Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan. Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Chapter 1.
A democratic transition is complete when the following conditions hold:
1) Sufficient agreement has been reached about political procedures to produce an elected government
2) A government comes to power that is the direct result of a free and popular vote
3) This, aforementioned, government de facto has the authority to generate new policies
4) The executive, legislative and judicial power generated by the new democracy does not have to share power with other bodies de jure.
Democratic consolidation occurs once democracy becomes "the only game in town"--that is, when:
1) No significant political groups seriously attempt to overthrow the democratic regime or secede from the state.
2) Even in the face of severe political and economic crises, an overwhelming majority of the people believe that any further political change must emerge from the parameters of democratic formulas.
3) All the other actors in the polity become habituated to the fact that political conflict will be resolved according to the established norms (specific laws, procedures, and institutions) and that violations of these norms are likely to be both ineffective and costly.
4) Democracy becomes routinized and deeply internalized in social, institutional, and even psychological life, as well as in calculations for achieving success.
Consolidated democracies break down due to new dynamics in which the regime cannot solve a set of problems; the breakdown is unrelated to weaknesses or problems specific to the historic process of democratic consolidation.
A robust civil society in a democracy guarantees the right of association and has the capacity to generate political alternative to monitor government and state; it helps push democratic transitions to their completion.
Political society crafts the constitution, laws, manages the state apparatus to support the civil society, and produces the overall regulatory framework for economic society.
No consolidated democracy has a purely free market economy or command economy; regulations are necessary to protect the interests of the public, but a purely command economy would deprive the society of the relative autonomy necessary in a consolidated democracy.
