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The first part re‐examines the three worlds’ typology of welfare capitalism: the liberal welfare regime, the social democratic welfare regime, and the conservative welfare regime. A summary overview of the three regime characteristics is provided. The second part looks at the historical and comparative robustness of regime typologies, and examines whether a three‐way typology adequately exhausts the variance of the different regimes found in different countries. Three cases are identified that call for an additional fourth ‘world’; these are the Antipodes, the Mediterranean, and Japan.

Assuming the validity of these three claims, a total of six models is reached for 19–20 nations. These three cases are examined under the headings The Antipodean Fourth World, The Mediterranean Fourth World, and The East Asian Fourth World (Japan possibly with Korea and Taiwan). This second section of the chapter also looks at families and welfare regimes.

The first substantive part of the book examines women's organizing during different stages of transitions to democracy. As the starting point of the analysis, it explores how women mobilize, under what conditions, and with what results. It also looks at how women's movements, including feminist movements, interact with their context — both national and international — during these different stages. The section begins with a discussion of the pre-existing literature on civil society and women's movements. This is followed by an analysis of different forms of women's organizing during state socialist and authoritarian regimes; the breakdown of non-democratic regimes and subsequent transitions; and in the post-transition period. It concludes by arguing that to understand the impact of women's organizing, it is necessary to broaden the analysis to include the electoral arena.

This concluding chapter restates and further examines the findings of the book in detail. The first section explores the impact of democratic regime-building operations across the three cases, paying particular attention to the mechanisms of influence and the influence on the mode of transition. The second section identifies a range of challenges to democratic regime-building, including the inherent limitations of international democracy promotion in these settings and the role of domestic state weakness and political divisions. Subsequent sections then examine a set of further issues, including the implications of the findings for theory and for policy, and the scope of the book's findings.

This concluding chapter argues that the contemporary politics of the welfare state takes shape against a backdrop of both intense pressures for austerity and enduring popularity. In this context, even strong supporters of the welfare state may come to acknowledge the need for adjustment, and even severe critics may need to accept the political realities of continuing popular enthusiasm for social provision. Thus, in most of the affluent democracies, the politics of social policy centre on the renegotiation, restructuring, and modernization of the terms of the post‐war social contract rather than on its dismantling. The crucial issue is whether particular national settings facilitate the emergence of such a centrist reform effort, and if so, on what terms. The argument proceeds in three stages: in the first, a basic framework is outlined for studying the politics of reform in a context of permanent austerity; in the second, two complications are discussed — the need to incorporate different dimensions of social policy reform and the need to recognize three quite distinct configurations of welfare state politics among the affluent democracies; in the third, these arguments are applied to analyse the politics of restructuring in the liberal, social democratic, and conservative ‘worlds’ (regimes) of welfare capitalism.

On the basis of a discussion of influential conceptions of democracy, the chapter proposes a definition of a democratic regime (or political democracy) as made by reasonably fair elections, the rights of voting, the freedom to be elected, and some surrounding “political freedoms.” The ensuing argument is that, even though these are indispensable components, democracy includes other ones. The discussion of the undecidability of those freedoms, of the universalistic wager that is entailed by fair elections, of various aspects of the state that an attentive eye discovers under the formal characteristics of the regime, and of the agent that underlies the citizen that grounds democracy as its basic unit, or micro‐ foundation, open various avenues of inquiry that are pursued in the rest of the book.

The lack of confidence of citizens in their democratic institutions is not new, although the current context differs in various ways: first, the unchallenged supremacy of the two victorious paradigms of market and democracy; second, the weaker capacity of new or old democracies to deal with the new challenges they have to face; and third, the relative position of market and democracy, which has changed in favour of the market and to the detriment of democracy. The chapter first considers the nature of the democratic malaise and its manifestations; has it to do with the democratic principle itself or is it only a temporary dissatisfaction with elites, parties and political organizations? Two complementary explanations are then offered to interpret the birth and expansion of this phenomenon: the structural explanation emphasizes the tension between the constitutionalist and the popular dimension of contemporary democracies; the conjunctural explanation relates to political corruption, which became so pervasive in the 1990s and contributed to the delegitimation of representatives and of the principle of representation in many European countries, populism and populist dichotomy.

After walking through the various arguments and analyses of the book, this concluding chapter proposes several criteria why democracy should be preferred to all other kinds of political rule, including democracies that do not include much in terms of civil, social, and cultural rights, and where even the effectiveness of political rights is impaired by poor social options. The book concludes with a characterization, not strictly a definition, of a concept of democracy that goes beyond the democratic regime.

Based on a discussion of influential conceptions of democracy, this chapter proposes a definition of a democratic regime (or political democracy) which state that a democratic regime consists of reasonably fair elections and includes the right to vote and eventually be elected, and some surrounding ‘political freedoms’. It argues that, even though these are indispensable components, democracy includes other elements. The discussion of the undecidability of those freedoms, of the universalistic wager that is entailed by fair elections, of various aspects of the state that an attentive eye discovers under the formal characteristics of the regime, and of the agent that underlies the citizen that grounds democracy as its basic unit, or micro foundation, opens various avenues of inquiry that are pursued in the rest of the book.

This chapter examines the democratization of civil–military relations in two former fascist dictatorships, postwar Germany and Japan, whose armies had destroyed and terrorized large swathes of the surrounding territory. The creation of lasting democratic regimes on the ashes of these dictatorships stands as the signal achievement of democracy promotion. An important part of this process was the building of the new West German and Japanese armed forces. On the other hand, Hungary after World War II illustrates the trajectory of military politics in numerous European states where domestic political forces were defeated by the Soviet Union and its native communist puppets. The chapter then considers the evolution of Hungarian civil–military relations from the end of the war until the March 1953 death of Joseph Stalin, which is a suitable point to mark the consolidation of the Soviet-controlled communist regime and the completion of the armed forces' transformation.

This chapter develops a theory of electoral politics and representation in the one-party South, conceptualized as an exclusionary one-party enclave. It begins with a stylized description of the logic of electoral democracy and how it induces government to represent its citizens. Here, democracy is defined as a system for collective decision making that treats all participants as political equals. Next, the chapter considers the role of political parties, especially partisan competition, in democratic theory and practice. Having developed this framework with respect to democratic regimes, this chapter then proposes a modified version of it to describe electoral politics in the one-party South. It focuses on three important factors distinguishing the South from democratic regimes: its political exclusion of many citizens, its lack of partisan competition, and its status as a subnational enclave embedded in a national democratic regime. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the empirical implications of this theoretical framework and what we can learn through examination of the one-party South.

The introduction presents the central question of the book: how and why does a semi-democratic regime collapse without experiencing further democratization? It defines the semi-democratic regime, a subtype of hybrid regimes. It then describes the book's two objectives in answering this question, which it attempts to achieve through a study of the literature on hybrid regimes as well as on prewar Japanese political development. The first is to widen our knowledge of the political dynamics of hybrid regimes. The second is to provide a comprehensive analysis of Japan's political development from the late 1910s to the early 1930s. Lastly, it refers to three comparable cases of semi-democratic regimes: Great Britain in the latter half of 19th century, Brazil between 1945 and 1964, and Thailand between 1978 and 1997.

The focus of Chapter 5 is the social democratic regime countries — Sweden and Denmark — and how regime characteristics, such as universalism and entitlements based on citizenship and residence, have affected immigrants' social rights. The chapter discusses immigrants' formal inclusion in social provision, the impact of welfare cutbacks on immigrants' social rights and economic well-being, and the influence of changes in the incorporation regime on immigrant rights. The concluding discussion compares how similarities and differences in the Swedish and Danish welfare and incorporation regimes have affected immigrants' social rights. The comparison is also extended to the other regime countries.

This chapter has two objectives. First, it demonstrates that the regime that existed in Japan from 1918 to 1932 can be defined as semi-democratic. It argues that three distinct regimes—a competitive oligarchical one, a semi-democratic one, and a military authoritarian one—existed between 1889 and 1945. The first spanned 1889 to 1918, the second from 1918 to 1932, and the third from 1935 to 1945. Second, to illustrate the special nature of prewar Japanese democratization and the semi-democratic regime in prewar Japan, it compares democratization in Britain and Japan. In doing so, it examines the implications of their differences might have on the study of democratization as a whole.

This chapter begins the adventure of classifying regimes and their changes by laying out first some tools for the description and analysis of contentious politics—government, governmental agents, political actors, regime, political resources, capital, commitment, contention, public politics, and contentious politics. This is then followed by a review of intersections of regimes with various forms of contentious politics. The chapter discusses regime space as a two-dimensional space: capacity democracy. The four crude types of regime are also addressed: low-capacity, nondemocratic; high-capacity, nondemocratic; high-capacity, democratic; and low-capacity, democratic. By following the leads drawn from Aristotle, Dahl, and Finer and concentrating on two sorts of regime variation: from nondemocratic to democratic regimes, and from low-capacity to high-capacity governments, the chapter then simplifies the work of analyzing regimes and contention.