“We All Know A Democracy When We See One”: (Neo)liberal orthodoxy in the ‘democratisation’ and ‘good governance’ project
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract ‘Democratisation’ and ‘good governance’ have come to constitute a fundamental aspect of Western interventions in Latin America, Asia, Africa and the former Eastern bloc, particularly in the post-Cold War period. Despite a vast literature on ‘democratisation,’ there has been a paucity of analysis which interrogates the great-power-defined agendas of democratisation. The naturalism of a particular vision or model of democracy is such that its promotion is rarely questioned or critically interrogated. Yet democracy is an essentially contested concept and universalistic claims around the Western (neo)liberal notion of democracy are being increasingly challenged. The article interrogates therefore the notion(s) of democracy articulated by the dominant social agents associated with the democratisation project, through specific reference to Africa. It contends that an orthodox notion can be identified. The orthodoxy constitutes a (neo)liberal, procedural notion of democracy, a claim substantiated through interrogation of the orthodoxy and the detailing of the extent to which the orthodox notion is informed by (neo)liberal theory and practice. The article concludes that ‘democratisation’ and ‘governance’ interventions are to be understood as a current manifestation of the liberal project.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".