A political and cultural sociology of democracy can contribute to the analysis of modern democratic regimes in two important ways. First, while much of political science and political theory approaches democracy in a disattached way, i.e., as ultimately a universally applicable and exportable political model, a sociology of democracy understands democracy as necessarily emerging, and being embedded, in local contexts. Second, a sociology of democracy emphasizes the conflictual nature of democracy out of which institutionalized constellations emerge. What emerges from this is that, since democracy possibly takes a distinct form depending on its context, a comparative sociology of ''multiple democracies'' is indispensable for our understanding of its contemporary predicament. In the first part of the paper, I will outline a sociology of democracy in theoretical terms in what will be labelled a ''multiple democracies'' approach, in which the inherent multiplicity of democracy will be conceptualized. In the second part, this approach will be made relevant empirically by suggesting a number of ''ethics of democracy'' that can serve as guidelines for exploring local knowledge and cultures, but also suggests the influence of context on democratic theory itself. In the third part, this framework will be used to comparatively study a number of democratic societies in Central and Eastern Europe, that is, Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic. I will show that democratization in these countries, in contrast to the emphasis on the application of external knowledge in democratization studies, cannot be understood without an analysis of local knowledge and political cultures.
