Let's start with a really hard case: India. Since independence in 1947, India has occupied a position somewhere within the high-capacity, high-democracy quadrant of our capacity-democracy space. Both capacity and democracy have fluctuated somewhat over the sixty years, but in general India's national regime has resembled that of Canada, say, more than that of Jamaica or Kazakhstan. This country of 1.1 billion inhabitants nevertheless poses problems for any analysis of democratization and de-democratization. Those problems arise in a number of different ways:

• Despite extensive poverty and inequality among its people, the Indian economy is becoming one of the world's great makeweights.

• Its 25 states – many of them larger and more populous than most European states – vary enormously in wealth, social composition, and political character.

• Its public politics regularly features vivid displays of religiously tinged ritual.

• Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, and other religious militants all intermittently massacre one another and attack one another's sacred symbols.

• Around the country's edges (for example, in Kashmir and in the ethnically fragmented northeast) separatist groups regularly use armed force to attack government personnel and state security personnel regularly employ brutal repression.

• In the country's central regions Maoist guerrillas (commonly called Naxalites), who have some political presence in about a quarter of all Indian political districts, likewise use lethal means to massacre government forces and uncooperative villagers.

• Since independence in 1947 the regime has careened between emergencies and moments of accommodation.

• Finally, India remains by far the world's most populous democratic regime.