[oblio]

Well, you could say that for sure it can be done, because we didn't really have democracies before 1776, excluding some super short and unstable versions, and democracies with universal suffrage are even newer, after about 1900.

According to the Democracy Index, ~75 countries are full or flawed democracies, so 75 countries made the leap.

[rich_sasha]

Most strong democracies were born through a very long and drawn out process of democratisation. UK Houses of Parliament date back to 13th century; of course at that point there was no democracy, but a tradition of open debate on government is very old.

In fact in the UK it’s probably hard to pinpoint where real monarchy ended and democracy started. The monarch had less and less power over time, and an increasingly wide circle of privileged voters held more and more power.

Many struggling democracies had to make that leap much more quickly and often the failures of democracy are to do with the cultural remains of the previous systems.

[stormbrew]

> In fact in the UK it’s probably hard to pinpoint where real monarchy ended and democracy started.

I would put it more or less around Oliver Cromwell's tenure, even though the monarchy enjoyed some resurgence in power after the monarchy was restored it was short lived and the threat of parliament removing an unruly monarch, as they had done fairly decisively, became a real constraint on their power.

The struggles around that were also significant inspirations to French and American revolutions that followed.

[nickysielicki]

Poland would like a word: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Liberty