Introduction: democratization in the early twenty-first century

Hardly any other subject in the last quarter of the twentieth century has influenced the research agenda of political science more than the transformation of authoritarian and ‘totalitarian’ political regimes into pluralist democracies. However, to the same extent that the third wave of democratization unfolded, beginning in 1974, which initially encompassed southern Europe and Latin America and then eventually included eastern Europe, Asia and Africa as well, the main focus of democratization studies shifted accordingly. While the ‘transitologists’ of the 1970s and 1980s investigated the conditions and modes of transition from dictatorship to democracy, the ‘consolidologists’ of the 1990s concentrated on inquiring into causes, conditions and models of the consolidation of young democracies. Most recently, the questions of whether democracy is working, how ‘good’ or ‘bad’ a democracy is, and of the conceptual issue of diminished sub-types of democracy (illiberal democracies, defective democracies and so on) have begun to become the new predominant trend in democracy theory and democratization studies. One must admit that a glance back at three decades of the ‘third wave’ indicates that political alternatives to democracy have since lost much of their appeal ‐ not only from an ideological point of view; their empirical relevance seems much diminished. The data offered by quantitative measurement of democracy leave no room for doubt about this. The political map of the world is, more than ever, marked by the presence of democracy. 1 However, some, if not many, new democracies (and some old ones) have very little to offer outside of elections, which liberal theorists of democracy would associate with the notion of a ‘liberal democracy’, a ‘good democracy’, or a ‘quality democracy’. As Thomas Carothers recently stated