Dept. of Political and Social Change, Research School of Pacific Studies, The Australian National University
Abstract
A vast literature has accumulated about democratic preconditions, transition, and consolidation in developing countries, highlighting the centrality of these themes in comparative politics today. Further, much of this discussion has been collated among the geographic areas through which democracy's 'third wave' (Huntington 1990) has recently passed, enabling specialists to control for important contextual variables. In explaining regime openings in the relatively uniform settings of South America, southern Europe, eastern Europe, and East Asia, for example, area specialists have been able to analytically set aside such disparate, though significant, features and legacies as bureaucratic authoritarianism, latifundist agriculture, Soviet antecedents, new NIC statuses, Catholicism, Confucianism, and varying degrees of ethnic or cultural complexity. This has permitted, in short, much comparative work, the testing of relatively uncluttered causal statements across a number of cases. Then, after sketching out bold regional generalizations, specialists have been able to factor in fine country uniqueness's, specifying with even greater exactness the relationships between democratic pressures and outcomes. (First paragraph.
