Democracy and Changes

As in other fields of research the burden of research tradition has been influential in empirical democratic theory. Consequently, there have always been new studies that continue building on previous published work. As a result, there has been no significant gap between reality and research, particularly when we consider the years when papers and manuscripts began to circulate and to be read, rather than the years of publication of related articles and books. ¹ Thus, in the case of European and non-European democracies at the end of the 1960s and early 1970s we should take into account popular mobilisation, demand for participation and civil rights, activism of workers’ movements, dissatisfaction and protest, instability and military coups d’état as the key phenomena of those years and we can immediately trace the related analyses of democratic crises and stability, participation and so on to work by Huntington (1968), Crozier et al. (1975), Barnes and Kaase (1976), Linz and Stepan (1978), and many others. ² When we pay attention to the diffusion of democracy from Southern Europe, where the process began in the second half of the 1970s, to Latin America in the 1980s and Eastern Europe as well Asia and parts of Africa in the 1990s and later, we find related research on democratisation, consolidation and the analyses of more ambiguous cases of pseudo, façade or minimal democracy.