GLOBALIZATION AND DEMOCRACY

By 1996, 66% of the countries of the world were using elections to cho ose their top leaders. This wave of democratization was accompanied by a paradigm shift that took the large number of historically clustered democratizations and called it a ''wave.'' The scholarship has moved beyond overly episodic, event-oriented accounts of democratization to comparative work that investigates the impact of global processes on t he political regimes of nations. This review examines numerous renderi ngs of the linkage between globalization and democratization, includin g: favorable climate for democracy, global economic growth, global cri ses, foreign intervention, hegemonic shifts, and world-system contract ion. Those authors who have advanced a stronger theoretical integratio n of the global and domestic processes offer exceptional insight into the momentous shifts that recently have occurred.