Democracy in hard places

In Democracy in Hard Places, Scott Mainwaring and Tarek Masoud bring together a distinguished group of social scientists to explore how democracies around the world continue to survive even in an age of democratic decline. Adopting a comparative, cross-regional perspective, the authors present nine case studies in which democracy emerged and survived despite tumult and crisis, economic underdevelopment, ethnolinguistic fragmentation, and chronic institutional weakness. By bringing these cases into dialogue with each other, this volume begins to develop a theory of how democracy can be built and maintained in places that dominant social science theories would lead us to least expect it.

How does democracy persist for long periods of time in countries that are poor, ethnically heterogenous, wracked by economic crisis, and plagued by state weakness? In Democracy in Hard Places, leading scholars of comparative political regimes attempt to answer this question by examining cases of unlikely democratic survival in "hard places": countries that lack the structural factors and exist outside of the contexts that scholars have long associated with democracy's emergence and endurance. Democracies in hard places overcome underdevelopment, ethnolinguistic diversity, state weakness, and patriarchal cultural norms. The book offers rich, empirically grounded theoretical debates about whether democracy survives only because a balance of power and formal institutions constrain actors from overthrowing it, or if it also survives in part because some critical actors are normatively committed to it. The book presents nine case studies-written by leading experts in the discipline-of episodes in which democracy has emerged and survived against long odds. The cases are drawn from almost every region of the world that formed part of the "third wave" of democracy. In each case, many of the conditions conventionally associated with durable democracy were either attenuated or absent. Each case study details the constellation of obstacles to democracy faced by a given country, describes the major political actors with the potential to impact regime trajectories, and explains how the threat of democratic breakdown was staved off or averted.

How does democracy persist for long periods of time in countries that are poor, ethnically heterogenous, wracked by economic crisis, and plagued by state weakness? In Democracy in Hard Places, leading scholars of comparative political regimes attempt to answer this question by examining cases of unlikely democratic survival in "hard places": countries that lack the structural factors and exist outside of the contexts that scholars have long associated with democracy's emergence and endurance. Democracies in hard places overcome underdevelopment, ethnolinguistic diversity, state weakness, and patriarchal cultural norms. The book offers rich, empirically grounded theoretical debates about whether democracy survives only because a balance of power and formal institutions constrain actors from overthrowing it, or if it also survives in part because some critical actors are normatively committed to it. The book presents nine case studies-written by leading experts in the discipline-of episodes in which democracy has emerged and survived against long odds. The cases are drawn from almost every region of the world that formed part of the "third wave" of democracy. In each case, many of the conditions conventionally associated with durable democracy were either attenuated or absent. Each case study details the constellation of obstacles to democracy faced by a given country, describes the major political actors with the potential to impact regime trajectories, and explains how the threat of democratic breakdown was staved off or averted.

"How does democracy persist for long periods of time in countries that are poor, ethnically heterogenous, wracked by economic crisis, and plagued by state weakness? In this volume, leading scholars of comparative political regimes attempt to answer this question by examining cases of unlikely democratic survival in "hard places": countries that lack the structural factors and exist outside of the contexts that scholars have long associated with democracy's emergence and endurance. Democracies in hard places overcome underdevelopment, ethnolinguistic diversity, state weakness, and patriarchal cultural norms. The book offers rich, empirically ground theoretical debates about whether democracy survives only because a balance of power and formal institutions constrain actors from overthrowing it, or if it also survives in part because some critical actors are normatively committed to it. The book presents nine case studies-written by leading experts in the discipline-of episodes in which democracy emerged and survived against long odds. The cases are drawn from almost every region of the world that formed part of the "third wave" of democracy. In each case, many of the conditions conventionally associated with durable democracy were either attenuated or absent. Each case study details the constellation of obstacles to democracy faced by a given country, describes the major political actors with the potential to impact regime trajectories, and explains how the threat of democratic breakdown was staved off or averted"--