Illusions and Conceptual Flaws

Journal of Democracy

Volumn 7, Issue 4, 1996, Pages

  O'Donnell, Guillermo ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 1842483946     PISSN: 10455736     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jod.1996.0072     Document Type: Article

References (16)

1. Richard Gunther, P. Nikiforos Diamandouros, and Hans-Jürgen Puhle, eds., The Politics of Democratic Consolidation: Southern Europe in Comparative Perspective (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 3. Except when otherwise noted, all page references in parentheses are to this volume.
2. Assuming that a settlement can be reached regarding the eventually thorny issue of who are, or should be, the "politically significant actors."
3. The authors are inconsistent in the use of their terminology. Since they regard "full consolidation" as "the unachievable end point of our ideal-type continuum" (rejoinder), they deal with "sufficient consolidation" as the higher point in the consolidation "trajectory." On many occasions, however, they merely refer to "consolidation" or to a case as "consolidated," when in the context it seems that they should have added the qualifier "sufficient." In these cases, I add this term in parentheses or brackets.
4. See Philippe Schmitter, "Organized Interests and Democratic Consolidation in Southern Europe," in Gunther, Diamandouros, and Puhle, eds., Politics of Democratic Consolidation, 284-315.
5. Since "full" consolidation is an unattainable "ideal type," I gather that the text actually refers to "sufficient" consolidation.
6. The possibility of such a national-regional consolidation split, and its practical and theoretical consequences, are not elaborated.
7. The authors assert that "democracy in Italy was by and large consolidated" when "by the end of the 1970s, the PCI [Italian Communist Party] had demonstrated its reliability as a loyal democratic competitor" (p. 25). Until then, "concern over the PCI's commitment to democracy and its perceived antisystem stance constituted the major obstacles to consolidation" (p. 391). One could argue no less plausibly that since the Svolta de Salerno in 1944, the PCI had stubbornly demonstrated democratic loyalty (see Gianfranco Pasquino, "The Demise of the Fascist Regime and Italy's Transition to Democracy: 1943-1948," in Guillermo O'Donnell, Philippe Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead, eds., Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Southern Europe [Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1986], 45-70), and that it was in the cynical interest of other political actors to raise the "specter of communism" to hinder the electoral chances of the former. The position of the authors in this matter seems influenced by another criterion of sufficient consolidation that they introduce entirely ad hoc. In their discussion of Portugal they refer to provisions of the 1976 Constitution, including those "guaranteeing the irreversibility of the nationalizations carried out during the revolutionary period," as the "last obstacle" to (sufficient) consolidation "removed through the May 1989 constitutional reform" (p. 28; see also p. 390). The rationale for this argument is that such clauses removed "important substantive policy issues from the everyday give and take of democratic politics" (p. 28). Here the authors give us a narrow and ahistorical implicit definition of democracy, according to which only issues of private property can be removed from political "give and take," and which has no place for a constitution that gives the state an important role in the economy. Their arguments about Greece are also indicative. In arguing "for using 1977 as the date signaling the end [sic] of consolidation," the authors point out as decisive the Greek Socialists' abandonment of their "erstwhile Third World orientations towards Greek foreign policy" (p. 30). Apparently democracies cannot exist, much less consolidate, if all politically significant actors do not share "the requisite conditions of moderation and restraint" (p. 391; see also p. 402) that the authors prefer - in this view India's and Israel's democracies cannot possibly have existed. These criteria are too ad hoc and subject to too many comparative variations across time and space to merit further discussion.
8. Notice, however, that according to the authors "the extreme end" is the "stage of democratic persistence"; the criteria and even the end points of this "trajectory" seem to be in permanent oscillation.
9. Against the authors' disclaimers in both their book and rejoinder, a teleological view does not imply that all cases reach maturity, or that they cannot "freeze" at an intermediate stage, or that they cannot degenerate after reaching maturity. The point is that these events are seen as deviations from the proper, somehow preexistent path (p. 398). Moreover, a teleological view does not preclude asserting that a given entity has somehow "leap-frogged" some developmental stages (pp. xiv-xx), or that different objects may travel "quite different routes" (p. 19) toward the end point, or that progress toward the end point should be "unilinear" (p. 20).
10. On "mass praetorian" regimes, see Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968). On "electoralist" regimes, see Terry L. Karl, "Imposing Consent? Electoralism vs. Democratization in El Salvador," in Paul Drake and Eduardo Silva, eds., Elections and Democratization in Latin America, 1980-85 (San Diego: Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies, 1986), 9-36.
11. On "mass praetorian" regimes, see Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968). On "electoralist" regimes, see Terry L. Karl, "Imposing Consent? Electoralism vs. Democratization in El Salvador," in Paul Drake and Eduardo Silva, eds., Elections and Democratization in Latin America, 1980-85 (San Diego: Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies, 1986), 9-36.
12. Because of space limitations, I refer the reader to this definition in my essay. Whatever its merits, this definition should suffice to show that only an extremely casual reading of my essay could have led the authors to assert that I regard "the holding of elections as the only institution relevant to the study of democratization," or to attribute to me a term ("informal polyarchies") that I never wrote and that bears no relation to the "informally institutionalized polyarchies" discussed in my essay.
13. Actually, in their book the authors are rather dismissive of the significance of this factor, and probably would have vigorously denied it if I had seen them using it as an indicator of consolidation. Furthermore, in their book they note that "pervasive cynicism at the mass level and extraordinarily low levels of mass-level involvement with politics reflect the incomplete status of efforts to resocialize the Spanish public" (p. 22). The reference is to Spain, but similar phenomena have been found in the other Southern European cases; see especially José María Maravall, Los resultados de la democracia: Un estudio del sur y el este de Europa (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1995), 257-302.
14. Data from Latino Barometer, 1995, transcribed by Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Postcommunist Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); I thank these authors for facilitating my access to these data. Should we conclude from these data that Uruguay and Argentina are "as consolidated" as Spain while Greece is even more "consolidated" than these three countries, or that Chile, the only newly democratized Latin American country that the authors see as "well on its way" to consolidation, may not be so? Obviously, this does not seem a promising kind of discussion.
15. In addition to several years of four-digit inflation, one should count at least: the premature death of a very popular elected president (Tancredo Neves), five years of an extremely inept presidency (José Sarney), the impeachment for corruption of another president (Fernando Collor de Mello), and the indictment on similar charges of several prominent legislators - all without rumor or fear of military intervention. It should be noted, too, that Argentina not only weathered even higher inflation rates than Brazil but, when faced with a military-coup threat similar to Spain's, saw all political and social leaders (also as in Spain) rally unequivocally to democracy, with mass demonstrations supporting their stand. It seems that to the authors, surviving "severe tests" indicates "substantial" or "sufficient" consolidation in Southern Europe, but only "unconsolidation" in the rest of the world.
16. For a recent assessment and bibliographical references on these and related matters, see Maurizio Ferrera, "Il modello sud-europeo di welfare state," Rivista italiana di scienza politica 26 (April 1996): 21-66.