Conceptual Issues in the Comparative Study of Regime Change and Democratization

Abstract

There is no richer field of enquiry in contemporary comparative politics than the study of regime change and especially democratization. Throughout the last two decades, and especially in the 1980s, many authoritarian regimes around the world, while perhaps not succumbing altogether, have certainly withered. The most extensive changes have come about in eastern Europe. In southern Europe and parts of Latin America, too, democratization has gained in strength, while in Asia the Philippines and South Korea have experienced similar movement. But in Asia the repression of some democratization movements has also been severe, China and Burma providing notable examples. Another exception to the democratization trend was the coup in Fiji, the first in the Pacific. But in some neighboring countries such as Tonga and Western Samoa, resistance to traditional rule (although it is relatively benign) is growing, and more democratic institutions may emerge. South Africa is still undergoing a significant transformation. Elsewhere in Africa authoritarian regimes continue to predominate and are likely to do so for some time. There is, nonetheless, a growing dissatisfaction with single-party rule which has generated a wave of demands for more pluralistic political institutions.'

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 165 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.