Will More Countries Become Democratic?

WHAT ARE THE PROSPECTS FOR THE EMERGENCE of more democratic regimes in the world? This question has intellectual and policy relevance for the 1980s. During the 1950s and early 1960s, scholars concerned with this issue were generally optimistic that decolonization and economic development would lead to the multiplication of democratic regimes. The history of the next decade dealt roughly with these expectations, and people became more pessimistically preoc­cupied with the reasons for the breakdown of democratic systems. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, the prospects for democracy seemed to have brightened once again, and social scientists have responded accordingly. “Transi­tions to democracy” became the new focus of attention. The optimists of the 1950s were rather naively optimistic; those of the 1980s have been more cautiously optimistic, but the optimism and the hope are still there. Coincidentally, the Reagan administration moved far beyond the Carter administration’s more limited concern with human rights and first launched “Project Democracy” and “The Democracy Program” to promote democratic institutions in other societies, and then persuaded Congress to create a “National Endowment for Democracy” to pursue this goal on a permanent basis. In the early 1980s, in short, concern with the development of new democratic regimes has been increasing among aca­demics and policymakers. The purpose of this article is to use social science theory and comparative political analysis to see to what extent this new, more cautious optimism may be justified.