Transitions to Democracy

Lisa Anderson

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 1999
• ISBN:
  9780231502474
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Democracy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Are the factors that initiate democratization the same as those that maintain a democracy already established? The scholarly and policy debates over this question have never been more urgent. In 1970, Dankwart A. Rustow's clairvoyant article "Transitions to Democracy: Toward a Dynamic Model" questioned the conflation of the primary causes and sustaining conditions of democracy and democratization. Now this collection of essays by distinguished scholars responds to and extends Rustow's classic work, Transitions to Democracy --which originated as a special issue of the journal Comparative Politics and contains three new articles written especially for this volume--represents much of the current state of the large and growing literature on democratization in American political science. The essays simultaneously illustrate the remarkable reach of Rustow's prescient article across the decades and reveal what the intervening years have taught us.

In light of the enormous opportunities of the post-Cold War world for the promotion of democratic government in parts of the world once thought hopelessly lost of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, this timely collection constitutes and important contribution to the debates and efforts to promote the more open, responsive, and accountable government we associate with democracy.

1	Introduction
	Lisa Anderson

In 1970 few American comparative political scientists were preoccupied by democracy and democratization. Issues of development and dependency, political order and revolution seemed far more compelling. In the issue of Comparative Politics in which Dankwart A. Rustow’s article, “Transitions to Democracy: Toward a Dynamic Model,” originally appeared, other contributors addressed problems that were at least as significant at the time: Marxism in Africa, the military in politics, interest groups in the Soviet Union. These problems were important, but as the political predicaments that prompted their examination were superseded by other policy puzzles, the urgency of their analytical and theoretical contribution diminished as well.

Yet good social scientists are sometimes inspired to ask questions and explore issues that reflect not the policy considerations of the moment but instead the more eternal and universal dilemmas that constitute ordinary social and political life. Often these explorations fail to excite the readers of their day, preoccupied as they are with headlines and crises. Only later does the prescience of these remarkable exercises slowly become apparent as analysts, theorists, students, and teachers refer repeatedly to “the early article” that shaped their thinking.

“Transitions to Democracy” is one of these inspired exercises. While the cases cited very much reflect its time, Rustow’s analytical perspective is far from dated. Indeed, though written well before the Spanish and Portuguese democratic transitions of the mid 1970s inaugurated the wave of regime changes that provide virtually all of the cases treated in this volume, “Transitions to Democracy” usually strikes readers today as almost clairvoyant, uncannily anticipating the debates about democratization that characterized the succeeding three decades.

To illustrate and celebrate Rustow’s remarkable shrewdness, the editors of the journal Comparative Politics (of which Rustow himself was editor-in-chief from 1979 to 1995) assembled a special issue of articles written as comments on and extensions of his original insights. The articles in that issue, which was published in April 1997, are reprinted here, along with Rustow’s original essay. In addition, three members of the editorial committee of Comparative Politics, who are prohibited by journal policy from publishing in Comparative Politics during their tenure on the committee, have contributed chapters written expressly for this book.

“Transitions to Democracy”: The Era and the Argument

Rustow began his discussion in “Transitions to Democracy” with the very simple and acute observation that much of the literature then available on the causes and conditions of democracy and democratization conflated the two. It assumed that the conditions that were required for the initiation of democratization were also dictated for the maintenance of established democracies. This assumption, as he pointed out, was mistaken: “the factors that keep a democracy stable may not be the ones that brought it into existence; explanations of democracy must distinguish between function and genesis.” Thus did he open the conceptual space for considering democratic transitions independently from democracy.

This analytical maneuver permitted Rustow to develop a perspective that accentuated a dynamic process of change rather than stability, allowed ample room for violent conflict and struggle as well as civil competition, and underscored the importance of choices made by identifiable political actors in crafting democratic institutions. Although Rustow never denied the significance of structural and cultural conditions to the maintenance and stability of existing democratic regimes, he was more interested in identifying the factors that brought such regimes into existence in the first place. These factors he found to be a more varied mix of economic and cultural predispositions with contingent developments and individual choices.

The implicit optimism of this emphasis on choice seemed almost reckless in the early 1970s. At that time transitions to democracy were relatively rare; far more common—and certainly far more feared—were transitions from unstable democracies to authoritarian military regimes or, still worse, revolutionary totalitarian systems. The few contemporary cases of democratization were subsumed in the larger universe of “regime change,” and in explaining the majority of the outcomes, most analysts were uncomfortable finding redeeming virtue in violence or attributing the collapse of democracy to voluntary choices made by strategic elites. The temptation already posed by the emphasis on democratic stability to adopt structural or cultural explanations was exacerbated by the reluctance of most American political scientists to attribute intention to those who rejected democracy.

However, by the end of the 1970s events in southern Europe and Latin America gave rise to a new sense of hopefulness, and with that hopefulness came a new openness to analysis which deemphasized constraints and highlighted the possibility of choice. Rustow’s framework became more plausible and attractive.

His rejection of the “preconditions” then widely associated with democracies—for example, relatively high literacy rates and levels of per capita income and widespread adherence to liberal or democratic values—permitted analysts and activists alike to consider the prospects for democracy in many countries that had little likelihood of meeting these “preconditions” in the foreseeable future.

Because he thought the structural and cultural contexts of “pre-democratic” situations were enormously varied, Rustow identified only one “background condition” as common to all democratic transitions: national unity. Citizens’ adherence to a common political community distinguished battles that could produce compromise over political institutions from civil war. Otherwise, as he put it, “the model deliberately leaves open the possibility of democracies (properly so called) in premodern, prenationalist times and at low levels of economic development.”

Understandably, many analysts of the developing world were heartened by this sense of possibility. In their rush to encourage and support nascent democratic transitions, some overestimated Rustow’s appraisal of political elites’ realm of maneuver; Rustow himself recognized that, while the social structural conditions for democratic transitions are varied, they are not insignificant. In the period he called the “preparatory phase,” he postulated that major battles must precede the compromise represented by democratic institutions and argued that “the protagonists must represent well-entrenched social forces.” Their struggles will be profound and prolonged; typically, therefore, they are fought over deeply important structural or cultural issues: class, ethnic, religious conflicts.

Ultimately, if the democratic transition is to go forward, Rustow argued, these struggles must end in stalemates, creating the context in which angry and exhausted elites ultimately decide that their interests are better served in the compromise represented by democracy than in continued battle. However, the struggles and their structural foundations do not necessarily dictate or determine the content of these interests: “while the choice of democracy does not arise until the background and preparatory conditions are in hand, it is a genuine choice and does not flow automatically from those two conditions.” Rustow shifted both the level and style of analysis in response to the particular exigencies of what he called the “decision phase,” a period in which determining structural and cultural factors are less important than the choices, perceptions, preferences, and bargaining skills of individuals among the political elite.

During the late 1970s and 1980s, analysts and activists seized upon this perspective. Some were influenced by Rustow; many arrived at a similar perspective independently. As active participants, policy advisers, or merely academic promoters of democratization, the scholars swept up in the excitement of the new waves of democratization, first rippling out from southern Europe and Latin America, then dramatically bursting forth in eastern Europe, were better served by analytical perspectives that gave a prominent role to enthusiasts like themselves and emphasized choices, preferences, and bargains rather than constraints, interests, and class struggles.

The early euphoria of these democratic experiments gave way relatively quickly in both reality and in scholarly commentary to attention to the more mundane demands of what Rustow called the “habituation phase.” The consolidation of democracy requires not only that the elites retain their commitment to and confidence in democratic procedures but also that “the population at large will become firmly fitted into the new structure.” To assess this process, Rustow and many other commentators resumed their earlier focus on the constraints of structural factors: the collective interests and identities associated with existing economic positions and cultural communities would profoundly influence the integration of the general population into the new democracy. Indeed, for Rustow, the effectiveness of the new democratic institutions and procedures in conciliating and accommodating contending forces not only among elites but also in the broader society would ultimately define the strength and resilience of the democracy itself.

“Transitions to Democracy”: Responses and Refinements

The articles in this volume represent much of the current state of the large and growing literature on democratization in American political science. They both illustrate the remarkable reach of Rustow’s essay across the decades and reveal some of its limits. Several of the contributors, for example, question the desirability of analytically divorcing structure from agency. The changing importance of individual actors and their collective constituencies in each of the phases Rustow distinguishes in the democratic transition was often echoed in far more caricatured forms by subsequent theorists of democratization. While Rustow’s argument as a whole gives ample weight to both the structural conditions that prompt democratic initiatives and the role of individual actors in seizing opportunities, each of the phases taken separately exaggerates the importance of either structure or agency. This framework may therefore be limited in predicting specific institutional choices, despite empirical evidence of discernible patterns in the relationship between the strength of certain social groups and their elites and the choice of specific institutional arrangements.

Irving Leonard Markovitz returns to the roots of the United States’ transition to democracy in the eighteenth century to illustrate how interests and institutions are linked through the actions of elites. He examines the work of the authors of the Federalist Papers, elites who constituted knowledgeable and interested actors in their society, as they fashioned constraints which would both serve their purposes—personal and class—and reach across centuries to bind their successors. In a literature in which long historical perspectives are ordinarily associated with structural analysis, Markovitz captures the signal importance of the individual, of fits of pique and strokes of genius, as well as the strategic interactions that produced the U.S. Constitution. Markovitz also suggests that in the eagerness of such elites to build a new polity, even Rustow’s background condition—national unity—may have been a deliberate construct, designed rather than reflected by the framers of democratic institutions.

Stephan Haggard and Robert Kaufman draw on more contemporary cases to argue that much of the literature on democratization has failed to recognize, much less specify, the links between the elites who craft the democratic bargains and the followers who make them elites in the first place. However strategic and self-interested they may be, elites are not socially disembodied; virtually by definition they represent and draw upon collective groups, whether interest groups, mass organizations, social movements, classes, or ethnic and religious communities. Hence the status of such groups will influence the resources—the “bargaining chips”—of the elites as they enter negotiations and consequently the shape of the resulting institutions. Economic crises that weaken the bureaucratic and social bases of the incumbent elites undermine their bargaining position and, Haggard and Kaufman argue, produce an outcome of less restrictive democratic institutions and procedures.

In a similar vein, Ruth Berins Collier and James Mahoney argue that the struggles of collective actors are significant not only in a Rustovian preparatory stage but in the decision phase itself. In many of the southern European and Latin American cases of democratic transition, labor protest began during the early stages of political struggle and continued through the period of elite bargaining. Continuing protest, they suggest, not only ensured that negotiations did not stall but also permitted representatives of labor to participate in shaping far more inclusive outcomes.

Nancy Bermeo also explores the role of popular collective actors through examination of labor organizations, and she concurs with Collier and Mahoney in taking issue with the very widespread proposition that, as she puts it, “too much popular mobilization and too much pressure from below can spoil the chances for democracy.” In contrast to Collier and Mahoney, however, Bermeo concludes that the significance of radical popular protest is determined not by its role in producing or pressuring elites at the negotiating table but by elite calculations of the strength of the protesters. She suggests that in a number of transitions, including Portugal and Spain, popular protest raised the cost of the status quo but also, equally importantly, meant that [elites’] estimates of the popular forces could be excluded from participation in the emerging democratic institutions.

As each of these essays suggests, the structural economic and cultural conditions in which elites operate, from economic crises to popular protests, may not determine but do clearly shape their calculations and strategic preferences during the decision phase, as they bargain over the adoption of democratic institutions and procedures. Rustow’s preliminary distinction between the levels of analysis appropriate to the different phases of a democratic transition merited critical refinement.

Other factors Rustow identified as contributing to the consolidation of democracy in his habituation phase, as well as the periodization or configuration of the phases he proposed, have also been critically reexamined by subsequent theorists. Evelyne Huber, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and John Stephens stress structural factors in their treatment of the conditions that contribute to consolidating formal or liberal democracy, and they point out that these same factors appear to inhibit extension of liberal democracy to more participatory or social democratic institutional arrangements. Huber, Rueschemeyer, and Stephens are prepared to specify with considerably more precision than Rustow the nature of the struggle that produces the impetus to democratization in the first place. For them, democracy is intimately linked to capitalist development because capitalism undermines the power of landholders and strengthens popular classes; this balance produces the impetus toward democracy. The link between democratization and capitalist development is the key to their understanding of the outcomes of the transition, including their insistence on the importance of international power configurations.

Rustow’s omission of international pressures was self-conscious and tactical. He viewed his essay as “a first attempt at a general theory” and therefore chose to simplify his task by neglecting such foreign influences as defeat in war and the contagion of democratic ideas. Yet, even more clearly now than when Rustow was writing, international influences are crucial. As Huber, Rueschemeyer, and Stephens argue, the globalization of the international capitalist economy and the accompanying enthusiasm for liberal economic arrangements and political institutions over the last several decades have had a profound impact in both promoting the spread of liberal democracy and weakening national commitments to social democracy.

Gerardo Munck and Carol Skalnik Leff are also concerned with identifying factors that contribute to the consolidation of democracy, but they emphasize the role of elites and elite choices and look at the nature of the transition itself. Rustow warned repeatedly against assuming that transitions, once begun, inevitably produce consolidated democracies of any kind, observing that “a decision in favor of democracy … may be proposed and rejected.” To inquire about the circumstances that promote or inhibit decisions in favor of democracy, Munck and Leff systematically distinguish between transitions from authoritarian regimes and transitions to democracy and examine factors internal to the transition itself—Rustow’s decision phase—that may lead to the rejection or adoption and consolidation of democratic institutions.

Munck and Leff point to specific characteristics of the identities and strategies of the actors seeking and opposing change that shape institutions and influence the likelihood of their consolidation, particularly whether or not they are incumbents. They echo Bermeo’s emphasis on the importance of the elite’s strategic thinking and willingness to pursue confrontation or accommodation, but in marked contrast to conclusions reached by several other contributors, they take a sanguine view of the roles of the incumbents, hypothesizing that reforms from below produce more restrictive democratic institutions than transitions which more fully incorporate the incumbent elite and that dramatic breaks from the past create legacies of confusion and distrust that inhibit consolidation of new democracies.

Rustow’s openness to a variety of paths to democracy and its consolidation is reflected in the variety of roles our contributors assign to incumbents, their social bases, and their interests and preferences. Šumit Ganguly illustrates the cumulative importance of each of the phases Rustow proposes in his examination of India, echoing Markovitz’s emphasis on the role elites may play in constructing even the national unity Rustow deemed a necessary precondition. Ganguly warns, however, that sustaining one factor that Rustow neglected—the autonomy and capacity of the state—may be a key challenge to consolidation of Indian democracy over the long run.

Ezra Suleiman’s examination of the relationship between the state a...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Transitions to Democracy: Toward a Dynamic Model
• 3. Constitutions, The Federalist Papers, and the Transition to Democracy
• 4. The Political Economy of Democratic Transitions
• 5. Adding Collective Actors to Collective Outcomes: Labor and Recent Democratization in South America and Southern Europe
• 6. Myths of Moderation: Confrontation and Conflict During Democratic Transitions
• 7. Bureaucracy and Democratic Consolidation: Lessons from Eastern Europe
• 8. The Paradoxes of Contemporary Democracy: Formal, Participatory, and Social Dimensions
• 9. Modes of Transition and Democratization: South America and Eastern Europe in Comparative Perspective
• 10. Explaining India’s Transition to Democracy
• 11. Democratization in Africa after 1989: Comparative and Theoretical Perspectives
• 12. Fortuitous Byproducts
• Bibliographical Essay: The Genealogy of Democratization
• Bibliography
• Index