Introduction — The New Challenges to Democracy

Abstract

During the last half of the 20th century, democracy became the only legitimate game in town. The world witnessed an extraordinary and unprecedented expansion of the number of democracies, as a result of the third wave of democratization. Of course, not all countries have completed and consolidated their transition to democracy, and there are still a considerable number of countries that have not even begun to make their transition to democracy. Beyond the West, the process of democratization has proven to be more difficult than expected. Moreover, the world is currently changing in ways that, according to many observers, pose new threats to the already established democracies. In contrast to the optimism of the early 1990s, when some observers heralded an ‘end of history’ that would definitively seal the victory of liberal democracy across the world, a realistic assessment of the state of democracy today must admit that democratic regimes are faced with numerous challenges that threaten to undermine their very legitimacy. Contrary to the optimists’ predictions, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the triumph of democracy it symbolized have given way to a severe political malaise almost everywhere in the West. Today, citizens in Western democracies are increasingly disillusioned with their leaders and institutions. This disillusionment is, for example, expressed in declining levels of electoral, or in the increasing populist, mobilization in Western Europe and the US.