Are Free Elections Necessary to Have a Democracy?

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Recommended: the importance of democracy

It is important to understand the concept of democratization to examine newly developed democracies more critically and to have a better understanding of the contemporary politics around the world. Since many countries consider themselves as democracies, there needs to be a scale that represents the shared value and aspiration of democracy to evaluate these countries in a critical and objective manner to determine the democratic performance of these governments. The region this essay will be focusing on is central and eastern Europe. When Poland, Hungary, and Czech Republics joined NATO in 1999 (B. C. Biega 2004), it made a great impact in many countries in central and eastern Europe as they start to adopt the concept of democracy in order to rebuild their countries after overthrowing the authoritarian regimes that had been in power for many years. However, the legitimacy of these democracies may be questionable; it is essential for one to be able to evaluate democracies that lack certain characteristics in order to understand democratization more critically. The purpose of this essay is to examine four countries in the central and eastern Europe region with democratic criteria and determine the legitimacies of these countries. The first section of this essay will examine the two criteria of the principles of democratic government that are chosen to evaluate each of the four countries in central and eastern Europe and the scale that will be used in the evaluation stage. The second section will brief explain the history of the four countries that are chosen and the decisions behind selecting those four countries. Section three of the essay will examine the political and civil aspects of each country and then it will be the compari...

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... W. 2004. Dimensions of Law: Canadian and International Law in the 21st
Century. Toronto: Emond Montgomery Publications.

B. C. Biega. 2002. “19th and 20th Centuries - Struggles for Freedom.” B. C. Biega. April, 2004. http://biega.com/history20.html Freedom House. 2013 “Albania”. Last modified 2013. http://www.freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2013/albania#.UvqccfldVBl Freedom House. 2013 “Croatia”. Last modified 2013. http://www.freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2013/croatia-0#.Uvn-BPldVBk Freedom House. 2013 “Latvia”. Last modified 2013. http://www.freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2013/latvia#.Uvn9-PldVBk Freedom House. 2013 “Ukraine”. Last modified 2013. http://www.freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2013/ukraine#.Uvn-DPldVBk O’Donnell, Guillermo. 1998. “Horizontal Accountability in New Democracies” Journal of
Democracy 9:3: 112-126.

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