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The first wave of democracy (1828–1926) began in the early 19th century when suffrage was granted to the majority of white males in the United States ("Jacksonian democracy"). This was followed by France, Britain, Canada, Australia, Italy, and Argentina, and a few others, before 1900.
- Overview
- Trends in democratization
- Defining democratization
- Transition versus consolidation
- Modes of transition
- Definitions of consolidation
- Hybrid regimes and consolidation
- Explaining democratization
- Elite-choice explanations
- Structural conditions
democratization, process through which a political regime becomes democratic. The explosive spread of democracy around the world beginning in the mid-20th century radically transformed the international political landscape from one in which democracies were the exception to one in which they were the rule. The increased interest in democratization ...
Transitions to and from democracy tend to occur globally and in waves, meaning that they have been clustered in both space and time rather than distributed randomly. The American political scientist Samuel Huntington identified three main waves of democratization. The first, lasting from 1826 to 1926, accompanied the expansion of suffrage, principally in western Europe and the United States. The collapse of many European democracies after World War I marked the first reverse wave, lasting from 1922 to 1942.
The second main wave (1943–62) occurred through the occupation of the Axis countries by the Allied powers following the end of World War II, the attempts at democratization in newly independent former British colonies during the postwar period, and the spread of democracy in Latin America. The second reverse wave (1958–1975) came with the reversion to military rule in much of Latin America and the collapse of young democracies in Asia and Africa.
Democratization is difficult to define in practice, in large part because of disagreements about how to understand democracy. For example, there is no consensus on where to mark the beginning and end points of the democratization process. One approach defines democratization as the period between the breakdown of an authoritarian regime and the conclusion of the first democratic national elections. Others mark earlier beginning points, such as the initiation of liberal reforms by authoritarian regimes or structural changes that weaken authoritarian regimes enough for opposition groups to push for democratic reforms. Some democratic theorists similarly assert that democratization continues long after the first elections because, by themselves, elections do not ensure a functioning democracy. The problem with this approach is that it is not clear when the democratization process stops. If measured against the ideal of a perfect liberal democracy, all countries may be viewed as perpetually being in a process of democratization. This limits the utility of democratization as an analytical tool.
Disagreements about definitions of democracy also make it difficult to measure where a country is in its democratization process. One common measure is the Freedom House score, which measures political rights and civil liberties. Another indicator is the Polity score by the Center for Systemic Peace, which measures “authority characteristics” and is more consistent with procedural definitions of democracy.
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One common approach to specifying the democratization process is to differentiate between two phases: (1) the initial transition from an authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regime to an electoral democracy and (2) the subsequent consolidation of the democracy. The transition to and consolidation of democracy are often viewed as distinct processes d...
Democratization theorists have identified different patterns of interaction among social groups that shape the way democratization unfolds in a particular environment. Numerous such modes of transition have been identified, reflecting variations in the role of elites and masses in confronting the authoritarian regime, the degree to which the transition is managed by elites from the old regime, the speed with which the transition occurs, and the degree to which the new democratic regime breaks dramatically with the old regime. In all cases, transitions occur when a democratic opposition becomes strong and united enough to confront the authoritarian regime, and the authoritarian regime is too weak and divided to control the situation, either by co-opting the democratic opposition or cracking down through force.
Three very general modes of transition include pacted transitions, bottom-up transitions, and top-down transitions. In pacted transitions, moderate members of a weakened authoritarian regime negotiate the conditions of a transition with moderate leaders of a pro-democracy movement. These transitions tend to occur relatively rapidly and result in power-sharing arrangements that preserve elements of the old authoritarian regime. Examples include the democratic transitions in Spain and Chile.
In bottom-up transitions, social groups develop a broad-based grassroots movement for change that weakens the authoritarian regime through mass protests and ultimately forces the regime to relinquish power. These transitions often result in a radical break with the old regime. Examples include the democratic transitions in Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in the second half of the 20th century.
In top-down transitions, leaders of an authoritarian regime implement democratic reforms because they become convinced that the reforms are necessary for regime survival. Sometimes these reforms produce protracted transitions in which the new democratic regime does not break dramatically from the old regime, as in the case of Mexico. In other cases, the reforms may produce more rapid and dramatic transitions, sometimes unintentionally, as in the case of the Soviet Union.
Consolidation may be defined in terms of either democracy’s sustainability or the deepening of its quality over time. These different understandings of consolidation reflect different definitions of democracy. For minimalist definitions, which understand democracy as a dichotomous variable (a regime is either democratic or it is not), consolidation is merely the survival of an electoral democracy. For broader definitions, which view democracy as a continuous variable (a regime may be more or less democratic), consolidation means going beyond an electoral democracy to include characteristics of a liberal democracy, which incorporates guarantees of fundamental rights and liberties. In either case, it is difficult to know how consolidated a democracy is.
Conceptually, a country’s democracy is consolidated when there is no longer a chance that it will revert to authoritarianism. This is difficult to know because only failures can be measured directly, and these only in hindsight. One common indicator is two consecutive turnovers of power. Another is when one political group agrees to give up power to the former opposition, because this indicates a willingness by incumbents to settle disputes through the democratic process and to spend periods of time out of office. However, these measures are somewhat tautological, because the processes that define a democracy are also used to measure its persistence.
Sustainability and quality of democracy were long thought to go hand in hand—the higher the quality of democracy, the more resistant it will be to reversal. Although this may be true, the assumption that the longer a democracy survives the higher its quality is likely to be has been criticized as overly deterministic and teleological. This assumpti...
Not surprisingly, arguments regarding the sources of democratization responded to developments in the real world as the third wave evolved. There are two main approaches to explaining democratization: one that emphasizes favourable structural conditions and another that stresses elite choice. Each has benefits that compensate for the drawbacks of the other. The favourable-conditions approach allows a detailed explanation of the democratization process in particular countries, but it tends to produce a long list of factors that matter, making it difficult to produce a general model of democratization. By contrast, the elite-choice approach is theoretically concise and useful for making generalizations, but it lacks the richness of structural explanations.
Regardless of which approach one adopts, there are two areas of general agreement. First, there appear to be many paths to democracy. In some countries, democracy evolved gradually over centuries (e.g., Great Britain), whereas in others it emerged much more rapidly (e.g., the Baltic states). Some countries inherited democratic institutions from Britain as a result of colonialism (e.g., Canada and Australia), whereas others finally became democratic through foreign intervention following war (e.g., Germany and Japan). Second, democratization does not occur in a linear process. Rather, it is a long, slow, and conflictual process, often with frequent reversals. Viewed historically, the democratization process in a given country is shaped by the accumulation of experience with democracy over time. Each successive democratic experience builds on the institutions and expectations of the previous experience while also shaping those of the future.
During the early 1980s, many scholars were intrigued by the rapid expansion of democratic transitions in southern Europe and Latin America, which challenged the conventional wisdom that authoritarian regimes were robust. Democratization theorists of the period understandably focused on explaining these transitions. The third wave brought democracy to places where it was least expected, suggesting that there were no preconditions for democracy and that democratization could occur anywhere.
The wide variety of conditions surrounding democratic transitions suggested that the specific causes of democratization in a particular country might vary over time and space, making efforts at generalization difficult, if not impossible. Because the timing of transitions was highly contingent on contextual factors, many early democratization theorists framed general explanations in terms of the strategic interaction among elites, which produces a decision to adopt democratic procedures and institutions once the opportunity arises.
According to this approach, democratization is ultimately explained by elites’ decision to establish institutions that generate incentives for them to voluntarily comply with the democratic process. Transitions are successful to the extent that elites perceive themselves as better off in the long run under the new system, either by ensuring the possibility of future access to power or by providing material gains through greater stability. The only necessary conditions are that elites view themselves as members of the same nation and agree on the borders of the state. These conditions induce elites to resolve their conflicts through bargaining rather than breaking off into separate political groupings. This is not to say that ethnic homogeneity guarantees democracy or that heterogeneity prohibits it; there is little evidence to support either proposition. Rather, elites must simply accept that they belong to the same nation-state and therefore seek to resolve political conflicts within that context.
The advantage of the elite-choice approach is that it is theoretically concise and overcomes the problem of multiple causality inherent in structural explanations. However, it does not account for the origins of elite preferences or the conditions that shape negotiations. A related criticism is that it understates the importance of the masses, particularly labor and civil society organizations, in pressuring authoritarian elites to liberalize and providing credibility to demands by the democratic opposition. In addition, the fact that democratization occurs in waves suggests that transitions are not entirely contingent but are shaped by international structural forces.
Over time, the third wave of democratization provided many more cases to study and to test various theories. Two trends revitalized explanations emphasizing conditions that facilitate democratization. First, the democratic transitions that occurred in Latin American and East Asia in the wake of rapid industrialization renewed interest in modernizat...
Jul 14, 2021 · The First wave of democracy, 1828–1926 began in the early 19th century when suffrage was granted to the majority of white males in the United States (“Jacksonian democracy”). Then came France, Britain, Canada, Australia, Italy and Argentina, and a few others before 1900.
The first one brought democracy to Western Europe and Northern America in the 19th century. It was followed by a rise of dictatorships during the Interwar period . The second wave began after World War II , but lost steam between 1962 and the mid-1970s.
If democracy is equated with the franchise, the first wave of democratization was a slow one, spreading from France and some states in the United States in the 1790s to most of the industrialized world by 1918. After both the First and Second World Wars, there were wavelets of democratization.
The first wave of democratization started in the early 19th century and persisted until the 1920s, with many democracies backsliding at that time to autocracy (i.e., the first reverse wave). With the end of World War Two came a second wave of democratization.
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The first wave began in America in the early nineteenth century and culminated at the end of World War I with about thirty countries having democratic regimes. Mussolini's march on Rome in 1922 began a reverse wave, and in 1942 there were only twelve democracies left in the world.
