The great dilemma of democracy revolves around the state. Historically, the state has played a crucial role as enforcer of liberal democratic constitutions, but it has also been used by autocratic rulers to entrench their rule. The state is thus a two-edged sword: It can both be the guarantee of democratic rights and a tool that can be used to suppress such rights. One corollary of this is that the influence of state structures on democratic development depends on who holds government power. But the opposite observation can also be made, as governments play an important role in shaping the state apparatus. The state and the regime are thus intertwined. Against this backdrop, this book presents a series of attempts – authored by influential experts such as Francis Fukuyama and Gerardo Munck – to disentangle the relationship between the state and political regimes. The contributions differ in terms of their particular theoretical and empirical focus. But they share the assumption that three criteria need to be observed to achieve a better understanding of the state-democracy nexus. First, it is valuable to distinguish conceptually between different aspects of the state. Second, the potential relationships between democracy and these attributes of state should be carefully theorized. Third, the consequent propositions must be interrogated using comparative approaches. This book was originally published as a special issue of Democratization.

This paper addresses the nexuses between democracy, understood in minimal procedural terms, and three key aspects of the state: the state as a political center with a monopoly of the use of violence over a population within a given territory, the state as a political center which rules over a population that has a sense of nationhood, and the state as a political center that delivers public goods beyond political order, such as economic and social welfare. We consider two perspectives on these state-democracy nexuses: one that holds that, to ensure that democratization is successful and democracy enduring, various challenges pertaining to the state must be tackled before the democracy question is addressed; another that posits that the challenges pertaining to the state can be addressed in the course of a process of democratization or through democratic procedures. And we conclude that the oft-repeated proposition “no state, no democracy” is at best only partially true and many of its derivations are false. Indeed, “no democracy, no state” is a more plausible claim and one that is especially relevant in the contemporary period.

The great dilemma of democracy revolves around the state. Historically, the state has played a crucial role as enforcer of liberal democratic constitutions, but it has also been used by autocratic rulers to entrench their rule. The state is thus a two-edged sword: It can both be the guarantee of democratic rights and a tool that can be used to suppress such rights. One corollary of this is that the influence of state structures on democratic development depends on who holds government power. But the opposite observation can also be made, as governments play an important role in shaping the state apparatus. The state and the regime are thus intertwined. Against this backdrop, this book presents a series of attempts – authored by influential experts such as Francis Fukuyama and Gerardo Munck – to disentangle the relationship between the state and political regimes. The contributions differ in terms of their particular theoretical and empirical focus. But they share the assumption that three criteria need to be observed to achieve a better understanding of the state-democracy nexus. First, it is valuable to distinguish conceptually between different aspects of the state. Second, the potential relationships between democracy and these attributes of state should be carefully theorized. Third, the consequent propositions must be interrogated using comparative approaches. This book was originally published as a special issue of Democratization.

The growing body of research on the relationship between the state and democracy has remained inconclusive both in terms of causal direction and sign. One key factor contributing to this inconclusiveness is the lack of precision in the conceptualization and measurement of democracy and state capacity. Drawing on this argument, my study takes an original approach to the topic by shifting the focus on more specific aspects of the two concepts. Through a statistical analysis of two precise attributes of democracy and state capacity-namely, civic participation and impartial bureaucracy-my study provides new evidence on their dynamic relationship in a comparative cross-country setting of over 160 countries after World War II. My findings strongly support the hypothesis that a vibrant civic society is an important prerequisite of impartial bureaucracies. They also highlight the importance of digging deeper into the concepts of democracy and state capacity to achieve a more thorough understanding on the state-democracy nexus and its underlying mechanisms.