Internationell demokratisering. Utvecklingstrender och förklarande faktorer

Abstract

International democratization. Trends and explainingfactors. The aim of this essay is to provide an overview of current research on international democratization. I start by discussing the choice of empirical indicators. Given a set of indicators - Freedom House and Polity, which stand out as the most useful ones - 1 make a graphic representation of democratic tendencies in different regions in the world. In this survey one region, North Africa and the Middle East, comes out as exceptional; here no general improvements have been made since the early 1970s. I then make an account of explanatory conditions which have proved in large-n empirical studies to play a role for democratic progress (such as modernization, access to oil, popular demonstrations and the type of authoritarian regime). I end up in a puzzle, which regards the Muslim countries. We can establish, on the one hand, that these countries clearly under-perform democratically. But on the other hand, comparative research has not managed so far to point out why that is the case. We can se a pattern, but we cannot point out an empirically solid explanatory mechanism.