ABSTRACT
The last quarter of the twentieth century witnessed the greatest expansion of democracy in the history of the world. In what Samuel Huntington (1991) described as the third wave of democratization, many countries that were previously under autocratic rule in Latin America, Africa, and the Caribbean have embraced democracy. From the submission of the Freedom House (2010), there were 121 democracies in the world at the end of 2001. The spread of liberal democracy has become more pervasive since the fall of the former Soviet Union. This episodic multiplication of democratic practice evoked a sense of triumphalism in the West, particularly among the neoliberal scholars like Francis Fukuyama (1992), who declared capitalism and liberal democracy as the end of history. As Larry Diamond (1996) opines, the global expansion of liberal democracy was particularly rapid in the years immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
