Recently scholars identified a global explosion of democracy as a sharply distinctive period within Huntington's Third Wave of democratization. So far the role of modernization has not been analyzed with particular regard to this outstanding phase of democratization. Given that modernization has...

This paper demonstrates that socioeconomic development, cultural modernization, and democratic regime performance constitute a coherent syndrome of social change'a syndrome whose common focus has not properly been specified by standard modernization theory. We specify this syndrome as Human...