ABSTRACT
The accelerated rate of political transformation that characterised the last decade of the past century in various regions of the world stimulated a renewed interest in the relationship between development and democracy. While the argument in the 1960s had been that democracy was positively correlated with level of modernisation – then viewed as the equivalence of development – the two subsequent decades were much more circumspect about any such relationship. It was only the tumultuous years following the fall of communism and the attempts to move away from autocratic modes of rule that encouraged students of comparative politics to revisit the development-democracy nexus. To be sure, students of Latin American politics had already begun to respond to reform efforts undertaken in their region in the early 1980s, but it was only in the 1990s that issues of democratisation re-entered the mainstream of comparative politics. The reorientation in the field of comparative politics has already resulted in a broad range of publications. This volume is an effort to provide an understanding of this literature by focusing on two elementary questions: (1) what do we know? and (2) how do we know it? As such, the book is aimed at serving as a text that introduces the reader to an increasingly complex set of issues that scholars have raised and are still grappling with.
