Democracy is one of the core concepts covered in every introductory comparative politics course. However, the tendency is to oversimplify this concept and to present democracy and authoritarianism in binary terms, where states are neatly classified as either one or the other. Definitions of democracy in most textbooks are taken from the Western canon. The result is that students often get a very simplified understanding of the term, with a strong bias toward liberal majoritarian rule. There is often inadequate time during a course for instructors to delve into the many and varied ways of understanding what democracy might mean, how it can be measured, and how it might look different in different societies.

Our goal here is to give instructors the tools to teach a more comprehensive and decolonized version of democracy and to carry this idea throughout the other topics typically covered in an introductory comparative politics course. Our backgrounds are in political economy, so we give some ideas of how to incorporate these discussions into this topic, but the same types of discussions could be used for covering other topics like constitutions, political institutions, nationalism, and so on.

This resource is part of the Teaching Comparative Politics Resource Collection.