Democracy in small states : persisting against all odds /

Corbett (Univ. of Southampton, UK) and Veenendaal (Leiden Univ., the Netherlands) present a book focusing on democratic development in small states. The authors discuss 39 cases of countries with populations below 1 million clustered in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Europe, and the Pacific. The book has two main objectives. The first is to contest theories of democratization originally developed in large and rich states. The second is to present democracy in small states as a result of informal political practices and democratic governance. From a methodological point of view, the book draws on material based on more than 250 interviews with politicians and local experts, on public documents and secondary literature, and on participant observation. Structurally, the book is organized into thematic chapters followed by two appendixes, which present the background on the 39 small states and the authors' previous publications on the same topic. Most of the book is dedicated to discussing traditional democratization theories and their applications to small states. Individual chapters discuss modernization theory, cultural homogeneity, colonial heritage and institutional designs, the presence of political parties, geographic location, and their correlations to democracy in comparative perspective. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. --Simeon Mitropolitski, University of Ottawa