Forthcoming in a Special Issue of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, guest editors Jennifer McCoy and Murat Somer, January 2019. Transformations through Polarizations and Global Threats to Democracy Murat Somer and Jennifer McCoy Abstract This article introduces the goals, comparative logic, methodological approach and the case studies in this volume and some original concepts underlying the analysis. The goal of the volume is to explore when and how societies become “perniciously” polarized and how this affects democracy, and then to start building a foundation for remedies. For this purpose, it brings together and comparatively analyzes eleven country case studies of polarized polities that are or had been an electoral democracy, with a view to identify the common and differing causal mechanisms that lead from polarization to different outcomes for democracy once a society begins to experience polarization. This introductory article highlights and explains the nature of the political and relational aspects of polarization that are the foci of the volume, presents the concept of formative rifts, discusses how opposition strategies should be part of an explanation of severe polarization, and describes how the different case studies are organized in the volume in terms of different outcomes on democracy. Keywords: polarization, democracy, democratic erosion, populism, opposition strategies Bios: