Transitions to Democracy: Bibiliographical Essay

Lisa Anderson (editor)

1999

Bibiliographical Essay: The Genealogy of Democratization

Elke K. Zuern

The development of the literature on democratization has, with a few important exceptions, closely followed the lessons of these historical processes around the globe. Before the most recent wave of democratization began, in 1974, most writers on the subject spoke of democracy rather than the process of democratization; they focused their analysis on identifying the basic attributes of existing democracies, often comparing them to nondemocratic countries. After a number of countries in Southern Europe and Latin America underwent transitions to democracy, whether for the first time or for a repeat performance, the discussion moved to one of a process of democratization instead of democracy itself. Writers who addressed these regions stood in the forefront of a new and growing literature which sought to explain and also often encourage this process. By 1990, another dramatic historical change was evident. Growing numbers of states outside of the earlier transition regions were now experimenting with democracy. In Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa, authoritarian rulers fell or were pushed and not only new rulers but also new regimes were established in their place. By and large, the short-term results of these changes would not be fully functioning democracies but rather very imperfect attempts at such systems. At the same time, practitioners and analysts in those countries that went through the democratization process in the prior decades were now more acutely aware of the difficulties of consolidation. These events account for the extremely guarded optimism in the current literature on the prospects for democracy across the globe.

The following bibliography is organized to reflect these monumental changes both in the real world and in the literature which strives to unravel and explain complex democratization processes. It encompasses key theoretical arguments, incorporating a variety of different methodologies and perspectives, and draws examples from around the world. The list begins with some of the best-known works available to Dankwart Rustow when he made his path-breaking argument in 1970 and follows the development of the English language, largely American, literature, roughly decade by decade, from that point. It does not include any but the briefest mentions of democratic theory, nor does it include discussions of the workings of well-established democracies or the vast literature concerning the relationship between democracy and various forms of capitalism or socialism. It does not include arguments concerning corporatism and its affects upon democracy, nor does it address the important issues of human rights and transitional justice which are closely associated with democratization. These are all important topics, but remain beyond the scope of this book and this list. Also, while the following list does include discussions of the experiences of countries across the globe, it is not meant to cover all democratizing countries or all aspects of each of these processes. This task must be left to regional or country specialists. What this list does provide, however, is an overview of the changing state of the literature as represented by some of its most prominent works.

The first section of the bibliography includes articles and books published prior to Rustow’s (1970): “Transitions to Democracy” and the virtually simultaneous publication of Robert Dahl’s very influential Polyarchy (1971). Rustow’s article stands in stark contrast to the other works on this list; as its title indicates, it is the only work that addresses the question of a transition to democracy. While questions of modernization and development clearly preoccupied political scientists at this time, discussions of democracy tended to focus on defining democracy and its variants or identifying the requisites of such a system. Prominent scholars such as Seymour Martin Lipset (1959) and Philips Cutright (1963) employed statistical correlations to compare democratic societies with their less democratic counterparts in order to isolate these requisites. Rustow challenged these approaches. First, he distinguished questions regarding the functioning of a democratic system from those of its genesis; second, he defined only one background condition—national unity—and attributed far greater causal importance than his predecessors to the choices made by political leaders. Rustow also paved the way for future analyses of democratization by defining the various (though not necessarily sequential) stages of democratization.

While the value of Rustow’s early work is clearly recognized today, it did not immediately give rise to a new body of scholarship; most political scientists writing in the 1970s did not focus on issues of democracy or democraticization. Instead, Latin American scholars such as Guillermo O’Donnell (1973) pointed to the structural connection between modernization and what he called “bureaucratic authoritarianism,” arguing that the experiences of a number of Latin American states directly challenged earlier predictions of the parallel processes of modernization: economic development and the spread of democracy. Other prominent academics such as Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan (1978) challenged the determinacy of these structural models and instead applied elite-actor models to explain the great uncertainty surrounding democratic breakdowns. Scholars of other regions underlined the continuing and powerful role of the military in politics, and Samuel P. Huntington’s slightly earlier but highly influential Political Order in Changing Societies (1968) stressed the central importance of political institutionalization in developing countries and deemphasized democracy and political freedoms.

The next decade brought renewed interest in questions of democracy and democratization as the process that started in Southern Europe began to spread to Latin America. Scholars of these regions blazed new trails in working to understand varying processes of democratization and to draw lessons from them. Numerous publications provided important, in-depth experiences of one or a few countries. In contrast, the five-volume series edited by Guillermo O’Donnell, Phillippe Schmitter, and Lawrence Whitehead (1986) attempted to bring together the lessons of a dozen countries spanning the two regions. In the fifth volume of the series Tentative Conclusions About Uncertain Democracies (1986), O’Donnell and Schmitter laid out what they saw to be the patterns evident in many of the recent transitions. In contrast to their earlier work, these authors now turned away from structural conditions and followed Rustow in articulating the central importance of elites in bringing about transitions. This new literature developed in contrast to an earlier literature on revolutions which specified rapid and fundamental changes in both the state and society. In the case of democratization, the change was expected to be significantly more gradual: negotiations between opposing parties take time; the pacts that bring about the transition are signed between power holders and opposition groups, so that neither side gains all its demands while both make significant concessions. There need be almost no bloodshed as the masses take a back seat to government and opposition leaders, and those departing from power are more likely to be given a golden parachute than be forced to the guillotine.

While predictions for the success of these transitions in Latin American and Southern Europe were generally guardedly optimistic, the 1990s brought a new decade of greater trepidation concerning the consolidation of new democracies. These newer works addressed the difficulties of consolidation, or “habituation” in Rustow’s terminology, as well as new political and economic perspectives on democratization. Scholars interested in issues of consolidation underlined the fact that the mere continued existence of a newly democratized regime did not in any way imply the consolidation of democracy; the consolidation of democracy requires the building of a broad-based commitment to democracy, a delicate process which is threatened by the legacy of authoritarianism and, as Frances Hagopian (1990) points out, the political pacts made during transition processes. In volumes such as those edited by: Richard Gunther, P. Nikiforos Diamandouros, and Hans-Jürgen Puhle (1995), Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan (1996), and Mainwaring, O’Donnell and Valenzuela (1992), analysts pointed to the challenges to democratic consolidation: the continued political decisionmaking power of nonelected elites, including the military, biased electoral processes which skew the vote in favor of powerful constituencies, economic crises which threaten the stability of the democratically elected governments, the threat of military coups, partial judicial systems, and the lack of an institutionalized party system. Once again, structural conditions assumed greater causal importance in assessing the fate of regimes. The imperfect nature of these new democracies has led writers such as O’Donnell (1994) to call for more nuanced definitions and descriptions of regime types which would transcend the simple dichotomy of authoritarianism versus democracy.

The late 1980s and early 1990s also brought a large number of countries outside of Latin America and Southern Europe into the club of aspiring democracies. The lessons from regions beyond Latin American and Southern Europe came principally from states in Eastern and Central Europe as well as some states in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East; the experiences of these countries challenged many of the conclusions that had been drawn from the earlier processes of democratization. The former communist countries, led by Poland, pointed to the importance of the masses in bringing about democracy; in stark contrast to the general experiences of the earlier transitions, here, protest preceded transition. Transitions here were further complicated by the need to simultaneously transform both the political and the economic systems; authors such as Claus Offe (1991) demonstrated the contradictions inherent in such simultaneous transitions. The African experience also emphasized that elites would not always be the prime movers in the transition. Authors such as Michael Bratton and Nicholas van de Walle, in their comparative work: Democratic Experiments in Africa (1997), point out that almost all African transitions occurred only after sustained popular protest; the experiences of these states also challenge the notion that democratization will be the result of elite pacts. A number of Asian countries provided evidence that leaders could elect to transform a regime without a significant economic crisis; the experiences of both new democratic regimes and potential democratizers as discussed in James Morley’s (1993) edited volume and Minxin Pei’s article (1995) suggest, once again, that economic growth can and does contribute to the chances of and pressures for democratization; the verdict, however, on cases such as China is still out. Crossnational studies such as: Stephan Haggard and Robert Kaufman’s The Political Economy of Democratic Transitions (1995) as well as Adam Przeworski’s Democracy and the Market (1991), have provided analyses of the political and economic dynamics of transition across regions.

The empirical lessons of the 1990s greatly enhanced scholarly understanding of the dynamics of transition and consolidation, and contributed to interest in two additional, broad bodies of scholarship. First, actors in civil society, absent from much of the analysis of transitions in Latin American and Southern Europe, have now assumed a much greater role. The contributions of civil society actors in Eastern Europe, such as Solidarity in Poland, as well as the clear importance of civil society in the consolidation processes in Latin America have brought about a widespread resurgence of scholarship on civil society. Earlier works such as the edited volume by John Keane (1988) and the detailed work of Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato (1992) provided the basis for many important later works such as those by Marcia Weigle and Jim Butterfield (1992), Michael Foley and Bob Edwards (1996), and Stephen Ndegwa (1996). Robert Putnam’s influential: Making Democracy Work (1993) also promoted much greater attention to this level of analysis. Questions of constitutional choice and institutional design have also gained attention. As the transitioning regimes write their new, democratic constitutions, they offer models of what an ideal society of the future might look like and present challenges to future lawmakers and politicians to uphold their principles. Edited volumes such as those by Jon Elster and Rune Slagstad (1988) as well as Douglas Greenberg et. al. (1993) illustrate this trend. Institutional debates over the merits of presidentialism and parliamentarism have also drawn attention; interestingly, while many scholars of Latin America, such as Juan Linz (1990), stress the dangers of presidentialism for democracy, the leaders of the countries within these regions have almost universally elected presidentialism. Such discrepancies between academic theory and historical choices present a challenge to future scholars and politicians. Finally, the sharp distinction drawn by Rustow and his followers between theories of democracy and theories of democratic transitions should not discourage students of democratization from studying questions regarding the nature of democracy itself. A few discussions of democratic theory are included here; these works push readers to consider what is understood by democracy in light of the experiences of democracy and democratization across the globe.