Uluslararası İlişkiler Dergisi

Abstract

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.