Introduction

Four decades ago, there were few democratically elected governments outside Western Europe and North America. Non-democracies had various kinds of authoritarian, unelected governments, including, military, one-party, no party and personalist dictatorships. From the mid-1970s, there was an unexpected, not regionally specific, shift from unelected to elected governments – a process of democratization. The US political scientist, Samuel Huntington, was quick to identify the phenomenon and decided to give it a name: the ‘third wave of democracy’. The democratization process continued in the 1980s and, after a brief hiatus, took further energy in the 1990s and early 2000s with the ‘decommunization’ of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) in what some observers call the ‘fourth wave of democracy’ (McFaul 2002). Taken together, the third and fourth waves of democracy highlight that competitive electoral politics are now being conducted in a record number of countries, in most parts of the world. In 2011, Freedom House characterized 147 countries as ‘free’ or ‘partly free’, indicating a significant level of democracy, while 47 other states were identified as ‘not free’, suggesting a palpable lack of democracy. ¹ Overall, then, of the 194 countries identified by Freedom House in 2011, just over three-quarters (75.8 per cent) had extant, recognizably democratic regimes 35 years after the start of the third wave in the mid-1970s.