Democracy in the Developing World: Challenges of Survival and Significance

Abstract

The study of political development over the past half century has been heavily influenced by the ebb and flow of democracy in the global South. The global experience has demonstrated that the geographic, economic, and cultural range of democratic regimes is far more expansive than often assumed half a century ago, forcing major theoretical reassessments of democracy’s political origins and social correlates. At the same time, the challenges of constructing effective representative and participatory institutions to stabilize democracy and make it more “consequential” have become increasingly apparent. The tensions between democracy’s rapid spread and its oftentimes shallow reach have fostered a wide range of experiments with new representative and participatory channels, creating a fluid democratic landscape in much of the developing world.