Thinking outside the box: Extra-parliamentary strategies and their effects on the development of good governance in new democracies

Burke, Amanda E.

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/105169 Copy

Description

Title

Thinking outside the box: Extra-parliamentary strategies and their effects on the development of good governance in new democracies

Author(s)

Burke, Amanda E.

Issue Date

2019-04-10

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Skalnik Leff, Carol

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Skalnik Leff, Carol

Committee Member(s)

• Gaines, Brian J.
• Sin, Gisela
• Winters, Matthew S.

Department of Study

Political Science

Discipline

Political Science

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

democratization, opposition, comparative politics, mixed methods, opposition parties, good governance

Abstract

The literature on transitions and democratization overwhelmingly supports the idea that opposition parties should pursue tactics akin to those used in Westminster and other Western democracies, and those the choice to pursue extra-parliamentary opposition tactics is ultimately anti-democratic. In particular, there is a popular consensus that opposition participation in boycotts prevents the development of democracy. This dissertation takes a critical look at this conjecture, evaluating its plausibility in the first dedicated mixed-methods study of parliamentary and electoral boycotts as extra-parliamentary opposition tactics. I argue that the choice to condemn the use of boycotts takes too narrow a view of the utility of extra-parliamentary tactics in new democracies. I support this claim through the use of case study analysis and dynamic panel data analysis, for which I constructed, using event data, the most extensive dataset on electoral boycotts and the first dataset on legislative boycotts. My findings in both parts show that there is indeed no difference between the likelihood that a country that experiences a boycott and a country which does not will experience good or improved democratic governance, refuting the literature’s current consensus.

Graduation Semester

2019-05

Type of Resource

text

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http://hdl.handle.net/2142/105169

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2019 Amanda Burke

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