**2. Trends of democracy building**

In the early 1990s, studies on democracy building mushroomed, identifying how the number of democracies worldwide had become greater than ever before in modern history. About 25 years ago, Huntington [8] identified major democratic waves in political changes, going from dictatorships to electoral and liberal democracies. The transition processes to electoral democracies centered on the establishment of popular votes and an election as the main competition for office. The numerous transitions into electoral democracies around the world embedded the right to vote for competitive parties in free and fair elections where the electoral outcome was respected and assured based on checks and balances between a country's judiciary, executive and legislative powers.

In the early 1990s, Huntington argued that the historical global spread of democratic transitions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries could be described as waves of democracy building. A historical wave constituted numerous states around the world, all going through democratic changes within a specific period of time. In particular, a wave of democratic change included a larger group of transitions from nondemocratic (authoritarian) to democratic (electoral) regimes within a specified period of time, and this change outnumbered the reverse transitions into authoritarianism. The wave metaphor of global democratization had a great impact on the scholarly interests in the patterns of democratic change around the world. However, many scholars in the field of democratization raised concerns about how democratic regimes were defined, focusing only on free and fair elections (electoral fallacy), thereby disregarding other important democratic qualities, and the overlapping time periods of these waves of democratization [9]. Most scholars who focused on democracy building agreed, however, that Huntington shed light on important historical transformations [10] in a suggested "two steps forward and one step back" pattern. Huntington summarized the historical changes until the early 1990s in three waves of democratization and two reverse waves.

despotic leaders in Southern Europe, Latin America, Asia, Africa and Central and Eastern Europe. These political changes made scholars portray the global changes in terms of "the triumph of democracy," [1] "the end of history," [2] "the democratic revolution" [3] and how democracy had become "globalized" [4] as a third "universal language" aside from money

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, authoritarianism has gone global and is challenging democratic regimes and the notions of political rights and civil liberties around the world. Recent studies from the early 2000s and forward have pointed at a potentially worrisome trend in new types of authoritarianism and hybrid regimes [6] comprising both authoritarian and democratic institutions. This trend may have left the world community at a crossroads of democracy and authoritarianism. The global spread of democracies during the late twentieth century and the rise of authoritarianism in the early twenty-first century have raised an interest in understanding and explaining how to build democratic states around the world [7]. This study chapter sets out to understand how to build a democracy by identifying national and international favorable factors for democracy building. Section 2 after this introduction illustrates the global patterns of democracy building over time and is followed by Section 3 on the theoretical foundation of democracy. Sections 4 and 5 explain the favorable national and international factors for building democracy. Section 6 concludes this study.

In the early 1990s, studies on democracy building mushroomed, identifying how the number of democracies worldwide had become greater than ever before in modern history. About 25 years ago, Huntington [8] identified major democratic waves in political changes, going from dictatorships to electoral and liberal democracies. The transition processes to electoral democracies centered on the establishment of popular votes and an election as the main competition for office. The numerous transitions into electoral democracies around the world embedded the right to vote for competitive parties in free and fair elections where the electoral outcome was respected and assured based on checks and balances between a country's

In the early 1990s, Huntington argued that the historical global spread of democratic transitions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries could be described as waves of democracy building. A historical wave constituted numerous states around the world, all going through democratic changes within a specific period of time. In particular, a wave of democratic change included a larger group of transitions from nondemocratic (authoritarian) to democratic (electoral) regimes within a specified period of time, and this change outnumbered the reverse transitions into authoritarianism. The wave metaphor of global democratization had a great impact on the scholarly interests in the patterns of democratic change around the world. However, many scholars in the field of democratization raised concerns about how democratic regimes were defined, focusing only on free and fair elections (electoral fallacy), thereby disregarding other important democratic qualities, and the overlapping time periods

and the Internet [5].

176 Globalization

**2. Trends of democracy building**

judiciary, executive and legislative powers.

The first wave of democratization was the longest in terms of years covered (1828–1926). It was argued that the first wave began with the American and French revolutions and transplanted ideas of what democracy was all about and how democracy could be established. This wave of democratization included the spread of the political right to vote to new previously marginalized groups of society and to newly established states around the world, such as in the West, Australia and South America. The historical record showed how the first wave included democracy building in about 30 states after World War I. The wave of democratization did, however, halt and was reversed with the authoritarian and totalitarian ideologies developed in Germany, Italy and Japan during the 1930s and 1940s, which resulted in reverse democratic setbacks and authoritarian regimes in Eastern and Southern Europe, as well as in South America.

The second wave of democratization (1943–1962) lasted for a far shorter time compared to the first wave and was an outcome of the major international political changes of the balance of power that came with the end of World War II and the defeat and collapse of Nazism and fascism. The collapse of antidemocratic systems resulted in the expansion of new democracies in, for instance, West Germany, Austria, Japan, Turkey, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Costa Rica, Argentina, Colombia, Peru and Venezuela. The aftermath of the war became a window of opportunity for the new spread of democratic regimes, political rights and civil liberties in greater number of states, though primarily with the deviant cases in the communist states in foremost Eastern Europe and East Asia (China). It was the powerful role of the Soviet Union in a post-World War II context that eventually founded the reverse wave of authoritarianism and resulted in the consolidation of communism in the Eastern European states and in limited democracy in Latin American states and some East Asian states.

The third wave of democratization (1974–1991) was argued to have begun with transitions in Southern Europe in the early 1970s and ended with major democratic transformations in Eastern Europe as a result of a weakened and finally collapsed Soviet Union. Democratization began in Spain, Portugal and Greece and peaked with the transitions in communist ruled Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania and the independence of 15 new states. The third wave of democratic transitions was, however, global in a geographical scope, with numerous new democracies established in Latin America and Asia, outnumbering the previous authoritarian traditions of regimes around the world. The third wave had great global impact on the democratic political landscape. As stated, "the birth of more than ninety democracies in this period represents the greatest transformation of the way states are governed in the history of the world" [11], and as a consequence, many scholars perceived the twentieth century as the century of progress [12].

Though the academic community had spent decades of research on how to explain and foresee democratization, the third wave of democratization came as a surprise [13] and sparked greater interest in the geographical scope of transitions, the driving engines behind such democratic change and the possibilities of further democracy building within newly democratized states. Scholars agreed that the third wave was global in scope and how the numerous transitions actually led to the number of democratic regimes now outnumbering authoritarian regimes for the first time in human history. Both scholars and international politicians argued how democracy was a symbol of good governance and how the wave of democratic transitions had shown "the unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism" in the world [14]. The global victory of political liberalism was argued to consist of the democratic transitions that established government by the people based on popular free and fair elections in multi-party systems. For almost half a century, the scholarly world had argued that democracy was based on free and fair elections. In his famous study, Schumpeter [15] presented a minimal definition on democracy and became the founding father of a procedural definition of democracy. Schumpeter's definition of an electoral democracy focused on competing political elites for power. From this perspective, democracy was perceived as a political tool for selecting politicians and how popular elections, as a core political procedure, were essential for the spread and consolidation of other crucial political rights and civil liberties often tied to democratic systems and societies.

most influential antidemocratic regimes are no longer content simply to contain democracy. Instead, they want to roll it back by reversing advances dating from the time of the democratic surge" [17]. The increasing bulk of studies have presented different concepts to describe these

Building Democracy: National and International Factors http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.71984 179

There has been a long and on-going scholarly discussion on how to define and measure democratic and nondemocratic regimes [19]. Democracy is a fuzzy and multifaceted concept. In the literature on building democracy, two conceptions of democracy are relevant; a minimalist and maximalist perspective. First, the minimalist perspective has defined democracy as an electoral democracy, focusing on the procedural system of institutions and the institutional mechanism of free and fair elections. An electoral democracy has embedded the procedure of free and fair elections in which political elites compete for political power and where the population uses the election to check the political power from wrong-doings. The scholarly studies on electoral democracy has stressed the importance of political procedure to ensure political rights and civil liberties, although the main focus from a minimalist perspective has been on the implementation of elections as a guarantee for the idea of government by the people. Such definition of democracy has been argued to provide scholars with the ability to make comparative studies on democracy-building in different states by analyzing if there are

Second, the maximalist perspective has, in comparison to the minimalist perspective on electoral democracy, focused on a more substantive democracy embedding political rights and civil liberties beyond the procedure of free and fair elections. Such conceptualization of a liberal democracy has developed out of the notion of the "fallacy of electoralism" [21], meaning paying too much attention to the election and missing out on other important political rights and civil liberties in a democracy. It has been argued that the fallacy of electoralism may lead to the definition of states as democracies, although such states consist of nondemocratic traits. Although free and fair elections are important in democracies, focus on electoralism only is a too narrow perspective on what democracy is all about. The maximalist perspective has therefore introduced the definition of a liberal democracy, based on the procedural ingredients in an electoral democracy, but also including additional rights and liberties in, for example, minority rights, politically equality, freedom of belief, opinion, discussion, speech, publication and assembly, the rule of law and securing human rights, etc. [22]. It has been argued that three fundamental dimensions exist in a liberal democracy; high level of competition,

*"Meaningful and extensive competition among individuals and organized groups (especially political parties) for all effective positions of government power, at regular intervals and excluding the use of* 

*A highly inclusive level of political participation in the selection of leaders and policies, at least through* 

participation and liberties. As summarized by Georg Sørensen,

*regular and fair elections, such that no major (adult) social group is excluded.*

challenged electoral democracies [18].

**3. The foundation of democracy**

free and fair elections or not [20].

*force.*

In the early 2000s, however, a growing number of individual academic studies, think-tanks and statistical assessments on democratic freedoms identified new challenges to the previous global transitions embedded in the third wave of democratization. Though this has not yet been argued to be the signs of a third reverse wave of global authoritarianism, scholars have pointed out worrying signs of democratic challenges across the world. First, it has been argued that many transitional states have turned up as vague electoral democracies with authoritarian characteristics. They have had free and fair elections, but have continued to face political, economic and social obstacles that have had negative impacts on the democratization process. These obstacles have created political societies of democratic fuzziness where democratic patterns have been mixed with undemocratic ones. Such obstacles may be found in electoral democracies with patterns of restricted participation and liberties, electoral democracies influenced by the existence of personal rule and patron-client relationships, electoral democracies with the existence of human rights abuses, electoral democracies in which there is a massive and perhaps uncontrolled popular mobilization that challenges order and stability and/or electoral democracies where undemocratic actors, such as the military, continue to influence politics. All these democracies may have elections and may tolerate legal alternative parties in opposition to the ruling party, but they are challenged by other major problems that influence the democratization process and democratic stability [16]. Second, it has also been argued that we have seen an authoritarian surge in international affairs with greater activities among major authoritarian powers to contain democracy around the world. Aside from limiting democratic rights and liberties at home, authoritarian states have actively coordinated foreign policy actions to halt the global spread of democracy. Such authoritarian measures have included media initiatives to limit the impact of Western news around the world, political actions against pro-democracy and human rights' organizations, such as in global and regional intergovernmental organizations, and in civil society. Altogether, "The extent of the authoritarian challenges forces us to confront the disconcerting prospect that the most influential antidemocratic regimes are no longer content simply to contain democracy. Instead, they want to roll it back by reversing advances dating from the time of the democratic surge" [17]. The increasing bulk of studies have presented different concepts to describe these challenged electoral democracies [18].
