Democracy is the legitimating myth of the 20th century. It does not take long for a beginning student in Political Science to learn there is a bewildering list of democratic claims. There is “constitutional democracy”, “liberal democracy”, “populist democracy”, “democratic centralism”, “people's democracy”, “guided democracy” among many. Once it has been declared that all men are created equal, it is impossible to roll back the belief, Pareto and Hayek notwithstanding. And it develops into “the sovereignty of the people” and “the will of the people”. Performance legitimacy is an alternative but, by itself, is neither sufficient nor enduring. Even totalitarian or authoritarian regimes do not rely on performance alone for their legitimacy. For that matter, neither is democracy by itself enough. The de-legitimizing of a non-performing democratic regime has led to its replacement by other forms of government. This has happened not only in developing states, but in established industrialized democracies as well.

This paper takes off where Professor Huntington's The Third Wave left off. Professor Huntington made a valuable and significant contribution by tracking the patterns of democratization and their reversals, and explaining the hows and whys of democratization of the most recent wave. For the many now engaged in the democracy debate, it was useful to be reminded by Professor Huntington that the Schumpeterian formulation of democracy as a procedural arrangement, an “institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people's vote”, is the definition of democracy that has gained the widest consensus today. Democracy is the selection of leaders through competitive elections, or put another way, a democratic system is that which practices free and fair elections.

Although Schumpeter meant his definition to be a “value free” functional specification, even this definition contains a margin of ambiguity and requires value judgement. The ambiguity lies in the degree of freedom and degree of fairness considered essential, for not only is the electoral process itself scrutinized, evaluating accompanying political rights is a source of debate and differences as well.