Democratization and the Mischief of Faction.

• Author: Yildiz, Tugce

Democratization and the Mischief of Faction

Benjamin R. Cole

Boulder London, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2018, 200 pages, ISBN: 9781626377318

Democratization and the Mischief of Faction by Benjamin R. Cole is a comprehensive book, filling the salient gap in the literature by providing the complete theoretical work on the relationship between factionalism and democratization processes. It also makes an important contribution to the literature with the critical empirical mapping of this link by analyzing every episode of factionalism in the world between 1946 and 2015 with the Polity IV dataset. As Cole said, factionalism is not a new term or concept but reflects a common phenomenon behind all apparent social cleavages, polarization, and sectarian violence, among other outcomes, that have been well researched previously by scholars from different subfields by using different terms (p.5) The novelty of this book is that it strikingly reveals two facts: firstly, factionalism is a common and nearly universal phenomenon in democratizing states and young democracies as they inherit a factional legacy from autocratic predecessors; and secondly factionalism is one of the reasons for the failure of democratization processes. The empirical findings on divergent practices of different states to manage or mitigate factionalism provide new insights into debates in the democratization literature.

The book is well structured and well written so that each chapter is constructed in connection with the others and tries to fill the missing parts of the whole research design. The book has seven chapters. In Chapter 1, Cole tries to deal with the factionalism phenomenon in every aspect by offering a comprehensive literature review. A critically important point here is the argument that while autocracies can keep latent factionalism from manifesting in its overt form through key authoritarian governance strategies i.e., suppression and repression as its modus operandi (p.10), the political liberalization process paves the way to make factionalism inherited from the preceding autocratic regime in democratizing states and young democracies visible. In fact, the manifestation of factionalism in liberalizing society is expected to occur via mass protests, political riots, and electoral boycotts. However, as Cole argues, this kind of polarization can be dangerous for young democracies, as they lack fully functioning conflict-resolution institutions such as an...