ABSTRACT
Ever since S.M. Lipset’s seminal article ‘Some Social Requisites of Democracy’ (1959), researchers have discussed and studied the causes of democratization. Most of the world’s countries have democratized, at least to some extent, but democracy is still fragile in many of them, and the number of countries in which democratic institutions, or attempts to establish democracy, have failed is considerable. Therefore it would be important to understand why democracy has emerged in some countries but not in certain others. What are the causes of democratization and of the failures of democratization? Are the causes and failures of democratization similar in all parts of the world, or do they vary from place to place and over time? These are some of the basic questions tackled by researchers and investigated in this study, too.
