ABSTRACT
As the previous chapters have demonstrated, both the establishment and maintenance of democracy have long been a focus of comparative politics. Chapter 4 assessed the many comparisons of the relationship between economic development and democracy. Chapters 5 and 6 compared the ways in which scholars have analysed violent and non-violent challenges to political rule, as well as how those challenges are related to democracy. In addition to these research topics, the comparative study of democracy has also included a focus on critical historical moments of democratic transition. Democratic transitions increasingly became the object of comparative inquiry after the end of the Portuguese dictatorship in 1974, an event which ushered in the so-called ‘third wave’ of democracy in world history (Huntington 1991). The process of democratic transition that started in Portugal would spread to other authoritarian countries in Southern Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe so that by 1996, there were over 120 ‘formal’ democracies comprising approximately 60 per cent of the total independent countries in the world (Diamond 1999: 24–29).
