limitations that did not allow me to explore additional independent variables in this particular analysis. Specifically, large datasets that included all nations and went back to the 1980s did not yet exist. I believe that testing the effect of many of the systemic conditions on the reforms’ outputs is best undertaken in a large-N statistical analysis. Fortunately, better databases, such as the Varieties of Democracy project, are now available; therefore I am currently working on a quantitative analysis to complement the largely qualitative analysis in this book.
Democracy from Above? explores six kinds of participatory institutions that engage new actors in public policy decision making. Bolleyer asks: Can we determine which design has the most impact on democratic governance in these countries? She is correct that the most potential might lie in the national council or fourth branch design. However, my theoretical framework is based on the finding that the impact of all of these reforms, including the national-level participatory systems, will rest on several intervening variables: the nature of the design, civil society, and political support. In other words, in an environment with weak civil society and political support, such as Guatemala, the systemic participatory design will not have its purported effects; in an environment with stronger civil society and political support, such as Brazil, it may. Thus, the conditioning factors are so important that they can mitigate results for all of the institutional designs in ways that prevent or allow results. This makes it difficult to state with certainty which design will have the most impact over time.
Bolleyer also notes that it is hard to decouple nationally mandated participatory reform from the larger decentralization reform, a question that reflects her interest in legal inclusivity. In this particular study, I hold the larger decentralized state structure relatively constant in an effort to simplify the research design. This oversimplifies the real world, of course, and her point offers a fascinating line of research for future work on this issue.
Combined, the books explore the nature of civil society–state relations in almost the entire globe, Bolleyer focusing on the developed world (or the Global North) and my own work focusing on developing nations (or the Global South). Reading the books together demonstrates how research on these two different parts of the world will lead to different research questions, data collection, and methodological choices. Researching established democracies, for example, allows us to hold more factors constant and gather data in a way that is not always possible when undertaking a cross-national analysis of countries in the developing world. I enjoyed juxtaposing our common intellectual interests and realizing how much the distinct locations condition the nature of our analytic endeavors.
