ABSTRACT
It is a customary refl ex to think of democratization processes as national in scope. This instinct is to be expected, given the national scopes of the political systems within which the democratization processes are presumed to be located. The corollary propensities to study the role of national causal factors in democratization are equally natural. This does not mean that systemic factors are never considered in the democracy literature, only that so far they have not received much attention.
