ABSTRACT
This book has analysed factors that produce democratic consolidation using the case studies of Italy, Spain, and Turkey. Of particular interest in the book has been the question of why – despite sharing many features with these two other Southern European countries – Turkey has failed to create a fully functioning democracy while the other two countries have managed to do so. As with most case-study analyses, the explanation for this difference is somewhat ‘over-determined’. That is, there are too may potential explanatory factors and two few cases with which to analyse these potential causes of democratic consolidation.1 This analysis has sacrificed the ability to provide a more definitive answer to the question of why consolidation varies across cases (e.g. by using large-N quantitative analyses) for the ability to instead say something about the historical processes in the three cases and to draw some inferences about which variables are and are not likely to have been connected to differences in democratic consolidation across the three. What does the analysis tell us about the answers to this question? Table 11.1 summarizes the factors investigated in this book and provides a rough numerical score representing the differences or similarities across the three cases for these variables. The findings for these variables are reviewed in this chapter.
