What is Democratisation?
Democratisation is a complex and contested concept. It may refer to the process by which power and authority are transferred in a peaceful and orderly manner from one popularly mandated regime to another, or it could be used as a label for a set of political practices and institutional arrangements, such as freedom of speech, assembly and religion, the rule of law, an independent judiciary, limited corruption, reasonable equality of opportunity, a vigorous bourgeois middle class, and civic institutions. A key component of democratisation is the presence of a democracy-friendly civil society. This is a group of institutions – religious, professional, and civic – that support democratic principles and encourage participation in the electoral process. A democracy-friendly civil society is a strong indicator of future stability in democratic processes and institutions.
The success of democratisation in the post-World War II period and the recent so-called Third Wave has encouraged many to try to explain why democracy seems to have a built-in momentum that cannot be reversed, and even to compare democratic trajectories across countries in an attempt to identify common factors and conditions for successful democratisation. Some suggest a universal craving for democratic choice, others point to strengths of existing democracies that make them models worthy of emulation, and still others emphasize the role of evolving norms of ‘democratic governance’.
Despite the lack of consensus as to what precisely democratisation is, there is broad agreement that it is a complex and elusive concept. It is difficult to impose democratic forms on a population that does not demand them or have the means to defend and implement them, and that has not learned the necessary skills of democratic self-government in other ways. Moreover, it is often difficult to achieve true democratisation when the forces of centrifugal disintegration – ethnic, regional, and religious – are strong.
Many democratisations have taken place as a result of the withdrawal of colonial masters (as in Australia, New Zealand and Canada) or the collapse of dictatorships or one-party states (as in Chile, Poland and South Africa). In other cases, leaderships use the vocabulary of democracy and some democratic procedures in an effort to brand their governments as ‘popular’, though they may lack any substantial democracy.
Democratisation has been influenced by the evolution of the discipline of political science, and by the development of techniques for observing, collecting data, and analyzing elections, public opinion polling, and other political phenomena. Modern political science aims to study a wide variety of socio-political events as objectively and rigorously as possible, in order to provide useful information for policy making and for comparisons across societies. The democratisation of the world has contributed to the growth and diversification of this field. As a result, there is a burgeoning literature on the causes of democratisation (why), and on practical/strategic issues surrounding the democratization process itself, including the question of whether and how much democracy can be ‘imported’ from abroad. This is an important area of study, and it has been a major factor in the emergence of a ‘Democratisation Studies’ subfield of Political Science.
Democratisation is a complex and contested concept. It may refer to the process by which power and authority are transferred in a peaceful and orderly manner from one popularly mandated regime to another, or it could be used as a label for a set of political practices and institutional arrangements, such as freedom of speech, assembly and religion, the rule of law, an independent judiciary, limited corruption, reasonable equality of opportunity, a vigorous bourgeois middle class, and civic institutions. A key component of democratisation is the presence of a democracy-friendly civil society. This is a group of institutions – religious, professional, and civic – that support democratic principles and encourage participation in the electoral process. A democracy-friendly civil society is a strong indicator of future stability in democratic processes and institutions. The success of democratisation in the post-World War II period and the recent so-called Third Wave has encouraged many to try to explain why democracy seems to have a built-in momentum that cannot be reversed, and even to compare democratic trajectories across countries in an attempt to identify common factors and conditions for successful democratisation. Some suggest a universal craving for democratic choice, others point to strengths of existing democracies that make them models worthy of emulation, and still others emphasize the role of evolving norms of ‘democratic governance’. Despite the lack of consensus as to what precisely democratisation is, there is broad agreement that it is a complex and elusive concept. It is difficult to impose democratic forms on a population that does not demand them or have the means to defend and implement them, and that has not learned the necessary skills of democratic self-government in other ways. Moreover, it is often difficult to achieve true democratisation when the forces of centrifugal disintegration – ethnic, regional, and religious – are strong. Many democratisations have taken place as a result of the withdrawal of colonial masters (as in Australia, New Zealand and Canada) or the collapse of dictatorships or one-party states (as in Chile, Poland and South Africa). In other cases, leaderships use the vocabulary of democracy and some democratic procedures in an effort to brand their governments as ‘popular’, though they may lack any substantial democracy. Democratisation has been influenced by the evolution of the discipline of political science, and by the development of techniques for observing, collecting data, and analyzing elections, public opinion polling, and other political phenomena. Modern political science aims to study a wide variety of socio-political events as objectively and rigorously as possible, in order to provide useful information for policy making and for comparisons across societies. The democratisation of the world has contributed to the growth and diversification of this field. As a result, there is a burgeoning literature on the causes of democratisation (why), and on practical/strategic issues surrounding the democratization process itself, including the question of whether and how much democracy can be ‘imported’ from abroad. This is an important area of study, and it has been a major factor in the emergence of a ‘Democratisation Studies’ subfield of Political Science.