Globalization and Democracy

Abstract

By 1996, 66% of the countries of the world were using elections to choose their top leaders. This wave of democratization was accompanied by a paradigm shift that took the large number of historically clustered democratizations and called it a “wave.” The scholarship has moved beyond overly episodic, event-oriented accounts of democratization to comparative work that investigates the impact of global processes on the political regimes of nations. This review examines numerous renderings of the linkage between globalization and democratization, including: favorable climate for democracy, global economic growth, global crises, foreign intervention, hegemonic shifts, and world-system contraction. Those authors who have advanced a stronger theoretical integration of the global and domestic processes offer exceptional insight into the momentous shifts that recently have occurred.