Research On The Influencing Factors Of The Quality Of Democracy In Micro States

In the arena of political science,great powers often get much attention because of their international influence and strong comprehensive strength.By contrast,smaller countries might easily be marginalized or ignored in political science.However,because of the rise of international decolonization movement in the 1960 s,a large number of microstates toward independence,and have a place in the international system.In the actual political practice,these smaller countries always have a big gap with big countries in the domestic political system operation and the policies of foreign relations,thus result in the generation of some special results.Through observations of micriostates in the world,it can be found that these small countries have a good performance in the democratization ratio and the quality of democracy,even better than many big countries.For the current situation in which the world's democratic development is in a bottleneck,the selection of these special cases for research may bring different perspectives and inspirations to the political science community.Therefore,the core proposition of this paper is to explore which influencing factors and the combination of influencing factors led microstates have a better democratic quality than other categories of countries.This paper selects the democratic microstate which the population is less than 1 million in the world as the research object,and uses the fuzzy-set qualitative analysis(fs QCA)research technology to test the combination of conditions that may affect the democratic quality of microstates,thus receive the path which leading to the high democraticquality of microstates.This paper takes the microstates' quality of democracy as a result variable,based on existing research findings on the quality of democracy and democracy in microstates,choose economic development(per capita GDP),religious factors(proportion of Christian population),ethnic differentiation(diversity of ethnicity and language),geographic location(whether or not an island country)and historical heritage factors(whether ever British colony)five variables as condition variables,exploring how the combination of these variables to play a role in the quality of democracy in microstates.Through the analysis,the paper finally got three paths.The variable of religious is included in all three paths,thus become a necessary condition of the result variable alone.Path 1 and Path 3 show that for the island microstates,the historical legacy of political institutions and political culture which retained by the colonists has a greater impact on their democratic quality.Path 2shows that for non-island microstates,their democratic quality tends to be more dependent on their higher level of economic development and better maintenance of citizen welfare.It can be seen that geographical factors and historical heritage factors play a role in the democratic quality of microstates.At the same time,regardless of whether the microstate is an island country,if its ethnic group is highly differentiated,in order to obtain high-quality democracy,it must have a higher level of economic development to neutralize this factor.In addition,through the analysis of Palau's special case,this paper finds that the external influence factor of international asylumism may have an impact on the democratic quality of microstates,and should be paid more attention in more in-depth research.