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Marcus gustafsson
pares the current democratic transition in Mexico to the democratisation
process in West Germany after the Second World War. While there are
great spatial and temporal differences between the two cases, these differences and the relative uniqueness of each country’s situation highlight
the essential characte ristics of the consolidation process. Looking at two
dissimilar case studies also provides an opportunity to examine the general theories in this area to attempt to reconcile them within an overall
comparative framework.
This article begins with a brief overview of the theories and the main
causes of democratic consolidation, and then proposes two lines of inquiry as a framework of comparison: political commitment and public
commitment. Apart from the approaches outlined within the existing
literature outlined below, this article proposes ‘public homogeneity’ as
an important component of the latter, which becomes apparent when
comparing the Mexican and German examples. The article concludes by
making some general observations on the implications of the comparative approach within the field of democratic consolidation and transition
theories. In relation to the two case studies, it concludes that political
commitment has been the instrumental factor in both cases, and that
West Germany’s stronger political commitment was key to ensuring a
smoother democratic consolidation than that which has taken place in
Mexico so far.
Democratic Consolidation
The necessary features of a consolidated democracy have been extensively discussed. In a quantitative study, Collier and Levitsky found that
the political literature provides hundreds of examples of how to measure and label democracies (1997). One of the most prominent and commonly used definitions is the eight criteria set out by Robert Dahl in his
seminal book Polyarchy: (1) the right to vote, (2) the right to be elected,
(3) right of political leaders to compete for support, (4) free and fair elec-