Conditions for democratic consolidation

This survey of the literature on conditions for democratic consolidation suggests the necessity of going beyond procedural definitions of democracy (based on fair, honest and periodic elections) to more normative ideas about decision‐making being controlled by all members of the group as equals. In this view, democracy is a matter of the degreeto which basic principles are realised and democratisation is always and everywhere an unfinished process. Four factors which facilitate democratic consolidation — the experience of transition itself, a country's economic system, its political culture and its constitutional arrangements — are analysed through an assessment of ten key hypotheses implicit in the literature.