democratic rules." ⁴ This democratic momentum has not bypassed the
Caribbean. Guyana has been welcomed into the democratic comity since
October 1992, Haiti is undergoing democratic (re)construction, and do-
mestic and international forces have been combining to force the Dominican
Republic and Suriname to resolve their democracy crises. Cuba, then, is the
only Caribbean country squarely outside of the democratic camp.

Despite or perhaps because of the impressive record of democratic politics
in the Caribbean, there has long been considerable interest in the subject of
Caribbean democracy, from theoretical as well as empirical vantage points.
The democratic explosion that the hemisphere and other parts of the world
have witnessed since the late 1980s has further stimulated intellectual inter-
est in the subject, and a large number of books, conferences, and journal ar-
ticles devoted to democracy and allied subjects have appeared since the mid-
1980s. ⁵ One of the allied subjects has been human rights.

There is, of course, no single approach to the study of democracy, or of
human rights, or of the democracy-human rights nexus. The most popular
approach to democracy among contemporary Caribbean social scientists,
though, is the Schumpeterian approach, which sees contestation and partici-
pation as the central denotative features of democracy. ⁶ According to Carl
Stone, for example, "democracy can be defined as a process which seeks to
distribute power from centers of power concentration to the majority of citi-
zens in a political system." ⁷ Evelyne Huber is a little more explicit: "Democ-
racy is defined by free and fair elections, at regular intervals, in the context of
guaranteed civil and political rights, responsible government (i.e., account-
ability of the executive to elected representatives) and political inclusion
(i.e., universal suffrage and nonproscription of parties)." ⁸ Other specialists
view democracy as "a system of government in which there is meaningful
and extensive political competition for positions of government power, at
regular intervals, among individuals and organized groups, especially politi-
cal parties." ⁹

The Schumpeterian approach reflected in these definitions sees democracy
essentially as electoral democracy, and we accept that elections are central to
democracy. But because they are periodic contestations in which interest ag-
gregation and representation are centered on political parties or individual
contestants, it is important to extend the definition of democracy to account
for participation and policy choice on a continual basis and beyond parties,
to interest groups and other social movements.

Elections are a critical legitimizing mechanism for democracies, and hence
they are a requirement of democracy, and they must be free and fair. Never-

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