Democracy Promotion and Civil Society: Regime Types, Transitions Modes and Effects

Abstract

The literature on external democratization or democracy promotion1 has gone through different phases. During the heyday of Huntington’s famous ‘third wave of democratization’ (Huntington, 1991), external influence on regime transformation was not dealt with as a major factor. There were a few exceptions (see, for example, Whitehead, 1986), but in general regime transition was conceptualized predominantly as a domestic affair. By the mid 1990s, when the European Union (EU) and other international organizations made it clear that they would link the membership ambitions of new democracies to the real existence of certain democratic institutions, the perspective changed. The external dimension of democratization and democratic consolidation, and in particular the influence by Western dominated organizations, attracted more attention from political actors and scholars. Governments and, for example, the European Commission started to design programs to enhance the capacity of transition regimes for democratic governance and implemented tools to export institutions and values thought compatible with sustainable democratization (Carothers, 1999; Burnell, 2000).KeywordsEuropean UnionSocial CapitalCivil SocietyDemocratic ConsolidationAutocratic RegimeThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.