Modern Society Democracy And The Modernization Theory

In modern society reaching democracy is a number one goal for many states. They like to reach it for plenty of reasons, civil and economic. First of all democracy is associated with wealth, a good material situation, and economic growth. We can clearly see it on example of The United States or large European democracies such as Germany or France. It is also believed that democratization brings high living standards, peaceful environment and overall happiness to the state; and The United States and European democracies are also a good example of that. Many institutions believe that to reach democracy states should follow the Western example of transaction to democracy and the Modernization theory, which is to modernize their industries,†¦show more content†¦There are four main theories though which states come to democracy, it is modernization theory, neo-modernization theory, Marxism, and Voluntarism. I would like to give a brief description of each one of them before explaining why Marxism is the best fit for the case study of El Salvador. Modernization theory, in general, is a theory designed to explain the process of modernization in society. It considers the internal factors of development of any given country, based on the setup that the traditional countries may be involved in the development in the same way as more developed. In a political studies context, modernization theory evaluates how countries come to the democratic type of government if they are educated, urbanized, industrialized, and what is most import ant -wealthy. Professor Lipset, from University of California at Berkeley, states that economic development leads to democracy. He demonstrates the accuracy of the modernization theory through comparing democratic Anglo-Saxon world countries with Latin America and states a high level of education and wealth are sufficient conditions for democracy such as urbanization and industrialization. Lipset proofs the correlation exists on this example. Neo-modernization theory is similar to the original modernization theory. Neo-modernization considered the practice of communism and adopted modernization theory to the post-WWII