Comparetive Politics

Research of Democratization in the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s, when it seemed that new democracies were rising equably across Europe, Latin America, Africa, assumed that the meaning of democratization was self- evident: a shift from personal, single party or dynasty rule to responsible and typical government (Haerpfer, 2009: 75). Democratization is the best understood as the process and a concept by which a nation-state, society, community, or institution transform more democratic (ibid). There are many reasons result in the democratization, such as social legitimacy, economic development, culture and historical experience. This paper will only focus on two points, economic development and culture. This essay will argue that economic change is a part of factors to issue in the democratization, beyond that, cultural is also a necessary reason to lead to the democratization, especially religious. This essay will include the theories of Lipset and Huntington of democratization firstly, and give example to explain it. Secondly, comparing the same and differences points of these theories of Lipset and Huntington.

In the 1959, Lipset has been put forward that the social requisite of democracy is economic development (Lipset, 1959: 69). There are two reasons to demonstrate it. Firstly, The view of Lipset is that the rational political personality and tolerant political principle was cultivated under the high level education. In addition, with the increase in social wealth, and the shrink of the gap between the rich and the poor, the number of the middle class can be increased, thus it will contribute to expand and stabilize the foundation of democratic society (ibid).

Secondly, Lipset chooses two basic research areas as the object of study: Europe－ English speaking countries and Latin America country. In addition, these two areas are divided into four categories according to the degree of democracy: 'more democratic' and 'less democratic' European countries and 'more dictatorial' and 'less dictatorial' Latin American countries (Lipset, 1959: 73). Measuring the level of economic development is the four variables: wealth, industrialization, education and urbanization level. He proposed that there was a clear correlation between the degree of democracy and the economic level (Lipset, 1959: 75). By comparing analyzing various index data, he found that for the democratic countries, the degree of social wealth, industrialization, urbanization, and education in democratic countries is much higher (ibid). For improve this hypothesis, he had connected with Europe and Latin America, and the particular data be presented in the table 1. The primary indices of wealth are per capita income, amount of persons per physician and per motor vehicle, and the number of newspapers, radios, and telephones per thousand persons. There are obvious differences for each score. For the Europe, there are 17 persons per automobile in the more democratic countries, buy in the less democratic countries, there are 143 persons per motor vehicle. For the Latin America, there are 99 persons per motor vehicle in the less dictatorial countries, but in the more dictatorial, there are 274 persons per motor vehicle. In addition, the differences of income are also striking. Decreasing from per capita income of $695 for the more democratic countries to $308 for the less democratic ones in Europe. The consistent difference is from $171 to $119 for Latin America (Lipset, 1959: 75-77). In general, Lipset thought that there is a positive correlation between economic development and democracy (ibid).

“A wave of democratization is a group of transitions from nondemocratic to democratic regimes that occur within a specified period of time and that significantly outnumber transitions in the opposite direction during that period of time” (Huntington, 1991: 15). In one sense, the democratization waves and the reverse waves suggest a two-step-forward, one-step-back forward pattern (ibid). The first “long” wave of democratization appeared between 1828-1926, and the main reason is that the industrial revolution has greatly promoted the development of economy. The second wave occurred between 1943 and 1962, and The Second World War is the most important reason for the second wave of the world democracy. Since 1974, approximately 30 countries made transitions to democracy, and this is the latest inflation of democracy. What Huntington (1991) has named “the third wave”, start in the mid-1970s in southern Europe (Lipset, 1994: 1). The factors that lead to the three wave of democratization are various, but economic development is the most important factor to promote democratization (ibid).

According to Huntington, there are three reasons to explain that why economic development promotes democratization. First of all, the economic development has created a new economic class and power center, which is independent of the existing political system, they would like to go into politics, decentralized decision making （Przeworski, 2000: 117）. The second reason is that economic development promotes the change of social structure and contributes to the formation of democratic values. On the one hand, within a society， economic prosperity degree determines the attitudes and values of citizen and cultivate the personality of people, such as mutual trust and competition ability, this kind of political culture has contributed to the establishment of democratic system （ibid）.on the other hand, economic development makes the social groups have more resources to be used for redistribution, reducing the degree of economic inequality and the disparity between the rich and