INTRODUCTION

The rise of new democracies throughout the world has produced a rich literature on the origins, forms, quality, and sustainability of democracy. This literature has been based primarily on the experiences of two regions: Latin America and Southern Europe. The focus on these two areas in particular is understandable. The global – or “third” – wave of democratization began in Spain and Portugal and then moved to Latin America. Moreover, specialists in these two regions were well positioned to compare democratization, given their earlier work on both democratization and democratic breakdown. Finally, these cases met many of the conditions that make for instructive comparisons. Latin America and Southern Europe contained a large number of cases and some variation in both the timing and modes of transition, yet they shared a similar culture in certain respects and the common political destination of democratic rule.

With the passage of time, however, what was once a broad geographic focus became an increasingly narrow one. By the 1990s, democratization had become a global phenomenon, extending from Latin America and Southern Europe to Africa, Asia, and Europe's eastern half. Indeed, for the first time in history, a majority of the world's population now live in democratic orders. This diffusion of democratic politics introduces an obvious question. Once we include other new democracies in the empirical equation, does the literature on recent democratization – that is, the approaches, concepts and arguments that grew out of the Latin American and Southern European experiences – still hold?