Abstract

TOVAR, Jesús. The First Democracies in Hispano-America. Polít. gob [online]. 2009, vol.16, n.1, pp.71-113. ISSN 1665-2037.

This article helps to demonstrate the conceptual disparity among some authors about democracy. Despite sharing a procedural definition of democracy, they do not agree in how to fix the starting date of political regimes in Hispano-American democracies between the end of the xix and the beginning of the XX centuries. For this reason, we propose a criterion to classify the democracies and we apply this to Hispano-American countries during the first wave of democracy. We then make a comparative analysis of these early democracies. Finally, we create an explanatory outline that permits us to identify independent variables of democratic advance in this region in this particular time.

Keywords : democracy; first wave; competition; alternation; democratization; democratic breakdown; electoral reforms.

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