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Lipset's Some Social Requisites Of Democracy

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The interest based explanation for democracy comes from an assumption that people are going to pursue their own interests, like goods, wealth, or income in different economic classes and that politics comes from a clash between people with different interests. In Lipset’s “Some Social Requisites of Democracy,” one of the points he makes is that industrialization is a good indicator of a democracy. He uses statistics of different countries and their rations of working men in agriculture -- it shows that the more urbanized the country, the more democratic it is. This can be traced back to the level of education in the country, better education leads to citizens that leads to citizens with less extreme values and are more tolerant of others -- education is able…show more content…
religion or ethnicity or beliefs about the world or causality. This leads to a certain group taking their own way of thinking and transforming it into a democracy. This is laid out well in Woodberry’s “The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy.” Here, he starts out his argument by giving an example of how Protestants have been so successful in creating democracy. “Previous quantitative research consistently suggests that countries with more Protestants are more democratic and have more stable democratic transitions (Woodberry 245).” He then discusses how Protestantism was the way that the modern representative democracy was created. “CPs such as protestant missionaries wanted people to be able to read the bible in their own language and wanted to facilitate lay religious involvement (246).” Woodberry is here describing how the Protestants were able to truly form mass educations, printing, and civil society through their plan to spread their religion. Democracy arose easily through this method, the people were educated to make the best decisions, and there was mas printing, so everyone was also well
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