Dimiter D. Toshkov is assistant professor at the Institute of Public Administration at Leiden University. He studied public administration at Sofia University ‘St. Climent Ohridski’ and Leiden University. He also studied research methods at the ICPSR Summer Program at the University of Michigan. Currently, his major research project, supported by a VENI grant from the NWO, investigates the strategic interactions between the Commission, the ECJ and the Member States in the context of enforcement of EU legislation. His other ongoing research focuses on the diffusion of tobacco policy in Europe, asylum policy, and decision making in the EU. We contacted the Professor Toshkov to discuss democracy, democratization, governments and good governance, and political parties, and he replied to our questions in an exclusive interview to Gulan Magazine as the following:

* Lake of good governance is the main problem of the developing countries due to not having consolidated government system especially institutions, how the developing countries can overcome this problem?
- Institutions of course in my opinion are a big part of the picture but what is necessary for establishing good governance is a certain political culture as well. The institutions suggest the rules of the game that would make the game being played is the political culture so as long as the people don’t want to participate in the democratic government as long as they don’t have the will to engage into the democratic policy making then even the best institutions in the world just would remain empty shells, they would remain dead letters. To some extent it’s a matter of forms of institutions but what make the institution is the people, so a certain political culture would be necessary for good democratic governance.

* The developing countries are usually trying to repeat the successful experiences of the western well developed countries and they ask western advisers to guide them for shaping the governance, to what extend imitating the western countries can be helpful for the developing countries?
- This is actually related to my previous point about the form of institutions. Even if institutions are working in Western Europe or in the US and they imported to the developing countries, there is no guarantee that they would produce the same outcome because institutions are imbedded (they function) in a certain environment and when they are transferred to other countries there is no guarantee that they would work I have some experience observing from very close the institutional transfer recommended by the western advisers to the countries of Central and Eastern Europe - these countries were consolidating their democracies and when they were building their market economies - some of the imported institutions worked and some of the institutions that were suggested by western experts were actually counterproductive. Again, importing institutions can only do that much - it really depends on the local people to make them work. There are some institutions that obviously benefit the society in many different contexts no matter the country, developing or developed. For example stable civil service. I'm not aware of any example in which a stable merit-based civil service has been established and it hasn’t brought any benefits to the society. To some extent institutions like that can be imported and transferred to different contexts but there is no guarantee that if you take independent courts from the European system and you transform them to a different environment like developing countries they would produce good outcomes. Independent courts work in Western Europe because they are a part of a political system of checks and balances and, for example, if you try to institute independent courts in developing countries all you do is just to give independence to a branch of government which is not accountable to anyone. So I'm a little bit skeptical about the profit of institutional transfer which is often advocated by western advisers. In my opinion, in many circumstances societies have developed their own tradition of institutions which might work very well for particular problems and solve particular common problems and it is not necessary the case that importing foreign institutions would work.

* If all the policies in the society is local that means its necessary for the governance to become a respond to the demands of the local citizens, how good governance can be build based on the demands of the local citizens?
- Of course responsibility or responsiveness of the government to the wishes of the people is a necessary condition for any political system which calls itself as democracy. At the same time even in the established democracies in Western Europe or in the US, it is not always the case that for all the policies at all points in time the public wishes correspond to government policies. It’s always a matter of degree whether the government polices corresponds to the wishes of the people. And again, to a certain extent, some degree of correspondences is necessary for the rule of democracy in the first place. Whether this democracy should be exercised at the local level or at the national level or the federal level, I would say it will really depend on the problem. For some problems, we will take the wishes of the people at the local level as sufficient. For other problems, actually the preferences of the people at the regional level are what we need to know. The preference of one municipality need to be coordinated with the preferences of the people in another municipality maybe, or of the whole region so a degree of coordination is necessary as well. But in addition to the people being able to express their wishes and their preferences at some local elections or council, what is more important is that the public officials are responsible and they are accountable to these people after the decisions have been made, because democracy is not only about taking decisions with the participation of the people but is also about being accountable when the time comes for implementation of the decisions, so that actually the local population can change officials which are corrupted or just inefficient. Regarding to your question whether being closer to the people always works for better, I can’t really say. Sometimes if you devolve too much democracy at the local level, you end up with governments which don’t have the capacity, they don’t have the human capital to establish good governance, so for some problems actually cooperation between local, regional and federal levels is a good thing, I would say.

* What the developing countries are suffering from is that, political parties shaped the government within democracy, but the political parties of the developing countries are not well democratized, so you expect from them to build the democracy, how political parties can be democratized?
- I wish I had an answer to this question. There are at least several things to be considered here, the role of political parties for democratization is of course great and it’s their responsibility to accept that they participate in a certain game with rules which require that if they are voted out of office they will leave peacefully and there will be normal transfer of power. Often parties don’t have the incentives to do so. Actually there are reforms that they need to do - to establish some basis of good governance, for example civil service, so they have to restrain themselves from the firing of the officials from the previous party government and often parties don’t have these incentives, so for them is much easier to not pursue reforms and not give power if they implement these reforms. Whether parties internally have to be organized in a democratic way? I can’t really say that I'm an expert on the political parties, but in my view it is the western European experience the party is no longer the only animal in the political zoo. Parties are much more like cartels aggregating different opinions from different groups in society, rather than a state within a state. When a party becomes a state within a state, then you get a problem.

* Making reforms in the society needs ability and knowledge so how is it possible to make reforms in the developing societies and how ability is achieved for making reform?
- In addition to ability and knowledge, what I find as the most important thing for reforms is the will to do so. In many circumstances the politicians and the civil service know very well what the best course of action is and they know very well that this course of action is possible but they don’t have the will to implement that because they will suffer themselves in the short term. Let me give you an example with the democratic reforms and the economic reforms happening in central and Eastern Europe in the late 1990’s. It was actually the governments who implemented the very painful economical reforms that get punished for them because the people lost their jobs in the short term, because the standards of living went down and of course these reforms were necessary in the longer term to establish the foundations of market economy and to establish institutions but in the short term these reforms hurt the people, and the people in a democratic system punished the same politicians who actually implemented the reform. So it’s to some extent a matter of ability - that’s why it’s necessary to have well-trained civil servants who are aware of the policy options and so on and so forth, but the politicians need to show the will to actually implement these reforms. In addition to ability and knowledge I would say that the will to reform is equally important.

* Last Question: Democracy culture is the most important think in the developing countries; the duty of intellectuals in the developing countries is difficult so to what extent they can help building democracy culture in the society?
- Let me say two things in this respect. First I think that in this age where the social media is so powerful and everyone can set up a blog or almost everyone can set up a facebook account and twitter, etc, the role of intellectuals is diminishing because everyone can be an intellectual and everyone can express their opinion and if you have a good argument that can be persuasive you don’t need an academic title and you don’t need endorsement of some official institutions to express an opinion and to be persuasive. At the same time I see that the intellectuals and the political elite as representatives of the people have certain responsibilities for cooperation. They need to provide examples of cooperation. Even if they respective constituencies - Sunnis or Shi’, Kurds or Arabs, poor or rich, - have different preferences, it is the responsibility of the elites to cooperate and make a common policy. Just to give you an example - the Netherlands, where I am based now, has been a deeply divided society for many centuries with Protestants and Catholics and liberals very much living on their own and having their own newspapers and having their own political parties and schools and everything. And what made the system work this way was the cooperation of the elites who actually got together to make the common policies and to find solutions which are for the benefit of all different groups. Although at the local level the different communities did not cooperate too much, it was the elites who made good governance possible.


Transcription: Mahmud Samih