Introduction

Abstract

No global political trend in the last quarter of the 20th century has been more far-reaching and profound than the growth of democracy. During what Samuel P. Huntington has called the “third wave” of democratization, the percentage of states in the world that are democratic has grown from 27 (when the third wave began in 1974) to 61 percent. The trend was particularly powerful during the first half of the 1990s, when the number of democracies increased from 76 to 117, where it has essentially remained during the subsequent four years.