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| >> Foreign Aid in the National Interest >> Chapter 1 |
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Jump to Chapter 1 Sections: 
The last quarter of the 20th century witnessed the greatest expansion of democracy in history. If
democracy is defined in the minimal sense as a system of government in which the principal positions of political power are filled through free, fair, and regular elections about three of every five independent states are democracies today. In the judgment of Freedom House, the world had 121 democracies at the end of 2001 the highest number in history. Some of these regimes, possibly as many as 17, may be better classified as competitive authoritarian, since elections, while competitive, either are not free and fair or do not confer full power to rule on those elected. But even by this conservative count, electoral democracy is now the predominant form of government. When the most recent, third wave of democratization began in 1974, only about 39 states (28 percent) were democracies. Today there are about three times as many (figure 1.1).
With the growth in the number of democracies has come a parallel, though more gradual, expansion of freedom. The share of states rated free by Freedom House increased from 34 percent in 1985 to more than 40 percent in 1991, and today it stands at about 45 percent, nearly the highest ever (figure 1.2). The average freedom score (on the Freedom House scale from 7 as least free to 1 as most free) improved from 4.29 in 1985 to 3.61 in 1992. After deteriorating slightly, the score has continued to improve at a modest pace. The current average of 3.47 is a full point lower than in 1974, when the third wave of democratization began. In most years since 1990 the countries showing discernible improvement in political and civil liberty have outnumbered the countries showing a decline. 
Democracy expanded particularly rapidly in the years immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Within just a few years of the implosion of the Soviet communist empire, democracies increased from about 40 percent of all states to 60 percent. But since 1995 the number of democracies has remained fairly constant (particularly if marginal and dubious cases of democratization are excluded). Transitions to democracy have been largely offset by reversions from democratic to authoritarian rule. Still, democracy has scored strategically and symbolically important advances in the past few years. In 1999 democracy was introduced in Indonesia and Nigeria, two of the largest and most influential developing countries (and among those with the largest Muslim populations), even as it was breaking down in Pakistan. In 2000 Mexico completed a transition to democracy with the peaceful electoral overthrow of the seven-decade-long hegemony by a single party. In that same year one-party hegemonic regimes were also brought down at the ballot box in Ghana, Senegal, and Serbia, while Taiwan (already a democracy) moved to a more competitive system with the defeat of the longruling KMT. In each of these cases the victory of the opposition party signaled the arrival or deepening of democracy, with promising long-term implications for the regional status of democracy. page 2 |
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