¹ In Tony Smith's apt phrase, they thereby reassert “the autonomy of the peripheral state.” See Smith, , The Pattern of Imperialism: The United States, Great Britain, and the Late Industrializing World Since 1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 68–84Google Scholar.

² Relevant collections include Baloyra, Enrique, ed., Comparing New Democracies: Transition and Consolidation in Mediterranean Europe and the Southern Cone (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Drake, Paul and Silva, Eduardo, eds., Elections and Democratization in Latin America, 1980–85 (La Jolla, CA: Institute of the Americas, 1986)Google Scholar; Diamond, Larry, Linz, Juan, and Lipset, Seymour, eds., Democracy in Developing Nations (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, forthcoming 1988)Google Scholar; and Malloy, James M. and Seligson, Mitchell, eds., Authoritarians and Democrats: Regime Transition in Latin America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987)Google Scholar.

³ Note the reversal of longstanding patterns of intellectual transfer. This body of theory emerged within Latin America, determined to make sense of the Latin American experience without simply borrowing terms of reference from Europe or North America. In the process, it challenged many key tenets of social science theory, and gradually spread to order research and reflection elsewhere in the Third World, and now in Europe itself. The well-known case of Liberation Theology offers important parallels, suggesting notable intellectual vigor in contemporary Latin America.

⁴ For a still useful overview, see Collier, David, ed., The New Authoritarianism in Latin America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979)Google Scholar. See also Foxeley, Alejandro, Latin American Experiments in Neo-Conservative Economics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983)Google Scholar, and Ramos, Joseph, Neo-Conservative Economics in the Southern Cone of Latin America, 1973–1983 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986)Google Scholar.

⁵ The position is not well adapted to the study of agrarian or ethnically divided societies. It thus has little specific relevance to the revolutionary upsurge in Central America, despite notable parallels between agrarian change in this region and industrialization elsewhere. On the link between agrarian transformation and political change, see Baloyra, Enrique, “Reactionary Despotism in Central America,” Journal of Latin American Studies 15 (November 1983), 295–319CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The position is also ill-suited to the analysis of countries in the middle range of development, leaving them in a residual category.

⁶ See O'Donnell, Guillermo, “Reflections on the Pattern of Change in the Bureaucratic Authoritarian State,” Latin American Research Review 13 (No. 1, 1978), 3–38Google Scholar, and also his Modernization and Bureaucratic Authoritarianism: Studies in South American Politics (Berkeley, CA: Institute of International Studies, 1973)Google Scholar.

⁷ One becomes accustomed after a while to hearing specialists state that “we used to believe A was true, now we know it is really B.” The Transitions editors approach this position, but as we shall see, attribute their conceptual shift more to changing circumstances than to theoretical reevaluation. O'Donnell and Schmitter state the matter as follows:

Our exploration took a rather different turn from those which have attempted to explain the advent of the very authoritarian regimes whose demise—actual or potential—was the object of our interest. This is somewhat ironic, given the fact that several of the protagonists in our project (one of the coauthors included) were active protagonists in the research and discussions generated by attempts to account for the emergence of those authoritarian regimes. This may be a sign of intellectual flexibility—or of theoretical fuzziness. But in our opinion it is basically a recognition that political and social processes are neither symmetric or reversible. What brings down a democracy is not the inverse of those factors that bring down an authoritarian regime (Vol. 4, p. 18).

⁸ The editors treat this largely as the result of “necessary” manipulations of the electoral system. According to O'Donnell and Schmitter:

Put in a nutshell, parties of the Right-Center and Right must be “helped” to do well, and parties of the Left-Center and Left should not win by an overwhelming majority. This often happens either “artificially,” by rigging the rules—for example, by overrepresenting rural districts or small peripheral constituencies—or “naturally,” by fragmenting the partisan choices of the Left (usually not a difficult task) and by consolidating those of the Center and Right (sometimes possible thanks to the incumbency resources of those in government) (Vol. 4, p. 62).

This formulation assumes that victory by the Left is somehow normal and natural; a leftist defeat is presented as an anomaly to be explained. The empirical grounds for such an assumption are not clear.

⁹ de Tocqueville, Alexis, Democracy in America, 2 vols. (New York: Schocken, 1961)Google Scholar; Weber, Max, “Politics as a Vocation,” in Runciman, W. G., ed., Max Weber. Selections in Translation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 212–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schumpeter, Joseph, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (London: Allen & Unwin, 1961)Google Scholar; Dahl, Robert A., Political Oppositions in Western Democracies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966)Google Scholar, Dahl, , Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971)Google Scholar, Dahl, , Regimes and Oppositions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973)Google Scholar, and Dahl, , Dilemmas of Pluralist Democracy: Autonomy vs. Control (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982)Google Scholar; Lipset, Seymour M, “Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy,” American Political Science Review 53 (March 1959), 69–105CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Lipset, , Political Man (New York: Doubleday, 1960)Google Scholar, and Lipset, , The First Nation (New York: Basic Books, 1963)Google Scholar; Lijphart, Arend, The Politics of Accommodation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968)Google Scholar, Lijphart, , Democracy in Plural Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977)Google Scholar, and Lijphart, , Democracies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Linz, Juan and Stepan, Alfred, eds., Breakdowns ofDemocratic Regimes (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978)Google Scholar. The wealth of relevant precedents makes the scarcity and inward-looking character of notes and references in the O'Donnell, Schmitter, and Whitehead series all the more surprising. Many internal references are to one or another of the editors' “original” formulations of the matter, presumably derived from the series of conferences held between 1979 and 1981 at the Woodrow Wilson Center, where papers were first presented. The Transitions volumes have no individual or collective bibliography or index.

¹⁰ Ties like these undergird formal legitimations of democracy with a generalized experience of competition and association in all walks of life. They also provide a concrete basis for the diffusion of norms of accountability. De Tocqueville (fn. 9) and Mill, John Stuart, Considerations on Representative Government (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1962)Google Scholar, remain classic statements of the issue.

¹¹ John Sheahan's unfortunately brief contribution discusses the difficult economic legacy of recent authoritarian regimes and outlines a sensible agenda for the future (Vol. 3, pp. 154–64).

¹² This suggests that O'Donnell and Schmitter may be too quick to see rulers' potential refusal to negotiate as a negative index of the necessity of pacts (Vol. 4, p. 39). Pacts can be negotiated among challengers themselves; in any event, exiting rulers may lack the capacity to enforce agreements insisted upon with great tenacity. In his contribution to Volume 2, Gillespie makes this point for the case of Uruguay. Pacts can cover a wide range of situations, including some in which group interests may be sacrificed indefinitely for the goal of long-term consolidation. A case in point is Togliatti's famous svolta di Salerno, which committed Italian communists to work within a liberal political framework. There is an extensive scholarly literature on pacts. In addition to the sources cited in fn. 10, see Barry, Brian, “Review Article: Political Accommodation and Consociational Democracy,” British Journal of Political Science 5 (October 1975), 477–505CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Lijphart's, Arend still influential “Consociational Democracy,” World Politics 21 (January 1969), 207–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹³ This sort of critique has become common lately. Another recent example is Peeler, John, Latin American Democracies: Colombia, Costa Rica, Venezuela (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986)Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Cf. Remmer, Karen, “Redemocratization and the Impact of Bureaucratic Authoritarian Rule in Latin America,” Comparative Politics 17 (April 1985), 253–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁵ Cf. the studies collected in Eckstein, Susan, ed., Power and Popular Protest: Latin American Social Movements (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming 1988)Google Scholar; Main-Waring, Scott and Viola, Eduardo, “New Social Movements, Political Culture, and Democracy: Brazil and Argentina in the 1980s,” Telos, No. 61 (Fall 1984), 17–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Sklar, Richard, “Developmental Democracy,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 29 (October 1987), 686–714CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁶ A concrete instance much stressed by de Tocqueville is the relation of associational life to politics. He argued that experience in political associations gave Americans habits, skills, and models of proper action that they then put to use in other walks of life, thereby giving political democracy a firm base in everyday discourse and action. For this reason, he saw the art of association as “the mother of all action,” and described political associations as “large free schools, where all the members of the community go to learn the general theory of association” (de Tocqueville, fn. 9, pp. 139–40).

The title given to Chapter 9 of the first volume of Democracy in America is suggestive: “The Laws Contribute More to the Maintenance of the Democratic Republic in the United States Than Do the Physical Circumstances of the Country, and Mores Do More than Laws.” By “mores,” de Tocqueville meant to denote much of what is considered here under the rubric of civil society: manners and styles of social interaction, patterns of family life, prevailing norms about hierarchy, equality, and authority, and the mutually reinforcing links between civil and political associations.

¹⁷ Scott, , Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985)Google Scholar. See in particular Scott's discussions of the need to put human agents at the center of analysis (pp. 41–47), of ideology and ideological work (pp. 184–240), and of the concept of hegemony (pp. 304–50).

¹⁸ In a similar vein, it seems at the very least inadequate to attribute postwar restoration of French democracy to the effects of “armed struggle” (Vol. 1, p. 14).

¹⁹ Cf. Cammack, Paul and O'Brien, Philip, Generals in Retreat (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Cammack, , “Democratisation: A Review of the Issues,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 4 (No. 2, 1985), 39–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Juan Rial, “The Uruguayan Elections of 1984: A Triumph of the Center,” in Drake and Silva (fn. 2), 245–72.

²⁰ As one classic formulation has it, verification of this theory depends on the capacity of social movements to implement what are perceived as structural possibilities [which in turn depend on] real social and political struggle. So the “demonstration” of an interpretation ... depends to some extent on its own ability to show socio-political actors the possible solutions to contradictory situations.

Cardoso, Fernando H. and Faletto, Enzo, Dependence and Development (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), xivGoogle Scholar.

²¹ Machiavelli, , The Discourses (New York: Random House, 1950), Second Book, chap, xxvii, p. 378Google Scholar.