Department of Political Science
From Victory to Defeat? How
Human Rights Infringements in Foreign Policy During the War on Terror Contributed to the
Decline of Democracy in the US
Marco Bouwmans
Independent research paper, 15 credits Political Science III (30 credits)
Spring 2020
Supervisor: Josef Hien
Word count (including everything):12.332
From Victory to Defeat? How Human Rights Infringements in Foreign Policy During the War on Terror Contributed to the Decline of Democracy in the US
Marco Bouwmans
Abstract
As democracy globally declines according to the indices that measure the level of democracy around the world, existing literature lines up a wide spectrum of explanations for this decline.
However, the impact of foreign policy on the domestic democratic system is widely overlooked. In this research project I have investigated the possible contribution of human rights infringing elements in foreign policy to the decline of democracy in the US. I have done a single case study with a constructivist approach, US foreign policy in the post Cold War era being the case, focussing on the War on Terror. This is done with Historical
Institutionalism as the theoretical framework. The results of this study show that practices of detention without legal charges and torture strain the rule of law and the accountability of officials and violates the value of equality, a core value of democracy. I come to the conclusion that foreign policy does have impact on the quality of the domestic democracy.
Keywords: decline of democracy, foreign policy, human rights infringements, War on Terror, equality, historical institutionalism
Contents
Introduction………...1
Literature review………...4
Democracy………4
Human rights and democracy………...5
The decline of democracy……….6
The decline in the US………..11
Theoretical Frame………...15
Historical Institutionalism………...15
Transferring theory into the research project………...17
Method……….18
Ontology, Epistemology and Method……….………18
Single case studies………..18
Case selection………..19
Reliability and validity………....19
Empirics………...21
The historical context………..21
The events………...23
Human rights infringing elements………...24
Analysis………27
Individuals or institutions?…..………27
Consequences for democracy………..28
Former human rights infringements………32
Conclusion……….………..34
Future research………...35
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1. Introduction
Victory! The feeling of the word is tickling and the taste is sweet. Victory is declared several times during the last couple of decades and, within the timeframe of the content of this essay, for the first time at the end of the Cold War by the democratic and capitalist West. The word was all around, from world-leaders to backbenchers, from high profile academics to
university scholars and from worldwide broadcasting news networks to local door to door newspapers: ”We” had won The (Cold) War!
The end of the Cold War spread the belief in an undisputed idea on the supremacy of
democracy and its accompanying capitalism. During the last century we had witnessed three waves of democratization, bringing the number of democracies in the world up to never seen before proportions (Huntington, 1991). The end of the Cold War gave democracy its
ultimate momentum, boosting the wave with almost all former Warsaw Pact countries turning to democracy in those exciting years right after the tumbling down of the Berlin wall.
However, from the 2000s onward, we see a reversed trend: we see a global decline of
democracy, with yet no signs of evening out. Even the democratic quality of the hegemon, the US, is in line with this trend, according to the democracy indices, monitoring these
developments. In the EIU democracy index the US dropped from the 17th position in 2006 to the 25th position in 2019 (The Economist, 2019), resulting in being coined as a flawed
democracy. In the V-dem reports (V-dem, dataset v10), all graphic lines for the US points downward for the variables on democracy, and in the latest report published by Freedom House (Freedom House, 2019), the US scores only 86 out of a possible 100, ranking behind countries like Slovakia (88/100), Chile (90/100) and Lithuania (91/100). An intriguing question is how it is possible that the institutions of one of the oldest and most stable modern democracies produce political outcomes that are apparently damaging for democracy itself?
Historical Institutionalism shows us how critical junctures, such as the end of the Cold War, change institutions and by that, the political outcomes these institutions produce. As
developments and outcomes get locked in by path dependency, the struggle for scarce resources continues. Being aware of the unequal distribution of power and attainment of resources within the approach of Historical Institutionalism, human rights, being at the heart
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of democracy and in the range of foreign policy, are one of these scarce resources that this unequal power distribution is having its impact on.
The link between human rights and democracy is not often explicitly made. Human rights and democracy are two sides of the same coin: respect for human rights provides the necessary circumstances for the building blocks of democracy such as freedom of speech, freedom of organization and freedom of movement. Besides these essential elements, human rights are needed for giving all people the rights to resources and capacities to make use of these democratic freedoms that make up the system (Beetham, 1997). The universal character of human rights makes the subject by definition a matter of foreign policy. The end of the Cold War made the world order move from a bipolar system to a unipolar system (Krauthammer, 1990). This shift was announcing changes in the world order and corresponding foreign policies, with the hegemony of the US in place.
In the years following the end of the Cold War, we can see political outcomes in foreign policy that are alien to the rule of law and the core value of equality, as we for example see during the invasion of Iraq and in the on-going War on Terror. These outcomes can have deteriorating effects on the political system at home and contributes to a loss of quality of democracy. According to Beetham (2009) it has endowed substantially to a deformation of democracy in the leading countries of these enterprises, such as the US and the UK.
In this essay I will use a single case study, the case being US foreign policy from the end of the Cold War and onwards, focussing on some different elements of the War on Terror, trying to answer the research question at stake: how are human rights infringing political outcomes in foreign policy in the post Cold War era, that are produced by path dependent institutions, contributing to the decline of democracy in the US?
This study will show that foreign policy containing human rights infringing elements is impairing the for democracy axiomatic notion of equality, leading to the undermining of rule of law and other practical effects. In the case of the War on Terror, the institutionalized means of torture and persistent breach of (inter)national law and norms contribute to the decline of the quality of democracy in the US. The element of foreign policy and possible contribution to this decline is widely overlooked and has not received the attention it should have.
In this paper I will start with a literature review on democracy, the role of human rights in this concept and the trends of democracy over the years. After bringing the focus to the US, I will present the theoretical framework of this thesis, being historical institutionalism, followed by
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a methods section. The main parts will be formed by the empirics and analysis sections, where I will show how elements of foreign policy can have an impact on domestic policy, by
analyzing how torture creates accountability problems, how the detainment of people without legal charges violates the rule of law and how the essential norm of equality becomes
pressured by elements of the War on Terror.
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2. Literature Review
2.1. Democracy
If there is one thing that social science scholars can agree on, it is their disagreement on the definition of democracy. Democracy takes on a number of different shapes and sizes (Miller, 2010) and is a long and incomplete struggle, without clear landmarks and signposts. However we do find some recurring elements in the different definitions, that seem to play a central role in any definition of democracy. Archibugi (2008) finds three criteria crucial to
democracy: non-violence, popular control and political equality. For Beetham (1994), equality is the axiomatic element of democracy. From equality, all else follows that is instrumental in a democracy, expressed in the responsive rule. It contains that political outcomes are in line with majority preferences. But this conceals a potential lethal notion: the tyranny of the majority, where minorities are not respected. The avoidance of such a tyranny raises the need for necessary conditions. These conditions follow deductively from the equality principle and make up the necessary framework for a successful implementation of democracy. These conditions are basic freedoms as freedom of speech, movement, association etcetera;
citizenship and partnership, that represent the possibilities for influence and participation for all individuals; administrative codes to make it possible to follow up on public decisions and the works of the public sector; social rights, giving all individuals the right to health care and educations (Ibid). Young (1990) reflects upon equality and social justice with a different and interesting approach. While connecting different threads of injustice produced by inequality, she distinguishes ’five faces of oppression’ being exploitation, marginalization, lack of autonomy (in the workplace), cultural imperialism and violence. Where oppression by definition only exists where inequality reigns, we can see how her ideas are contributing to this article.
I endorse the central and axiomatic character of equality in a democracy as posed by Beetham. It is essential to give all several elements in a democracy its intended value.
Competitive elections, majority rule, contestation and participation: all worthless when equality is not the basic principle. Where equality is being tampered with, oppression gets breathing space and quality of democracy is lost and eventually turning democracy into a house of cards, waiting to collapse.
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2.2 Human rights and democracy
Beetham (1997) takes the above mentioned need for specific conditions by the hand, showing how democracies are based on political institutions and on the basic civil and political
elements of what makes up the universal declared human rights. Human rights are at the very heart of democracy. The concept is worthless if the conditions that make it possible for people to implement their civil and political rights are not in place. These conditions as physical security, health care, education, employment or other social rights, are the natural products of respected human rights. Such conditions are needed to be ’alive’ and to give way for any effective citizenship. The same goes for the opposite situation. Where these conditions are absent, where there is widespread unemployment, lack of education and dispossession and this can effect the quality of democracy in a negative way, by deriving insecurity possibly leading to repressive forms of social control (Ibid). Such conditions even favor a politics of intolerance, which is by definition contrary to equality, the underlying stepping stone for human rights and democracy. Institutions as competition, separation of powers, accountability and so forth, form one side of the coin named democracy. The part needed to complete the concept and working, is formed by human rights, needed to make citizens able to give themselves the essential role that makes democracy a true democracy.
Historically, we can see that democracy at a nation state level is relatively new. Before 1800, there was no such thing as democracy at this level. Huntington (1991) shows in his classical work on the waves of democratization, how democracy bit by bit has conquered the world during the last two centuries. With different roots and reasons behind them, he describes three waves of democratization where the 3rd wave started in 1974 with the carnation revolution in Portugal and continued the years after. From the end of the Cold War, we have seen how practically all the ex-communist countries that were members of the Warsaw Pact turn to democracy and eventually even become members of the EU, embracing liberalism and its accompanying capitalist economic structures.
6 Figure 2.1 The waves of democracy from 1820-2008.
Source: Uppsala University
In his book, Huntington presents many different reasons to explain how and why countries transitioned from non-democratic to democratic regimes. Notable is the missing similarity amongst the countries that experienced regime change within the 3rd wave. Countries from different continents, with different cultures, histories and socio-economic circumstances all shared the common move towards democracy. The fact that so diverse countries all converted to democracy, that the concepts based on equality and popular control spread over the world, slowly taking over, tells us quite a lot about the concept itself. Apparently it is a system of government that is universally attractive, no matter culture, social conditions or continent. The underpinning role of human rights may play a part in that.
2.3 The decline of democracy
But despite the universal attractiveness described above, despite the central position of equality in the concept, appealing to so many people around the world, the 1st (1828-1926) and 2nd wave (1943-1962) were followed by a reverse wave. Huntington (1991) does not exclude such a reverse wave to follow up the 3rd wave of democratization either, as he describes the patterns and conditions grounding the reverse waves witnessed during the 20th century as possible causes for the fallback of democracies into authoritarian regime after the 3rd wave. Democracies failing to operate effectively, snowballing effects of major powers
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reverting to authoritarian regimes and snowballing effects of authoritarian regimes gaining power and success, are factors that could play a role (Ibid).
There are several institutes in the world that are occupied with the ’measuring’ of democracy.
Probably the most widely known is Freedom House, a US based NGO occupied with research on democracy, freedom and human rights. These indices measure the level and quality of democracy and freedom around the world, weighing in the different aspects of the concept.
They all do it in a slightly different way, but every index considers the key area’s like civil and political rights and liberties, election processes, participation and the functioning of government. The Freedom House reports on the state of democracy around the globe show the same pattern as the reports from other institutes who are involved with research on this matter such as V-Dem and the EIU democracy index: from around the year 2006 we see a decline in democracy, both quality-wise and number of countries-wise. The indices of these various institutes are of course not exactly the same, but all the ingredients of democracy and freedom are part of it, with the emphasis of different factors making up the index, varying.
For this paper I use the Freedom House index.
Their report from 2019 (Freedom House, 2019), accounts for the 13th consecutive year of global democratic decline. As with the rise of democracy, the inducements are diverse, the regions spread out all over the world. As the momentum of the end of the Cold War and its boost to democratization has subsided, many countries are struggling to withstand the
sustained attacks on their rapidly erected democratic institutions. At the same time we see that older and supposedly stable democracies are challenged, by withdrawing confidence in the system by the polity. The report shows that of 41 countries that were continuously ranked as
”free” for 30 years or more prior to 2005, 22 show a net score decline in the last 5 years (Ibid).
The US are no exception to this. For more than a decade, Freedom House, and others, report on a downward trend for the quality of democracy in the US. It may seem alluring to tie this to the current president, but the trend goes back much further than that. But according to Freedom House (2019) are the infringements of rights for American citizens, the polarization and the tampering with rule of law all phenomena that occurred during the last decades. The fact that the forerunner of the liberal democratic world is in regression can have huge impact on freedom and democracy on a global level. The US has lost its position of being the exemplar of freedom and beacon of hope for those struggling for freedom and democracy around the globe.
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Figure 2.2 Freedom House scores on Levels of Democracy 2006-2017.
Source: freedomhouse.org
While many scholars accept the idea of a decline of democracy during the last 10-15 years, there is criticism as well. Levitsky & Way (2015) argue that many of these countries that are supposedly confronting an erosion of democracy, have been falsely identified as democratic in the first place. They have enjoyed ”pluralism by default” for a short time because of authoritarian weakness, but never developed into a full-fledged democracy. Consolidating authoritarianism in these cases should not be seen as a decline of democracy, as these countries should never have been qualified as democratic.
Staying with the argument that there is a downward trend when it comes to democracy, either in regime change or in a loss of quality, the underlying causal process is what is at the heart of this paper. While forms of decline come in all shapes and sizes, the antecedent elements and circumstances are as varied. Many scholars (Merkel, 2004; Erdmann 2011; Fukuyama 2015;
Kurlantzick 2013;) argue that there is no one single factor causing a downwards transition of democracy. Causes can differ for different countries and periods, where specific combinations of causes suitable for certain actors to abuse power and attenuate democratic norms underpin loss of quality of democracy or even a transition back to (semi)authoritarian regime. Erdmann (2011) elaborates on distinguished circumstances that seem advantageous when it comes to
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the stability of democracy. A factor that seems to largely contribute, is the age of the democratic regime. Looking at the statistics produced by several indices such as Freedom House, Erdmann identifies the positive relation between the variables time and democracy.
Time is needed to install the institutions that are indispensable for a working democracy, getting ingrained in the dynamics of civil and political society to be able to deliver the political outcomes that are in accordance with majority rule and the rule of law.
Coming from a non-democratic regime, it is not always a paved road towards democratic heaven. Potentially there are a lot of bumps in the road, such as economic crises,
malfunctioning judiciary, undemocratic factions gaining power etc. The different stages of development of democracies is well analyzed by Bernhard et al. (2003). They advocate the idea of an initial honeymoon, where the new regime seems to be able to parry threats to the new system of government. After this initial period, democracies seem to become extra vulnerable for these threats, such as a poorly performing economy. To develop to a stable and robust democracy, time is needed to walk down the mentioned road, avoiding these potential obstacles. Kurlanzick (2013) adds to the discussion the way new democratically elected leaders take up on their new role. Many times we have seen that new leaders, not used to the rules and habits of the novel regime, turn into elected autocrats. They often show no interests in cooperation, compromises, negotiations, tolerance or opposition. All essential components of the new regime that made their election possible: democracy.
Besides the factor time, Erdmann (2011) points at the importance of economic and social development. It is stated, again based on the produced numbers, that in no country with a high income level and/or a highly modernized society a breakdown of democracy has taken place Ibid). Kurlanzick (2013) also focuses on economic circumstances. The welcoming of the new democratic regime accompanied with prosperous capitalism and its promises, has many times proven to halt the idealizing the undemocratic regime in place during the ’good old times’, when the overdone expectations are not fulfilled. Democracy may not always bring economic growth, but economic decline can surely bring a young democracy down. This goes hand in hand with the growth without prosperity for these lower classes, where globalization is enhancing economic inequality, turning the lower classes disillusioned, making them worse off than before. These classes, often being the popular majority, become a serious threat when turning their back on the new regime. But it is not always the lower class, showing its back to the new born democracy. In countries where this popular majority has produced a leader, hostile to the middle class, this is a serious threat as well (Ibid). The middle class is the back
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bone for the new economic system and in that sense of decisive importance for both the new economic and political system.
Fukuyama (2015) recognizes the importance of institutionalization that raise the chances of new democracies to survive. State capacity needs to keep up with popular demands. When this fails, a setback is probable. In order to get these institutions in place and to make good government possible, there is a need for state building, where the three core elements of liberal democracy come together: the concentration and employment of power by the state, the rule of law and democratic accountability. Without proper state building, everything else fails. Where it is accepted, the so called ’overspill’ that the region can provide plays a role in the building or decline of democracies, Plattner (2015) argues that recently, democracy itself has not been the best promotor of the concept internationally. There is a growing sense that established democracies themselves are in trouble, looking at the different financial crises they had on their hands during the last 12 years and the way these crises were handled. And where democracies seem to be in trouble, authoritarian regimes take their moment to shine.
Countries like China, Saudi Arabia and Russia show that economic growth and gain of soft and hard power in the international arena can take place without the shackles of democracy.
Democracy has lost a part of its attractiveness (Ibid). Kurlantzick (2013) adds to this the constant death-lock in Congress in the US, the paralyzed situation in Japan and the ineffective workings of the institutions of the EU, as examples of the negative imaging of democracy by democracy itself.
In the light of this paper, Kurlantzick’s passage on the international aspects of democracy and the reasons of its decline, are drawing the attention. As Merkel, Kurlantzick assigns
importance to the role the international aspects play when it comes to the rise or decline of democracy. The earlier mentioned spillover effect is a huge contributor, in both ways. While countries like China, Singapore and Malaysia show that economic growth, high levels of technical modernization and a blooming middle class are possible without the meddling of democracy, the hegemon, being the oldest modern democracy and leader of the free world, is not doing its job as promoter of the supposedly superior system of freedom and equality very well. The missed opportunity of cooperation with leaders in (democratically) developing countries to tame the expectations of the citizens is of a crucial meaning. The false
perceptions that exist with transition into democracy play a crucial role in a possible decline or fallback. Both Bush and Obama have failed on this eminent part of foreign policy and the promotion of democracy. The lack of managing the prospect of social and economic wealth is
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also visible in the absence of the important role of civil society in the democracy promotion policies by both presidents. The role of inclusion, expressed in civil society has been missing out (Ibid).
Instead, questionable practices became part of foreign policy. Questionable, because for example rendition and torture are human rights and international law breaching acts, but also because of their intertwining with the democratic degree of the serving regime. Lukes (2007) makes the crucial deepening step when it comes to the complex notion democracy is, in describing a state becoming more democratic when it ”incorporates institutional arrangements and mechanisms that secure a range of basic rights, protecting all, especially the most
vulnerable, from arbitrary abuses of power” (Lukes 2007, p. 571). Obviously, the
undemocratic practices approved by the Bush administration such as rendition and torture have been devastating for democracy’s reputation. During the years where promotion of democracy was the most needed, it showed its darkest side instead.
Closing this section, I would like to draw the attention to the fact that all of the above causes and grounds for decline (and the mirroring situation of stability) of democracy, that I have elaborated on, are all of a descriptive character. How can these explanations on age, economic misery and elites not used to the system, be applied to the oldest modern democracy in the world, the US? And where is the normative side? All the above explanations are global explanations, at first sight not applicable to the US.
2.4 The decline in the US
The previous paragraphs demand for complementary explanations, when it comes to the decline of democracy in the US. The relative short period of decline that is reported by the mentioned indices, limit the amount of literature on the decline in the US. Levitsky and Ziblatt (2018) enlighten us with a solid analysis on how democracies die with some of their chapters are explicitly on the US. In the book, the authors put much emphasis on the
gatekeeping function of political parties in the US, when it comes to the nominees to run for the presidency. Over decades, the party elites kept a close eye on upcoming candidates, in order to keep ”the unfit figures from the ballot” (Levitsky & Ziblatt 2018, p. 46). When the democratic convention got totally out of hand in the already turbulent year 1968, changes were made in the process to appoint candidates. The introduction of binding primaries loosened the party leaders grasp on the selection procedure, but the so called invisible
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primary, the mechanisms around a candidacy needed to make the campaign a success, was still highly influenced by parties and their elites. But during the last decade or two, this gatekeeping mechanism has enfeebled even more. The increased role of money and the new dynamics round a campaign, caused and made possible by a new media landscape, has opened the door to let the ones ’not fit for the job’ through.
Another aspect the authors discuss is the vital role democratic norms and unwritten rules have played in the democratic history of the US. These unwritten rules reinforce the written
constitution and highlight vital parts of (US) democracy: mutual tolerance and institutional forbearance. When this agree to disagree element fades, polarization can take over, leading to trampling on democratic norms, disengaging traditions that ground these vital parts, creating apertures between how the system works and how it should work. The deterioration of the bannisters make the once so solid system increasingly vulnerable (Ibid).
In his article on the causes of the present hyperpolarization, entailing a great danger to the system as Levitsky & Ziblatt described, Pildes (2011) concludes that the damaging
hyperpolarization in the US as we see it over the last two decades, finds its roots in the 1965 Voting Rights Act, assigning equal political rights to African Americans. This becoming of age of the US democracy is structural and by that persistent, entailing a threat to mentioned vital norms as mutual tolerance and restraint. Polarization is damaging in a way that it can not only bring a status of paralyzation and deadlock, but even a breakdown of the system of checks and balances, when in cases of unified government during times of (hyper)
polarization, congress will omit an aggressive overlook of the executive and its actions. But even legislation will suffer, because of the structural hurdles that make the requirements for legislation far more than just majority support: it needs supermajority support. And that entails cooperation between parties, as the situation of one party forming such a supermajority is very rare (Ibid).
Gardner (2005) seeks the explanation for the democratic decline in the US in (the failure of) the separation of power and the idea of self-sustaining constitutional constraints on
undemocratic behaviour. He argues that Madison’s nightmare of tyranny by the accumulation of powers in one place is pretty much today’s practice, where the power is not gathered in one branch of government, but has come to a state of partisan control over all three branches.
Where the public just wants to see results, a polarized Congress is not able to deliver these results. The executive branch shows it is more than willing to step in, transferring power to itself, where it, for democratic quality reasons, should be elsewhere.
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Abramowitz, Alexander and Gunning (2006) add another elucidation to the discussion. They signal of decay, one that is of vital importance to democracy: competition. They show, besides the trend of polarization, the reinforcing tendency of decreased financial competitiveness of House challengers. This leads to a decline in competition, a crucial element in democracy. It has lead to so called safe districts, where the same party stays in power election after election, which diminishes the urge for members of the House to cross party lines, resulting in decreased bipartisan collaboration on major issues. This brings a paralyzing effect to democracy, damaging one of the components at the heart of democracy:
competition.
Referring to Beetham (1994) mentioned in the introduction, we see that some vital elements of democracy have been deteriorated over the last decades. With competition in the form of agonism instead of antagonism, partisan cooperation, trias politica and respect for norms and each other under pressure, we see how the axiomatic equality norm is loosing ground.
As we have seen, the existing literature cumulates many different explanations with a lot of focus on economy, civil society, nation building, power execution and so forth. Overlooking these explanations, a research gap is detected: there is no explanation on the decline of democracy that takes foreign policy into account. A more complete look at the causes of decline of democracy is strongly needed, whereas foreign policy has the ability to affect domestic policy to an even high degree. While there is a vast literature on the link from domestic politics to foreign policy, analysis that go the other way around barely exist. This blurs how foreign policy can affect the domestic system, when coercive actions abroad can pave the way for limitations of domestic liberties in the name of the ’common good cause’
and channels movement of power within the system. Foreign policy can disturb the domestic democratic system and this can be another factor weighing in on the decline of democracy. I argue that this is the case during the War on Terror.
At the same time, one could raise the question: why now? What about for example the Vietnam War? Definitely there were elements of human rights infringement in this enterprise abroad as well, but did it cause democracy decline in the US in that period? The answer is negative. Quite the opposite, there was an enormous upswing in participation and
emancipation during those years, showing rather an increase of quality of democracy.
Historical Institutionalism helps us to see how the different historical background, with different path dependent institutions, creating different outcomes. I will elaborate on this in the analysis part.
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In the present globalized world, it is odd to consider domestic and foreign policy as isolated phenomena, operating in divided spheres, not affecting one another. This brings me to my research question, which is: how are human rights infringing political outcomes in foreign policy in the post Cold War era, that are produced by path dependent institutions,
contributing to the decline of democracy in the US?
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3. Theoretical Frame
In this essay I will use the theoretical approach of Historical Institutionalism (HI). This will be done in a single case study, where the case is US politics and foreign policy from the end of the Cold War and onwards, focussing on foreign policy that is infringing on human rights.
Here follows an introduction to HI.
3.1 Historical Institutionalism .
Historical institutionalism is one branch of the so called new Institutionalism, that was coined this way by James March and Johan Olsen. They shift the focus from being about institutions towards the role institutions play in politics, where these institutions make a difference in political life (March & Olsen, 1984).
There is a abundance of literature on Historical Institutionalism and its main threats, written by authors as Kathleen Thelen, Sven Steinmo, Paul Pierson, Theda Skocpol, Peter Hall and Rosemary Taylor. The highly influential article by Hall & Taylor from 1996 will be the main background for my disquisition on Historical Institutionalism that follows here.
Historical Institutionalism (HI) recognizes the core of politics being the answer to who gets what, when and how, containing the conflict revolving around scarce resources. HI explains the inequality that originates out of this conflict for scarce resources by the way institutional organizations handle the conflict between these same organizations and economic structures where some interests are appreciated and others are not. Here HI expands the notion of both which institutions matter and of how they matter. Besides group conflict theories we can see the influence of structural functionalism on HI. Within HI the polity is seen as one
overarching complex of interacting parts, like structural functionalists do. But unlike structural functionalists do HI scholars regard institutional organization of the polity or political economy as the main cause ordering collective behavior and engender distinctive outcomes. HI scholars took on the role of the state as not just a neutral party in the arena of conflicting interests, but as a complex of institutions playing an essential and sometimes decisive role in the character and results of these ongoing conflicts in the polity. Adding other social and political institutions like the ones connected with labour and capital made it
possible to structure interactions to come to idiosyncratic paths (Hall & Taylor, 1996).
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Institutions play the core role within the HI approach. Institutions are the phenomena that structure behavior and determine outcomes. Different HI scholars use different definitions of institutions, but all extend the most simple definition of institutions: rules. Some focus on formal rules and organizations and others include informal rules and norms. But what remains is their crucial role in politics as they create the playing field, selects and forms the
participants and simultaneously gives route to their strategic behaviour (Steinmo, 2008). On the historical side of this approach we can state that history is not just a reference point for analysis but is important in several ways for HI scholars. To start with, political events happen in a historical context that will have decisive consequences during the follow up of such an event. But when we concentrate on the actors we have to acknowledge that they do not live and act independent from time and space, but are learning entities acting in relation with the historical given moment (Ibid, 2008).
Hall and Taylor (1996) elaborate on four features of HI as more or less distinctive. The first one they mention is the way HI scholars often describe the relationship between institutions and individual behaviour in rather broad terms. Eclectically, they use both the calculus approach, where individuals behave in a rational way, base their decision on strategic calculation while seeking maximization of the attainment of a set of goals produced by preference, and the cultural approach, where the behaviour of individuals is not fully
strategic, but influenced by the individual’s worldview, to analyze the works and mechanisms that determine political outcomes. I will return to these calculus and cultural approaches in a moment. The second feature Hall and Taylor mention is the underlining of the asymmetries of power and the role that power plays in HI analyses. Important for this essay is the stress HI puts on how these asymmetric power relations are visible in the way institutions unevenly grant access to some actors and deny others resulting in outcomes that make some actors winners and some losers, instead of an outcome where everybody is better off or at least an outcome in the spirit of Rawls’ veil of ignorance (Rawls, 1971). The third threat of HI distinguished in the Hall and Taylor article is the concept of path dependency and connected with it, the concept of critical junctures. Thelen (1999) defines both concepts in her article on HI very clear and comprehensive. Critical junctures are ”crucial founding moments of
institutional formation that send countries along broadly different development paths” (Thelen 1999, p. 387). On path dependency she states that ”institutions continue to evolve in response to changing environmental conditions and ongoing political maneuvering but in ways that are constrained by past trajectories” (Ibid). The fourth and final threat covered is the openness of
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HI for the role of other factors as elements in the causal chain. Especially socioeconomic development and the scattering of ideas are often elements of HI analyses, focusing on how institutions, ideas and beliefs interact and relate to each other. Unlike rational choice institutionalists, they tend to see the world as more complex than rather just a world of preferences, calculations and institutions (Hall & Taylor, 1996).
HI is, as all other approaches, being criticized in the academical world. A widely heard
critique expressed by Rational Choice theorist is that HI scholar do nothing else than tying the dots together, which in practice is nothing more than story telling. Thelen (1999) sees a weakness in the underdeveloped ability of HI to point out the mechanisms that translate critical junctures into politics that are locked into path dependency. Peters et al. (2005) states that path dependency in unable to explain change and sees the methodology of HI as non- falsifiable.
3.2 Transferring theory into the research project
Pierson and Skocpol (2012) state that substantive agenda’s, temporal arguments and focus on contexts and arrangements form an identifiable HI approach and point out how normative dilemmas are often present in the phenomena researched within this theoretical frame. The nexus to my study, where I want to practice research on how political outcomes are produced that are in conflict with democratic values and have a possibly damaging effect on that same democracy, is to be found in the way that ideas, formal and informal rules, shape behaviour and outcomes against a historical contextual background. The compelling effect of path dependency, that makes it hard to reverse certain events, gives room for inefficient and even detrimental outcomes. HI offers the best framework to answer the questions on the
mechanisms and workings behind such outcomes and how they are contributing to the decline of democracy in the US.
The empirics in this research will contain eclectic secondary data, allowing us to obtain knowledge on the presented problem. In the following chapter I will describe the
philosophical paradigm this research project stands in, and gives the context for this research project.
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4. Method
4.1 Ontology, epistemology and method
Steinmo (2008) states, that most historical institutionalists are first and foremost interested in explanation and not prediction. For these scholars, the problem with science looking for results that permit meaningful predictions is not the lack of methods, but the elimination of contingency. The complex interplay of interdependent variables over time are overlooked in the search for laws and regularities. This makes the study of politics eminently different from the study of physics: what we study and try to explain are not insensate bodies, subject to absolute and fixed laws. The constructivist ontology and epistemology allow for other
questions and explanations, focussing on how history, idea and other factors contribute to the way we describe and recognize social phenomena (Moses & Knutsen, 2019). Endorsing the statements by Steinmo (2008), Pierson & Skocpol (2012) and other HI scholars, my
philosophical paradigm is a constructivist one.
On ontology, constructivists raise doubts about the presence of law-like regularities in the social world and wether this social world exist independently of social actors. Human
behaviour is subject to meaning and agency which makes interdependency between the social world and its actors a doubtful assumption (Moses & Knutsen, 2019).
These ontological principles lead to an epistemology where knowledge is gained by studying how people give meaning to actions, recognizing how the patterns and regularities in the social world are socially constructed and how knowledge is by definition contextual (Ibid).
Easton (2009) identifies the case study method as the best path to investigate the interaction of structures, events, actions and context to single out and explain causal relations. With the goal to study contemporary social phenomena and to identify causal mechanism and the context that produce these mechanisms, leading to the construction of certain political outcomes, qualifies case studies as very suitable for this study.
4.2 Single case studies
Ragin (2000) provides us with a well defined notion of case studies, describing case studies as a strategy where we explore the ordering of a case, by an in-depth inquiry of occurrences,
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giving us the possibility to explain features of a larger population of similar occurrences, by developing and assessing theoretical explanation. There is not one single way to gather data in case studies, and a case study can be both quantitative and qualitative. This single case study will be an interpretive case study, where the framework formed in the earlier chapters will furnish an explanation of this particular case.
The practical side of gathering the data within a case study can be very diverse. Vennesson (2008) explains how process tracing has become a very wide-spread used option for the empirical observation in case studies, and how it is used both in the positivist and
constructivist perspective, where the former has the focus on establishing and evaluating the link between different variables and the latter has the focal point more directed on the question how things happen. Process tracing is in several ways much more than just story telling. It is focused, structured and with the goal to produce a narrative clarification of a causal path leading to specific outcomes.
4.3 Case selection
Levy (2008), defining a case as a spatially and temporally bounded set of events and George
& Bennet (2005) defining it as an instance of a class of events, show how the decline of democracy in the US in general and the connection between foreign policy and this decline specifically, allows the case selection of the US and its foreign policy for this research project.
US foreign policy in the post Cold War period being the case, and considering the limits on time and resources for this project, I will focus on the events during the War on Terror and their human rights infringing and undemocratic character.
4.4 Reliability and validity
In quantitative research, reliability and validity are important notions, hinting on the quality of the research project. The question is how relevant these notions are when it comes to
qualitative research. Guba & Lincoln (1994) show how tricky it is to apply these notions within qualitative research, where the key point with reliability and validity is to arrive at a indisputable truth of the social reality. While this is problematic within qualitative research, they offer alternatives, that relate to the quantitative equivalents and have the ability to say something on the quality of the research. These alternatives are: credibility, relating to internal
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validity; transferability, relating to external validity; dependability, relating to reliability and confirmability, that relating to objectivity.
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5. Empirics
As stated previously, I will focus on the War on Terror. The concept was rhetorically launched by president Bush in his address to a joint session of Congress on the 20th of September, stating that this war will last until every terrorist group in the world has been terminated (georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov). However, the War on Terror is a very wide and unclear concept, lacking a real definition. I do not hold any illusion on presenting an utter and complete account for this so called War on Terror, but will go in deeper on
distinguishing elements that contribute to this project. I will present the historical context, where after I present a brief timeline on the events and the enrolled foreign policy by the US in the light of the War on Terror, closing this empirics section with the focus on the different elements of human rights infringing elements in this foreign policy. The analysis will follow in the next chapter.
5.1 The historical context
To narrow the timeframe down to the scope of this paper, we concentrate us on the course of events and developments from the end of the Cold War onward in the US.
I think I do not exaggerate when I coin the End of History article by Fukuyama (1989) as the academic established time of death of the Soviet Union and the connected Warsaw Pact, and by that, the victory of the US and the west in the Cold War. Fukuyama sees how the triumph of economic and political liberalism announces the end of history, where this western idea will be the final form of human government. At the end of history, not all societies have to become successful liberal societies, but ”merely that they end their ideological pretensions of representing different and higher forms of human society” (Fukuyama 1989, p. 13).
Interesting is the hegelian way of looking at history, normally more of a feature of Marxist theory.
The dramatic shift from a bipolar to a unipolar international system, was an occurrence with tremendous impact on the course of history. Combined with the dominance of liberalism as claimed by Fukuyama, the end of the Cold War classifies as a critical juncture as HI intends to see critical junctures: a major event, changing the course of history, marking the beginning of a new path dependent era. Krauthammer (1990, 2002) describes the state of unipolarity as an international order with only one unchallenged superpower at the centre, the US. Taking its
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position in the centre, having this huge leverage in hard and soft powers, the US became the new hegemon.
Where the international order changed dramatically, this crucial founding moment gave room to neoliberalism to take its place centre stage, sending the country along the path of creating a minimal state, and the arise of large private concentrations of wealth and power. McKinnon (2015) labels this as a danger to democracy, as it enables these wealthy and powerful private actors to maneuver the minimal state in a way that serves their own ends. According to neoliberals, the essence of the problem is the inefficiency a large and powerful state by definition will suffer of. Their solution is the transfer of a vast amount of functions executed by the state to the market and limit the states mandate to protecting property rights and liberties (Ibid).
The sediment of the critical juncture attached and spread itself to all nooks and crannies of US society. In his book titled Post-democracy (2004) and his follow-up article (2015), Crouch lays out a clean and thorough analysis how this process developed. Although the usual
suspects of a democracy like free elections, debate and rule of law are in place, the dynamism of the system moved elsewhere. The real power shifted towards business lobbyists orbiting in the overlapping circles of the politico-economic elites. Where globalization and post-
industrialization has made struggle for political identity superfluous, where classes of course still existed, there was during the period right after the end of the Cold War one class who had a very clear picture of who they were. The class of major shareholders and business
executives had an hegemonic ideology (neoliberalism) to voice themselves and power to determine political outcomes. Globalization united the global class of shareholders, being the only class with a political identity. Due to these two developments, the way of relating to voters through parties, which seemed to have become relics from the past, became
increasingly problematic for the political class (Ibid). Crouch’ analysis gained a lot of strength during the financial crisis of 2008 and on. While it was pregnant with all elements needed for another crucial juncture, neoliberalism came out stronger than ever, receiving bail outs from every direction, revealing the utter asymmetry in power-distribution.
Hacker and Pierson (2014) present a nice insight of the institutions at work during the last decades, maneuvering neoliberalism to the heart of US society and beyond. Their analysis focusses on the rescinding of regulations and progressive tax schemes under administrations from both sides of the political spectrum, forming a starting point for a growing gap of inequality.
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Schäfer & Schwander (2019) elaborate on how this increased inequality evoked by the neoliberalism doctrine has its repercussions on the core of democracy: equality. When it comes to participation they show that there is an overall decline in unequal countries, but that this decline is much stronger for the groups with the lowest income. This tampers with participation and representation and has a negative impact on the quality of democracy.
Continuing with the progression of US society during these early years of the post-Cold War era, Feldman (2015) contrasts the years of the Cold War with this period. He analyzes how the Cold War has had a balancing and constraining effect not only on the international order but even on corporate capitalism. Both the geography of the Cold War and the ideological struggle against communism limited the scope of capitalism. Opportunities for multinationals to spread globally were limited and the room for attacks on the culture and workings of the supposedly superior domestic democratic system, was basically zero. With the end of the Cold War, these curtailments vanished.
The different threads characterizing the theoretical approach of HI are manifest. Considering the rise of corporate elites, the accompanying asymmetric distribution of power and the role socioeconomic factors play in the causal chain establishing path dependency, we recognize defining elements of HI.
5.2 The events
On the 11th of September 2001, the world witnessed the shocking attacks on New York and Washington landmarks, executed by the terrorist organization al Qaeda. In this historical and unprecedented strike on US soil, over 3.000 people were killed, leaving western leaders and society frozen in disbelief.
After dealing with the shock, institutions produced quickly. Already in October 2001, the US waged war on Afghanistan, at that moment under Taliban rule, the alleged protectors and facilitators of Bin Laden’s organization. The regime was toppled and Bin Laden escaped to Pakistan. However, this was not the end of the Afghanistan chapter. A severe guerrilla like war started between US troops and all kinds of belligerents, lasting till at least January 2020, when the Taliban and the US reached an agreement on withdrawal of the US troops. How this will develop, remains to the future.
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As early as October the Bush administration and the UK government sought to link Iraq in the person of its notorious dictator Saddam Hussein (T. Blair, personal communication, October 11th, 2001). The attempts to establish this link culminated in the presentation by Colin Powell to the UN on the 5th of February 2003. ”Proving” that Iraq possessed weapons of mass- destruction, the US (backed up by the UK) tried to build a so called ”coalition of the willing”
to take (military) action against Iraq (georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov). Although this forming of a willing coalition was moderately successful, the second conventional war in the name of the War of Terror was waged, when on the 20th of March Iraq was attacked by a shock and awe bombardment of the country. This war would officially end on the 18th December of 2011, but US troops are still present till date.
The political outcomes that were produced in this post 9/11 era had impact in different areas during the years to come. It would lead to two wars in the middle east of conventional character, innumerable incidents and conflict in the region, a sprawl of new terrorist groups and the dismantling of a sovereign state, creating a vacuum that allowed the rise of a brutal and horrific regime, installed by ISIS. The price was high. Thousands and thousands of civil and military casualties and a weakened democratic system, with its core values of equality and liberty under pressure, leading to both practical and normative diminishing of democratic quality.
5.3 Human rights infringing elements
Besides democratically questionable laws and measures as the Patriot Act (2001), the Homeland Security Act (2002) and the unprecedented expansion of the secret services, the War on Terror contained explicit human rights infringing elements. There are numerous reports and scholarly articles and books on this element of the War on Terror. Because of the scope of this paper, I will elaborate now on two of these breaches of human rights.
5.3.1 CIA detention program
On September 17th, 2001, president Bush handed out a directive sanctioning the CIA to kill, capture, detain and interrogate suspected al Qaeda members. Ten days later, the head of the CIA informed the administration of renditions operations, containing the transfer of suspects to custody facilities in countries like Jordan and Egypt, for detention and interrogation
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(Human Rights Watch, 2011). Following the presidential order, the CIA set up secret
detention facilities, so called ”black sites”, in several parts of the world. These prisons became sites of the most shocking human rights violations, as reported by organizations like Human Rights Watch (2011) and Amnesty International (2004). In these reports there are accounts of illegal interrogation techniques and torture.
In August 2002, some memos were signed by Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, drafted in january by Deputy Assistant Attorney John Yoo, which included what would become known as the ’Torture Memo’ (J. Yoo, J. Bybee, personal communication, January 9, 2002).
It states that torturing detainees in captivity outside the US is justified and international laws against torture ”may be unconstitutional if applied to interrogations”. The doctrines of
”necessity and self-defense could provide justifications that would eliminate any criminal liability” for the officials conducting these interrogations (Ibid, part II). In his memoirs, Bush describes the controversial practices as inevitable, and as a choice between security and values, that couldn’t have been made in a different way. ”Had I not authorized waterboarding on senior al Qaeda leaders, I would have had to accept a greater risk that the country would be attacked. In the wake of 9/11, that was a risk I was unwilling to take [ ] I approved the use of the interrogation techniques” (Bush 2010, p. 169).
5.3.2 Guantanamo Bay
In the above introduced ’Torture Memo’, John Yoo advises to declare the Geneva
Conventions non-applicable to al Qaeda members, because Al Qaeda was not a state and by that not a party to the conventions. Despite doubts on the legal sustainability expressed by several peers, president Bush announced in a memorandum that the US would apply the principles of the Geneva Conventions, but that members of al Qaeda were excluded, because they did not meet the requirements of an armed force, as stated in the conventions. This effectively stripped them from all legal protection.
During the War on Terror, the US brought hundreds of people to Guantanamo Bay, their naval base on Cuba. Here, these people were imprisoned, in the belief that US courts could not get to them there. Malinowski (2008) describes how the administration opted for detaining these people without charge and without time limits. With a route to Guantanamo filled with
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torture, abduction and maltreatment, these prisoners find themselves in a legal vacuum that seems to exist in juridical outer-space.
The human rights infringements accompanying the War on Terror have deteriorate democracy in the US on the elements of rule of law, on the separation of powers and to a lesser extent on the independency of media. Increased police brutality during the years of the War on Terror, increased racial profiling by that same police of especially Arabs, Muslims and Asians, the detainment of hundreds of people without legal charges, a shift towards misbalance in the system of checks and balances between Congress and the President and a damaged normative side of the coin called democracy are all empirics that have a relation towards the War on Terror and that I will elaborate on in the next chapter of analysis.
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6. Analysis
The question is: what are the consequences? Evidently, institutions has produced these political outcomes, but how do they relate to the domestic democracy and how is democracy affected?
6.1 Individuals or institutions?
At first sight, president Bush and his successor Barack Obama, come from two completely different political worlds. But are the political outcomes when it comes to the War on Terror all that different? On his second day in office, Obama cancelled the CIA secret prison project.
He announced his intentions to terminate the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was going to close the Guantanamo detention facility, but didn’t. But was it all that different? Stern (2015) speaks of a difference in posture, as well as a continuity that marks the relationship between Bush’s War on Terror and Obama’s prolongation of it. Despite general differences in tone and tools, Guantanamo, imprisoning people without legal charges is still open to date and troops are still present in both mentioned countries. Calhoun (2018) shows the zealous use of drones, used for so called targeted killing, during the Obama presidency and analyzes how this concept of killing while being out of range grounds in totalitarian and none democratic principles.
When looking at the problem using the historical institutionalist approach, this difference in tone, but not so much in practice, is not surprising. HI offers the possibility to see and contemplate at the layered origins of political outcomes. These outcomes are produced by institutions, shaping individual behaviour and the historical setting is highly important. Let’s go back to the contextual background. Feldman (2015) shows how the Cold War restrained the ”wildest” parts of capitalism, unleashing the laissez faire doctrine of libertarian
neoliberalism when this war was over. He shows how the political system becomes more capitalistic and corporate capitalism more politically vigorous. Where citizens are still voting as usual, corporate America is highly influential on a wide scale, where it has an
”incestuously coexistence with government power” (Feldman 2015, p. 306). Corporate wealth skews electoral outcomes and government policies, while government officials and policies further contribute to wealth inequality, in general, and corporate power, more specifically”
(Ibid). The dominance of neoliberalism is of such proportion during these post Cold War
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years, that Feldman coins the system as Democracy Inc. In this paper, the dependent variable decline of democracy is explained by the independent variable foreign policy, with
neoliberalism as the confounding control variable.
To show the path dependent institutions at work when it comes to the attacks of 9/11, I want to contrast the outcome as we know it, with other possible outcomes. Rogers (2013) argues how the attacks were generally described as attacks on the neoliberal world order, and by that forming a fundamental danger to this dominant order, so undauntedly led by the US. A possible reaction could have been to see this as an act of transnational criminality, with the accessory response of making an effort to get the perpetrators brought to justice, even if this required patience and a long breath. But such an option had no chance in that moment in time.
Instead, all democratic principles and values were subordinated to the scuffle with the new enemy (Bush, 2010). Lafer (2004) takes it a step further stating that the War on Terror is a neoliberal project to advance its agenda, by gaining a grip and influence in the last wealthy region (Middle East), that is not under neoliberal and democratic control. I argue that the political outcomes discussed in this paper, are formed by institutions, in times of a dominant neoliberal idea, that gives way to an us & them grounded policy, found at the edges and beyond of liberal and democratic norms, making these outcomes colliding with the reported dominant thought.
6.2 The consequences for democracy
As previously discussed, many indices report of a decline of democracy in the US for a long period of time now, and there are different analyses presented to explain this decline. But the contribution to loss of democratic quality, caused by foreign policy, is widely overlooked. My argument is, that the human rights infringements as seen in the War on Terror do contribute to the reported decline of democracy in the US.
When a state exercises the practice of torture, it moves on to slippery territory if it wants to hang on to the label of democracy. Besides the violation of human integrity itself, which is a breach of core democratic and liberal values, there are some practical consequences as well.
Usually torture by the state takes place in covert operations, and raises by that an
accountability issue. In the case we are discussing here, the state has gone a step further and has approved and institutionalized the practice of torture. Although approved, the practice itself still takes place in darkness and unknown places, diminishing the possibility of holding
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the public officials accountable. A complicating element is the fact that the nature of torture entails definitional problems. Both on the practice itself and in defining who can be subjected to it. This problem of definition extends the problem of holding people accountable. Public control and accountability being central elements of almost every definition of democracy, we see how torture reduces the quality of democracy. Indirectly, even another element of
democracy is jammed by torture. Reciprocity, crucial to avoid a tyranny of the majority, thrives on mutual respect, fairness and dignity. Notions like these cannot coincide with the existence of approved torture.
There are scholars who state that torture is not harming democracy in its essence, but is just another case of ’dirty hands’: extreme measures in the defense of liberty. I disagree.
According to me, this is a false contradiction. The effectiveness of torture in preventing greater evil is highly controversial and the cases of the ’ticking nuclear bomb’ are mainly fictional. I argue that considering torture as a way to defend liberty is a case of ’the operation was successful, but the patient died’.
The way people are detained in Guantanamo and the absence of legal charges are severe violations of the rule of law. The legal uncertainty it causes is highly conflictual with the core value of equality and raises practical issues. Who is at risk of being treated this way and who is not? As with torture, officials will test the limitations of these practices, basically making every citizen outlawed. We see the practical side of this in the UN report (Ritchie & Mogul, 2007) that accounts for a rise of racial profiling and police brutality. Targeted are those of color and the deprived. The legal uncertainty and arbitrariness and the discriminating effect of this tampering with the rule of law are anti-democratic and has its repercussions on the quality of democracy.
Sorely lacking in the existing analyses is the notion that democracy is more than just a
number of votes or the development of GDP. Democracy is also, or some might say foremost, a normative concept. Going back to the earlier mentioned work of Beetham (1994), I claim that the normative side of democracy is the defining and distinguishing part of democracy, with equality as the essential dimension. There is a great need to bring this side of democracy to the centre of attention, to get a more comprehensive understanding of the movements of democracy. As shown, when the normative side of democracy is scratched on, this will by definition have its repercussions on the practical side of democracy. It will lead to tampering with the rule of law, diminished accountability and curving of checks and balances,
weakening the institutions so vital to democracy. It is a trickling down that starts by impairing
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the normative side of democracy that will in due course make its appearance in the quality of the democratic system at hand. In this way, normative breaching political outcomes as human rights infringing foreign policy as present in the War on Terror, have a devastating effect on the quality of the domestic democracy, and far beyond.
Braml and Lauth (2011) review the US democracy with help of their so called field matrix of democracy. This matrix combines the three dimensional concept of democracy, with equality, freedom and legal control as the normative foundations, with the five key institutions of democracy, formed by decision making, institutional intermediation, public communication, effective rule of law, setting and implementation of laws. If any value is scored as sufficient, the regime will be labeled as deficient. As we can see in table 6.1, the US qualifies as a deficient democracy, as a result of the events of the War on Terror and its consequences. The scores are low on public communication, rule of law and setting and implementing laws. The authors ascertain unequal opportunities to take part in the public discourse, which yields the executive to frame the events and mobilize public support. The targeting of certain groups, opening up for torture and other forms of mistreatment of these groups and the establishment of military tribunals to prosecute these groups is a gross violation of the equality principle. As discussed were alleged terrorists deprived of the right to review their detention which is a violation of a fundamental democratic right and disregards ”the balance of power in the system of checks and balances” (Braml & Lauth 2011, p. 118). Finally, their article states that Congress was seeing itself restricted by the atmosphere in the country at the time. Attorney General Ashcroft even linked criticism on citizen rights restricting laws as the Patriot Act to treason.
I subscribe to Braml and Lauth (2011) their empirics and analysis of it, labeling the US as a deficient democracy, but not to the essential conclusion. Where the authors express that there is reason for concern and hope, hanging it up to the Bush administration and expressing the possibilities a new president has, I have shown this not to be the case. The next president did not terminate the War on Terror and even extended some democracy value damaging
elements of it, like drone attacks. As I have shown, it is not a specific government, a certain president or a powerful Attorney General. They are all part of a social reality that is made up of institutions, that are the contributors to political outcomes. These institutions are affected by embedded inequality that accompanies neoliberalism, opening up for institutionalized torture, illegal detention and all the other kinds of reported maltreatment and democratic core violations, spoken of in this paper.
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Table 6.1 Strengths and Deficiencies of American Democracy, 2001-2008
Source: Braml & Lauth, 2011
