Comparative politics and Governance - Essay Example

France is taken to be the birthplace of liberal democracy in the modern era, sharing leadership culturally in the development of democratic society internationally with Britain and the USA. The ideals of democracy can be found in literature and transported to any location, but their implementation as a system of government is most strong in the USA and France today. Britain still has the House of Lords and Monarchy which illustrate the feudal patterns of society which liberal democracy replaced, and Spain also has a Constitutional Monarchy and King.

The patterns of democratic liberalism found in the USA and France are used as a basis for development of similar systems in nation-states around the world in the process of modernization that relates to democratization internationally. Jurgen Habermas (1994) discusses the process of democratization as it aligns with modernization in his work, “Three Normative Models of Democracy,” relating the different stages a nation may enter into as the people emerge from feudal power relations. (Habermas, 1994) Following this theory, liberal democratic structures will increase in a society as the culture develops economically and through education, adopting scientific standards, and becoming globalized.

This theory would suggest that the world’s most advanced economies, such as the U.S., France, and Spain, would be also the most free historically, or have the highest advocacy for democratic institutions. Yet, China has the second largest economy globally, and it is often found to be lacking in liberal democratic openness on these standards. Similarly, Russia replaced the Soviet regime with a technically democratic system, and still has a strong economy today, yet international watchdogs regularly report human rights abuses and undemocratic processes in the country.

This leads to the conclusion that there is not a direct relation between the size or advancement of an economy and liberal democracy as a political system inherently, as seen particularly in Russia and China today, but also in historical examples from around the world. Nevertheless, the relationship between modernization and democratization does proceed together in many nations historically, as Barber and other show in their studies on political sociology. (Barber, 2003) 2: The separation of executive and legislature is a fundamental requirement of democratic government’. Discuss. The separation of the legislature and executive is not the fundamental characteristic of democratic government, because the Parliamentary system of government links the Prime Minister directly to the ruling party and its control of the majority of legislators.

What is more important than the relationship of separation of powers and indicative of a liberal democracy historically is the use of a constitution in the establishment of the system of government itself. Habermas, in such works as “On the Internal Relation between the Rule of Law and Democracy” (1995), describes the existence of a constitution as a foundation document in a system of government as characteristic and a predictor of democratic liberalism. (Habermas, 1995) Yet, France, Spain, US, Russia and Nigeria all have constitutions and make claims to political liberalism, but in practice display