ABSTRACT

From the “revolution” in Portugal (April 1974) to the “liberation” of Iraq (April 2003), the so-called “third wave” of democratizations has triggered various types of “transition” from authoritarian (or even totalitarian) rule. Over the past thirty years this has affected almost half of the sovereign states recognized by the United Nations (UN). In some countries, a clear-cut episode of regime change separates an old (undemocratic) order from a new (more or less “consolidated”) electoral democracy. In many other cases, the political trajectory has been more erratic and the outcome more ambiguous, but even so what has come to the fore has been the norms and structures of competitive politics within a relatively neutral institutional framework. There remain large regions that have proved resistant to this global tendency (most notably in the Arab world), and there have been a small number of significant reversals (as in Pakistan). In some cases democratization has come about through delicate negotiations between rival domestic political elites, but there are also numerous examples of regime change through rupture, perhaps precipitated by external crises, or even (as in Iraq) imposed through military conquest. The old established democracies remain securely in place but there is quite widespread evidence of growing disenchantment with the way that “really existing” democratic politics works, and in some important countries there have been significant signs of “decay” in the observance of basic democratic norms. Quite a few of the new democracies display substantial levels of citizen disenchantment, and in some cases even institutional dysfunctionality. Whereas the early democratizations of the 1970s all took place in long-established and securely implanted nation states, those of the 1990s were more likely to occur in institutionally fragile nations (perhaps newly created), where basic elements of the underlying political order remained subject to contestation. Overall, then, the record of the past thirty years presents a mixed picture. Democratization has advanced, but initial theories and models of democratic transition have been stretched (and even undermined) by the resulting diversity of paths and outcomes.1