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ABSTRACT
Comparative democracy indices such as Freedom House Nations in Transit underpin many scholars’ perceptions of democratic progress and backsliding. However, these fail to account empirically for practices of deliberation, a central concern in contemporary democratic theory. They also fail to address the ideational nature of emergent global challenges to democracy. This article addresses these domains of empirical neglect by presenting an “Everyday Democracy” approach to democracy evaluation, an ethnographic methodology rooted in an engagement with democratic theory. Data collected in Serbia and Bulgaria is contrasted, revealing a more vibrant and contested public sphere in Serbia, which is usually graded as less democratic. This finding highlights the need for a reassessment of some assumptions that underpin ongoing debates about democratisation, “backsliding” and the evaluation of democracy generally.
Disclaimer
I, James Dawson, am the sole-author of this paper. All this work is my own.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on contributor
James Dawson lectures in Politics and International Relations at King’s College London. He is the author of Cultures of Democracy in Serbia and Bulgaria: How Ideas Shape Publics (Routledge, 2016).
Notes
1. Theories of democracy stressing citizens’ deliberative practices include those of Arendt (Citation1958), Habermas (Citation1989 [Citation1962]) and may be considered dominant in political theory today. As Dryzek (Citation2005, 218) notes, “for contemporary democratic theorists, democracy is largely a matter of deliberation”.
2. The label “Everyday Democracy” is derived from “Everyday Nationhood” (Fox and Miller-Idriss Citation2008), a distinct methodological agenda that traces the everyday practices through which the nation is enacted and embodied (or deflected and ignored).
3. Some of this data was used in an earlier book monograph that applied public sphere theory to advance arguments about the democratic cultures of these two countries (Dawson Citation2016). In this case however, the purpose is to model a replicable ED methodological approach for the benefit of comparativists engaged with measuring democracy generally.
4. Freedom in the World gave identical scores to Serbia and Bulgaria in 2012 (2 for both Political Rights and Civil Liberties, hence “Free”) while Polity IV concurred with NiT (as we shall see), ranking Bulgaria higher at 9 and Serbia as 8 (both categorised as “Democracy” where 10 is a “Full Democracy”).
5. V-Dem, a newer database which also relies on expert-testimony, is slightly more closely informed by democratic theory in that one of the five indices it produces is a “Deliberative Component Index” (of which 20% of the country score is calculated based on expert judgement of societal engagement [“Engaged Society”]). However, I focus instead on NiT, first because it remains more widely used by scholars and second because (unlike NiT) V-Dem does not yet supply country-specific annual reports with qualitative justifications.
6. As of the 2017 scores, showing Bulgaria at 3.29 and Serbia at 3.82, this gap is maintained.
7. As of 2016, the online presentation format of the Country Reports changed to the extent that a greater emphasis was placed on justifications for changing scores, inevitably meaning that specific political events were given more prominence than stable legal frameworks. This is welcome, yet the overall ethos appears to be unchanged: to compare like-for-like, Bulgaria’s first Civil Society paragraph for that year focused on the “institutionalisation” of NGOs and a paragraph-long description of the NGO legal framework fills the third paragraph (Freedom House Citation2016).
8. Arendt (Citation1958) uses the terms “civic power” and “solidarity” almost interchangeably.
9. The main periods of fieldwork data collection were carried out between January and July 2011 in Niš and between July and December 2011 in Plovdiv. I returned to each city for a week in May 2012, the time of parliamentary elections in Serbia.
10. While apparently more “representative”, a cross-section approach requires just as much care and contextualisation on the part of the author to represent fairly as the more selective approach presented here.
11. “Vili” identifies with both her Bulgarian citizenship and her Armenian ethnic background at various times in the recording.
12. The Bulgarian response to the (mostly Syrian) refugee influx since 2015 provides a more recent illustration of illiberal dominance even in pro-European circles (BBC Citation2016), while Serbian responses have been more mixed, inclusive of both public hostility and widespread acts of solidarity, including a great many Belgraders who opened their homes to refugees (“Roundtable on the refugee crisis in Europe”, University College London, 15 September 2015).