ABSTRACT
Democratization of political systems is a theoretical problem that has fascinated me since the 1960s. The collapse of authoritarian socialist systems and the emergence of numerous new democracies since the 1980s have intensified the quest of researchers to explain democratization and to evaluate the prospects of democracy in the regions of the world still ruled by authoritarian regimes. Scientific knowledge on the causes and conditions of democracy is urgently needed. Karl Popper says that scientific knowledge starts from problems. According to him, ‘a theoretical problem consists in the task of providing an intelligible explanation of an unexplained natural event and the testing of the explanatory theory by way of its predictions’ (Popper 1992:3-4; see also Popper 1983:191-205). That is just what I am trying to do in this study.
