Beyond Transitions: The Politics of Democratic Consolidation

Scholarly interest in democratic transitions has gradually given way to research into the politics of democratic consolidation, broadly understood as social acceptance of the democratic rules of the game. Studies of democratic consolidation are bifurcated into aggregate and disaggregate conceptualizations of democratic consolidation. The disaggregate approach provides better analytical tools for comparative analysis across cases and a more accurate depiction of the rooting of democratic institutions and of the kind and quality of the emergent democracy.