In his seminal 1970 article 'Transitions to Democracy: Toward a Dynamic Model,' Rustow broke from the prevailing schools of thought on how countries became democratic.

He was a visiting professor at Harvard and other institutions, a vice president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America and the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship.

Dankwart Rustow argued that the modernizationists, such as Seymour Lipset, asked a functional question: what can enhance or preserve the health of a democracy?

Studying the decline in authoritarianism in Latin America and Southern Europe in the 1970s and 1980s, scholars such as Larry Diamond, Lawrence Whitehead, and Philip Schmitter explained transitions from authoritarianism not in terms of socio-economic or structural changes, but rather in terms of consensus and pacts between elites.

[3] Michael McFaul argued that post-Cold War Russia supported Rustow's argument that national unity was a precondition for successful democratization.