Democracy in the Global South

Abstract

Given the legacies of colonialism and the inequities of the global capitalist system, consolidated democracies in the Global South were the exception prior to the third wave of democratization in the 1970s. As democratization in the Global South grew, a first generation of work by sociologists challenged mainstream political science's preoccupation with electoral and liberal democracy and brought popular mobilization to the center of the analysis. This literature made key contributions to the debate on democratic transitions and consolidation. A more recent wave of work has focused on the democratization of democracy, examining civil society, movements, participatory democracy, transnational activism, and the wide range of political actors and forms of collective action that have emerged in a democratizing Global South. Variation across and within democracies remains high, but there have been clear cases of democratic deepening. Improving our understating of the fabric of democratic institutions and practices, including recent cases of regression, calls for more research, especially in subnational and local contexts. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Sociology, Volume 48 is July 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Pig‐feast democracy

“…These findings have implications for how democracy and democratic reforms should be understood in the West Papua context and beyond. If theories of democracy have proposed a minimalist and formalist definition of democracy as the existence of free and competitive elections (Heller, 2022; Przeworski, 1999), the reemergence of pig feasts in West Papua cannot be understood merely as a return of big men or an arrival of patronage democracy. For democracy, Papuan pig feasts are an exercise of autonomy and participation.…”