Country Examples of outcomes FROM applying the assessment framework:
- The new democrats of Mongolia forged a competitive electoral system in which real alternation of power has taken place, and where all major stakeholders have become engaged in state reform and strengthening the rule of law.
Ochir Enkhtsetseg, Permanent Representative of Mongolia to the United Nations, shares lessons learned from assessing the State of Democracy in Mongolia - In the Netherlands, popular rejection of the EU constitution and two prominent political assassinations initiated an assessment that revealed the need to revisit issues of Dutch citizenship and the complexity of government itself in representing the needs and democratic aspirations of the population.
In South Asia, the State of Democracy project sought to locate democracy in the context of that region of the world in order to discover what South Asians think about democracy and how they have adapted its very idea. The project showed that across the region democratic ‘preconditions’ are not necessary for the installation of democracy and that democracy has not yet been able to address questions of poverty.
More informaiton on State of Democracy in South Asia on the Democracy Asia website.
Democracy assessment is not an end in itself but a means to assist a democratic reform process by providing the systematic evidence, argument and comparative data on which reforms might be based. This means that publication of the assessment findings should not necessarily be regarded as a final step.
The International IDEA framework stresses that the process of assessment is an effective means to communicate a particular story about democracy that has been forged through national consensus.
The story itself ought to be communicated to as diverse and broad an audience as possible and it ought to lead to the formulation of concrete proposals for democratic reform that draw on the findings of the assessment in ways that are based on local ownership of the reform agenda.
A domestic team of assessors and stakeholders based in the country of the assessment provides the empirical basis for answering the questions while reflecting on the democratic achievements and deficits for the period being assessed, as well as identifying the obstacles for democratic reform that may exist.
The potential for initiating, implementing and sustaining significant democratic reforms, however, must be seen as a function of four larger factors that need to be taken into consideration. These factors are:
- the context under which the assessment was carried out;
- the types of influence that the assessment made possible;
- the audience to which the assessment was directed; and
- the type of outputs produced.
These factors can act alone or in combination to affect the type of democratic
reform possible, both in the short term and in the longer term. These different dimensions of the assessment process (agent, context, openness of the political process, audiences, outputs and impact) create different opportunities and areas for democratic reform, which include:
Institutional reforms are based on enhancing accountability mechanisms in ways that prohibit the centralization of power or prevent power and decision making being exercised without real oversight.
Across different institutional arrangements (e.g. unitary and federal systems, presidential and parliamentary systems, and proportional and majoritarian systems), the assessment experiences have shown that it is important that institutional mechanisms are in place for maintaining independent forms of representation and accountability. Institutional oversight requires real power backed with constitutional or statutory authority to oversee and control actions of government that can have a deleterious impact on human rights, including civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights.
Popular institutional solutions include the establishment of national human rights institutions,
electoral commissions, anti-corruption bodies and ombudsman offices, as well as more traditional legislative and judicial powers of oversight that have evolved over long periods of time in the more
established democracies. For transitional societies there is an additional demand for institutional solutions that confront authoritarian legacies (at a formal and legal level and at a cultural and practical level), the so-called military ‘reserve domains’ of power (e.g. in Bangladesh and Pakistan), and the use of emergency powers within national constitutions. Moreover, there ought to be institutional solutions to enhance participation and the inclusion of all groups, including minority groups and women.
The need for resource-based reforms stems from the fact that the framework is based on the idea that political and legal equality must be complemented by the means for realising social equality. The persistence of social and economic inequality constrains the ability of large numbers of people to take part in the public affairs of the country. Concentration on the fulfillment of economic and social rights is
often criticized for placing a heavy burden on the fiscal capacity of governments, but programmes that enhance the protection of civil and political rights also entail such a burden. All rights depend to some degree on tax revenues and government spending. Thus, the improvement of the quality of democracy involves enhancing the fiscal capacity of states, while more democratic procedures and institutions can contribute to a better allocation of national revenue in ways that raise living standards and overall well-being.
There is a longer-term need for the kind of reforms that promote and develop a broader political culture that is supportive of democracy. The Bosnian and Latvian assessment experiences showed that new and restored democracies face harder challenges in this regard. Bangladesh has experienced ongoing military interventions in the political sphere which the general public in general has backed, which suggests a weak attachment to democracy and democratic principles. Indeed, the South Asian assessment found that ‘an affirmation of democracy does not lead to the negation of authoritarian alternatives, so support for democracy is thin’. The Netherlands has sought to formulate
an interconnected package of measures to guarantee, reinforce and – where necessary – renew democracy, together with the results of the Citizens’ Forum (Burgerforum) and the National Convention (Nationale Conventie), among other initiatives.
