Democracy

The last three decades of the 20th century witnessed the global spread of democratic institutions. In 1974, when the Portuguese dictatorship was overthrown, there were only 39 countries classified as democratic by Freedom House out of a total of 145 countries. By 1997, this number had increased to 117 out of a total of 191 countries. In other words, whereas roughly a quarter of the countries in the world were classified as democracies in 1974, this had increased to over 60% by the end of the century. Democratization spread from southern Europe in the 1970s to Latin America and East Asia in the 1980s, and to central and eastern Europe and Africa from 1989 to the early 1990s. Although some of these countries have moved out of the democratic category, others have joined them, especially postconflict countries, where elections are often held as an exit strategy for the international community.

The spread of democratic institutions has to be understood in the context of globalization. Common rules and procedures provide an institutional basis for the global connectedness of states. But the spread of rules and procedures is not the same as the spread of substantive democracy—that is, the possibility for ordinary people in different parts of the world to influence the decisions that affect their lives. Despite the spread of formal democracy, substantive democracy is under erosion everywhere, in the West as well as in other countries. This has something to do with globalization. If we are to renew the democratic process, then it is not just a matter of spreading the formal procedures of democracy; it also requires new fora that provide access for ordinary people to all levels of governance (local, national, global) and a new responsiveness at all levels of governance to public debate and deliberation.

Interestingly, most of the literature on what is known as democratic transition focuses on the national level. Within the globalization literature, there is a lot of discussion of the global democratic deficit, but this is rarely taken into account in the democratization literature. This is why the gap between formal and substantive democracy is usually explained in terms of the legacy of authoritarianism or the weakness of democratic culture, despite the fact that the gap characterizes older Western democracies as well as newly democratic countries.