Democratic Consolidation

The third wave of democratization practice has been sustaining for two or threedecades in the late1980’and early90’s. Whereas, most emerging democracies instead ofproceeding into an optimistic prospect as the transition experts anticipate, they stillremain in the situation which wavers between authoritarian regime and democracy.Therefore, scholars have realized that in order to avoid the resurgence of the third wavedemocratization, the priority of the current democratization study is how to strengthenand sustain these established democracies which are established in the third wavedemocratization. Thus, the issue of democratic consolidation has become a newresearch field, and the democratization study has transited from the “Transitology”to“Consolidation Study”.The concept of democratic consolidation is the core concept in the democratictheory, and the way to define the democratic consolidation is also a primary issue in thestudy of democratic consolidation. Hence, how to understand democratic consolidation,not only determines the development of democratic consolidation research, but alsodecides the conclusion of the crucial democratic consolidation.Nonetheless,the conceptof democratic consolidation is also the most tough and controversial research topic, anddifferent scholars have various understanding of democratic consolidation.Via theclarifying the development of the democratic consolidation concept,we can discoverthat there is a sequence spectrum between various democratic consolidation concepts,from system to culture, from maintaining to deepen, from single to comprehensive, anda trend that generalization of democratic concept has appeared. Since1990’s, the zeal ofscholars for prenting a standard concept for democratic consolidation has significantlyreduced, and the research of democratic consolidation has entered into a stage of reflection. Scholars have reflected numerous problems existing in the definition ofdemocratic consolidation, thoughts such as logic contradiction existing in thedemocratic consolidation terminology itself, strong color of teleology, and lack ofclassification about democratic forms, in the cultural level, the definition of democraticconsolidation belongs to the repetition of same language and the generalization ofdemocratic consolidation.From the development of the concept of democratic consolidation and reflection ofthe scholars, with much more connotation and ambiguity in the concept of democraticconsolidation, the concept has become comprehensive, blurred, thus leading thedemocratic consolidation concept to be lack of effective interpretation and guidance inthe real world. It is quite harmful for a political science concept, which not only affectsthe application and popularization of the concept itself, but also hindered thedevelopment of the theory of democratic consolidation. Therefore, it requiresclarification and correction on this concept in order to establish a clear and preciseconcept of democratic consolidation,if you want to make the concept of democraticconsolidation really exert in interpretation and guiding significance for the reality, aswell as further development of democratic consolidation theory. However, lots ofproblems still exist,which are mainly referred to: the unlimited extension of the researchcontent; numerous case studies and differences between them; varieties of researchmethods and the complex connotation of "democracy" and "consolidate" themselves.In the conclusion part of the article, the author gives several suggestions to clarifythe concept of democratic consolidation. For example: the concept of limited andordered democratic consolidation, and to establish a core research methodology indemocratic consolidation, etc.