Regime analyses and cultural studies are exclusionary approaches to the study of democratization but they present thematic interfaces on theoretical and historical problems. Such are the issues of clieritelism and of the normative concept of democracy, the relevant sociopolitical actors, the level and unit of analysis, etc - which both approaches face differently. This article reviews these differences, and maintains that they reveal the internal limitations and unsolved theoretical problems of both approaches, as challenges for a more comprehensive theoretical and empirical approach to democratization.
democratization; institutionalism; culturalism