The previous chapter examined how we might recognise a democracy when we see one, and how we would know whether it was making progress towards fuller democratisation. But this says nothing about the ingredients which make it more likely that a democracy will be born – and, when it is, how it will deepen or broaden. And so it tells new democracies, and those who seek to understand them, nothing about what is required if they are to move closer to the goal of popular sovereignty.

A celebrated article by the American scholar Seymour Martin Lipset suggests that we can identify the elements which democracies require to be born and to survive by distinguishing between the system's maintenance and support. Lipset noted that democracies need internal mechanisms to sustain themselves, such as ‘the specific rules of the political game’, but they are also, he thought, supported by factors which make democracy more likely. Maintenance factors are those internal features which keep it going, while support factors are the elements in the environment it requires to operate at all. This chapter will argue that democracy's key maintenance factor is also its key support factor: the capacity of citizens to act collectively to hold governments to account and ensure that they respond to voters.

Analyses which stress the support factors claim that democracy cannot emerge or grow unless preconditions are met. They are common in the academic literature and can broadly be divided into the material and the historical. The former insists that democracy cannot be sustained in societies which have not reached particular stages of economic development or levels of wealth. The latter points to historical legacies which ensure that societies are more or less likely to become democracies: these may be cultural or the product of past patterns, such as how contending interests resolved their conflicts. Neither set is comforting to new democracies, particularly those in Africa, since both suggest that democracies can survive and deepen only if conditions exist which were produced by processes that developed over centuries and are usually said to be absent in Africa.