Liberalism, Democracy and Development

Yet another book on ‘liberal democracy’?

I wrote this book to present an original argument, an argument that is aimed at a better understanding of why and to what extent ‘liberal democracy’ is a good system that delivers ‘economic development’: Does democracy really cause development? How tight is the connection? How does it do so? What really is the connection? What are the limits of that connection?

In other words, in this book I ask a series of questions that few people seem to be asking any more. By examining how ‘liberal democracy’ can or cannot contribute to ‘economic development’, I challenge readers to think about what ‘liberal democracy’ really is, what it can be, and especially what it can do – how, and under what circumstances.

These are important and long-overdue questions. Since the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s to now, ‘liberal democracy’ has been celebrated and ‘democratisation’ seemed ‘the only game in town’. The universal goodness of ‘liberal democracy’ is almost always assumed: it will bring economic development, social harmony, enhancement of human rights, etc. In this atmosphere of triumphalism, there is little critical reflection on the concept of ‘liberal democracy’ itself.

The original argument presented in this book is constructed around a ‘2 × 3 + 1’ axis: the first set of three concepts are ‘economic’ liberalism, ‘civil’ liberalism and ‘political’ liberalism (achieved by ‘decomposing liberal democracy’, in chapter 2); the second set of three concepts are ‘security’, ‘stability’ and ‘information and openness’ (achieved via a top-down overview of liberal democratic theories, rendered in chapter 5).