ABSTRACT
Tatu Vanhanen has set himself an ambitious and meritorious task in this book. One both central to current academic concerns in mainstream Political Science, and one that he is eminently qualified to undertake. The issues he addresses are not new-the prerequisites of democratization and the conditions that sustain democratic governance world-wide. But definitive, universally accepted answers to these questions, still persistently evade scholars. This is cogently attested to by the abundance of literature that has accumulated over several decades on the issue of democratization, the continued prevalence of such themes at national and international conferences, the academic mini-industry that still churns out research on these issues, and the sharp disagreements over matters of methodology, substance, variables, and detail, as well as of priority (i.e. ‘stages of democratization’ debate) among those continuing to plough these fertile academic fields.
