ABSTRACT
This chapter is primarily concerned with explicating the social conditions which serve to support a democratic political system. In order to test some generalizations bearing on the differences between countries which rank high or low in possession of the attributes associated with democracy, it is necessary to establish some empirical measures of the type of political system. Individual deviations from a particular aspect of democracy are not too important, as long as the definitions unambiguously cover the great majority of nations which are located as democratic or undemocratic. The chapter locates European democracies are the uninterrupted continuation of political democracy since World War I, and the absence over the past 25 years of a major political movement opposed to the democratic “rules of the game.” Perhaps the most widespread generalization linking political systems to other aspects of society has been that democracy is related to the state of economic development.
