How Countries Democratize

Between 1974 and 1990 more than thirty countries in southern Europe, Latin America, East Asia, and Eastern Europe shifted from authoritarian to democratic systems of government. This '"global democratic revolution" is probably the most important political trend in the late twentieth century. It is the third wave of democratization in the modern era. A wave of democratization is a group of transitions from nondemocratic to democratic regimes that occurs within a specified period and that significantly outnumbers transitions in the opposite direction in the same period. The first wave began in America in the early nineteenth century and culminated at the end of World War I with about thirty countries having democratic regimes. Mussolini's march on Rome in 1922 began a reverse wave, and in 1942 there were only twelve democracies left in the world. The Allied victory in World War II and decolonization started a second movement toward democracy which, however, petered out by the early 1960s when about thirty-six countries had democratic regimes. This was then followed by a second reverse movement towards authoritarianism, marked most dramatically by military take-overs in Latin America and the seizure of power by personal despots such as Ferdinand Marcos. The causes of the third wave, like those of its predecessors, were complex and peculiar to that wave. This article, however, is concerned not with the why of the third wave but rather with the question of how third wave democratizations