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Democratic Theory after Transitions from Authoritarian Rule

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䡬
Review Essay
Democratic Theory after Transitions from
Authoritarian Rule
Gerardo L. Munck
Democracy, Agency, and the State: Theory with Comparative Intent. By Guillermo O’Donnell. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2010. 280p. $85.00.
Democracy and the Limits of Self-Government. By Adam Przeworski. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
216p. $75.00 cloth, $23.99 paper.
Crafting State-Nations: India and Other Multinational Democracies. By Alfred Stepan, Juan J. Linz, and Yogendra
Yadav. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011. 236p. $60.00 cloth, $30.00 paper.
ecent events across the globe make clear the com-
R plexities of the politics of “democratization” and the
importance of developing nuanced and compelling
understandings of these complexities. In Eurasia, “Color
Revolutions” have given way to democratic disappoint-
ments and “authoritarian regimes.” In north Africa, an
unanticipated upsurge of democratic movements has felled
autocrats in Tunisia and Egypt, but the political outcomes
of these “transitions” are very much in doubt. Contempo-
rary political science has developed an elaborate vocabu-
lary for understanding such processes. And this vocabulary
owes a great deal to a small group of scholars—Juan Linz,
Guillermo O’Donnell, Philippe Schmitter, Alfred Stepan
and Adam Przeworksi—who helped to lay the theoretical
foundations of our current understanding of politics around
the globe.
The publication of three new books by these authors
offers an opportunity both to reflect on the enduring con-
tribution of the distinctive approach to democratization
that they helped pioneer in the course of studying the
democratic transitions of the last quarter of the twentieth
century, and to consider further developments in the think-
ing of these scholars as they reflected on the new political
realities of the 1990s and 2000s. In this review essay, I will
present an overview of their distinctive approach to the
study of democratization and then discuss their recent
books in light of this account. My basic point is a simple
Gerardo L. Munck is professor at the School of Inter-
national Relations at USC. He would like to thank Abra-
ham Lowenthal, Sebastián Mazzuca, Guillermo O’Donnell
and Adam Przeworski for their comments. He also owes a
special thanks to Jeffrey Isaac for his extensive constructive
suggestions.
doi:10.1017/S1537592711000600
䡬
one: These scholars have generated many fundamental
insights, and their key texts are indispensible references in
current democratic theory.
Establishing a New Baseline: On
Research Questions, Explanations,
and Testing 䡬
Theorizing about democracy has a long history, from the
ancient writings of Plato, Aristotle, and Thucydides to the
European social contract writers of the early modern period
to the seminal nineteenth-century writings of John Stuart
Mill, Karl Marx, and Alexis de Tocqueville. In the early part
of the twentieth century, a more empirical approach emerged,
informed by the ascendancy of the new social scientific sen-
sibility and pioneered by writers such as Max Weber, Rob-
erto Michels, and Joseph Schumpeter. This approach was
central for the initiators of the behavioral revolution in the
United States, and theorists such as Robert Dahl, Gabriel
Almond, Barrington Moore, Seymour Martin Lipset, Arend
Liphart, and Stein Rokkan further developed an empirical
theory of democracy, in close conjunction with the theory
of modernization. This intellectual history is well known,
and it laid the foundations for contemporary political sci-
ence scholarship on democracy and democratization.
At the same time, contemporary political science would
be unimaginable without the seminal contributions that
emerged from the Woodrow Wilson Center project on
“Transitions from Authoritarian Rule.” 1 This project, the
brainchild of O’Donnell and Schmitter,2 began with three
conferences, in 1979, 1980, and 1981, that gathered many
of the world’s most distinguished scholars of democracy,
including Dahl, Linz, Przeworski, Fernando Henrique Car-
doso, and Albert Hirschman. And the final product of
this project, the four-volume Transitions from Authoritar-
ian Rule, and especially volume 4 of this work, O’Donnell
June 2011 | Vol. 9/No. 2 333
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Review Essay | Democratic Theory after Transitions from Authoritarian Rule
and Schmitter’s Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain
Democracies, 3 became the first major statement on the
“third wave” of democratic changes that unfolded in the
wake of the overthrow of the Portuguese fascist dictator-
ship in 1974.
Reflecting the rapidly changing world of the last quar-
ter of the twentieth century, this new research on democ-
racy soon expanded beyond the initial concern with
democratic transitions in Latin America and Southern
Europe, incorporating all three regions of what was still
known as the Third World and eventually including the
communist world in the East. Going beyond the question
of democratic transitions, but still focused on contempo-
rary developments, attention increasingly turned to the
consolidation, or more precisely the durability, of the new
democracies that flourished around the world. Further-
more, as time went on, the link between democracy and
economic reforms gained prominence, multiple dimen-
sions of the state were addressed, and nationalism and
religion entered into the picture.
As the twentieth century was coming to a close, the
world was changing rapidly, and scholars were trying to
make sense of these changes in real time. A wealth of new
research on democracy was published, including the results
of various collective projects,4 and influential books such
as Przeworski’s Democracy and the Market, Linz and Stepan’s
䡬 Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation, and
Przeworski et al.’s Democracy and Development. 5 And a
new baseline for research on democracy was established.
Framing the Research Questions
One element of this new baseline concerns the outcome
to be explained. In this regard, this new literature helped
to cement an emerging consensus regarding the concept
of democracy. The question “What is democracy?” is a
matter of continuing discussion, as I will address below.
Nonetheless, building on Dahl’s earlier work, O’Donnell
and Schmitter’s emphasis on the “consensus in the con-
temporary world” regarding the status of a “procedural
minimum” as a “necessary” feature of political democracy
was valuable.6 It helped to specify the outcome that called
for an explanation in terms that made sense to researchers
interested in a diverse set of countries at a time when
doubts about such a procedural minimum were still raised
in some quarters. And it provided a much needed concep-
tual anchor for empirical research.
Relatedly, this new literature helped establish the impor-
tance of disaggregating the problematic of democracy into
distinct questions in an organized fashion. At the broadest
level, understanding the conditions of democracy was seen
as hinging on two distinct questions: (1) What are the con-
ditions for a transition from some form of authoritarian-
ism to democracy? and (2) What are the factors that account
for the durability or endurance of democracy? In turn, the
334 Perspectives on Politics
䡬
first question was disaggregated into two questions, about
the conditions for a transition from authoritarianism and
for a transition to democracy. That is, the overarching
research question—What explains democracy?—was bro-
ken down into component parts that were both amenable
to more careful analysis and explicitly linked together.
Again, these were not new ideas. In particular, Dank-
wart Rustow had earlier introduced the distinction between
a theory of democratic transitions and a theory of the
stability of democracy.7 But, in stressing the possible asym-
metry between processes of transition to democracy and
the breakdown of democracy, O’Donnell and Schmitter
highlighted the need to consider the possibility that ques-
tions about the origins and the durability of democracy
might call for different answers. Moreover, by underscor-
ing that a theory of the demise of authoritarian rule is not,
by itself, a theory of democratic transitions, and by clari-
fying that liberalization is not the same as democratiza-
tion and can result rather in a liberalized autocracy
(dictablanda) or a limited democracy (democradura),
O’Donnell and Schmitter spelled out the explanatory chal-
lenges with uncanny lucidity.8
While O’Donnell and Schmitter’s way of framing the
research on democratization has not, to be sure, been adopted
by all, it dramatically transformed scholarship on democ-
racy. The consensus around the procedural minimum of
democracy has broadened. In addition, more and more
scholars distinguish between processes of transition to
democracy and breakdowns of democracy. For example,
Ruth Berins Collier explicitly distinguishes the origins from
the endurance of democracy and has devoted considerable
attention to the task of identifying the threshold countries
must cross in a democratic transition.9 Charles Tilly simi-
larly places the distinction between processes of democra-
tization and “de-democratization” at the heart of his analysis,
and repeatedly highlights the asymmetry between these two
processes.10 And Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson’s
“unified theory of democracy” centers on the challenge of
providing an explanation that can account for both the ori-
gins and the durability of democracy.11 At the same time,
the importance of distinguishing transitions from author-
itarianism and transitions to democracy is at the heart of
the large new literature on “hybrid regimes,” that is, regimes
that combine features of authoritarianism and democracy
and thus occupy a grey zone between clearly authoritarian
and democratic systems.12 In all of these respects, the impact
of the Woodrow Wilson Center project on transitions on
the framing of research was profound.
Theorizing Political Dynamics
A second element of the new baseline established in the
new phase of research on democracy concerns the devel-
opment of explanatory theories. The literature on demo-
cratic transitions, and in particular O’Donnell and
䡬
| |
䡬
Schmitter’s book and Przeworski’s early work on transi-
tions,13 broke with the focus on macrosocietal forces that
figured prominently in the earlier works of Lipset and
Moore and in other classic books.14 The reason for this
shift in approach, as the instigators of this shift have
acknowledged,15 was largely political rather than purely
scientific. In Przeworski’s words, in the older literature,
outcomes were “uniquely determined by [macrosocietal]
conditions, and history . . . [went] on without anyone
ever doing anything.” 16 That is, the prevailing macroso-
cietal theories of the 1960s and 1970s were seen as overly
deterministic and hence offering no guidance to political
actors or, even worse, seemed to invite quiescence. Indeed,
the political reading of these theories offered by some schol-
ars highlighted that many authoritarian countries lacked
the supposed prerequisites for democracy and that politi-
cal activity oriented toward promoting democracy when a
country was not ripe for democracy might actually be
counterproductive. The participants in the Wilson Center
project on transitions thus practiced what Abraham
Lowenthal characterized as “thoughtful wishing,” 17 reject-
ing “structural determinism,” unabashedly embracing
democracy as a positive normative value, and searching
for realistic possibilities to foster democracy.
If the break with prevailing macrosocietal theories in
this new literature was largely politically driven, the alter-
native theoretical approach that these writers offered stands
on its own merits. The new theorizing focused on process,
drew attention to both state actors and societal actors, and
analyzed the choices made by these actors. Rejecting struc-
turalist determinism, O’Donnell and Schmitter argued
that political outcomes were “underdetermined” from the
perspective of standard macrostructural factors, since polit-
ical outcomes were contingent on the strategic choices of
actors and, most critically, because key characteristics of
the relevant actors such as their power were not givens but
rather were affected by their choices and underwent sig-
nificant changes in the course of the political process itself.18
In developing these ideas, O’Donnell and Schmitter
drew on Rustow’s earlier work on transitions to democ-
racy and Linz’s analysis of the breakdown of democracy.19
Przeworski, too, had earlier stressed, in his analysis of social
democracy, that “Classes are not a datum prior to the
history of concrete struggles” and that “politics . . . should
be seen as a contingent historical outcome of continual
conflicts.” 20 But the Wilson Center project brought these
insights into greater prominence. The term “endogeneity,”
used to denote explanatory factors that are affected by
the variables they are purported to affect, did not enter the
vocabulary of students of democracy until later, in the
mid-1990s. But it is not a stretch to say that the new
literature on democratic transitions was grappling with
the problem of endogeneity and suggesting, as Przeworski
put it later, that “everything is endogenous” and hence
that “[t]he only motor of history is endogeneity.” 21
䡬
The influence of this turn to political explanations is
most obvious in recent institutionalist scholarship that
treats political institutions as results of the decisions of
political actors.22 It is also evident in recent research that
revisits some of the classic macrosocietal arguments of the
earlier literature on democracy. For example, when Col-
lier revisited the debate about classes and democracy
launched by Moore, she explicitly included political elites,
both within and outside the state, in her explanatory frame-
work.23 Similarly, attempts to revisit the classic macroeco-
nomic and macrosocial explanations of the 1960s using
the tools of game theory highlight the strategic inter-
action among actors and the choices that elites in partic-
ular make in light of the redistributive consequences of
state policies.24 These developments mark the emergence
of a new political sociology and political economy of
democracy, more attuned to the duality of structure and
agency and to the endogeneity of societal forces and
actors.25
Testing Propositions
Finally, a third element of the new baseline established in
the new research on democracy concerns the empirical
testing of propositions and, relatedly, the use of the results
of empirical research for the purpose of offering policy
advice. The literature of the 1960s and 1970s was empir- 䡬
ical. But few authors used cross-national data, provided
any sort of rigorous statistical test of their explanatory
propositions, or paid much attention to matters of research
design when drawing conclusions about the causes of
democracy. These limitations, however, did not stop authors
such as Samuel Huntington from mobilizing arguments,
among other things about the economic prerequisites of
democracy, to support authoritarianism during the Cold
War.26
These characteristics of the literature on democracy
began to change, in large part due to the work of Przewor-
ski, starting with his 1997 World Politics article on mod-
ernization theory and his 2000 book Democracy and
Development. 27 These publications showed that by invest-
ing efforts in data generation, being attentive to endo-
geneity, and drawing on relevant statistical techniques, it
was possible to assess arguments in a much more rigorous
manner than was the case in earlier decades. They also
showed how careful academic research could be used to
unmask influential ideological arguments about democ-
racy and offer a more responsible basis for debate about
policy choices.
Specifically, Przeworski tackled the argument that,
because economic development supposedly leads to democ-
racy and authoritarian governments ostensibly perform
better in economic terms, the wise thing to do is support
authoritarian governments and their development projects.
He showed, based on a more scientifically valid evaluation
June 2011 | Vol. 9/No. 2 335
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Review Essay | Democratic Theory after Transitions from Authoritarian Rule
than had ever previously been conducted, that “we do not
have a shred of evidence that democracy need be sacrificed
on the altar of development” and that “democracy is . . .
neither inevitable nor impossible . . . [but rather] a con-
tingent outcome of conflicts among several organized
groups.” 28 Przeworski thus added force to the rejection of
the thesis about the economic prerequisites of democrati-
zation offered by the Wilson Center project, mainly based
on political considerations, by questioning the empirical
validity of the sort of political arguments Huntington was
known for.29
Much as with other changes introduced or consoli-
dated during this phase of research on democracy, not all
writers on democracy have embraced the new standard
concerning the testing of propositions, especially when
seeking to extract policy recommendations from research.
Perhaps more worrisome, several authors, including pub-
lic intellectuals Fareed Zakaria and Francis Fukuyama, have
recently resurrected Huntingtonian arguments cautioning
against the “premature” promotion of democratization.30
While such calls for postponing, demoting or containing
demands for democracy have increasingly placed empha-
sis on the need to secure political order and not just eco-
nomic development before pushing for democracy,31 these
claims about prerequisites of democracy are typically based
on a clearly selective reading of the evidence and certainly
䡬 nothing that approximates a robust causal finding.
But such impressionistic arguments fly in the face of an
increasingly sophisticated body of research on democrati-
zation driven by the commitment to collect cross-national
data and subject explanatory claims to a systematic empir-
ical analysis.32 A heightened attention to questions of mea-
surement and data generation has been at the root of many
important advances in proposition testing. Equally crucial
is the increased emphasis on matters of research design,
which Robinson refers to as the “causality revolution,”
which has gradually spread from the discipline of econom-
ics to the study of democracy.33 And though this more
methodologically self-conscious literature has not addressed
prescriptive questions and political arguments as much as
it could and should, it implicitly exposes the purely ideo-
logical nature of much advice offered in the name of pro-
moting democracy.
Opening New Research Frontiers: On
the State and Democracy
Beyond establishing a new baseline for research on democ-
racy, the post-1986 scholarship also tackled theoretical
issues that were not part of the agenda of the Wilson
Center project on transitions. One new line of inquiry has
addressed the question of the nation-state. Interestingly,
though the scholars who were part of the Wilson Center
project shared Rustow’s view that the economic and social
factors that figured prominently in modernization theory
336 Perspectives on Politics
䡬
are not prerequisites of democracy, they were silent about
Rustow’s argument that there still was a key prerequisite
of democracy, specifically that before a transition to democ-
racy can begin, national unity, understood as entailing an
established sense of national identity and fixed territorial
boundaries, must be secured.34 But, starting in the early
1990s, in the context of a resurgence of ethnonationalism,
this idea that the construction of a nation-state must pre-
cede democratization came under scrutiny and was increas-
ingly questioned.
A second new line of inquiry has addressed the more
purely conceptual question “What is democracy?” and
the associated normative question “Why should democ-
racy be valued?” The Wilson Center project had touched
on these questions, but only briefly. The focus had largely
been on making sense of a rapidly changing political
world and developing explanatory theory that could ori-
ent the actions of prodemocratic actors. And the urgent
conceptual task at the time was to specify a target for
immediate action that was widely held to be desirable—a
“minimalist” conception of democracy. Yet, also begin-
ning in the early 1990s, as it became a matter of conven-
tion to talk about the spread of democracy to all corners
of the world, some scholars started to reconsider the con-
cept of democracy that served as the anchor of explana-
tory theorizing and empirical analyses and, in effect, to
revisit Dahl’s conceptual and normative arguments about
democracy.35 The recent books by O’Donnell, Prze-
worksi, and Stepan, Linz, and Yadav that are the occa-
sion for this review essay thus significantly extend the
original Wilson Center approach.
State and Nation in Explanations of Democracy
The relationship between the character of the state and
democratization has long been central to the collaboration
of Linz and Stepan. These two scholars did some of the pio-
neering work on the topic in the 1990s, when the fate of
two ethnofederal states, the USSR and Yugoslavia, made it
abundantly clear that the state could not be treated as a con-
stant and that it was necessary to theorize the relationship
between the state, the nation, and democracy.36 These
authors have dedicated sustained attention to this complex
relationship over the past fifteen years, gradually broaden-
ing the empirical scope of their analysis and increasingly
highlighting the role of federal institutions.37 The result of
these efforts is their new book on the topic, coauthored with
Yogendra Yadav of the Centre of Developing Societies in
Delhi: Crafting State-Nations: India and Other Multinational
Democracies.
Linz and Stepan argue that when a process of democ-
ratization starts to unfold in a society that is multi-
national, political demands will likely not focus solely on
altering the way key government offices are accessed. Ques-
tions will also be raised about the appropriateness of the
䡬
| |
䡬
political unit, that is, over what territory and what pop-
ulation a state should govern. Thus, discussions about
democracy and the state cannot be divorced. Yet the stan-
dard answer—that only nation-states, that is, states that
contain only one nation, can generate the necessary degree
of trust in the major institutions of the state that a mod-
ern democracy needs, and hence every state should be a
nation and every nation should be a state—is problem-
atic. When a society is multinational, building a nation-
state is likely to be incompatible with developing
democracy, requiring the marginalization of important
sectors of the population and even a heavy dose of repres-
sion. Moreover, the difficulty of creating nation-states
through state policies has been increasingly demon-
strated in the twentieth century.
Seeking a way out of this quandary, Linz and Stepan
offer some interesting ideas. First, they introduce the con-
cept of a “state-nation,” characterized by multiple but com-
plementary political identities and loyalties, a high degree
of positive identification with the state, and pride in being
citizens of that state, which they see as more appropriate
than the idea of the nation-state for culturally diverse soci-
eties and multinational societies in particular. They also
suggest that democratization need not be incompatible
with a questioning of the appropriateness of the political
unit if multinational societies opt for asymmetrical feder-
alism, an arrangement in which some cultural preroga-
tives are constitutionally embedded for subunits with salient
and mobilized territorial identities, along with other con-
sociational features.
In short, emphasizing institutional choices in a manner
that is reminiscent of Lijphart,38 Linz and Stepan develop
a theoretical argument that counters Rustow’s view that
national unity is a key prerequisite of democracy.39 The
Rustow thesis, Linz and Stepan’s analysis implies, is based
on an unduly restrictive model of the state that does not
envision the real possibility that questions regarding the
political unit need not be settled before democratization
but, instead, can be tackled simultaneously. That is, Linz
and Stepan show how the question of the state can be
endogenized within a theory of democratization rather
than treated as a fixed background condition.
Linz and Stepan’s ideas about the relationship between
the state and democracy do not settle the question of how
to incorporate the state within a theory of democracy, let
alone arguments about whether the state is a prerequisite
of democracy. The viability of their alternative depends to
a large extent on the independent power of institutions, a
matter that they do not directly address.40 Moreover, when
Linz and Stepan focus on dimensions of the broad prob-
lematic of the state that go beyond the appropriateness of
the political unit, they more or less explicitly posit that the
state still is, in some senses, a prerequisite of democracy.
However, these other arguments, introduced without much
elaboration, are either unclear or questionable.
䡬
For example, Linz’s statement that “without a state there
can be no democracy” seems to be an overreach.41 Indeed,
as Schmitter has noted, “it is an exaggeration to claim that
without a state there can be no democracy.” 42 And Linz’s
statement is also problematic from a theory-building per-
spective. We might interpret it as referring to a defini-
tional matter, meaning that inasmuch as democracy refers
to, at the very least, the access to government offices,
democracy presupposes, as a matter of conceptual logic, a
state.43 But we might also interpret it as a claim about the
causes or consequences of democracy. On a critical matter
of theory, we are left wondering.
It is also noteworthy that Linz and Stepan explicitly
argue that the state is a prerequisite of democracy in the
sense that “democracy requires statehood,” that is, the
recognition of a territorial unit as a sovereign state.44 But
this claim is challenged, on empirical grounds, by the grow-
ing literature on the international dimensions of democ-
ratization. As Schmitter remarks, this literature, and
especially the strand that studies the vast array of activities
that have as a stated aim the international promotion of
democracy, is not highly theoretical—another reason to
be dubious about the strong prescriptions offered by some
authors regarding what Western governments should do
and not do in the name of democracy.45 Nonetheless, it
shows that starting in the 1990s, in cases such as Cambo-
dia, Bosnia, Eastern Slavonia, Kosovo, and East Timor, 䡬
the international community—and, more specifically, the
UN—assumed some or all of the governmental powers of
a territory and treated the transfer of power from an inter-
national administration to an elected government as the
key mechanism of an exit strategy.
To be sure, there is an inescapable contradiction involved
in efforts to impose democracy from the outside through
such international administrations of a territory. After all,
the inhabitants of these territories under international
administration did not elect their administrators. But the
essential point is that, in some cases, the restoration or the
gaining of sovereignty is the result of a process, not its
point of departure. As the experience in Kosovo shows,
not only can democratization proceed when the political
status of a territory is a central unresolved issue. In addi-
tion, democratization can be fueled precisely by the aim
of establishing a claim for sovereignty. Thus, there is such
a thing as democratization without a state.46
To sum up, Linz and Stepan shed important light on
the challenges of constructing democracy in the context
of multinational and, more broadly, multicultural soci-
eties. But there is still much work to do done on this
topic. Much hinges on how the relationship between the
concepts of the state and democracy is understood. Yet
scholars have barely begun to grapple with the various
ways in which the state—or more accurately, dimensions
of the state—might be considered as causes of democracy,
as consequences of democracy, and/or, yet another option
June 2011 | Vol. 9/No. 2 337
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Review Essay | Democratic Theory after Transitions from Authoritarian Rule
(raised next), as constitutive of democracy. Moreover, work
on data collection and analysis is sorely needed to turn
this discussion into more than a debate about theory. In
this regard, the paucity of empirical analyses of the state
compared to analyses of modernization theory is striking.
While the role of the state is thus increasingly addressed in
research on democracy, more theoretical and empirical
research is needed to develop this relatively new line of
inquiry.
Conceptualizing and Valuing Democracy
The second new line of inquiry that extends the agenda of
the Wilson Center project involves a reconsideration of
the concept of democracy and its normative value. In the
early 1990s, O’Donnell had already suggested that because
the conventional view on democracy is based on the expe-
rience of the rich democratic countries of Western Europe
and North America, the spread of democracy well beyond
this region in the last quarter of the twentieth century
gave urgency to a reconsideration of standard conceptual-
izations of democracy. Since then, he has tackled that chal-
lenge in a series of essays in which he stressed, among
other things, how the state and its multiple dimensions is
presupposed by democracy.47 This long process of reflec-
tion has now culminated in his book Democracy, Agency,
䡬 and the State.
Along similar lines, Przeworski has responded to the
perception that the group of scholars that participated in
the Wilson Center project “studied transitions to democ-
racy without asking questions about democracy” (p. xii)
by turning his attention to conceptualizations of democ-
racy. Indeed, since the 1990s, he has considered the mean-
ing of democracy but also the distinct question of what
should be expected from democracy and what, if any, are
the limits of democracy.48 And, much as in O’Donnell’s
case, this sustained research over many years has been
rounded off with a book, Democracy and the Limits of
Self-Government.
O’Donnell’s and Przeworski’s books are alike in many
respects. They both rekindle the link between democracy
studies and political and legal theory. They both ground
their analyses in sweeping historical overviews of the devel-
opment of democracy. And they both are so substantial
that they invite comparison with Dahl’s earlier landmark
work on the meaning and value of democracy. But these
two books also differ in ways that have significant impli-
cations for research and for policy debates about democ-
racy. Indeed, it is instructive to compare, if in a necessarily
superficial manner, the responses O’Donnell and Przewor-
ski offer to two fundamental questions: What is democ-
racy? And why should democracy be valued? And, because
the work of these two authors invites a comparison with
Dahl, it is also informative to draw attention to their sim-
ilarities and differences with Dahl.
338 Perspectives on Politics
䡬
Regarding the concept of democracy, the most obvi-
ous difference is that between O’Donnell and Dahl.
O’Donnell deliberately seeks to broaden the meaning of
democracy as elaborated by Dahl.49 He reframes Dahl’s
operational, pared-down concept of polyarchy as corre-
sponding to what he labels the democratic regime, and
then argues that a full understanding of democracy must
reach beyond the democratic regime and encompass, on
the one hand, a distinct set of rights and freedoms related
to the civil, social and cultural aspects of citizenship and,
on the other hand, the legal backing of the agency of all
citizens. But O’Donnell’s view does not necessarily clash
with Dahl’s. After all, Dahl not only goes beyond a strictly
procedural conception by introducing the idea that cer-
tain rights traditionally understood as civil rights are inte-
gral to democracy.50 In addition, he raises the possibility
that there are certain features—such as vastly unequal
economic resources—that are external to the democratic
process yet which can affect the proper functioning of
democracy.51 And, going even further, Dahl holds that it
is not out of the question to consider whether the very
principle that justifies democracy—the principle of equal
intrinsic worth in Dahl’s case, and the principle of agency
in the case of O’Donnell (pp. 25–49)—is upheld in realms
that are not directly linked to the democracy process.52
Dahl’s and O’Donnell’s approaches thus offer an interest-
ing dialogue on ways of extending the conception of
democracy.
Przeworski’s concept of democracy is closer to Dahl’s
than O’Donnell’s. His four key conditions of democracy—
equality, participation, representation, and liberty—
resemble Dahl’s quite closely. Moreover, in contrast to
O’Donnell, Przeworski keeps the focus squarely on the
process of collective decision making and on political insti-
tutions rather than rights. But Przeworski moves well
beyond a Schumpeterian minimalist concept of democ-
racy and even Dahl’s concept of polyarchy. Rather than
focus only on whether access to government offices occurs
through competitive elections, Przeworski considers what
governments can do and cannot do, and stresses how super-
majority rule protects vested interests. He places a heavy
emphasis on effective equal opportunities and the condi-
tions of political equality. And his warning that “we may
be seeing a new monster: democracy without effective cit-
izenship” (p. xiv) resonates with much of O’Donnell’s writ-
ings. In short, though the differences between O’Donnell
and Przeworski are significant, they both propose con-
cepts of democracy that go beyond the essentially mini-
malist concept used in the Wilson Center project on
transitions.
Regarding the value of democracy, Dahl and O’Donnell
hold roughly similar views. Dahl argues that a compre-
hensive set of benefits accrue to democracies. And
O’Donnell, as might be expected in light of his focus on
agency and emphasis on rights, sees democracy as having
䡬
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䡬
a number of benefits beyond the strictly political arena.
Nonetheless, Przeworski’s position is the most telling, in
that he makes an assessment of the value of democracy a
central research goal and considers various possible ben-
efits of democracy both from a theoretical and empirical
perspective.53 And, interestingly, Przeworski’s conclusion
about the potential virtues of democracy differs consider-
ably from Dahl’s and O’Donnell’s. Democracy, according
to Przeworski, is beneficial because it offers a peaceful way
of processing conflicts and embodies the ideal of self-
government of the people. But, he underscores, choosing
rulers by elections does not lead to greater economic growth
and does not assure rationality, representation, or social
and economic equality. That is, Przeworski advances a
considerably more modest rationale for supporting democ-
racy than either Dahl or O’Donnell.
Przeworski also offers a political counterpoint to
O’Donnell. O’Donnell (pp. 209–10) stresses that, though
democracy is preferable to its alternatives simply because
it provides a peaceful way of deciding who will govern, the
normative appeal of democracy extends beyond this basic
value. In contrast, Przeworski counters the common ten-
dency to think naively about the promises of democracy
by drawing attention to the limits of democracy, cautions
against holding democracy up to a standard no other sys-
tem meets and criticizing democracy for what it cannot
realistically deliver, and calls for a discussion of and action
on feasible reforms. In other words, a difference between
these two scholars—which actually makes their analyses
complementary rather than contradictory—is that
O’Donnell is especially attentive to the way political ide-
als serve as a motivation for political action and Przewor-
ski is particularly concerned with offering a guide for
political action shorn of unreasonable expectations.
O’Donnell and Przeworski’s calls for a broadening of
the agenda that has typically occupied students of democ-
racy have major implications. It is worth recalling that
most of the research that seeks to explain democracy relies
on a minimalist concept of democracy centered on the
formation of government. This approach ignores matters
such as the ability of a majority to change the status quo
and the role of money in politics, is fully divorced from
substantive as opposed to procedural considerations, and
ignores the ways in which the state itself might be consid-
ered constitutive of democracy. Yet these issues—frequently
referred to as matters pertaining to the “quality of
democracy”—are increasingly moving to the center of the
political agenda in many countries, raising new questions
about political strategy and complex tradeoffs among mul-
tiple values. Thus, this new line of inquiry invites students
of democracy to tackle two big challenges: the develop-
ment of a new consensus about the conceptual and nor-
mative underpinning of research on democracy, and the
generation of ideas about the new empirical and prescrip-
tive questions that are inevitably raised by the adoption of
䡬
a concept of democracy that goes beyond the minimalist
concept used in the Wilson Center project and indeed in
most of the empirical literature on democracy.
Conclusion
Democratic theory, understood as encompassing concep-
tual and normative questions as well as empirical and pre-
scriptive questions, is at the heart of the study of politics. It
also plays an important role in shaping how choices are
framed by civil society organizations, politicians, govern-
ments, and international organizations, thus helping to shape
public debate. As I have tried to suggest, the evolution of
democratic theory since the publication of Transitions from
Authoritarian Rule in 1986 has brought significant advances
in the state of knowledge. By shedding light on the com-
plexities associated with authoritarian breakdowns, demo-
cratic transitions, and the endurance of democracy; by
clarifying the role of political agents in actuating these
outcomes; and by revisiting the role of the state and the con-
cept of democracy, the study of democracy and democra-
tization has proven itself a vital and evolving line of research,
offering both theoretical and practical insight.
At the same time, the continued evolution of this
research program would seem to require not simply meth-
odological rigor and theoretical cleverness, but a willing-
ness on the part of a new generation of political scientists
to engage with conviction the big political issues of the 䡬
day. The advances associated with the Wilson Center
project and subsequent efforts to extend the original Wilson
Center approach were driven by an approach to scholar-
ship infused by a strong concern with normative issues
and a real sense of politics. Yet the growing drive toward
professionalization and specialization in the discipline of
political science, and the discipline’s tendency to reward
knowledge that is mainly technical in nature, makes it
increasingly hard for young political scientists to emulate
the kind of scholarship produced by Linz and Stepan,
O’Donnell and Schmitter, and Przeworski. This is an unfor-
tunate development well worth pondering. Indeed, it will
be necessary for us to give serious thought to how young
scholars can be enabled to follow in the footsteps of the
scholars whose work I have been discussing.
Notes
1 The full name of the project is “Transitions from
Authoritarian Rule: Prospects for Democracy in
Latin America and Southern Europe.” For recollec-
tions about the Woodrow Wilson Center project by
O’Donnell, Schmitter, and Przeworski, see Munck
and Snyder 2007 (288–94, 323–29, 465–69).
2 Fernando Henrique Cardoso also participated in
the initial discussions that hatched the idea of
studying transitions from authoritarian rule. But
his growing involvement in Brazilian politics, a road
June 2011 | Vol. 9/No. 2 339
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Review Essay | Democratic Theory after Transitions from Authoritarian Rule
that eventually led him to the presidency of Brazil,
precluded him from becoming one of the project
directors.
3 O’Donnell, Schmitter, and Whitehead 1986;
O’Donnell and Schmitter 1986.
4 Three collective projects during the late 1980s and
early 1990s that resulted in substantial contribu-
tions to this new body of literature deserve men-
tion. One is the project directed by Larry
Diamond, Linz, and Seymour Lipset, which con-
vened a large group of researchers in 1985 to ana-
lyze democracy in all three main regions of the
Third World. This project produced three large vol-
umes entitled Democracy in Developing Countries.
Diamond, Linz, and Lipset 1988/1989. The prom-
ised volume 1 never materialized, but the coedi-
tors did offer a brief overview chapter in 1990 and
a longer version of this overview in 1995, and
later on, they each provided book-length statements
of their views. Diamond, Linz, and Lipset 1990;
Diamond, Linz, and Lipset 1995; Linz and Stepan
1996; Diamond 1999; Lipset and Lakin 2004.
A second collective project, coordinated by Linz and
Arturo Valenzuela and launched with a confer-
ence in 1989, produced a two-volume work titled
The Failure of Presidential Democracy, which scruti-
䡬 nized Linz’s theses about the perils of presidential-
ism. Linz 1990, Linz 1994, Linz and Valenzuela
1994a, Linz and Valenzuela 1994b. Finally, the
Group on East-South Systems Transformations, led
by Przeworski and including many of the same
scholars who contributed to the initial Woodrow
Wilson Center Transitions project, met between 1990
and 1992, and produced books titled Economic
Reform in New Democracies and Sustainable Democ-
racy, along with a number of papers that appeared
as journal articles. Bresser Pereira, Maravall, and Prze-
worski 1993; Przeworski et al. 1995; O’Donnell
1993; O’Donnell 1994; Schmitter 1993; Stepan and
Skach 1993.
5 Przeworski 1991; Linz and Stepan 1996; Przeworski
et al. 2000.
6 O’Donnell and Schmitter 1986, 8.
7 Rustow 1970.
8 O’Donnell and Schmitter 1986, 3–5, 7–13, 18–19.
9 Collier 1999.
10 Tilly 2007.
11 Acemoglu and Robinson 2006.
12 Levitsky and Way 2010.
13 O’Donnell and Schmitter 1986; Przeworski 1986;
Przeworski 1991.
14 Lipset 1960; Moore 1966.
15 Przeworski 1991, 95–97; Woodrow Wilson Inter-
national Center for Scholars 2005, 2; O’Donnell
2010, 183–84.
340 Perspectives on Politics
䡬
16 Przeworski 1991, 96.
17 Lowenthal 1986, viii.
18 O’Donnell and Schmitter 1986, 3–5, 24.
19 Rustow 1970; Linz 1978. Another precedent, which
served as a point of reference for the Woodrow
Wilson Center project on transitions, was Hir-
schman’s advocacy of “possibilism.” Hirschman
elaborated this notion in the context of research on
economic development, but extended it to the topic
of democracy in a 1980 lecture. Hirschman 1971;
Hirschman 1986.
20 Przeworski 1985, 69, 4.
21 Przeworski 2010, xv; Przeworski 2004a, 168.
22 Leff 1999; Cheibub 2007; Gandhi 2008.
23 Collier 1999; Moore 1966.
24 Boix 2003; Acemoglu and Robinson 2006; Dunning
2008.
25 We still lack, however, a strictly political culture of
democracy. Indeed, the study of political culture
largely takes attitudes and perceptions about politics
as prepolitical.
26 Huntington and Nelson 1976, 23, 35–37, 42–43.
27 Przeworski and Limongi 1997; Przeworski et al.
2000. See also the earlier article by Przeworski and
Limongi 1993.
28 Przeworski et al. 2000, 271; Przeworski 2004b, 491.
29 Though Huntington wrote a book in which he
asserts that “democracy is good in itself ” and
presents himself as a “democratic Machiavelli”
offering “guidelines for democratizers,” his more
influential works offer a quite different message.
Huntington 1991, xv.
30 For example, Zakaria warns that countries that do
not follow the “capitalism and the rule of law first,
and then democracy” sequence will pay the conse-
quences of engaging in “premature democratiza-
tion.” And Fukuyama holds that “There is nothing
wrong in principle . . . [with] the idea that govern-
ments seek order first, then economic development,
and only later democracy.” Zakaria 2003, 55, 58;
Fukuyama 2007, 10. See also Mansfield and Snyder
2005. The Huntingtonian origin of these statements
can be verified by comparing them to passages in
Huntington 1968 (1, 7) and Huntington and Nel-
son 1976 (23, 42–43).
31 Huntington 1968, 1, 7.
32 For example, a key innovation of Przeworski’s statis-
tical work on democracy was the generation of a
new dataset explicitly geared to identifying transi-
tions to and from democracy. Przeworski et al.
2000, ch. 1. Similarly, Przeworski’s new dataset on
the right to vote made it possible for him to test
competing arguments about the extension of the
suffrage. Przeworski 2009.
33 Robinson 2010, 1; Angrist and Pischke 2010.
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䡬
34 Rustow 1970, 351–52.
35 Dahl 1956; Dahl 1989.
36 Linz and Stepan 1992; Linz and Stepan 1996, ch. 2;
Linz 1993. Also noteworthy among the early studies
is Laitin 1995.
37 See, among other writings, Linz 1997, Linz 1999,
and Stepan 2001.
38 Lijphart 1977.
39 Rustow 1970.
40 This is the same problem that affects Lijphart’s 1977
argument.
41 Linz 1997, 117.
42 Schmitter 2010, 26. See also Whitehead 2005
(4–7).
43 Przeworski et al. 1995, 13; Mazzuca 2010.
44 Linz and Stepan 1996, 17–19. There is ambiguity
again in Linz and Stepan’s statement. Sometimes,
they refer to the formal status of the state as a sover-
eign state, that is, whether it is recognized by other
states as a state. But other times, they refer to the
state in Weberian terms.
45 Schmitter 2008, 28–31.
46 Tansey 2007; Tansey 2010.
47 O’Donnell 1999, part 4; O’Donnell 2007.
48 Przeworski 1999; Przeworski, Manin, and Stokes
1999.
49 Dahl 1971, 3, 235–36; Dahl 1989, 222.
50 Dahl 1989, 167–83, ch 6.
51 Though Dahl does not include any socio-economic
features in his famous lists of “institutions” necessary
for polyarchy, he does argue that modern “corporate
capitalism” tends “to produce inequalities in social
and economic resources so great as to bring about
severe violations of political equality and hence of
the democratic process.” Dahl 1985, 60.
52 Dahl 1989, 167.
53 Przeworski 1999; Przeworski 2010; Przeworski et al.
2000.
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