Transition To Democracy

The readings this week focus mainly on the transition of authoritarian regimes into democratic states. The way some scholars viewed the rise of democracy was through the scope of declining military influence in Latin American states. Karl’s definition of democracy is specified as a set of institutions that permits the entire adult population to act as citizens by choosing their leading decision makers in competitive fair and regularly scheduled elections which are held in the context of the rule of law, guarantees of political freedom and limited military prerogatives. She specifies democracy as political concept with four dimensions: Participation, condensation, accountability and civilian control. However, in states like Chile where they had a democratically elected president, Salvador Allende, who was overthrown for his leaning socialist views shows us that democracy isn’t as straight forward as it should be. The military coup that overthrew Allende was evidence that the military after Pinochet’s precautionary implementations made it very difficult to transition back into a fair democracy. Also, we have seen how the lack of military presence in a sovereign state actually helps the country economically because they don’t spend as much on the military itself. Moreover, just reading about all those democracies around the world it just shows me how much the United States needs to work on democratizing themselves. The military spending is astronomical and an elite group control almost everything that goes on domestically.