Democratic Transitions

Democratic Transitions – Structural explanations

In Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Development and Political Legitimacy, Seymour Lipset focuses on the conditions associated with the existence and stability of democratic society, which he defines as a leading concern of political philosophy. In this article Lipset established the theoretical link between the level of economic development of a given country and its probability of being democratic. According to him, factors such as industrialisation, wealth, education, and urbanisation—which lead to the development of an open class system and a large middle class in a given society—are the conditions to democratic transition or democratic stability. His work and argument serve as the base of the following studies.

Barrington Moore, on the other hand, compares revolutions and modernisation processes in China, Russia, England, France, the United States, Japan, and Germany in Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy : Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World, and develops a theory about how and why these processes result in different kinds of political systems in the given countries. By focusing on the lord-peasant relationship in these countries, he comes up with three different routes to modern nations. In the case of England, France and the US, we observe a transition triggered by bourgeois revolution, which results in a capitalist democracy, whereas in Germany and Japan, we see exemplary cases of revolution from above which eventually turn into fascism, where industry managed to grow and flourish. On the other hand, with the transition from peasant revolution, Moore draws the way to communism with the examples of Russia and China.

In contrast to Lipset and Moore, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens and John Stephens conduct a historical and comparative study examining the link between capitalism and democracy in Capitalist Development and Democracy. Rueschemeyer, Stephens and...