I dared not call this book by its true name: Democracy, Democratization, De-Democratization, and their Interdependence. That clunky, cranky title would have driven too many readers away from the book's visibly vital topic. But readers who reach the book's end will, I hope, emerge understanding why it makes no sense simply to describe an ideal political system called democracy and then try to specify conditions under which that system could emerge and survive. Democratization is a dynamic process that always remains incomplete and perpetually runs the risk of reversal – of de-democratization. Closely related processes, moving in opposite directions, produce both democratization and de-democratization. Or so, at least, this book argues at length.

Over long years, the study of democracy, democratization, and de-democratization forced itself on me gradually but inexorably. It grew out of a lifelong effort to explain how the means that ordinary people use to make consequential collective claims – their repertoires of contention – vary and change. Anyone who looks closely at this problem in historical perspective eventually recognizes two facts: first, that undemocratic and democratic regimes feature very different repertoires of contention, indeed that prevailing repertoires help identify a given regime as undemocratic or democratic; second, that as democratization or de-democratization occurs, dramatic alterations of repertoires also occur. Civil wars, for example, concentrate in undemocratic regimes, whereas social movements form almost exclusively in democratic regimes.