Govt 657: COMPARATIVE Democratization

Tuesdays 2:30-4:25 p.m.

Goldwin Smith Hall 162

Syllabus (HTML)

Syllabus (PDF)

Course Description

The study of democracy and democratization has a long history in the discipline of political science. Interest in this topic has expanded dramatically over the past decade and one-half, because of what seems to have become since the mid-1970s a global wave of democratization—extending from southern Europe and Latin America to eastern Europe, Africa and east and southeast Asia. Thus, to the considerable literature on democratization as a long-term process of historical development has been added a huge number of new studies of what could be termed “quick democratization.” It is primarily this literature that we will be addressing in this course—though we are happy to recommend comparative work on “slow democratization” as well.

The course is guided by two goals. The first is to introduce you to the major issues, theories, concepts, and arguments in the literature on recent democratization. This will not be easy, because there is so much work in this area. In this syllabus, we have tried to provide you with a representative sample of two types of work, which sometimes (and only sometimes) overlap—the best research and the research that grapples with the most important and interesting puzzles. The second goal of the course is to give you a comparative perspective on some of the major cases of transitions from dictatorship to democracy. In practice, this will mean focusing primarily—but far from entirely—on the postcommunist Eurasian states and Sub-Saharan Africa. This focus is not just self-serving on our part, given our areas of expertise. It is also easily defensible in methodological terms. These two regions feature a very large number of cases; each region exhibits unusual diversity in both causes and effects, thereby making for instructive comparisons (in direct contrast to Latin America, for example, where variations in regime outcomes are limited); and these two areas share, nonetheless, some important characteristics, such as weak states, long experiences with colonial rule, and far from ideal correlations between national and state boundaries.

What we are trying to do in this course, therefore, is to balance theory with empirics. This is difficult business. No doubt, this will leave us at times feeling that we should do more of one or the other. However, please keep in mind that: 1) you have the option of writing a research paper (or taking an examination at the end of the course); 2) this is a survey course which will, we hope, help identify the kinds of questions you may want to pursue in greater detail in the future.