One of the more perplexing problems of democracy in developing countries has to do with their potential for breakdown. In retrospect, at least three dynamics appear relevant in any consideration of how most come to atrophy: first, flaws in the pattern of instauration, involving the design and setting up of the modalities of the régime; secondly, a political process that tends to exacerbate entrenched cleavages such as class, ethnicity, and religion, given their relationship to the distribution of scarce economic and political resources; and thirdly, the events, internal and external, that lead to the onset of an ‘unsolvable’ crisis.