As you know, many political entrepreneurs have successfully won free elections that they then proceeded to convert into dictatorships, so democracy per se is no talisman. Most people can be very successfully manipulated in the short run (and some people can be successfully manipulated in the long run). As for culture - I do not disagree that the culture is a key element in preventing a successful attempt by a political entrepreneur to amass and centralize power. But culture is very much a long time series path dependent result. It can't be air dropped by the IMF. You're back to the circular argument that democracies work best where there are currently successful democracies. Unless one has a prescription for engineering a culture that supports democracy, democracy itself is a weak prescription. I freely admit that I don't have anything better to prescribe - and so I retain a healthy skepticism for the purported healing powers of Western style democracy as a universal salve.