ABSTRACT
In the introduction to this volume, I referred to my comparative studies of democratization in which I have argued that the chances of democratization in a particular country depend very much on its social conditions. Democratization is not equally possible under all kinds of social conditions. The variation in the social environments of political systems should be taken into account in the formulation and evaluation of the strategies of democratization. There can be no uniform strategy of democratization that is equally applicable to all countries for the simple reason that social structures and other environmental conditions vary from country to country. The question is: What are the relevant conditions and how can their variation be measured? We should be able to locate and measure social constraints of democracy. Because I have tackled certain aspects of this problem in my comparative studies of democratization, here I summarize my theoretical arguments as well as some of the results of my latest studies during the period from 1980 to 1988 (Vanhanen 1990, 1991a), and extend the analysis to the years of 1989 and 1990.
