Democratization,or democratisation,is the structural government transition from an authoritarian government to a more democratic political regime,including substantive political changes moving in a democratic direction.
Arend d'Angremond Lijphart is a Dutch-American political scientist specializing in comparative politics,elections and voting systems,democratic institutions,and ethnicity and politics. He is Research Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of California,San Diego. He is influential for his work on consociational democracy and his contribution to the new Institutionalism in political science.
Modernization theory holds that as societies become more economically modernized,wealthier and more educated,their political institutions become increasingly liberal democratic. The "classical" theories of modernization of the 1950s and 1960s,most influentially articulated by Seymour Lipset,drew on sociological analyses of Karl Marx,Emile Durkheim,Max Weber,and Talcott Parsons. Modernization theory was a dominant paradigm in the social sciences in the 1950s and 1960s,and saw a resurgence after 1991,when Francis Fukuyama wrote about the end of the Cold War as confirmation on modernization theory.
Comparative politics is a field in political science characterized either by the use of the comparative method or other empirical methods to explore politics both within and between countries. Substantively,this can include questions relating to political institutions,political behavior,conflict,and the causes and consequences of economic development. When applied to specific fields of study,comparative politics may be referred to by other names,such as comparative government.
Barrington Moore Jr. was an American political sociologist,and the son of forester Barrington Moore.
Seymour Martin Lipset was an American sociologist and political scientist. His major work was in the fields of political sociology,trade union organization,social stratification,public opinion,and the sociology of intellectual life. He also wrote extensively about the conditions for democracy in comparative perspective. He was president of both the American Political Science Association (1979–1980) and the American Sociological Association (1992–1993). A socialist in his early life,Lipset later moved to the right,and was considered to be one of the first neoconservatives.
In political science and in international and comparative law and economics,transitology is the study of the process of change from one political regime to another,mainly from authoritarian regimes to democratic ones rooted in conflicting and consensual varieties of economic liberalism.
Juan JoséLinz Storch de Gracia was a German-born Spanish sociologist and political scientist specializing in comparative politics. He was Sterling Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Political Science at Yale University and an honorary member of the Scientific Council at the Juan March Institute. He is best known for his work on authoritarian political regimes and democratization.
Adam Przeworski is a Polish-American professor of political science specializing in comparative politics. He is Carroll and Milton Professor Emeritus in the Department of Politics of New York University. He is a scholar of democratic societies,theory of democracy,social democracy and political economy,as well as an early proponent of rational choice theory in political science.
Guillermo Alberto O'Donnell Ure was a prominent Argentine political scientist who specialized in comparative politics and Latin American politics. He spent most of his career working in Argentina and the United States,and who made lasting contributions to theorizing on authoritarianism and democratization,democracy and the state,and the politics of Latin America. His brother is Pacho O'Donnell.
Dankwart Alexander Rustow was a professor of political science and sociology specializing in comparative politics. He is prominent for his research on democratization. In his seminal 1970 article 'Transitions to Democracy:Toward a Dynamic Model,' Rustow broke from the prevailing schools of thought on how countries became democratic. Disagreeing with the heavy focus on necessary social and economic pre-conditions for democracy,he argued that national unity was the necessary precondition for democracy.
Gerardo L. Munck is a political scientist specializing in comparative politics. He is professor of political science and international relations at the University of Southern California.
Alfred C. Stepan was an American political scientist specializing in comparative politics and Latin American politics. He was the Wallace S. Sayre Professor of Government at Columbia University,where he was also director of the Center for the Study of Democracy,Toleration and Religion. He is known for his comparative politics research on the military,state institutions,democratization,and democracy.
David Collier is an American political scientist specializing in comparative politics. He is Chancellor's Professor Emeritus at the University of California,Berkeley. He works in the fields of comparative politics,Latin American politics,and methodology. His father was the anthropologist Donald Collier.
Gerhard Lehmbruch was a member of the University of Konstanz. Lehmbruch received a doctorate and a Habilitation in Political Science from the University of Tübingen. Thereafter,he was professor at the universities of Heidelberg,Tübingen and Konstanz,from 1969 to 1996.
A hybrid regime is a type of political system often created as a result of an incomplete democratic transition from an authoritarian regime to a democratic one. Hybrid regimes are categorized as having a combination of autocratic features with democratic ones and can simultaneously hold political repressions and regular elections. Hybrid regimes are commonly found in developing countries with abundant natural resources such as petro-states. Although these regimes experience civil unrest,they may be relatively stable and tenacious for decades at a time. There has been a rise in hybrid regimes since the end of the Cold War.
Embedded democracy is a form of government in which democratic governance is secured by democratic partial regimes. The term "embedded democracy" was coined by political scientists Wolfgang Merkel,Hans-Jürgen Puhle,and Aurel Croissant,who identified "five interdependent partial regimes" necessary for an embedded democracy:electoral regime,political participation,civil rights,horizontal accountability,and the power of the elected representatives to govern. The five internal regimes work together to check the power of the government,while external regimes also help to secure and stabilize embedded democracies. Together,all the regimes ensure that an embedded democracy is guided by the three fundamental principles of freedom,equality,and control.
Josep Maria Colomer Calsina is a political scientist and economist. His research focuses on the strategies for the design,establishment,and change of political institutions. Topics include the processes of democratization,the origins of parliamentary and separation of powers regimes,the invention of electoral systems and voting rules,the development of nations and empires such as the United States and the European Union,and the increasing role of global institutions.
Critical juncture theory focuses on critical junctures,i.e.,large,rapid,discontinuous changes,and the long-term causal effect or historical legacy of these changes. Critical junctures are turning points that alter the course of evolution of some entity. Critical juncture theory seeks to explain both (1) the historical origin and maintenance of social order,and (2) the occurrence of social change through sudden,big leaps.
Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy:Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (1966) is a book by Barrington Moore Jr.
