In Democracy in Hard Places, Scott Mainwaring and Tarek Masoud bring together a distinguished group of social scientists to explore how democracies around the world continue to survive even in an age of democratic decline. Adopting a comparative, cross-regional perspective, the authors present nine case studies in which democracy emerged and survived despite tumult and crisis, economic underdevelopment, ethnolinguistic fragmentation, and chronic
institutional weakness. By bringing these cases into dialogue with each other, this volume begins to develop a theory of how democracy can be built and maintained in places that dominant social science theories would lead us to least expect it.