Democratic Theory after Transitions from Authoritarian Rule

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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 complexities 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 disappointments 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. Contemporary political science has developed an elaborate vocabulary 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 contribution 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 thinking 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

one: These scholars have generated many fundamental insights, and their key texts are indispensible references in current democratic theory.

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Establishing a New Baseline: On Research Questions, Explanations, and Testing 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 sensibility and pioneered by writers such as Max Weber, Roberto 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 science 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 Cardoso, and Albert Hirschman. And the final product of this project, the four-volume Transitions from Authoritarian Rule, and especially volume 4 of this work, O’Donnell

Gerardo L. Munck is professor at the School of International Relations at USC. He would like to thank Abraham 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.

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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 dictatorship in 1974. Reflecting the rapidly changing world of the last quarter of the twentieth century, this new research on democracy 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 contemporary developments, attention increasingly turned to the consolidation, or more precisely the durability, of the new democracies that flourished around the world. Furthermore, as time went on, the link between democracy and economic reforms gained prominence, multiple dimensions 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 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 contemporary 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 conceptual anchor for empirical research. Relatedly, this new literature helped establish the importance 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 conditions for a transition from some form of authoritarianism to democracy? and (2) What are the factors that account for the durability or endurance of democracy? In turn, the

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 broken down into component parts that were both amenable to more careful analysis and explicitly linked together. Again, these were not new ideas. In particular, Dankwart 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 asymmetry between processes of transition to democracy and the breakdown of democracy, O’Donnell and Schmitter highlighted the need to consider the possibility that questions about the origins and the durability of democracy might call for different answers. Moreover, by underscoring that a theory of the demise of authoritarian rule is not, by itself, a theory of democratic transitions, and by clarifying that liberalization is not the same as democratization and can result rather in a liberalized autocracy (dictablanda) or a limited democracy (democradura), O’Donnell and Schmitter spelled out the explanatory challenges 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 democracy. 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 similarly places the distinction between processes of democratization 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 origins and the durability of democracy.11 At the same time, the importance of distinguishing transitions from authoritarianism 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 development of explanatory theories. The literature on democratic transitions, and in particular O’Donnell and

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Schmitter’s book and Przeworski’s early work on transitions,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 macrosocietal 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 scholars highlighted that many authoritarian countries lacked the supposed prerequisites for democracy and that political 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 rejecting “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 alternative 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 structuralist determinism, O’Donnell and Schmitter argued that political outcomes were “underdetermined” from the perspective of standard macrostructural factors, since political 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 significant 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 democracy 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

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 Collier revisited the debate about classes and democracy launched by Moore, she explicitly included political elites, both within and outside the state, in her explanatory framework.23 Similarly, attempts to revisit the classic macroeconomic and macrosocial explanations of the 1960s using the tools of game theory highlight the strategic interaction among actors and the choices that elites in particular 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 empirical. 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 Przeworski, starting with his 1997 World Politics article on modernization theory and his 2000 book Democracy and Development. 27 These publications showed that by investing efforts in data generation, being attentive to endogeneity, 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 democracy and offer a more responsible basis for debate about policy choices. Specifically, Przeworski tackled the argument that, because economic development supposedly leads to democracy 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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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 contingent outcome of conflicts among several organized groups.” 28 Przeworski thus added force to the rejection of the thesis about the economic prerequisites of democratization 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 consolidated 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 public 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 emphasis on the need to secure political order and not just economic 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 nothing that approximates a robust causal finding. But such impressionistic arguments fly in the face of an increasingly sophisticated body of research on democratization driven by the commitment to collect cross-national data and subject explanatory claims to a systematic empirical analysis.32 A heightened attention to questions of measurement 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 economics 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 ideological nature of much advice offered in the name of promoting democracy.

Opening New Research Frontiers: On the State and Democracy Beyond establishing a new baseline for research on democracy, 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

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 democracy 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 precede democratization came under scrutiny and was increasingly questioned. A second new line of inquiry has addressed the more purely conceptual question “What is democracy?” and the associated normative question “Why should democracy 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 orient 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 beginning in the early 1990s, as it became a matter of convention to talk about the spread of democracy to all corners of the world, some scholars started to reconsider the concept of democracy that served as the anchor of explanatory theorizing and empirical analyses and, in effect, to revisit Dahl’s conceptual and normative arguments about democracy.35 The recent books by O’Donnell, Przeworksi, and Stepan, Linz, and Yadav that are the occasion 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 pioneering 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 constant 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 broadening 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 democratization starts to unfold in a society that is multinational, political demands will likely not focus solely on altering the way key government offices are accessed. Questions will also be raised about the appropriateness of the


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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 perspective. We might interpret it as referring to a definitional 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 growing literature on the international dimensions of democratization. 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 Cambodia, Bosnia, Eastern Slavonia, Kosovo, and East Timor, 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 international 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 addition, 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 societies. 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

political unit, that is, over what territory and what population a state should govern. Thus, discussions about democracy and the state cannot be divorced. Yet the standard 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 modern democracy needs, and hence every state should be a nation and every nation should be a state—is problematic. When a society is multinational, building a nationstate is likely to be incompatible with developing democracy, requiring the marginalization of important sectors of the population and even a heavy dose of repression. Moreover, the difficulty of creating nation-states through state policies has been increasingly demonstrated in the twentieth century. Seeking a way out of this quandary, Linz and Stepan offer some interesting ideas. First, they introduce the concept of a “state-nation,” characterized by multiple but complementary 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 societies 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 federalism, an arrangement in which some cultural prerogatives are constitutionally embedded for subunits with salient and mobilized territorial identities, along with other consociational 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 problematic 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.

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(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.

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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 experience 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 conceptualizations of democracy. Since then, he has tackled that challenge 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 reflection has now culminated in his book Democracy, Agency, 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 democracy without asking questions about democracy” (p. xii) by turning his attention to conceptualizations of democracy. Indeed, since the 1990s, he has considered the meaning 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 development 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 implications for research and for policy debates about democracy. Indeed, it is instructive to compare, if in a necessarily superficial manner, the responses O’Donnell and Przeworski offer to two fundamental questions: What is democracy? 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 similarities and differences with Dahl.

Regarding the concept of democracy, the most obvious 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 corresponding 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 certain rights traditionally understood as civil rights are integral 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 interesting 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 institutions rather than rights. But Przeworski moves well beyond a Schumpeterian minimalist concept of democracy 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 supermajority rule protects vested interests. He places a heavy emphasis on effective equal opportunities and the conditions of political equality. And his warning that “we may be seeing a new monster: democracy without effective citizenship” (p. xiv) resonates with much of O’Donnell’s writings. In short, though the differences between O’Donnell and Przeworski are significant, they both propose concepts of democracy that go beyond the essentially minimalist 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 comprehensive 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


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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 benefits of democracy both from a theoretical and empirical perspective.53 And, interestingly, Przeworski’s conclusion about the potential virtues of democracy differs considerably 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 selfgovernment 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 democracy 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 tendency 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 system 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 ideals serve as a motivation for political action and Przeworski 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 democracy 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 considered 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 multiple values. Thus, this new line of inquiry invites students of democracy to tackle two big challenges: the development of a new consensus about the conceptual and normative underpinning of research on democracy, and the generation of ideas about the new empirical and prescriptive questions that are inevitably raised by the adoption of

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 conceptual and normative questions as well as empirical and prescriptive 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, governments, 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 complexities associated with authoritarian breakdowns, democratic 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 concept of democracy, the study of democracy and democratization 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 methodological rigor and theoretical cleverness, but a willingness on the part of a new generation of political scientists to engage with conviction the big political issues of the 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 scholarship 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 unfortunate 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 recollections 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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that eventually led him to the presidency of Brazil, precluded him from becoming one of the project directors. O’Donnell, Schmitter, and Whitehead 1986; O’Donnell and Schmitter 1986. Three collective projects during the late 1980s and early 1990s that resulted in substantial contributions to this new body of literature deserve mention. One is the project directed by Larry Diamond, Linz, and Seymour Lipset, which convened a large group of researchers in 1985 to analyze democracy in all three main regions of the Third World. This project produced three large volumes entitled Democracy in Developing Countries. Diamond, Linz, and Lipset 1988/1989. The promised volume 1 never materialized, but the coeditors 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 conference in 1989, produced a two-volume work titled The Failure of Presidential Democracy, which scrutinized Linz’s theses about the perils of presidentialism. 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 Democracy, along with a number of papers that appeared as journal articles. Bresser Pereira, Maravall, and Przeworski 1993; Przeworski et al. 1995; O’Donnell 1993; O’Donnell 1994; Schmitter 1993; Stepan and Skach 1993. Przeworski 1991; Linz and Stepan 1996; Przeworski et al. 2000. O’Donnell and Schmitter 1986, 8. Rustow 1970. O’Donnell and Schmitter 1986, 3–5, 7–13, 18–19. Collier 1999. Tilly 2007. Acemoglu and Robinson 2006. Levitsky and Way 2010. O’Donnell and Schmitter 1986; Przeworski 1986; Przeworski 1991. Lipset 1960; Moore 1966. Przeworski 1991, 95–97; Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars 2005, 2; O’Donnell 2010, 183–84.

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Przeworski 1991, 96. Lowenthal 1986, viii. O’Donnell and Schmitter 1986, 3–5, 24. Rustow 1970; Linz 1978. Another precedent, which served as a point of reference for the Woodrow Wilson Center project on transitions, was Hirschman’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. Przeworski 1985, 69, 4. Przeworski 2010, xv; Przeworski 2004a, 168. Leff 1999; Cheibub 2007; Gandhi 2008. Collier 1999; Moore 1966. Boix 2003; Acemoglu and Robinson 2006; Dunning 2008. 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. Huntington and Nelson 1976, 23, 35–37, 42–43. Przeworski and Limongi 1997; Przeworski et al. 2000. See also the earlier article by Przeworski and Limongi 1993. Przeworski et al. 2000, 271; Przeworski 2004b, 491. 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. 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 consequences of engaging in “premature democratization.” And Fukuyama holds that “There is nothing wrong in principle . . . [with] the idea that governments 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 Nelson 1976 (23, 42–43). Huntington 1968, 1, 7. For example, a key innovation of Przeworski’s statistical work on democracy was the generation of a new dataset explicitly geared to identifying transitions 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. Robinson 2010, 1; Angrist and Pischke 2010.

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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 sovereign 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.

Cheibub, José Antonio. 2007. Presidentialism, Parliamentarism, and Democracy. New York: Cambridge University Press. Collier, Ruth Berins. 1999. Paths Toward Democracy: Working Class and Elites in Western Europe and South America. New York: Cambridge University Press. Dahl, Robert A. 1956. A Preface to Democratic Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. _. 1971. Polyarchy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. _. 1985. A Preface to Economic Democracy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. _. 1989. Democracy and Its Critics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Diamond, Larry. 1999. Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Diamond, Larry, Juan J. Linz, and Seymour Martin Lipset, eds. 1988/1989. Democracy in Developing Countries. Vol. 2, Africa; Vol. 3, Asia; Vol. 4, Latin America. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers. _. 1990. “Introduction: Comparing Experiences with Democracy.” In Politics in Developing Countries: Comparing Experiences with Democracy, ed. Larry Diamond, Juan J. Linz, and Seymour Martin Lipset. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers. _. 1995. “Introduction: What Makes for Democracy?” In Politics in Developing Countries: Comparing Experiences with Democracy, ed. Larry Diamond, Juan J. Linz, and Seymour Martin Lipset. 2nd ed. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Dunning, Thad. 2008. Crude Democracy: Natural Resource Wealth and Political Regimes. New York: Cambridge University Press. Fukuyama, Francis. 2007. “Liberalism versus StateBuilding.” Journal of Democracy 18(3): 10–13. Gandhi, Jennifer. 2008. Political Institutions under Dictatorship. New York: Cambridge University Press. Hirschman, Albert O. 1971. A Bias for Hope: Essays on Development and Latin America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. _. 1986. “In Defense of Possibilism.” In Rival Views of Market Society and Other Recent Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Huntington, Samuel P. 1968. Political Order in Changing Societies. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. _. 1991. The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Huntington, Samuel and Joan Nelson. 1976. No Easy Choice: Political Participation in Developing Countries. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Laitin, David. 1995. “Transitions to Democracy and Territorial Integrity.” In Sustainable Democracy, Adam

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