![]() The reason is that apartheid South Africa traced its origins to the right evolutionary path. The US currently applies broad sanctions on more than 35 additional countries, causing dramatic humanitarian suffering but no democratisation. Yet, broad sanctions and international isolation have done nothing to nudge Cuba towards democracy, even after more than 60 years of a brutal embargo. I mention apartheid South Africa intentionally, as it is the case many use to support the notion that broad sanctions and international isolation can work. Yet, approaching them with similar responses would be a mistake. ![]() The phenetic approach observes shared characteristics, like unfair or uncompetitive elections, constraints on civil society, and attacks on the press, and might even consider them similar in their degree of being non-democratic. This tempts us to characterise them as similarly undemocratic and pursue similar responses, but their split at a past critical juncture is important when thinking about how to move them away from non-democratic rule today.įor example, our increasingly precise measures tell us that countries like Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Philippines are flawed or non-democracies, as was apartheid South Africa. Some of these governments may evolve over time and accrue similarly non-democratic features. Countries that turn down the right path do so because colonial elites, domestic elites, and dominant identity groups shift to the right evolutionary branch. The history of regimes is traced by critical junctures, decision points when social forces come together to institutionalise an option down the left or right evolutionary branch.Ĭountries that turn down the left path do so because groups of workers, peasants, women, indigenous and minoritised groups come together around anticolonial and transformative projects. Ideal-typical right governments trace their origins to colonial powers, achieved power with promises to support international capital and its local allies, were tied to business associations and landed elites, and supported dominant-group identities against minoritised populations.Ĭountries do not travel down one or another path randomly. Ideal-typical left governments come from revolutionary and anti-colonial histories, achieved power with promises to redistribute wealth and lift the poor, were tied to labour and other lower-class social movements, and opposed patterns of racial, ethnic, gender and other exclusions. ![]() In particular, the branching tree to consider is the left or right heritage of different governments. When thinking about regimes, we would be wise to trace evolutionary paths. The platypus may have some characteristics of birds and reptiles, but its evolution follows the path that branched off to become mammals, so the platypus is in the mammal family. Phenetic categorisation doesn’t always work.īy contrast, cladistic, or evolutionary, approaches trace the branching tree that starts with single-cell organisms and becomes contemporary birds, reptiles, and mammals. Yet, the duck-billed platypus has a beak, lactates, and is venomous. In biology, phenetic classification presumes that we can look at different organisms and categorise them according to a snapshot of their characteristics: Birds have beaks mammals lactate reptiles can be venomous. Some regimes do not respond because they are platypus. Yet, such an approach takes a snapshot of current characteristics, fails to acknowledge the different ways in which regimes became undemocratic, and generates unrealistic attempts to nudge regimes towards democracy. One of the most elaborate multidimensional measures of democracy, the V-Dem Institute in Sweden, notes that today, 72 percent of the world’s population lives in autocracies and only 13 percent in liberal democracies, with 42 countries autocratising – moving farther away from democracy – in the past year. Democracy is under threat around the world.
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