1. The most representative collective endeavor is Guillermo O'Donnell, Philippe Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead, eds., Transitions from Authoritarian Rule , 4 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). Other literature will be cited as I proceed.

2. See, for various sources of data, G. Bingham Powell, Jr. Contemporary Democracies (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 2-7.

3. Samuel P. Huntington, ''Will More Countries Become Democratic?" Political Science Quarterly 99 (Summer 1984): 218.

4. For a review of the issues on the relation between progress and democracy, see G. Bingham Powell, Jr., "Social Progress and Liberal Democracy," in Progress and Its Discontents , ed. Gabriel Almond et al. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 373-402.

5. On "politics explained by politics" and the shortcomings of sociological explanations, see Giovanni Sartori, "From the Sociology of Politics to Political Sociology," in Politics and the Social Sciences , ed. Seymour M. Lipset (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 65-100.

6. Larry Diamond, Seymour M. Lipset, and Juan Linz, "Developing and Sustaining Democratic Government in the Third World" (paper delivered at the 1986 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, August 28-31, Washington, D.C.). The authors are also editors of a four-volume comparative study of democracy in the Third World. See Larry Diamond, Juan Linz, and Seymour M. Lipset, eds., Democracy in Developing Countries (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1989).

7. Myron Weiner, "Empirical Democratic Theory and the Transition from Authoritarianism to Democracy," PS 20 (Fall 1987): 862-63.

8. See, for example, Albert O. Hirschman, "The Search for Paradigms as a Hindrance to Understanding," World Politics 22 (March 1970): 329-43.

9. See the opening statement in Guillermo O'Donnell and Philippe Schmitter, Tentative Conclusions About Uncertain Democracies , vol. 4, of Transitions from Authoritarian Rule , ed. O'Donnell, Schmitter, Whitehead.

10. An excellent example of how these variables can be used is Robert A. Dahl, ed., Political Oppositions in Western Democracies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), esp. the contributions by Dahl.

11. The statement appears in Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan, "Political Crafting of Democratic Consolidation or Destruction: European and South American Comparisons," (paper delivered at the Conference on Reinforcing Democracy in the Americas, the Carter Presidential Center, Atlanta, Georgia, November 17-18, 1986).

12. As I will clarify later on, I do not believe material policies and outcomes are a very significant part of democratic crafting.

13. If crafting is crucial, we may well ask by the same token how much room it can actually claim and how much it can accomplish. These are the kinds of questions—the most difficult in effect—that we must address. Huntington himself opens the way to one answer. He mentions a zone of transition or choice, largely coincident with the top range of middle-income countries, where authoritarian crises are likely but outcomes promise to be rather indeterminate. Presumably, it is within that zone, or similarly constructed ones, where crafting may be effective. I will pursue other conditions in the presence of which outcomes may be indeterminate.

I must also stress that although crafting may be more crucial and, within a range of cases, possible, this does not unfailingly mean that political elites will avail themselves of the opportunity. The reader may well ask why the opportunities for crafting may be disregarded; why, if not disregarded, they may be botched; and whether, more generally, we can identify cycles in this regard that affect the balance sheet at different historical times. For example, is there today a greater sensitivity to the delicate role of political elites in democratic transitions? This is another example of the type of question for which we are often inadequately prepared.

14. Robert A. Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971).

15. Ibid., p. 208.

1. For the distinction between descriptive and normative definitions of democracy see Jeane Kirkpatrick, "Democratic Elections, Democratic Government, and Democratic Theory," in Democracy at the Polls: A Comparative Study of Competitive National Elections , ed. David Butler et al. (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1981), pp. 325-48.

2. See a summary of findings in G. Bingham Powell, Jr., "Social Progress and Liberal Democracy," in Progress and Its Discontents , ed. Gabriel Almond et al. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 385-89.

3. Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper, 1942), p. 269.

4. I am taking liberties with history by leaving out the first democracy, the United States. But the United States was a cultural fragment of that corner of Europe, and similarly unique. Also, diffusion will not forcefully originate from the United States until well into the twentieth century.

5. It is of more than passing curiosity to notice that the word democracy was either rarely used or used in a different, more limited or negative, sense as democracy first developed. In a way, what was being developed was not clear and planned. This contrasts singularly with the process of diffusion, within which the word democracy evokes a historical experience and tangible examples.

6. I am leaving out the possibility of democracy's being "invented" anew elsewhere because (with the possible exception of the U.S. experience) it has no correspondence in reality.

7. The distinctive possibility that the birth of modern democracy partook more of the fortuitous than the nonrepeatable can be teased out of one reflection. Contemporaneous with the birth of democracy, elsewhere in Europe some of the same circumstances that accompanied its birth—i.e., the rule of law, constitutionalism, a liberal public opinion—coexisted through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with forms of monarchical-bureaucratic rule of absolutist derivation. Yet the rule of law, constitutionalism, and a liberal public opinion were developments without which democracy cannot even be fathomed. Why then such coexistence? One ready answer is that the birth of democracy needed more; it needed all the other circumstances listed in the text, which only a corner of Europe was blessed with. Another answer—which I prefer, without ruling out the first—is that if something as basic to human freedom as constitutionalism did not converge toward democracy elsewhere, it is because democracy was nowhere an inescapable arrangement, impersonally ordained by history. It was never a blueprint already known in its details and effects, but merely one possible artifact developed as one goes.

Nineteenth-century European rulers had two types of conflict to deal with: (1) between royal authority and public opinion, and (2) between competing strands of public opinion, as society freed itself from feudal ascription. The needed balancing answer was modern constitutionalism. What was not at all foregone is that constitutionalism would take a democratic form, one that would not just limit but expropriate rule from above. Thus it can be argued that even in the cradle of democracy, special and favorable as the local circumstances were, democracy was in the final analysis an expedient creation. It emerged in due time from a series of decisions taken by, often urged upon, political elites. These elites did not necessarily define themselves as democratic, did not work from a blueprint, and could not imagine, except when the process was well on its way, the final product. In some cases, they may have backed into some decisions. In almost all cases, their decisions were pressed upon them by the need to address concrete and immediate problems, mainly fundamental conflicts involving rulers and society.

Dankwart Rustow, writing about England, mentions among the momentous decisions the 1688 constitutional compromise, introducing limited government and closing the revolutionary conflict, and the 1832 suffrage reform, a reaction in part to the fall of the Orleanist monarchy in France. See his "Transitions to Democracy," Comparative Politics 2 (April 1970): 337-63. Rustow's is a pioneering essay to which we will often return.

On the rule of law and constitutionalism as European developments see Roberto Unger, Law in Modern Society (New York: Free Press, 1976), pp. 66-86, 134-92. On the rise of public opinion see Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (Neuwied am Rhein: Hermann Luchterhand Verlag, 1962), chaps. 1-3. On the new lines of conflict emerging from the demise of the feudal order and the rise of absolutism, and on alternative constitutional responses, see Gianfranco Poggi, The Development of the Modern State (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1978), chaps. 4, 5.

8. That geographical uniformity is made unnecessary by fortuitousness may escape political elites bent on replicating the successful model, or regional and global powers bent on exporting democracy. And this usually has negative consequences.

9. For these two views of democracy, which the author treats as coexisting in the formation of the American Republic, see Powell, "Social Progress," pp. 376-79.

10. An early, predemocratic example of this reversal is the lure of, before and in the first phase of the French Revolution, eighteenth-century English constitutionalism in intellectual and political circles in Paris. It seemed to some circles that England's enviably solid progress was firmly rooted in its constitutionalism. The reader may detect a hidden bias on my part for English demonstration effects. In effect, though the French and English democratic models compete within nineteenth-century Europe, the significance of the former diminishes outside Europe as time goes by. Also, save for its Jacobin/Napoleonic component, the French model pertains more to the realm of ideas than of successful practices—and ideas, though exportable, are often disappointingly difficult to implement.

11. On the role (and vagaries) of demonstration effects and reference societies in European political development, see Andrew Janos, "The Politics of Backwardness in Continental Europe, 1780-1945," World Politics 31 (April 1989): 325-58. See also Reinhard Bendix, Kings or People (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), p. 292 and passim .

12. Indeed, pessimism—groundless, as it turned out—has from the very beginning surrounded the return of the defeated Axis powers to democracy following World War II.

13. The view of representative democracy as a prudential constitutional arrangement against undivided rule—by a king, an aristocrat, or a popular majority—is just as old as the Enlightenment view of democracy as the embodiment and agent of human progress. The willful optimism of the latter and its relative disregard for the ability of constitutional crafting to protect diversity contrasts with the constant constitutional concerns of, for example, the Founding Fathers. See on these points Powell, "Social Progress," pp. 376-78, and n. 1.

14. In itself, the notion that democracy may not turn out to be a universal key to progress had already occurred to some early social thinkers, who continued to see democracy as the product of progress. Bryce had already commented unfavorably on the ability of democracy to root itself in Latin American in his South America: Observations and Impressions (New York: Macmillan, 1911). Tocqueville, in a way, had anticipated such a line of analysis when contrasting the social bases of American democracy with the less favorable conditions in the Old World. What took longer to develop was the ability of political practitioners to anticipate the opprobrium of alternative regimes. And even more recent are the signs of a willingness to try democracy with more modest ambitions.

It may take witnessing that opprobrium to appreciate democracy—imperfections and all.

15. The comment applies to democratic transitions in already existing private economies. The connection between the return to political democracy and socioeconomic transformations is both closer and trickier in Communist countries because what is ambitiously at issue there is precisely the return to private market economies—a return that could expropriate Communist political classes and that also seems, however, politically necessary.

16. On these points, and especially on the return to democratic participation motivated by the desire to regain personal worth and dignity after authoritarian compliance and demobilization, see the insightful experiential account of Guillermo O'Donnell, "On the Fruitful Convergences of Hirschman's Exit, Voice, and Loyalty and Shifting Involvements : Reflections from the Recent Argentine Experience," in Development, Democracy, and the Art of Trespassing: Essays in Honor of Albert O. Hirschman , ed. Alejandro Foxley et al. (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986), pp. 219-68. I usually stay clear of nebulous issues such as self-worth and democracy, but O'Donnell's treatment is far from nebulous.

17. The obstacles may be domestic but also international. We should not forget that diffusion rests not only on demonstration effects but also on the direct weight of regional and global powers. I will return to this and other points about diffusion and demonstration effects in chap. 9.

18. The best English treatment of the Spanish republic in this respect is Juan Linz, "From Great Hopes to Civil War: The Breakdown of Democracy in Spain," in The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Europe , ed. Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), pp. 162-215.

19. This is true at least in more recent times. Some of the postwar European forces, especially on the left, were impressed earlier on by another example—the collapse of the Weimar Republic—from which they drew a different lesson. In their eyes, Weimar collapsed because democracy gave in to increasingly reactionary authoritarian forces and solicitations; hence the need for more advanced democracies. Spain itself was viewed in that way. Later on, the tragedy of Chile led to a reassessment of the Weimar lesson, possibly to a rediscovery of the Spanish case, and to a more balanced view of where the dangers for a new democracy might reside. The point is not the correct interpretation of historical examples, but how we often assess and reassess them in response to the historical conjunctures under which we operate.

20. One tough question is whether or how policy sacrifices are worth it (and possible) when the plural coexistence to be reestablished includes great socioeconomic inequalities, deep enough to raise troubling issues of social injustice. Should coexistence be reestablished, prior and decisive as the task is in the short run, without somehow addressing the issue of injustice? The question is addressed in chaps. 5 and 6.

21. Reliance, even in political science, on sociological functionalism, in the tradition of Durkheim and Spencer rather than Tocqueville, explains in part the extraordinary ability of the paradigms to disregard the historical fact that paths to development, social and political, did not converge (not yet?).

22. Andrew Janos, Politics and Paradigms: Changing Theories of Change in Social Science (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), chaps. 2, 3. Janos offers a very extensive analysis of the relevant literature, along the lines I follow in the text.

23. The founder of this literature is Seymour M. Lipset, Political Man (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1960). A critical review of the ample literature is John D. May, Of the Conditions and Measures of Democracy (Morristown, N.J.: General Learning Press, 1973). The logic of Robert Dahl's Polyarchy , which we took as a foil in the introductory chapter, is akin to this literature. One well-known criticism of the literature, which is not decisive for our counternarrative, is its tendency to confuse genetic and maintenance theories of democracy, mainly by using evidence from the latter as if it were evidence of why democracies come about.

24. The contrast may provide an intellectual clue to why fears of democratic instability and authoritarian involutions in postwar Europe went together with the elaboration of nondemocratic mobilization models for the Third World. What was culturally acceptable and therefore theorized for the Third World—the costs of mobilization for the community—was not acceptable for more advanced Europe.

25. There are a few scholars who have paid attention to this issue all along. Some I have mentioned; some will appear later on.

1. Robert A. Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), p. 16.

2. As we know from chap. 1, there is more to Dahl's analysis than objective circumstances. In his postscript to Polyarchy , he also examines how the lack of objective circumstances that favor mutual security can be remedied by actors purposely seeking mutual guarantees. In the light of this, his famous opening axiom (p. 15) concerning the greater likelihood that a competitive regime will develop if the costs of suppression exceed those of toleration, can be read to say that such a regime is more likely if, during the transition to it, the costs of tolerating opposition are made to be lower than those of suppression—if, in other words, the costs for a nondemocratic government of switching to a competitive regime are made lower than those of remaining nondemocratic. And this in fact falls within the perspective that I am about to discuss in the text.

3. It follows that I am not advocating replacing Dahl's hypothesis about coexistence (the higher the level of conflict, the less likely the establishment of coexistence in diversity) with its opposite. At such a level of blunt generality, both hypotheses lose cogency.

4. Dankwart Rustow, "Transitions to Democracy," Comparative Politics 2 (April 1970): 362.

5. The accent on forestalling conflict is worth noticing because it places attention on the role of perceptions and anticipations. There may be no clear long-standing authoritarian crisis yet, but one may be anticipated. In such a case, choosing democracy reflects a calculated bet that conflict within a legitimate democratic frame is preferable. Such a strategy is actually very much in keeping with Dahl's famous axiom. The Spanish transition comes readily to mind as the classic case. Another, more concerted effort to forestall conflict was the package of institutional guarantees adopted by Sweden between 1902 and 1907. Sweden is discussed by Rustow himself in his Politics of Compromise: A Study of Parties and Cabinet Government in Sweden (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955), chaps. 1-3.

6. Rustow, "Transitions to Democracy," p. 362.

7. As a small child, but somehow already an anti-Fascist, I was taken aback by my father's comment at the fall of fascism ("Yesterday everybody was a fascist; today everybody is a democrat"). Yet, for all its cynicism, the statement was not far from the truth. But was the cynicism warranted? The psychology of most conversions—accompanied as they are by behaviors that range from indifference toward the old regime, yet tinged perhaps with nostalgia, to heretical zeal against it—is too complex to be reduced to cynical calculations and self-serving deceptions. One may also notice, to counter cynicism, the long-standing and widespread popular rejection of communism in Communist countries.

8. For example, even taking for granted that a cultural tradition attuned to democracy existed in the first transitions to democracy (the classic English case), I am suggesting that in the more rapid and contentious transitions of recent times the missing benefit has been, and could be replaced successfully by, individual conversions coinciding with the personal trauma brought by authoritarianism and its crisis. As implied in n. 7, most citizens faced with a regime crisis are forced to come to terms with a past that they have passively or ambiguously witnessed. Their conversion, therefore, is a response to more complex—possibly defensive or cathartic—psychic needs. And though the conversions may not reflect the type of rational elite calculations that we are discussing in the text, they can become quite an asset in eventually directing the regime crisis toward a calculated democratic exit.

9. Adam Przeworski, "Some Problems in the Study of the Transition to Democracy," in Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Comparative Perspectives , ed. Guillermo O'Donnell, Philippe Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 47-63.

10. Ibid.

11. There is a contrast, here, with transitions from democracy to authoritarianism. Authoritarianism does not have to define itself for the benefit of prospective supporters but may succeed with a negative platform (e.g., stopping democratic anarchy; '' on s'engage et puis on voit ").

12. In the article cited in n. 9, Przeworski argues outright that the concept of legitimacy (and, implicitly, its derivatives: legitimation, loyalty, allegiance, trust, consensus, David Easton's "diffuse support") are unnecessary in that the mental readiness implied by these terms can be reduced invariably to a calculus of interests. See also Adam Przeworski, "Material Bases of Consent: Economics and Politics in a Hegemonic System," in Political Power and Social Theory, vol. 1, ed. Maurice Zeitlin (Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1980), esp. pp. 33-34.

13. Dahl, Polyarchy, pp. 40-47; Samuel P. Huntington, "Will More Countries Become Democratic?" Political Science Quarterly 99 (Summer 1984): 209-14; Alfred Stepan, "Paths Toward Redemocratization: Theoretical and Comparative Considerations," in Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Comparative Perspectives, ed. O'Donnell et al., pp. 64-84; Enrique A. Baloyra, ed., Comparing New Democracies (Boulder: Westview, 1987), pp. 9-52; and Leonardo Morlino, "Democratic Establishments," in ibid., pp. 53-78.

14. Another special factor that favored the removal of the legacy in the four countries is the presence, to which I shall return, of democracy or constitutionalism in their past.

15. I am following in this section my argument in "Government Performance: An Issue and Three Cases in Search of Theory," West European Politics 7 (April 1984): 172-87.

16. See, with reference to Latin America, Guillermo O'Donnell, "The United States, Latin America, Democracy: Variations on a Very Old Theme," in The United States and Latin America in the 1980s, ed. Kevin J. Middlebrook and Carlos Rico (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1986), pp. 353-77.

17. See on these points Baloyra, Comparing New Democracies, esp. pp. 36-42. Generational discontinuity has been typical of the more traditional or the older dictatorships: the holdovers from interwar fascism, which (like Portugal and Spain) have lost their original purpose along the way, or long-standing Communist regimes. Institutional conflict seems more central to Latin America's bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes, where the military as an institution is pivot (and prisoner) of the regimes' national development and security ideology. See on the latter, Alfred Stepan, Rethinking Military Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).

18. Hirschman discusses unintended consequences of human action and their relation to change—with particular regard to how action to conserve can lead to innovation—in his Bias for Hope (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), pp. 31-37. It seems that the French saying plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, more than reflecting common wisdom reflects instead the state of mind of those who—by function, status, aspirations, profession, or whatever—wish to believe in it.

19. Two classic statements on the distinction between authoritarianism and totalitarianism are by Juan Linz: "An Authoritarian Regime: The Case of Spain," in Cleavages, Ideologies and Party Systems, ed. Erik Allard and Yrjo Littunen (Helsinki: Westermarck Society, 1964), pp. 291-341; "Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes," in Handbook of Political Science, ed. Fred I. Greenstein and Nelson W. Polsby (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1975), vol. 3, Macropolitical Theory, pp. 175-411. The latter essay also discusses post-totalitarian regimes as a special category of authoritarianism.

20. In addition, the overthrow is not likely to bring about democracy, but some form of disguised "popular" dictatorship or guided democracy. The point will become clearer in the next chapter.

21. What response is chosen may depend—in addition to the consistency, cohesiveness, ideological makeup, and strategic preferences of the opposition—on the regime's perception of itself, its own resources, its own internal cohesiveness and extended reach. See Baloyra, Comparing New Democracies, pp. 40-42.

22. Indeed, notice how, with the crisis of communism, left and right have lost their historical connotations. Under Communist regimes, a "leftist" is almost anybody who does not compromise and wants radical measures against the Communist legacy of government. A rightist is a member of the regime—with the hard core constituting the extreme right wing.

23. Guillermo O'Donnell, who pays special attention to the strategic interaction between actors with different strategic attitudes toward the transition, also makes special room in his analysis for neutral and uncommitted actors. Mobilizing them in the right direction may be seen in some ways as the ultimate strategic move. See more recently, O'Donnell, "Notes for the Study of Democratic Consolidation in Latin America" (unpublished paper, Kellogg Institute, University of Notre Dame, December 1985).

24. A much jauntier view, limited to Latin America, of these and related matters is taken by Daniel Levine in his review of the work edited by O'Donnell, Schmitter, and Whitehead. Levine argues that greater importance should be accorded to the actual extent and weight of democratic commitment, and less to the view of democracy as a second-best choice as well as to the weight of nondemocratic players. Daniel Levine, "Paradigm Lost: Dependence to Democracy," World Politics 40 (April 1988): 377-94.

25. One exception is represented by consociational democracies, which employ preordained noncompetitive formulas in the allocation especially of politico-institutional positions. Noncompetitive formulas to accommodate various social and institutional constituencies are more likely to be found in dictatorships—especially authoritarian—that may use them in forging their coalitions. Because these formulas become stereotyped over time and often no prescribed rules exist to alter them, infighting and discontinuities with no clear exit may ensue.

26. Przeworski, operibus citatis .

27. I am following here my "Party Government and Democratic Reproducibility: The Dilemma of New Democracies," in Visions and Realities of Party Government, ed. Francis G. Castles and Rudolf Wildenmann (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1986), pp. 178-204.

28. Robert A. Dahl, After the Revolution? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), p. 12.

1. Nearly as important as adopting democratic rules is knowing how to adopt them: how to time them with respect to each other; what priority they should receive with respect to other processes, tasks, and reconstruction policies; how to employ them as leverage for alliances and coalitions; and what institutional and informal settings, what styles of interaction, to employ in processing them. The point is that, just as the rules make a difference, so does the way in which they are adopted. This is part of next chapter's topic.

2. This is very close to Dahl's formulation of the role of mutual guarantees in his postscript:

Opponents in a conflict cannot be expected to tolerate one another if one of them believes that toleration of another will lead to his own destruction or severe suffering. Toleration is more likely to be extended and to endure only among groups which are not expected to damage one another severely. Thus the costs of toleration can be lowered by effective mutual guarantees against destruction, extreme coercion, or severe damage. Hence a strategy of liberalization requires a search for such guarantees. ( Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971], pp. 217-18.)

3. Giuseppe Di Palma, "Party Government and Democratic Reproducibility: A Dilemma of New Democracies," in Visions and Realities of Party Government, ed. Francis G. Castles and Rudolf Wildenmann (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1986). I am using the Italian words because Italy is probably the best example of garantismo 's application.

4. The advantages of this early path are discussed in Robert A. Dahl, Polyarchy, chap. 1.

5. There are two points of difference between the German and the Japanese transitions. On the one hand, the American commitment to the reconstruction of Japan along democratic lines shows a "Jacobin" drive not found in Germany. On the other hand, and more important, Japan's old regime came to play an apparently subservient yet significant role in the reconstruction that has no parallels in Germany. On Japan see Arthur E. Tiedemann, "Japan Sheds Dictatorship," in From Dictatorship to Democracy, ed. John H. Herz (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982). As for the Italian transition from defeated fascism to democracy, it too had to come to terms with reluctant players in ways that I will discuss later in the chapter.

6. It should be clear, therefore, that I propose a less than comprehensive theory of crafting, offering a highly specific typology of crafting choices, their causes and consequences. Mine is more modestly an interpretive exercise that seeks to understand what securing a new democracy consists in. That is why I propose instead a few illustrative scenarios. Abstracted in part from the experience of instructive cases, these scenarios seem more appropriate for that exercise. Besides, I fear that a more comprehensive theory would convey the false impression that paths to democratization are finite. I prefer the risk of being incomplete.

7. In point of fact, improbable though the scenarios (at least the first two) and their positive outcomes may appear to some readers, the open question is whether they will stay improbable given the record of transitions. And the ultimate answer should be that—because learning, personal awareness, changing opinion climates, and other subjective factors come into play as time frames change—we cannot extrapolate from the present. We can, instead, speculate against it.

8. This and the other scenarios are reelaborations of scenarios presented in Di Palma, "Party Government and Democratic Reproducibility," sec. 2.

9. This was the position of the Marxist left in Italy's transition from fascism.

10. Guillermo O'Donnell and Philippe Schmitter consider a democradura a typical phase in the transition to democracy. I am interested in finding a shortcut in this phase. See O'Donnell and Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 40-45.

11. I will discuss in chap. 5 why postponements in the process of democratization can be a recipe for failure.

12. There are points of similarity between garantismo and the practice of consociationalism—at least in their intent to protect minorities, to seek mutual guarantees, to deny the prediction that people cannot coexist in diversity. However, consociationalism is in effect a noncompetitive answer—in some ways the opposite of garantismo 's randomness and uncertainty. In the previous chapter I suggest why in our scenario consociationalism may not be acceptable, save as an emergency measure limited to the transition, to any but the most reluctant sectors of the seceding right. In the medium run, it can create a stalemated political environment particularly deleterious to the civilian forces that are co-opted in it. Shielded and isolated from accountability and competition, they may lose touch with society. And because their political appeals or social composition may change, difficult renegotiations of the consociational terms may be needed. In sum, consociationalism may become a throwback to democradura . In a paper entitled "On Consociationalism in the Brazilian Context" (presented at the Conference on Constitutionalism and Democracy: Political Institutions for the Twenty-first Century, Brasilia, May 1987), I discuss at greater length this and other limits of consociationalism. They include the danger of arresting the rise of a socially rooted representative party system in countries where the problem for democracy is, not socially rooted partisan conflict, but weak parties poorly implanted in a context of social disaggregation and fragmentation. By comparison, garantismo may not treat, but neither does it aggravate, the inability of a society to represent itself politically.

13. Juan Linz has written repeatedly about presidentialism versus parliamentarism as a choice in contemporary transitions to democracy. I can do no better than paraphrase his argument. The winner-take-all logic of presidentialism; the fixity of the presidential terms of office; the fact that presidential government is not made of parliamentarians, does not need parliamentary support, but also cannot rely on it; and much more—all contribute to making presidentialism a rigid and awkward, rather than a strong, instrument for reconciliation in a new democracy. As an instrument for representation it forces a polarization of electoral competition and leaves losing candidates with no office. By contrast, in a parliamentary system there are no pressures for polarizing alliances to win the presidency. At the same time, appropriate electoral laws can safeguard the parliamentary representation of winners and losers alike and still avoid an excessive fragmentation of the party system. As an instrument of government, parliamentarism offers its governing elites coalitional flexibility, as well as the opportunity to endure, to resume action in parliament when out of office. Presidentialism has no such flexibility.

Nor is the notion that presidentialism introduces a beneficial system of checks and balances correct. A president can rarely perform the moderating role that a head of state performs in a parliamentary system. In the last analysis, he is an elected partisan. As to the presence, separate from the president, of an equally elected parliament, chances are that (unless president and parliament are expressions of the same majority) it will produce an often unreconcilable duality of powers, each appealing to its own source of legitimacy. Only in the United States, for reasons that go beyond the constitutional intent of presidentialism and have to do with the American party system and other American constitutional features, has presidentialism operated as a system of countervailing powers. See Juan Linz, "Democracy: Presidential or Parliamentary. Does it Make a Difference?" (presented at the Workshop on Political Parties in the Southern Cone, sponsored by the World Peace Foundation and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., July 1985).

Linz's remarks do not bode well for Latin America, where presidentialism has a long tradition. Repeatedly, in countries like Argentina (similarly in the Philippines after Marcos) presidentialism has contributed to the difficulties of democratization. More recently, we have seen attempts in Poland to use some features of presidentialism unconventionally, as part of a larger scheme to share power, by giving the presidency to the regime while opening parliament and government to the opposition. Notice, however, that this is an arrangement pursued within a predemocratic consociational context to forestall or slow down full democratization.

14. Powell provides evidence that garantismo cuts the cost of toleration. Comparing systematic evidence on presidential, majoritarian, and representational systems, Powell comments that the last system (a close version of garantismo ) has never used government powers to overthrow or suspend democratic processes. He writes: "The representational systems did, for the most part, work as their design suggests: bringing most groups into the political arena, giving them some policy making role, and emphasizing the linkages between all citizens and the democratic processes of government" (p. 224). Because his evidence also shows that in almost no representational system did democracy collapse because of civil war (exception: Lebanon) or electoral victory by the extremes (exception: Weimar), garantismo has so far worked better than presidentialism and majoritarian systems to keep democracy going. One cautionary note from Powell's evidence: "The representational parliamentary systems can be quite vulnerable to military intervention if the major parties cannot act together to support the system" (p. 225; emphasis added). See G. Bingham Powell, Jr., Contemporary Democracies: Participation, Stability, and Violence (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 224-25; p. 171, table 8-2.

15. Again, Powell reports evidence that representational systems help the entry of potentially disaffected groups in the democratic game. The groups turn their activity to legitimate political channels and away from protest—thus helping democratic stability. See Powell, ibid., pp. 206, 222-23.

16. The notion that institutions that have served an authoritarian regime (an army in particular) maintain a primary interest in running or supervising politics is often misplaced. On this point, with reference to the military, Juan Linz has written extensively and eloquently. See for example his "Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes," in Handbook of Political Science , vol. 3, ed. Fred I. Greenstein and Nelson W. Polsby (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1975). Another important contribution focused on the role of the military in the transitions is Alfred Stepan, Rethinking Military Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).

17. Conversely, if democratic actors do not move to seize the occasion, festering suspicion and circumspection may prevail. I have already hinted at the need for democratic options to emerge quickly.

18. On the importance of this bandwagon effect for macrosocial change, see Thomas C. Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior (New York: Norton, 1978), chap. 7.

19. For further details on democratic reconstruction and the onset of garantismo , see my "Italy: Is There a Legacy and Is It Fascist?" in From Dictatorship to Democracy , ed. John H. Herz. See also Leonardo Morlino, "Del fascismo a una democracia débil. El cambio de régimen en Italia (1939-1948)," in Transición a la democracia en el sur de Europa y América Latina , ed. Julian Santamaria (Madrid: Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas, 1981).

20. Interview conducted by Donald Share in January 1982 and reported in his "Two Transitions: Democratization and the Evolution of the Spanish Socialist Left," West European Politics 8 (January 1985): 92.

21. Giuseppe Di Palma, "Founding Coalitions in Southern Europe: Legitimacy and Hegemony," Government and Opposition 15 (Spring 1980): 162.

22. Such a change of practices is much more difficult in the first scenario. This does not make a democracy that emerges from that scenario necessarily weaker, but we will see that it makes the mechanisms of performance and survival different.

23. I have been cautioned by some colleagues that deriving scenarios from reality only to reapply them to reality, is a methodological abomination: nothing is explained. But whether scenarios are first inspired by actual occurrences or by a set of axioms is not of great relevance. The real point is what scenarios, however derived, are good for. Assuredly, they are never tools for systematic prediction of all occurrences. They are, as already stated (n. 6), tools for interpreting/explaining limited and bounded ranges of occurrences. That is why I assign great importance to their internal plausibility. There is, therefore, no reason for disappointment. Even if they are of concrete derivation, this does not demote scenarios to a theoretically barren restatement of actual occurrences. They are still designed, and can still be employed, to transform concrete and apparently linear events into contingencies. Thus, scenarios are models or abstractions—not narrative, or theory, but a guide, and one that needs retranslation when applied again to reality. See on this point, A. Feit, "Insurgency in Organizations: A Theoretical Analysis," General Systems 14 (1969): 157.

Max Gluckman (in Politics, Law and Ritual in Tribal Society [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965], p. 286) writes that each radical change results from a unique complex of many events that can be understood only through narrative. Scenarios are a guide through that narrative. Thus, one could adapt our "Spanish" scenario to make sense of transitions in other cases where democratization is taken up by the old regime—for example, South Korea. One interesting development in South Korea's transition was the reaction of newly elected president Roh Tae Woo to the unexpected defeat of the presidential party in the parliamentary elections of spring 1988. Despite presidentialism and its prerogatives—which, we have seen, raise potential obstacles to democratization—the new president chose to bolster the role of parliament by seeking greater cooperation with the opposition parties and by removing hard-liners from his government. This recalls the comment in the text, promoted by the Spanish case, that reformers coming from the old regime need the support of the forces to their left, and that such support carries political sacrifices. That need is clearer when those forces gather strength and electoral legitimacy.

24. The major point on which Spain departs from the scenario is that, the transition over, the party that controlled it suffered a devastating setback. Not only was the Democratic Center Union (UCD) replaced in government by the Socialists; it has practically disappeared from the electoral map (without another moderate party fully replacing it). According to Richard Gunther's persuasive interpretation, the success of the party in mastering the transition explains its demise. Not geared for normal party politics, but rather to making democracy a success, the party exhausted itself on the latter task. See his "El Hundimiento de UCD," in Crisis y Cambio: Electores y Partidos en la España de los Años Ochenta , ed. Juan Linz and José Montero (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Constitutionales, 1986). See also Richard Gunther, Giacomo Sani, and Goldie Shabad, eds., Spain after Franco: The Making of a Competitive Party System (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988).

25. The literature on the Spanish transition—both articles and books—is overabundant. In addition to the books just cited, which offer a thoroughly researched and documented retrospective, see also Donald Share, The Making of Spanish Democracy (New York: Praeger, 1986), which offers an analysis close in many ways to mine.

26. A populist left can denounce the limits of mere electioneering, but it may not be able/willing to ban elections; for most people elections are still an essential and coveted expression of mass politics.

27. Portugal not being as much a success story as Spain must be one reason why the literature on the Portuguese transition is not as abundant. Two useful collections are Lawrence S. Graham and Douglas Wheeler, eds., In Search of Modern Portugal: The Revolution and Its Consequences (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983); Lawrence S. Graham and Harry M. Makler, eds., Contemporary Portugal: The Revolution and Its Antecedents (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979).

1. Juan Linz, ''Il fattore tempo nei mutamenti di regime," Teoria Politica 2, no. 1 (1986): 16-18.

2. On elections in postauthoritarian regimes see a number of contributions in Myron Weiner and Ergun Ozbudun, eds., Competitive Elections in Developing Countries (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1987).

3. I am leaving aside for the moment the question of what it takes concretely to convince secessionists to abandon their natural inclination for caution and to transact a speedier democratization. Understanding the costs of caution may not be sufficient.

4. I am stressing early elections as an important signal, but secessionist governments can give other signals of their good faith. A clear one is the willingness of the government to embark on a constitution-making process, co-opting on the way other political forces. As we saw in last chapter's "Spanish" scenario of a transition directed from above, such a transition not only recommends that garantista rules be adopted but also recommends that, in keeping with their spirit, the rules be crafted in cooperation.

5. Larry Diamond makes a stronger case for the capacity of liberalization to alleviate skepticism and for the virtues of gradual transitions. See his "Beyond Authoritarianism and Totaliarianism: Strategies for Democratization," Washington Quarterly , 12 (Winter 1989): 141-63.

6. The equally supervised but faster and more clearly committed Spanish transition has avoided those pitfalls. See the contrast in Donald Share and Scott Mainwaring, "Transition from Above: Democratization in Brazil and Spain," in Political Liberalization in Brazil , ed. Wayne A. Selcher (Boulder: Westview, 1988). Terry Karl refers specifically to Brazil in her argument that pacts and "impositions" (transitions unilaterally guided from above) are the only available options in Latin America. Here assessment in convincing. But the costs of slowness, not a necessary ingredient of imposition, remain. See Terry Karl, "Dilemmas of Democratization in Latin America'' (paper presented at the Conference on Latin America at the Threshold of the 1990s, Beijing, June 8-16, 1988).

7. On elections in El Salvador see Terry Karl, "Imposing Consent: Elections versus Democratization in El Salvador," in Elections in Latin America in the 1980s , ed. Paul Drake and Eduardo Silva (San Diego: Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego, 1985).

8. In his paper on transitions ("Transitions to Democracy," Comparative Politics 2 [April, 1970]: 337-63), Dankwart Rustow argues both sides of the argument. He argues that transitions are not completed and democracy is not safe without a final phase of habituation lasting at least one generation. As he puts it, a democracy's "conspicuous failure to resolve some urgent political question ... early in the habituation phase ... may prove fatal" (p. 359). But he also argues that habituation only follows a decisional phase in which formal democratic rules are clearly instituted and made operational. It is the concrete operation of these rules that makes habituation possible, indeed likely—not vice versa.

9. The borderline is not always clear. Street demonstrations may be meant, not to rock democratization, but to influence it. Yet they may produce the former effect by raising the risk of conservative backlashes. The ultimate criterion is not behavioral motivations but effects—whether or not intended. Naturally, to complicate matters, political actors concerned with disruption must often anticipate whether certain behaviors will be disruptive, and will use the opportunity to prejudge the case.

10. O'Donnell and Schmitter discuss sequences, but their notion of a military pact is different from mine. See Guillermo O'Donnell and Philippe Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), chap. 4.

11. The assumption is too broad to be more than indicative. I let it stand for purposes of economy. Neither the bourgeoisie nor the political right is a homogeneous category. Nor, in a transition context of shifting alliances, are the significance and consequences of such identification that firm and predictable.

12. The problems of accommodating business, responding to labor demands, and dealing with economic downturns in a capitalist context are salient in southern European and especially Latin American transitions. They are less salient in the newly industrializing countries of Asia. On Latin America, see John Sheahan, "Economic Policies and the Prospects for Successful Transition from Authoritarian Rule in Latin America," in Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Comparative Perspectives , ed. O'Donnell, Schmitter, and Whitehead (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); and Barbara Stallings and Robert Kaufman, eds., Debt and Democracy in Latin America (Boulder: Westview, 1989).

13. Again, the contrast between the Spanish and the Brazilian transition is instructive. In Spain, economic pacts (the Pactos de la Moncloa ) were struck at the beginning of the constitution-making period. In Brazil, protracted wrangling over constitutional issues induced the political parties to stall action on the debt issue until after the approval of the constitution. On the point, see, for Brazil, in addition to the references above, Eul-Soo Pang, "Debt, Adjustment, and Democratic Cacophony in Brazil," in Debt and Democracy , ed. Stallings and Kaufman.

14. Franklin Adler argues that one reason fascism appealed more strongly to Italian landowners than to industrialists was that the former lacked cohesive business associations for dealing more effectively with labor pressures and economic downturns in a democratic context. See Franklin H. Adler, "Italian Industrialists from Liberalism to Fascism" (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1980).

15. One of the best historical illustrations of a constitutional tradition cast in an autocratic mold is the nineteenth-century German rechtsstaat . Public law under the rechtsstaat claimed a distinctive socioscientific role in the search for and definition of the collective welfare. Other constitutional traditions, though anchored to the same legal-rational core, followed more liberal paths. On the contrast between constitutional traditions, see Guido De Ruggiero, The History of European Liberalism (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1981).

16. The coincidence of interests, however, holds much less when transitions occur in countries where the state has no history of autonomy and impersonality, but one instead of primitive parasitism. Thus, for instance, in the dynastic or military patrimonial regimes of the Middle East and Central America, where public functions are privatized and the state operates intermittently, the offer of legal-rational guarantees under democracy holds limited appeal for the state apparatus. What avenues are open to democracy in such regimes is a matter for analysis in the last chapter.

17. Research on contemporary Latin America, and Brazil in particular, offers good evidence that business often had only ad hoc, sporadic, and individualized access to authoritarian governments and their policy processes, that this negatively affected its associationism, and that business has therefore played a role in the growing public resentment against those governments. These points are treated for Brazil in Ben Ross Schneider, "Framing the State: Economic Policy and Political Representation in Post-Authoritarian Brazil," in State and Society in Brazil: Continuities and Changes , ed. John Wirth et al. (Boulder: Westview, 1987); and Fernando Enrique Cardoso, Autoritarismo e Democratização (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1975), and "Entrepreneurs and the Transition Process: The Brazilian Case," in Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Latin America , ed. O'Donnell, Schmitter, Whitehead. For a general view of business in the democratic transitions of Latin America, see Sylvia Maxfield, "National Business, Debt-Led Growth and Political Transition in Latin America," in Debt and Democracy , ed. Stallings and Kaufman.

18. See on these points Adam Przworski, "Material Bases of Consent: Economics and Politics in a Hegemonic System," in Political Power and Social Theory , ed. Maurice Zeitlin (Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1980), vol. 1, pp. 25-28.

19. The term social contract in Eastern European literature refers to an implicit system of reciprocity between regimes and civil society, which developed after Khrushchev and in which the regimes obtain political support in exchange for a set of trimmed down but predictable social and material benefits. The term welfare-state authoritarianism has also been employed. See George Breslauer, "On the Adaptability of Soviet Welfare State Authoritarianism," in Soviet Society and the Communist Party , ed. Karl W. Riavec (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1978); and Walter D. Conner, "Workers, Politics, and Class Consciousness," in Industrial Labor in the U.S.S.R. , ed. Arcadius Kahan and Blair Ruble, (New York: Pergamon, 1979).

20. We may, on the other hand, take comfort in the possibility that trade-off tactics are not that urgent in other scenarios; for example, in the newly industrializing countries of Asia. There, models of economic growth, prevailing industrial and state-interest relations, the early dismantling of traditional agrarian relations, as well as the changing social composition of labor may ease the self-adaptation of corporate interests—whether of the state, business, or labor—to a nascent democracy. It follows that the conservative mood that accompanies most contemporary transitions should have, in these cases, limited social and political costs. In a way, the factors that account for the economic success of the newly industrializing countries are the same ones that ease class adjustment to democracy. On the other hand, the very fact that their regimes are not experiencing a crisis of material performance may mean that, on this aspect, there is no sufficient cause for political crisis. Interesting material on economic and class relations, and the intervening role of economic compromises, in the choice between democracy and authoritarianism is found in Hyug Baeg Im, "The Rise of Bureaucratic Authoritarianism in South Korea," World Politics 39 (January 1987): 231-57.

21. It should be clear from the thrust of my argument that the trade-offs would differ from the politically more cramped consociational practices discussed in the previous chapter. Though encompassing the negotiation of joint sacrifices, the trade-offs still include the creation of an openly competitive political system hinging on the recognition, indeed the fostering, of a popular opposition.

22. See on this point O'Donnell and Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions , pp. 46-47. It is worth remembering that divisions internal to labor and and business may hurt, but they also help by fostering defections by intransigents. They may also create bandwagon effects around sectors of labor and business that, feeling unencumbered by a unity yet to come, are readier to risk accommodations.

23. In addition to the essay by Sylvia Maxfield in Debt and Democracy , ed. Stallings and Kaufman, see in the same volume Ian Roxborough, "Labor: A Major Victim of the Debt Crisis."

24. In the article cited above, Larry Diamond, referring to the conditions for democratization "in countries like Mexico, or to a more extreme degree, the Soviet Union," writes that "the situation may be more delicate and intractable ... where the hegemonic party has spun a vast network of patrons, bosses and bureaucrats whose statuses, careers and livelihoods ... would be threatened by democratization" (p. 147).

25. For the way in which Eastern European regimes would prefer to understand the concept of democratic pluralism, see James P. Scanlan, "Reforms and Civil Society in the USSR," Problems of Communism 37 (March-April 1988): 41-46.

26. The case is argued eloquently and at length by Guillermo O'Donnell, who considers dealing with the social injustice and authoritarian relations that permeate Latin American society—in labor relations, education, the treatment of minorities, the approach to diversity—to be a central problem in the transitions of the region. See his "Notes for the Study of Democratic Consolidation in Contemporary Latin America" (unpublished paper, Kellogg Institute, Notre Dame University, December 1985).

1. Thus, a constitutional charter adopted by a less than composite majority may not be a good measure of agreement. In general, if the test of agreement is the disappearance of breakdown games, the matter of how to verify it—by what indicator or measure—becomes difficult. I treat such measurement problems at greater length in "Parliaments, Consolidation, Institutionalization: A Minimalist View," in Parliament and Democratic Consolidation in Southern Europe , ed. Ulrike Liebert and Maurizio Cotta (London: Pinter, 1990).

2. Albert O. Hirschman, A Bias for Hope (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), pp. 323-26.

3. Hirschman himself (ibid., pp. 31-33) remarks that the development of consonant attitudes may not always follow behavior, that cognitive dissonance theory may excessively deny human choice and freedom, and that human action has unintended consequences that may cause actors to break out of a path.

4. I am reminded here of Hirschman's distinction between voice and exit as quite different ways of responding to a deficit of collective goals. See his Exit, Voice, and Loyalties (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970).

5. In a formal theoretical analysis of decisional rules in democratic institutions, Douglas Rae shows that institutions that are more democratic do not necessarily produce greater satisfaction with individual decisions. See Douglas Rae, "Political Democracy as a Property of Political Institutions," American Political Science Review 65 (March 1971): 111-29.

6. Also, Spain and Italy are actually less than satisfactory examples. What I am discussing is democratic life following co-optative agreements that seek above all to remove breakdown games.

The Spanish agreement was defective on this score to begin with. Even so, Juan Linz argues that only late in the life of the Spanish republic was the point of no return reached; see his "From Great Hopes to Civil War: The Breakdown of Democracy in Spain," in The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Europe ed. Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). As to Italy, the more interesting point is that the agreement had not even been formed; hence the collapse of democratic hopes. This leaves the Weimar Republic, if even that, as a more appropriate example; though the fact that breakdown games were revived in earnest more than a decade after the founding of the republic, the fact that the rise of the Nazi party was also a late, sudden development, and the presence of other intervening domestic and international developments all raise questions about whether the brunt of the explanation for democratic collapse can be placed on "birth defects" and on the inherent inadequacies of the democratic game.

7. These points are amply analyzed in Guillermo O'Donnell, "Notes for the Study of Democratic Consolidation in Latin America" (unpublished paper, Kellogg Institute, Notre Dame University, December 1985). It should be further noted that, even in the presence of civilian prodding, the military may not wish to act against a democratic government. Despite a political climate that stimulated military resentment (postwar demobilization, a less than satisfactory peace treaty, continuous taunting of the army by the left), civilian prodding of the Italian army during the crisis that led to fascism had limited effects, especially at the higher echelons of the institution.

8. Peter McDonough, Samuel H. Barnes, and Antonio López Pina, "The Growth of Democratic Legitimacy in Spain," American Political Science Review 80 (September 1986): 735-60. This and other papers by the same authors reveal how complex and fluid are the criteria of legitimacy that people employ. They also reveal, in keeping with a larger literature, that the objects of political support are various and not so simply related.

9. Hence the use of pacts can equally be dismissed when comprehensive reformers, insensitive to the risks of discounting their adversaries, control the transition.

10. As implied in the last chapter, some yet unclear combination of the latter two seems to be missing in most of the present Latin American transitions. The combination is absent in part because of the pressure of socioeconomic emergencies, and in part because the animosity and discredit that have accompanied the crisis of the dictatorships make it difficult to enter into explicit pacts with their representatives.

11. See, for instance, McDonough, Barnes, and López Pina, "Growth of Democratic Legitimacy."

12. This limitation still left many reforms for the democratic governments to engage in. They touch on civil liberties, education, family and gender legislation, and so forth. In general, reforms of this type, aided by a growing popular sensitivity, hold great importance for removing a culture of traditionalism and authoritarianism at the micro level. They are much more accepted today than they were, even in European democracies, in the postwar period or between the two wars. At the same time, unless the reforms are introduced with a vindictive Jacobin spirit reminiscent of the 1930s, they do not seem of a type to rally the insurmountable opposition of injured corporate interests.

13. See n. 24, chap. 4.

14. Japan and Italy have not yet achieved government turnover. This does not mean, however, that the two democracies suffer from a problem of legitimacy.

15. Q. Your party is called socialist. What does that mean to you? ( Time , October 23, 1989)

A. Ask the Hungarians to help me on this one. (Felipe Gonzáles)

16. The proviso raises questions of whether this statement, and the illustrations that follow, can be extended to areas such as Latin America where the very ability to reach a democratic agreement seems to require pacts—yet pacts have recently eluded the region. I shall return to the point.

17. So, at least, I wrote in "Founding Coalitions in Southern Europe: Legitimacy and Hegemony," Government and Opposition 15 (Spring 1980): 162-89.

18. To understand the attitude of the left, it is important to keep in mind that, while pursuing a go-it-alone strategy, the transitional government, as a move toward full political democratization, also repealed postwar legislation that restricted the organization of "suspect" political movements. On this and other aspects of the Greek transition, see Nikiforos Diamandouros, "Transition to, and Consolidation of, Democratic Politics in Greece, 1974-1983: A Tentative Assessment," Western European Politics 7 (April 1987): 50-71.

19. In this case, political actors will in all likelihood show special forbearance in the period of institutional implementation, just as they demonstrate tolerance toward the openness of the democratic game and the uncertainty of its outcomes. In fact, when all political actors share a democratic bias, they may well be satisfied with a sketchy agreement, detailing only the broad parameters of the democratic game. Hence, the implementation of the agreement may safely accommodate alternative institutional and procedural solutions.

20. For the distinction between majoritarian (or Westminster) and consensus democracy see Arend Lijphart, Democracies: Patterns of Majoritarian and Consensus Government in Twenty-One Countries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984).

21. Yet for all the complaints about the imperfections of some constitutional charters, resistance to altering their delicate balance by legislation is, revealingly, almost the rule. When muddling through does not suffice, judicial review is a more legitimate way of settling contrasting interpretations.

22. Giuseppe Di Palma, "The European and the Central American Experience," in The Central American Impasse , ed. Giuseppe Di Palma and Laurence Whitehead (London: Croom Helm, 1986).

1. Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), p. 12.

2. Criteria and measures of consolidation are discussed in Guillermo O'Donnell, "Notes on the Study of Democratic Consolidation in Contemporary Latin America" (unpublished paper, Kellogg Institute, Notre Dame University, December 1985), and in Giuseppe Di Palma, "Parliaments, Consolidation, Institutionalization: A Minimalist View," in Parliament and Democratic Consolidation in Southern Europe , ed. Ulrike Liebert and Maurizio Cotta (London: Pinter, 1990).

3. See chap. 6, n. 2.

4. Guillermo O'Donnell, "Notes on the Study of Democratic Consolidation," p. 19.

5. A softer variant of this position is that deep-seated political orientations cannot be captured reliably by public opinion research. It is difficult to assess from a questionnaire or interview how permanent or transient a declared political belief may be.

6. See chap. 5, n. 8. The importance of time in the development of certain aspects of a democratic political culture is empirically analyzed in Philip Converse's classic work: "Of Time and Partisan Stability," Comparative Political Studies 2 (July 1969): 139-71.

7. See chap. 3, nn. 9 and 12.

8. See chap. 6, n. 7.

9. See chap. 2, n. 16.

10. We should not be misled by the ability of authoritarian movements to rally imposing crowds to commemorate dead dictators and historical events of the past regime. Symbolic attendance, the comradely return to a mythical and mystical past, the resurrection of rituals and paraphernalia, may have psychological more than political significance. Thus, I wonder how many of those who attend such communal affairs vote for the masters of ceremony.

11. For an interesting historical and cultural analysis of the reasons why, on the other hand, these developments in public opinion may still not amount to the formation of a democratic political culture, see Mihály Vajda, "East-Central European Perspectives," in Civil Society and the State: New European Perspectives , ed. John Keane (London and New York: Verso, 1988). Vajda also distinguishes between Eastern and east-central Europe. For a more discursive analysis that focuses more directly on the present diffusion of Western life-style models, see Orville Schell, Discos and Democracy: China in the Throes of Reform (New York: Pantheon, 1988).

12. Quoted anonymously in the New York Review of Books , June 15, 1989. Not knowing how to relinquish, in fact how to limit, power is not a promising predicament. China after Tiananmen Square is the most recent and dramatic case in point, but it is not the only one. If authoritarian elites do not know how to relinquish or limit their power, democrats might step in (the Philippines in 1986, Italy in 1943). But the dictatorship may just as well reassert itself (Poland in 1981). It is also true that there may be no better teacher of how to relinquish power than the growing realization that the time to relinquish it has come.

13. An interesting comparative analysis of the subjective vs. objective causes of poor performance and democratic breakdown is contained in the first chapter of Franklin H. Adler, ''Italian Industrialists from Liberalism to Fascism" (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1980).

14. The evidence on whether democracy promotes economic growth more than dictatorship is inconclusive when the question is addressed so broadly. Again, the important point is perceptions. Even though expectations about democracy may have decreased, the question is whether they are now higher than expectations about dictatorship. For contrasting findings about economic growth and regime type, see Adam Przeworski, "Party Systems and Economic Development" (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1966); William Dick, "Authoritarian versus Nonauthoritarian Approaches to Economic Development," Journal of Political Economy 82 (1974): 817-27; and Samuel Huntington and Jorge Dominguez, "Political Development," in Handbook of Political Science , ed. Fred I. Greenstein and Nelson W. Polsby, vol. 3, Macropolitical Theory (Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1975). See also chap. 2, n. 2.

15. If economic reforms require sacrifices, then sacrifices without political gains are self-defeating. If reforms involve economic liberalization that benefit at least some producers and consumers, then economic liberalization may spill over, and may have to spill over, onto political demands. Perestroika without glasnost is a bit like squaring the circle. The ultimate and already raised question—can Communist political classes afford and enact economic liberalization and a return to the market?—is still to be addressed.

16. More precisely, the relation between material performance and support may not be monotonic. Support may suddenly drop only when performance gets to be abysmally low, causing drastic cuts in already low popular consumption, or the maintenance of consumption at drastic costs to capital reproduction, or both. In these cases intervening factors of the type discussed in the text may offer little or no help.

17. The fact that citizens may attribute every aspect of collective performance to the government is a finding. The fact that analysts may do likewise is unfortunate. Yet analysts often employ aggregate statistics—rates of inflation or unemployment, balances of payments, budgetary outlays and deficits, gross national product, money supplies, rates of investment, prime rates—as quick indicators of how governments are doing. When such aggregates are applied to new democracies, we often discover, not surprisingly, that their governments perform poorly. Yet economic aggregates are only what policy analysts call outcomes, and outcomes have no clear connection with policies intentionally instituted by governments. Although policies have consequences that deserve study, starting from outcomes begs the question. See for a critical analysis centered on these points, Thomas John Bossert, "Can We Return to the Regime for Comparative Policy Analysis? or, the State and Health Policies in Central America," Comparative Politics 15 (July 1983): 419-41.

18. Convincing empirical evidence, focusing on Spain, on this and other following points is found in Peter McDonough, Samuel H. Barnes, and Antonio López Pina, "Economic Policy and Public Opinion in Spain," American Journal of Political Science 30 (May 1986): 446-79.

19. On the self-serving nature of liberalization, in contrast to democratization, Aleksandr Gelman, a member of the Soviet cinematographers' organization, writes colorfully: "Democratization provides for the redistribution of power, rights, and freedoms, the creation of a number of independent structures of management and information. And liberalization is the conservation of all the foundations of the administrative system but in a milder form. Liberalization is an unclenched fist, but the hand is the same and at any moment it could be clenched again into a fist. Only outwardly is liberalization sometimes reminiscent of democratization, but in actual fact it is a fundamental and intolerable usurpation." (Cited in Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Failure [New York: Scribner's, 1989], pp. 45-46.)

20. Of course, the capacity of each dictablanda to endure can differ substantially from case to case. A variation on the theme of endurance is the fact that in Argentina, always a difficult case for me to pigeonhole, the military skipped the dictablanda stage and relinquished power before finding a solution for its new institutional role; yet, because of this, the military still escapes the control of the competitive system. But these differences in the capacity to resist the democratic option are more appropriately dealt with in the next chapter.

1. Samuel P. Huntington, "Will More Countries Become Democratic?" Political Science Quarterly 99 (Summer 1984): 193-218.

2. Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Failure (New York: Scribner's, 1989), pp. 135-36. Brzezinski's broad statement is subjected to considerable qualifications, however, as his analysis proceeds.

3. Huntington, "Will More Countries Become Democratic?" p. 217.

4. Beginning in the 1960s, a vast revisionist literature has appeared, reassessing the concept of totalitarianism, its application to Soviet and East European communism, and Communist political evolution. My simple reference to a totalitarian/post-totalitarian dichotomy does not do justice to the richness and diversity of the literature. Still, there is little if anything in that literature that conceptually anticipates today's changes. An excellent review of the revisionist literature and classification of its theoretical strands is Andrew Janos, Politics and Paradigms: Changing Theories of Change in Social Science (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), chap. 4.

5. Jeane Kirkpatrick, "Dictatorships and Double Standards," Commentary 68 (November 1979): 34-46.

6. Among the few exceptions, we may want to include the newly industrializing countries of East Asia. There, the incentive to democratize originating in their economic progress may be offset (despite the countries' lesser problem in dealing with social inequalities and conservatism while democratizing) by the fact that their economic progress is singularly, though not necessarily, associated with their regimes. So why democratize? But even among these countries, there exist some (South Korea, Taiwan) whose greater international visibility and ambitions, whose role as models against their Communist counterparts, and whose greater politicization may weigh more heavily—both in creating resentment against the regimes and in inducing the regimes to seek reform. This means that international factors, with which I will close the essay, also enter into the democratic calculus.

7. Kenneth Jowitt uses the concept of neotraditionalism to describe the evolution of communism under Brezhnev. The interpretation is shared by other authors, and so is the interpretation of post-totalitarian trends as leading some Communist regimes toward military rule infused with nationalism, chauvinism, and praetorianism. Whatever concept or category we use, the argument I am developing stays largely intact. Accordingly, the regimes we are describing should have very few reasons to accept being dislodged. See Kenneth Jowitt, "Soviet Neotraditionalism: The Political Corruption of a Leninist Regime," Soviet Studies 35 (July 1983): 275-97.

8. A more detailed analysis of the points that follow in the text is found in my "European and the Central American Experience," in The Central American Impasse , ed. Giuseppe Di Palma and Laurence Whitehead (London: Croom Helm, 1986).

9. Even in the case of Spain, where the army both installed and temporarily ran the dictatorship, the new regime emphasized depoliticization and demobilization, and the state apparatus still presented itself as the historically impartial guarantor of a reconstituted legal order.

10. See chap. 5, n. 16.

11. For a recent statement on Central American dictatorships, see Enrique Baloyra-Herp, "Reactionary Despotism in Central America," Journal of Latin American Studies 15 (1983): 295-319. For the military component of parasitic Central American regimes, see Alain Rouquié, The Military and the State in Latin America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), chap. 6.

12. Interview published in the Italian daily La Repubblica , August 25, 1989. Emphasis added.

13. Dankwart Rustow, "Transitions to Democracy," Comparative Politics 2 (April 1970): 337-63.

14. There may be, on the other hand, less overstatement in the model of Central American despotism. In its case, vulnerability to a stalemate, when it finally sets in, may reflect the very fact that those who unscrupulously run these regimes with predatory intents may not be insensitive, when everything else fails, to a drastic fall in material rewards.

15. For criticisms, along these lines, of model-building in Communist studies, see Jerry F. Hough, The Soviet Union and Social Science Theory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), chap. 11.

16. The point is eloquently made in Enrique A. Baloyra, "Democratic Transition in Comparative Perspective," in Comparing New Democracies , ed. Enrique A. Baloyra (Boulder: Westview Press, 1987), pp. 44-47.

17. On the uses of elections in El Salvador, see Terry Karl, "Democracy by Design: The Christian Democratic Party in El Salvador," in The Central American Impasse , ed. Di Palma and Whitehead.

18. Nicaragua, not a despotic regime in the sense I have given the term, is included in the proposed settlement. A separate analysis of the Sandinista regime is not part of my task. In its place, it is worth pointing out the importance of the electoral pact that, within the regional settlement, the Sandinista government and the opposition parties have signed in the summer of 1989, for the purpose, also, of defusing armed violence.

19. See for example the treatment of El Salvador in the 1970s and early 1980s, in Enrique A. Baloyra, El Salvador in Transition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982). See also Piero Gleijeses, "The Case for Power Sharing in El Salvador," Foreign Affairs 61 (Summer 1983): 1048-63.

20. The importance of international referents and the way they have changed are underscored in Andrew Janos, "Social Theory and the Dynamics of Political Change in Communist Societies" (working paper, University of California, Berkeley, August 1989). Janos derives from the changes implications for Communist transformations more guarded than mine, and with different emphases.

21. Ibid., p. 16.

22. The best example is the repression of the Prague Spring, for attempting more than tactical domestic and global shifts.

23. The fall of Khrushchev can be understood in this light as the price for threatening, by the personalistic improvisations of his reforms, the status and influence of Soviet nomenklaturas at a time when their status and influence were at their functional peak.

24. On the social contract and its limits, see chap. 5, n. 19.

25. In China after Mao, problems with the internal cohesiveness of the political class, and with its loyalty to the leadership, have time and again been tackled by using one sector of the class to hammer others into submission. But the resulting pendulum of reforms followed by retrenchment exposes the unresolved problem of leadership succession and, underneath it, a persistent conflict within the political class and its leadership. China's toying with a market economy within autocratic government evokes the political model of the newly industrializing countries of Asia. But unless China can replicate the successes of the latter, the cohesiveness and endurance of its political class may be more appropriately compared to that of the less successful examples of bureaucratic authoritarianism—the examples of Latin America.

26. Why economic reforms should be easier in China is discussed in Brzezinski, Grand Failure , pt. 4, esp. chap. 16. Why China is more hesitant about politico-institutional reforms that affect the unity of its political class, and is resisting the spillage of economic reforms onto political ones, is another matter.

27. In Hungary support for a reformed party appeared, by all opinion polls, to hover in mid-1989 around 25 percent; in Poland, that support at the inauguration of the first non-Communist government appeared almost nonexistent.

28. By comparison, the single parties of right-wing dictatorships have less interest in their own reformed survival. In a democracy, these parties typically languish and their cadres are dispersed—revealing the exceptional nature of the dictatorships that produced them and the fact that the parties were contingent coalitions of disparate interests, less rooted in any popular groups and in the mass-based political and partisan traditions of their own countries.

29. Adjusting to a multiparty system did, and will, require a different understanding not only of a Communist party's external role but also of its internal organization and relations. The latter is especially delicate because it affects the ability of a reformed party to keep different functional components of the old party together under a new organization, more suited for competitive politics. But, judging at least from the interview reported earlier in the chapter, there is a surprisingly clear understanding among some Communist cadres of what this must entail. Answering a question in that interview (see n. 12) about future relations between his parliamentary group and the party's central committee, the leader of the Communist group in the Polish lower house comments as follows: "We do not want to impose ourselves upon the central committee, but we wish to be a pulling force, not just executors. As among Western parties, our members of parliament must be better represented in the central committee and the political bureau. A fusion between central committee and parliamentary group is not ruled out."

30. Jerry F. Hough, Russia and the West: Gorbachev and the Politics of Reform (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988).

31. If abandoned by the party, the only force capable of breakdown games would be the military. But, provided domestic tranquility and prudence in dealing with Communist bloc relations are sought—which seems to be the case in the scenario of reforms I am presenting here—it would seem that in Eastern Europe the military should have less interest in stepping in than it had in many or most right-wing dictatorships of clear military origin. We should also consider that "Bonapartism" has never sat well with European Communist regimes. Part of their founding myth is that the party speaks heroically for the nation and that, more than other institutions, the military is subordinate to the party and integrated within the regime. Thus, it is one thing for Communist leaders to recognize the military as one institution bolstering with other institutions a process of reforms guided by the party; it is another to accept that it preempt the party. The case of Poland, where an army general and head of the state offers himself as guarantor of a dialogue, is exemplary in this regard.

1. A more difficult variation on removing vetoes, of equal relevance to the Soviet case, is the lifting of a veto against the political autonomy of nationalities within a multinational state, favoring in turn radical changes in their political systems.

2. See chap. 8, n. 6.

3. In a much publicized article, Francis Fukuyama has recently announced the possible emergence of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. See Fukuyama, "The End of History?" National Interest 16 (Summer 1989): 3-18.

4. The Italian case, as I have already argued, should not be likened to that of the other two defeated dictatorships.

5. Instead, the occupying forces placed emphasis, especially in Japan, on the need to democratize society and the old state institutions—to avoid, by a combination of legal reforms, mass education and resocialization, a return to the past.

6. These lines were written well before American removal of the Noriega regime in Panama. The argument still stands.

7. Laurence Whitehead, "International Aspects of Democratization," in Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Comparative Perspectives , ed. Guillermo O'Donnell, Philippe C. Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), esp. pp. 10-19.

8. Ibid., pp. 17-18.

9. For a comparative analysis and data on the importance of external support in building and maintaining domestic violence (in particular, insurgency) see Karl Jackson, "Post-Colonial Rebellion and Counter-Insurgency," in Armed Communist and Separatist Movements in Southeast Asia , ed. Chandram Jeshuran (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asia Studies, 1986).

10. The vital importance of international factors in Central America does not diminish the ultimate role that domestic factors play, both in explaining and in treating the plight.

11. My colleague George Breslauer suggests in a personal communication that "the American posture in Central America [is] closer to the Khrushchevian or Brezhnevite (more the former) posture toward Eastern Europe. Earlier Soviet leaders, while willing to encourage East European emulation of the partial, post-totalitarian reforms going on in their countries, were more preoccupied with "anti-imperialism" in that region. ... Analogously, while the U.S. is willing to push for democratization of sorts in Central America, the price it is willing to pay toward that end is bounded sharply by a larger preoccupation with 'anticommunism' in the region."

12. Again, the remarks date a few weeks before the opening of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989.

13. Because Romania has discarded that fiction long ago, under international and domestic conditions that did not threaten the national dictatorship, the crisis of hegemony in the rest of Eastern Europe does not touch its leadership. Notice also how Ceausescu has moved closer to the patrimonial and predatory despotism of Central America. Thus, open repression/open conflict are more likely.

14. In part, a lesser attention to the hegemonic dimension leads other authors to different assessments of Chinese vs. Soviet reform prospects. See Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Failure (New York: Scribner's, 1989), chap. 4; and Constance Squires Meaney, "Is the Soviet Present China's Future?" World Politics 39 (January 1987): 203-30.

15. Even if the Soviet Union possessed the economic capabilities to retool itself as a trader in an internationalized economy—which it does not—it would never settle for such a role.

16. Cited in Louis Althusser, For Marx (London: Penguin Books, 1969), p. 120.