Globalization and the Horizontal Promotion of Democracy

Abstract

Globalization is not only a challenge to established democracy, it is also driver of democratization beyond the confines of Western liberal democracy. Following the adoption of the first democratic constitutions in the late 18th and 19th century, the spread of democracy came in three waves (Huntington 1991). The first began in the early 19th century with the extension of the right to vote to a large proportion of the male population in the US, and continued until the 1920s. A second wave began after World War II and covered Western Europe as well as Japan. In the 1970s the third wave started with the end of the dictatorships in Portugal and Spain, and spread to Latin America in the 1980s, Eastern Europe in the 1990s, and some African and Asian nations including South Africa and Indonesia — and, most recently, the revolutionary movements in Northern Africa.