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The contribution starts out from the question whether the political legitimacy of the Third Wave democracies has suffered in the wake of the Great Recession. The expectation of a damaging effect of an economic or political crisis on legitimacy is based on Lipset’s assumption that established democracies with a high degree of political legitimacy are better capable of coping with such crises than young democracies. The database includes two surveys of members of parliament conducted in 2007 and 2013 in Sweden, Germany and five Third Wave democracies located in different world regions (Chile, South Korea, Poland, South Africa and Turkey). Waves 5 and 6 of the World Values Survey that were conducted at about the same time were used for comparing the legitimacy beliefs among MPs and citizens. The data show that the scores for all indicators of political legitimacy are higher among MPs than among citizens and that the differences between the two groups of respondents are considerably larger in the five young democracies. Confidence in political parties is fairly low, especially among citizens, while the evaluation of the quality of democracy in the respondents’ country is much higher. Both evaluations have been rather stable over time. In the two established democracies, support for democracy among citizens is nearly as high as among MPs. In the five young democracies, the MP-citizen differential is larger and support for democracy in the population shows a steady increase only in Chile, while it has remained low in Poland and Turkey and even decreased in Korea and South Africa. This indicates that democracy has not taken deep roots in four of the five new democracies included in the study. In Korea and South Africa, the decline in support for democracy started already before the onset of the economic crisis and therefore cannot be attributed to the recession. This is confirmed by the lack of a statistical relationship between political legitimacy on one side and economic evaluations on the other side. A multiple regression analysis shows strong country-specific effects, while individual-level variables have only minor effects.

This study systematically addresses an important yet neglected question pertaining to the potentially time-varying effects of economic development on political democracy. Building on Huntington's insightful observations of alternating “waves” and “reverse waves” of democracy in world history, we deduce research hypotheses subject to empirical falsification and find, through a systematic analysis of the experiences of 87 countries from the 1960s to 1990s, that the impact of economic development on democracy shifted from the well-known U-shaped relationship to an inverted U-curve. These shifts occurred around 1980, a time point that corresponds to Diamond's classification of the end of the “second reverse wave” and beginning of the “third wave” of democratization. The finding thus demonstrates that the “wavy” progression of democracy in the world reflects historically changing dynamics of economic development and their impacts on political democracy over time.

There is a long-lasting debate on the relationship between democracy and economic growth, though it remained inconclusive. On the other hand, corruption is one of the greatest challenges of the contemporary world that lessens the efficiency of a good government, distorts public policy, leads to the misallocation of resources, harms the private sector and particularly hurts the poor. Moreover, the corruption–growth relationship has been shown to be contingent upon the political regime. This chapter has chosen a set of emerging market economies (EMEs), which consists of democratic as well as authoritarian countries, to throw light on democracy–growth relationship through the channel of corruption using a system generalized method of moments estimation of a panel of 27 countries for a period of 2006–2018. Results show that democracy is growth-enhancing but corruption dampens its positive impact to some extent. However, for authoritarian countries corruption can enhance growth.

Recent empirical and theoretical developments related to the microprocesses of institutional logics have helped to cultivate a powerful theory of agency. We build on these developments to show how the institutional logics perspective can shed light on important questions related to frame construction and how institutions matter. In particular, we show how the emergence of an economic democracy frame in post-war Sweden generated different efforts to define that frame with concrete ideas and practices linked to different logics – socialism and neoliberalism. We show how socialists tried to define economic democracy as requiring a radical transformation in the nature of ownership and control embedded in the innovative financial practice of wage earner’s funds. In contradistinction, conservatives drew on neoliberal ideas and extant mutual fund practices to construct alternative meanings and practices related to economic democracy that enrolled citizens in Capitalism without challenging extant Capitalist ownership structures. While mutual funds and wage earner’s funds initially existed in a state of parabiosis – existing side by side without much interrelationship – struggles over the meaning of economic democracy led these practices to become competing solutions in a framing contest. Implications for the study of institutional logics, frames and the social organization of society are discussed.

Although the concept of ‘social capital’ is not a new concept, its rise coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic. This concept of sociology, left in a controversial and secondary position, was reborn both in the social, political and economic fields and in the scientific world, with the increase of the COVID-19 outbreak cases. Social capital is a form of socialisation and a way of performing social relationships. The COVID-19 outbreak led to the understanding that physical capital and human capital would not be sufficient to sustain social life, and, therefore, social capital started to rise. The expected private earning from social capital is not individual profit, but collective welfare and mutual benefit. In short, social capital is the capital spent on society and is for common good. On the other hand, social capital has a volume in proportion to the density of the capitals in the society. Social capital, with its intensity, has attracted the attention of different disciplines on Corona days and has exceeded the limits of sociology. Another issue to be emphasised in this study is the relationship between social capital and democracy. In societies where tutelary democracy is dominant, civil society cannot become functional enough. In this difficult environment, social capital is shaped as paternal (tutelary) and a healthy social network cannot be functionalised in society. On the one hand, the horrors of the pandemic are experienced, and, on the other hand, a social capital model that is ineffective in healing social wounds emerges.

This chapter seeks to reconcile divergent views about how globalization affects democratic governance at the national level. Despite numerous studies on this subject, the resulting literature has not reached an overarching consensus. Some scholars conclude that globalization usually promotes democracy by fragmenting the political power of entrenched elites, by creating powerful demands for the rule of law, and by making democracy the global norm for governance. Other scholars, however, draw very different conclusions. They argue that globalization generally weakens democracy by reducing the autonomy of national governments, by generating “democratic deficits” between international policy makers and ordinary citizens, and by significantly enhancing the class power of transnational capital. To bridge these two literatures, the present chapter highlights that democracy has at least two normative charges: (1) it should promote civil and political liberties (its liberal dimension) and (2) it should promote social and economic equality (its social democratic dimension). When viewed from this perspective, it appears that globalization does indeed promote democracy, albeit a particular form of democracy in which the maintenance of civil and political liberties takes precedence over the realization of socioeconomic equalities. Furthermore, this perspective suggests that globalization can simultaneously promote democracy in some parts of the world (i.e., by encouraging authoritarian countries to adopt civil and political liberties), while undermining it elsewhere (i.e., by impeding political actors seeking to promote socioeconomic equality).

While many studies have focused on the link between economics and democracy in exploring the strategies adopted by developing countries, they have tended to overlook the role of bureaucracy in democratization. This study seeks the missing link between bureaucracy and democratization. What are the conditions necessary for bureaucracy to facilitate the democratization process of a country? This chapter begins by briefly reviewing the bureaucracy literature from Max Weber and Karl Marx and then argues that despite its shortcomings, bureaucracy in its Weberian form can facilitate the political democratization of a developmental state. This study concludes that although bureaucracy is often regarded as dysfunctional, it can be instrumental in the democratization process in the context of the developmental state. This article concludes that there are six conditions for the function for democratization: big enough to protect themselves from the arbitrary use of political authority, qualification and competency, take administration out of politics and political neutrality, red tape, consensus about the good government, and having an eye on the long-term, broader interests of the country and the government.

We use a new dataset on nonresource GDP to examine the impact of commodity price volatility on economic growth in a panel of up to 158 countries during the period 1970–2007. Our main finding is that commodity price volatility leads to a significant increase in nonresource GDP growth in democracies, but to no significant increase in autocracies. To explain this result, we show that increased commodity price volatility leads to a statistically significant and quantitatively large increase in net national saving in democracies. In autocracies, on the contrary, net national saving decreased significantly. Our results hold true when using indicators capturing the quality of economic institutions in lieu of indicators of political institutions.

The Mondragon cooperatives are the most thoroughly studied and well-known example of worker cooperatives in the world. Yet while there has been much discussion and wide recognition of the empirical growth of the Mondragon co-ops, there is substantial confusion about the lessons we can draw from this case in thinking about workplace democracy more broadly.

The normative and empirical literature on Mondragon is carefully analyzed to draw out the main implications from this case study for the broader issue of workplace democracy.

I contend that Mondragon teaches us two main lessons. First, that workplace democracy can indeed operate in a way that is economically sustainable and socially superior to conventional firms. Second, Mondragon sheds light on the question of whether co-ops are doomed to degenerate.

This paper advances our understanding and conceptualization of workplace democracy.

This paper provides practitioners with an up-to-date and comprehensive analysis of the world’s most successful cooperative network.

This paper provides insight into the practical feasibility and normative desirability of alternative organizations of workplaces in the form of worker cooperatives.

This paper will be of particular interest to scholars and activists interested in democratic alternatives to conventional hierarchical firms by illustrating the strengths and weaknesses of the Mondragon cooperatives and drawing out the lessons that this specific yet influential example has for issues of workplace democracy more broadly.