Building Democracy: National and International Factors

Based on the promising democratic changes around the world during the late twentieth century, what are the favorable factors for building democracy? In the 1990s, research on democratization mushroomed, exploring how to explain reasons for democracy around the world. The global spread of democracy resulted in numerous conclusions about national and international favorable factors for democracy. More recently, the global democratic upsurge seems to have halted with worrying tendencies toward new forms of authoritarianism, hybrid regimes of both democratic and authoritarian institutions and fragile democracies. Recent studies have argued how authoritarianism has gone global and challenge the previous global spread of democracy. Based on a literature review of the bulk of studies on democracy building, this chapter identifies the main national and international favorable factors for democracy. It is argued that research has had a domestic focus up until the 1990s, but how international factors have come to play an important role in explaining democracy. Today, research must focus on the interplay between national and international factors to democracy building embedding both an actor and a structural dimension.