Democracy and its Recent Surge in the World

A democracy is a state in which citizens have the right to vote for their own leaders. Democracy is "government of the people." Democracy requires an implicit agreement by the conflicting groups in a state to accept the possibility that they will lose out in the making of a policy. This is the democratic bargain. Democracy is fragile. Minute inconveniences are enough to make it collapse. After the 1980s and 1990s a wave of democratization swept across the globe. Three consecutive waves of democratization took place. The third one is explained through four possible reasons. These growing fondness of democracy has given way to the rise of a dubious belief about having reached the end of history. Through the study of comparative politics, political scientists have learned 5 things.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall most of the Eastern European countries that used to be communist, threw off their old systems and established democracies. Three waves of democratization took place. The first occurred in Eastern Europe and Latin America. The second one occurred in Germany and Italy and the third one is considered to have started in the late 1970s with the successful reintroduction of democracy to Spain and Portugal. Political scientist justify this last wave with four reasons; fatigue of some authoritarian regimes, international pressures, people's desires for security against arbitrary abuse, and people's desire for economic development. Based on the preceding events, an author declared that capitalist democracy had won the great ideological debate of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and that history, as we have known it, had ended because there was nothing left to fight about.

Through comparative politics scientist have learned 5 key concepts. The first one is the importance of pacts. It is important for successful democratization that the democratizers form pacts with those whom they are ousting to ensure a smooth transitions and to lay a good base of support for the future democracy. The second observation is sudden changes. Many of the recent shifts to democracy have taken observers by surprise. a year before the Eastern European countries became democratic, nobody predicted it would happen. The third observation that has been made is that the results of a transition to democracy differ if the transition takes place while the state is undergoing a crisis or not. Politics that follow a crisis tend to be problematic, whereas politics that follow times of stability, remain stable themselves. The third observation is related to democracy and freedom. Democracy and freedom are related but not identical. Moving toward one means moving toward the other but there is not an automatic correspondence between them. Finally the fifth observation is about democracy and capitalism. Most democracies of the world have market based economies, however there is no automatic connection between democracy and capitalism.

The amount of democratic countries has increased impressively in the last years. The waves of democratization that have swept across the globe have been drastic. The third wave might have been triggered by a series of factors. These rapid changes have led certain authors to believe that history as we know it has ended because there is nothing left to fight for. Through comparative politics scientists have made prominent conclusions on pacts, sudden changes, crisis or non crisis, democracy and freedom, and democracy and capitalism.




Democracy