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Few serious observers today doubt that democracy is the best form of modern political governance. Solid scholarship has shown that democracies are less likely to abuse their own citizens, rarely if ever wage war upon one another, and do at least as well as other regimes in promoting economic development. Unlike during much of the twentieth century, when radicals on both the right and the left were skeptical of democracy's value, today the most important political discussions concern not whether it is desirable but rather how to promote and nurture it.
In this regard, a long-running debate has pitted what might be called "preconditionists" against "universalists." The former believe that democracy generally emerges from a particular set of conditions and experiences, while the latter claim that it can come about in all sorts of ways and settings. During the 1950s and 1960s, the debate was dominated by the preconditionists, who stressed the importance of various national prerequisites and deep structural factors such as levels of socioeconomic development, degrees of socioeconomic equality and group polarization, patterns of land ownership or agricultural production, or the prevalence of certain beliefs or cultural traits. Where certain configurations of these factors were present, successful democratization was likely; where they were absent, it was unlikely. Policy makers, the preconditionists argued, needed to take this into account, and accept "the disagreeable, perhaps even tragic, fact that in much of the world the conditions most favorable to the development and maintenance of democracy are nonexistent, or at best only weakly present."1
In contrast, universalists contended that democracy could emerge through diverse paths and flourish in diverse circumstances. They believed, as Dankwart Rustow put it in 1970, that scholars should "abandon the quest for 'functional requisites'" and be skeptical of the idea that a "minimal level of economic development" or particular types of societal structure are "necessary prerequisites for democracy."2 The "third wave" of global democratization that began in 1974 gave a strong push to the universalist view, as the shift from authoritarian to democratic rule was made in dozens of countries-including many that preconditionists would not have considered ripe for such a move. As a result, scholarship began to focus less on the structures supposedly associated with successful democracy and more on the...