Samuel Phillips Huntington was an American political scientist, adviser, and academic. He spent more than half a century at Harvard University, where he was director of Harvard's Center for International Affairs and the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor.
Democratization, or democratisation, is the transition to a more democratic political regime, including substantive political changes moving in a democratic direction. It may be the transition from an authoritarian regime to a full democracy, a transition from an authoritarian political system to a semi-democracy or transition from a semi-authoritarian political system to a democratic political system.
An illiberal democracy describes a governing system in which, although elections take place, citizens are cut off from knowledge about the activities of those who exercise real power because of the lack of civil liberties; thus it is not an open society.
Modernization theory is used to explain the process of modernization within societies. Modernization theory originated from the ideas of German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920), which provided the basis for the modernization paradigm developed by Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons (1902–1979). The theory looks at the internal factors of a country while assuming that with assistance, "traditional" countries can be brought to development in the same manner more developed countries have been. Modernization theory was a dominant paradigm in the social sciences in the 1950s and 1960s, then went into a deep eclipse. It made a comeback after 1991 but remains a controversial model.
According to The Economist Group's Democracy Index 2020 study, Israel is the only democratic country in the Middle East, while Tunisia is the only democracy in North Africa. The level of democracy in nations throughout the world published by Freedom House, a U.S.-based, U.S. government-funded advocacy organization, and in various other freedom indices, report the Middle Eastern and North African countries with the highest scores are Israel, Tunisia, Turkey, Lebanon, Morocco, Jordan and Kuwait. Countries that have been consistently labelled as 'not free' by Freedom house (2017-2021) have been Iran, Iraq and Egypt. They have been increasingly becoming more and more adverse to the idea of liberal democracy with their scores steadily decreasing, only Iraq out of these countries have maintained some level of internet freedom with a score of 41/100. The remaining countries of the Middle East are categorised as authoritarian regimes, with the lowest scores held by Saudi Arabia and Yemen.
Adam Przeworski is a Polish-American professor of political science specializing in comparative politics. He is professor at the Wilf Family 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.
The Revolutions of 1989 formed part of a revolutionary wave in the late 1980s and early 1990s that resulted in the end of communist rule in Central and Eastern Europe and beyond. The period is often also called the Fall of Communism, and sometimes the Fall of Nations or the Autumn of Nations, a play on the term Spring of Nations that is sometimes used to describe the Revolutions of 1848. It also led to the eventual breakup of the Soviet Union—the world's largest communist state—and the abandonment of communist regimes in many parts of the world, some of which were violently overthrown. The events drastically altered the world's balance of power, marking the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the Post-Cold War era.
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.
In political science, the waves of democracy are major surges of democracy which have occurred in history. Although the term appears at least as early as 1887, it was popularized by Samuel P. Huntington, a political scientist at Harvard University in his article published in the Journal of Democracy and further expounded in his 1991 book The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century. Democratization waves have been linked to sudden shifts in the distribution of power among the great powers, which creates openings and incentives to introduce sweeping domestic reforms.
Democracy promotion, which can also be referred to as democracy assistance, democracy support, or democracy building, is a strand of foreign policy adopted by governments and international organizations that seek to support the spread of democracy as a political regime around the world. Among the reasons for supporting democracy include the belief that countries with a democratic system of governance are less likely to go to war, are likely to be economically better off and socially more harmonious. In democracy building, the process includes the building and strengthening of democracy, in particular the consolidation of democratic institutions, including courts of law, police forces, and constitutions. Some critics have argued that the United States has used democracy promotion to justify military intervention abroad.
Authoritarianism is a form of government characterized by the rejection of political plurality, the use of strong central power to preserve the political status quo, and reductions in the rule of law, separation of powers, and democratic voting. Political scientists have created many typologies describing variations of authoritarian forms of government. Authoritarian regimes may be either autocratic or oligarchic and may be based upon the rule of a party or the military.
American democracy promotion aims to encourage governmental and non-governmental actors to pursue political reforms that will lead ultimately to democratic governance.
Anocracy or semi-democracy is a form of government that is loosely defined as part democracy and part dictatorship, or as a "regime that mixes democratic with autocratic features." Another definition classifies anocracy as "a regime that permits some means of participation through opposition group behavior but that has incomplete development of mechanisms to redress grievances." The term "semi-democratic" is reserved for stable regimes that combine democratic and authoritarian elements. Scholars have also distinguished anocracies from autocracies and democracies in their capability to maintain authority, political dynamics, and policy agendas. Similarly, the regimes have democratic institutions that allow for nominal amounts of competition.
A hybrid regime, of which the most common type is competitive authoritarianism, is a mixed type of political regime that is often created as a result of an incomplete transition from an authoritarian regime to a democratic one. Hybrid regimes combine autocratic features with democratic ones and can simultaneously hold political repressions and regular elections. The term hybrid regime arises from a polymorphic view of political regimes that opposes the dichotomy of autocracy or democracy. Hybrid regimes are characteristic of resource countries such as petro-states. Those regimes are stable and tenacious.
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.
This article delineates the history of modernisation theory. Modernisation refers to a model of a progressive transition from a 'pre-modern' or 'traditional' to a 'modern' society. The theory particularly focuses on the internal factors of a country while assuming that, with assistance, "traditional" or 'pre-modern' countries can be brought to development in the same manner which more developed countries have. Modernisation theory attempts to identify the social variables that contribute to social progress and development of societies, and seeks to explain the process of social evolution. Modernisation theory is subject to criticism originating among socialists and free-market ideologies, world-systems theorists, globalisation theorists and dependency theorists among others. Modernisation theory not only stresses the process of change, but also the responses to that change. It also looks at internal dynamics while referring to social and cultural structures and the adaptation of new technologies.
Democracy and economic growth and development have had a strong correlative and interactive relationship throughout history. While evidence of this relationship's existence is irrefutable, economists' and historians' opinions of its exact nature have been sharply split, hence the latter has been the subject of many debates and studies.
Democratic backsliding, also called autocratization, is the decline in the democratic characteristics of a political system: the opposite of democratization.
Neoauthoritarianism is a current of political thought within the People's Republic of China, and to some extent the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), that advocates a powerful state to facilitate market reforms. It may be described as classically conservative even if elaborated in self-proclaimed "Marxist" theorization.
Democracy in Africa is measured by a variety of indexes primarily devised by Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs), such as Freedom House's Freedom in the World index, and the Fraser Institute's Economic Freedom of the World index. Both organisations measure a range of factors including human rights, property rights and free elections to determine the status of states as 'free', 'partially free', or 'not free'.
