THE SOCIAL REQUISITES OF DEMOCRACY REVISITED - 1993 PRESIDENTIAL-ADDRESS

In this paper I discuss the factors and processes affecting the prospe cts for the institutionalization of democracy throughout the world. I survey cultural and economic variables, religious traditions, various electoral systems, the importance of a participatory civil society, an d the methods through which political parties should be structured to maintain stability. I conclude that, because new democracies have low levels of legitimacy, there is a need for considerable caution about t he long-term prospects for their stability. In many countries during t he 1980s and early 1990s, political democratization occurred at the sa me time as a profound economic crises. Such conditions have already ca used the breakdown of democratization in a number of countries. To att ain legitimacy, what new democracies need above all is efficacy, parti cularly in the economic arena, but also in the polity. If they can tak e the high road to economic development, they can keep their political houses in order The opposite is true as well: Governments that defy t he elementary laws of supply and demand will fail to develop and will not institutionalize genuinely democratic systems.