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Studies on trajectory and trends of democratic growth frequently dominate scholarly debates. These studies are led by two distinct points of view. On the one hand, scholars believe that the prevalence of democracy is inevitable and thus marks an era of prosperity and of human rights. Such an era is dominated by the cultural values of independence, individuality, and freedom (Inglehart & Welzel, 2005) and leads to the end of the world's history and the end of the last man (Fukuyama, 1992; Mandelbaum, 2008). A contrasting point of view, on the other hand, is expressed by scholars who studied the crises of modern liberal democracies believing that democracies are failing and hence, the time of worldwide democratization is coming to an end (Mouffle, d’Angerville, 1994, The private life of Louise XIV. Cited in Thomas, Vagueness in law and language the concept of despotism. Oxford: Oxford University Press). This study adds to the ongoing debate by determining which of the trends prevails worldwide across the past two centuries and especially in the beginning of the 21st century. Moreover, it sheds light on existing knowledge about democratic paths and trends by suggesting that a comprehensive investigation of democratization processes requires both regional and worldwide analyses, and investigations of historical events and regional characteristic effects are more beneficial for long-term longitudinal studies.

While many studies have focused on the link between economics and democracy in exploring the strategies adopted by developing countries, they have tended to overlook the role of bureaucracy in democratization. This study seeks the missing link between bureaucracy and democratization. What are the conditions necessary for bureaucracy to facilitate the democratization process of a country? This chapter begins by briefly reviewing the bureaucracy literature from Max Weber and Karl Marx and then argues that despite its shortcomings, bureaucracy in its Weberian form can facilitate the political democratization of a developmental state. This study concludes that although bureaucracy is often regarded as dysfunctional, it can be instrumental in the democratization process in the context of the developmental state. This article concludes that there are six conditions for the function for democratization: big enough to protect themselves from the arbitrary use of political authority, qualification and competency, take administration out of politics and political neutrality, red tape, consensus about the good government, and having an eye on the long-term, broader interests of the country and the government.

An important issue in the study of economic development is that it examines how participatory democracy influences the efficiency and the equity associated with the utilisation of economic resources. The main research agenda in this context pivots on the question of whether and to what extent democratisation helps to allocate economic resources by serving the interests of the majority of voters. It is widely recognised that democratisation can promote the welfare of the majority by enhancing flows of information between citizens and policy makers and by increasing the accountability of policy makers to citizen voters. On the other hand, it has been widely held that democratisation can adversely affect the welfare of the majority by triggering and increasing unproductive rent-seeking activities in a democracy. Early empirical evidence on the welfare effects of democracy and democratisation have been primarily at the cross-national level and have focused on GNP growth as the outcome of interest (Barro, 1996; Minier, 1998). The results have been ambiguous, and riddled with a myriad of problems with regard to interpretation of national-level data. It also offered little explanation of the mechanisms by which democratisation affects the policy choices that, in turn, impinge on economic performance. It is also widely believed that the capture of public policies by interest groups can thwart the efficacy and the equity of the allocation of resources.

Democracy requires free speech, but the channels for free speech and communication vary across time and place. With reference to ongoing democratization processes, or to potential ruptures inside of authoritarian regimes, the role of mass communication, both by means of the conventional press and the internet, is an unavoidable topic of study.

The chapter examines the specificities of the internet as a “public sphere” for processes of regime transition, notably its transnational character, its potential for informal communication, its interactive character, the networking capacity it creates, and its medium-term political socialization potential. It also covers new censorship strategies designed by states to limit the freedom of the internet.

The role of the internet in fostering democratization in four African cases (Tunisia, Egypt, Angola, and Zimbabwe) is then studied, namely by considering material infrastructures, underlying socio-cultural conditions, and the efforts made by governments to curb its political effects.

The conclusion discusses the potential of the internet for fostering the breakup of authoritarian regimes and subsequent democratization processes, with reference to the African cases studied.

This chapter explores the impact of the seemingly new recognition of non-Muslims in Turkey, a historically marginalized minority. In the 2000s, the ruling AKP party, a religiously and socially conservative party, made a number of symbolic gestures toward the increasing recognition of these communities. This chapter explores this ethnographically and historically by looking at the political effects of AKP’s democratization attempts on the Rum Orthodox (“Greek”) community in Istanbul. It argues that these attempts paralleled a similar language of democracy within the community particularly in the aftermath of the government’s permission to run elections in the non-Muslim community institutions (vakıfs), following a period of time during which no elections had been held in these institutions. At the same time, these attempts occasioned old and new forms of hierarchies within the community, which emerged as a result of the competing claims within it to its representation. These seemingly ambiguous effects of democratization within the Rum community emerged in the gap between the AKP’s democracy discourse that claims universal inclusion and its highly selective practice of democracy. This was so because the AKP preserved the ethnoreligious definition of national identity even while it readopted the historical legacies of the Ottoman millet system that managed society along religious confessional lines. These findings contribute to the existing theories on democratization by highlighting the inextricable link between inclusion and exclusion that emerges in the gap between the discursive claims of democracy toward universal inclusion and the selective actualization of these claims in practice. Such selective inclusion that is inherent to the politics of democracy is managed differently in different contexts due to the hybrid forms of state recognition of the population.

It is well established in political theory that democracy promotes inclusive citizenship most especially politically – the right to vote and be voted for. This thesis is predicated upon the assumption that democracy is basically a representative government where all identities and interests are accommodated and/or tolerated in the politics and policy processes of their society. This chapter challenges the foundation of this assumption, using the Nigerian legislature's experience under the Fourth Republic (1999–2007), where the democratization process has failed to bring about substantial increase not only in women's numerical representation in parliament, but also in their ability to improve their participation in the politics and policy processes particularly those that advance women's cause. The central argument of the chapter is that for democracy to engender active representation of women in the politics and policy process of their environment will be largely dependent on women's numerical strength and their mode of ascension to power – their politics or affirmative action. Wherever the latter prevails, only passive, not active representation, will be prompted, as has so far been the case in Nigeria and most other African countries. This equates democratization of disempowerment for women.

The structural perspective on China's prospect of democratization has three variants. The first emphasizes the structural requisites for the survival of the authoritarian state. It argues that the conditions, such as the governing capacity of the state and support from the Chinese people that used to sustain the authoritarian state, have deteriorated significantly and the authoritarian state cannot escape a collapse in the near future (Chang, 2001). The second focuses on the structural requisites for democratization. It holds that the rise of the middle class and the emerging spread of education in China will create favorable conditions for the country to head toward democratization (Gilley, 2004). The third stresses the resilience of China's authoritarian regime. It argues that the rise of democratic polity in Europe resulted from the special social structures of the continent in the feudal period. Since China's social structure in its premodern period was quite different, democracy did not become a solution even after the middle class emerged in China. For the same reason, China's political change will be most likely to move toward rule by law rather than democratization in the future (Pan, 2006).

Here, we examine the challenges to democratization in Bahrain, with a particular focus on how the recent 2011 Uprising has resulted in a deepening of authoritarianism. It is argued that the recent unrest has brought into sharp relief the absence of “quality” democracy in Bahrain, and that any form of democratic transition is dependent on the will of a conservative Al Khalifa-Saudi nexus. While the pro-democracy movement may have prompted minor concessions on the part of the government, the extent of the popular mobilization triggered the Al Khalifa regime’s authoritarian reflex, and they have reacted to throttle the Uprising by putting in place legislative, ideological, and political barriers to reform, which points not only to a current de-democratization, but also a lack of future democratization. In addition to arguing for the post-2011 undoing of democracy in Bahrain, this paper also points to two major barriers to future democratization; (1) a conservative, post-Independence Al Khalifa-Saudi coalition assisted by large military resources (2) protracted communal tension brought about by the government’s instrumentalization of sectarianism.

This chapter explores the relationship between bureaucracy and the ­democratization of the Republic of Korea by analyzing the roles and responsibilities of the Board of Audit and Inspection of Korea (BAI) and how Korea’s unique type of supreme audit institution (SAI) have been involved throughout the democratization process of Korea over the last two decades. Unlike western supreme audit institutions which mainly functioned for financial and performance auditing, Korea’s SAI, BAI bureaucracy, has functioned to reduce corruption, in cooperation with citizen’s participation which gives unique cases for the context of developing countries. The most important finding of this study is that bureaucracy can be an effective vehicle in a country’s political trajectory towards democratization given that the public institutions and agencies have specific traits such as having clear and comprehensive mandates, retaining high ­sensitivity to external needs, and maintaining well-qualified staff with active utilization of Information Technology. The main targets of the analysis are the conditions under which BAI bureaucracy could effectively exert its mandates and successfully fulfill its duties; also the question of how the BAI bureaucracy has facilitated democratization as being the locus of participatory democracy will be addressed.