Buying Democracy or Demanding It? Protest and Democracy in Latin America.

The paper presents evidence that protest drives democracy, confirming the supply and demand theory of democratization while calling the dominant modernization approach into question. Modernization theory has remained the centerpiece of comparative research on democratization over the previous decade, amassing an impressive body of empirical research linking democracy to economic development. Drawing from an established cultural tradition in comparative politics, this paper challenges the dominant modernization approach and advances a theory that does not rely upon economic development to explain democratization. The supply and demand theory of democratization posits that the institutional supply of democracy flows naturally from the societal demand for democratization. Accordingly, countries cannot simply buy democracy with economic development, but rather, democracy must be actively pursued at the societal level. Using protest as an indicator of societal demand for democracy, cross-national evidence from Latin America confirms the new theory, providing robust evidence that societal demand drives democratization in the third wave. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]