Studying Democracy Comparatively

Previous chapters have discussed the concerns and methods of comparative politics as applied to the study of democracy. This chapter offers a first application of these approaches to the practical task of comparing political systems. It focuses on democratic systems for a number of reasons. First, democracy is the most widely diffused way of organizing polities in the contemporary world. Many countries which term themselves democracies of course fall considerably short of the ideal. Nevertheless they do follow practices (such as holding regular elections) which are recognizably democratic (see also: Derbyshire and Derbyshire, 1996; Chapters 3 and 12 in this book).

A second reason for ...