The collapse of communism across Eastern Europe was one of the final manifestations of a worldwide spread of democratization over a twenty-year period that began with Southern Europe in 1974, then continued in Latin America in the 1980s and subsequently moved on to Eastern Asia in the late 1980s and 1990s. Political scientists devoted much effort to account for the timing and modalities of political-regime change and the structural conditions and dynamic processes that made possible this “Third Wave” of democratization (Huntington 1991). But as we approach the turn of the century, we have only the most sketchy understanding of the practice of democratic competition, representation, and policy making in these new democracies. Political scientists have delivered few theoretically incisive comparative analyses of the way the new democracies actually work.

Much of the political science discourse is still mesmerized by an almost exclusive concern with the “survival” or “consolidation” of basic democratic regime parameters in Third Wave democracies, such as civil liberties, free elections, and legal-bureaucratic predictability. Contributors to this debate seek to specify the minimal conditions that make democratic rules of the game persist over time (cf. Linz and Stepan 1996: 7–37). But there may be no one set of baseline features that keeps democracy alive. Moreover, the focus on holistic questions of democratic consolidation has diverted attention from the specific mechanisms of electoral competition and legislative representation as well as the modes of interest intermediation in the policy-making process, all of which contribute to breathing life into the democratic framework.