Democratization

by Ronald Inglehart (Editor), Christian Welzel (Editor)

Especially when the visceral cry of ‘power to the people!’ has never been louder, the need to explore and understand democratization is of the first importance. It is a fundamental concept for political scientists (and many sociologists). And as research in and around the process whereby states and peoples seek to develop, establish, and entrench democratic polities burgeons as never before, this new four-volume collection from Routledge’s acclaimed Critical Concepts in Political Science series meets the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of a rapidly growing and ever more complex corpus of literature. Edited by two of the field’s leading scholars, the collection gathers a wide range of theoretical and empirical materials, bringing together both foundational and canonical work, along with innovative and cutting-edge applications and interventions. With a full index, together with a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editors, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context, Democratization is an essential work of reference. The collection will be particularly useful as a database allowing scattered and often fugitive material to be easily located. It will also be welcomed as a crucial tool permitting rapid access to less familiar―and sometimes overlooked―texts. For researchers, students, and instructors, it is a vital one-stop research and pedagogic resource.

Genres: Politics, Political Science, Social Science, History, Nonfiction

1736 pages, Hardcover

First published September 30, 2008

About the author

Ronald F. Inglehart (born September 5, 1934) was a political scientist at the University of Michigan. He was director of the World Values Survey, a global network of social scientists who have carried out representative national surveys of the publics of over 80 societies on all six inhabited continents, containing 90 percent of the world's population. The first wave of surveys for this project was carried out in 1981 and the latest wave was completed in 2014. Since 2010 Inglehart was co-director of the Laboratory for Comparative Social Research at the National Research University - Higher School of Economics in Moscow and St Petersburg. This laboratory has carried out surveys in Russia and eight ex-Soviet countries and is training Phd.-level students in quantitative cross-national research methods.

In the seventies Inglehart began developing an influential theory of Generational Replacement causing intergenerational value change from materialist to postmaterialist values that helped shape the Eurobarometer Surveys, the World Values Surveys and other cross-national survey projects. Building on this work, he subsequently developed a revised version of Modernization theory, Evolutionary Modernization Theory, which argues that economic development, welfare state institutions and the long peace between major powers since 1945, are reshaping human motivations in ways that have important implications concerning gender roles, sexual norms, the role of religion, economic behavior and the spread of democracy.

Reviews

[Monica · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've read this book from cover to cover, and although interesting and densely informative, as in all anthologies there is a certain amount of repetition. For me, being fairly new in the field of political science, reading variations on a number of themes does have a point! Even academic writing is under the influence of personal style and language and naturally, some contributors appealed more to me than others.

[Read a Book · Rating 2 out of 5]

The authors present an exhaustive work on the process of democratization. Rich in history, context, and frequent admission of the complexity of the field.

[Felix Borchgrevink Haave · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very important book about democratization, why it works in Western Europe and not in, say the Middle East (with the exception of Israel).