political systems, in this case the relationship between democracy and
political attitudes and values in five nations (four of them western but
also including Mexico).⁸ With increasing statistical sophistication, a new
style of social science analysis examined quantitatively the relationship
between socioeconomic modernization and democracy, or political development
more broadly, across nations throughout the developed and developing
worlds.⁹ Some scholars, such as Samuel Huntington, focused a more skeptical
eye on the sources of political disorder and breakdown in the new nations.¹⁰
Also in this period came the ambitious and controversial sociological-
historical effort of Barrington Moore to account for the emergence of
democracy, authoritarianism and totalitarianism in the world.¹¹

Probably the most ambitious and important project of the decade was the
work of the Committee on Comparative Politics of the Social Science Research
Council (SSRC), which produced a series of nine volumes (mostly during the
1960s) on the relationship between political development and various social
and political sub-systems, such as bureaucracy, education, parties and
political culture. Much of this work was synthesized and distilled
theoretically in *Crises and Sequences of Political Development*, which argued
that patterns of political development, including the chances for stable
democracy, could be explained by the way in which countries encountered and
dealt with five characteristic problems of state- and nation-building.¹² The
publication that same year (1971) of Robert Dahl's classic study,
*Polyarchy*,¹³ can be seen as the crowning work on democracy of the political
development decade. To this day, it remains one of the most important
treatments of the historical, social, economic, cultural and political
factors that foster or obstruct the development of stable democracy, and it

has much influenced our own work. Although centered on the European
historical experience, the work of Stein Rokkan has also been extremely
fruitful for our understanding of the conditions under which states and
party systems emerged and the variety of coalitions involved.¹⁴

The study of democracy was to sag through most of the 1970s. By 1970,
critiques of pluralist political development studies as ethnocentric and
even reflective of American imperialism were in full cry. Although these
criticisms were often based on a superficial and ideologically biased
reading of these works,¹⁵ they nevertheless pushed the study of comparative
political systems to the background. Instead, the fields of comparative
politics, political development and international political sociology became
dominated by issues relating to economic dependence and by theories of
international dependency -- often carrying with them the Marxist assumption
that political systems were mere superstructures, and "bourgeois
democracies" largely illusory and epiphenomenal. To the extent they dealt
with the political system explicitly, theories of dependency maintained that
political exclusion and repression of popular mobilization were inevitable
concomitants of dependent economic development and peripheral status in the
world division of labor.¹⁶ Cynicism about political democracy in these
developing countries was reflected and deepened by a new cycle of democratic
breakdowns in Latin America into particularly harsh, "bureaucratic-
authoritarian" dictatorships. This development was interpreted as a
consequence of the inherent strains and pressures of economic dependence at
a particular, middle stage of development.¹⁷ But the collapse of these and
other dictatorships around the world -- beginning with the transitions to
democracy in Southern Europe in the mid-1970s -- along with the

7

revalorization of political democracy as an end in itself (partly in
response to the extraordinary brutality of many recent authoritarian
experiences), has now refocused the attention of the scholarly world on the
conditions for liberal democracy.

The Project on Democracy in Developing Countries

The growth of political and intellectual interest in democracy in
developing countries provided a propitious climate for the study we wanted
to launch. Despite the rich profusion of literature, it seemed to us that
there remained huge gaps in our understanding of the factors that fostered
or obstructed the emergence, instauration (establishment), and consolidation
of democratic government around the world. All of the existing studies were
limited in important ways: to a particular period of time; to particular
regions (usually Europe and/or Latin America); to particular moments or
segments of the historical record (such as crises and breakdowns, or
transitions); and/or to a limited range of theoretical variables. While
understanding that any one study would inevitably be bound more or less by
such limits, we undertook to design a comparative historical analysis that
would nevertheless reach wider and further than had any previous one.

The resulting four-volume work is, we believe, somewhat unique in
several respects. In geographical scope, it is the first study of democracy
to compare systematically the historical experiences of individual countries
throughout Asia, Africa and Latin America. In the "developing" world, only
the Middle East (for reasons we will later explain) is excluded. In sheer

8

size, it may be the largest comparative study of national political systems to date, with chapters on 26 different countries. Significantly, these chapters are not the loose collection one sometimes encounters of varied papers and themes. Each was written specifically for this project, in response to a common set of guidelines, definitions and theoretical concerns. And we as editors took a broadly inclusive approach theoretically.

Rather than pursuing some new, elegant, "parsimonious" model, we deliberately eschewed monocausal and reductionist interpretations in favor of an exhaustive examination of all the historical, cultural, social, economic, political and international factors that might affect the chances for stable democracy; how they interact; and the conditions that might mediate their salience or their effects.

The contributions to this work are also distinctive in that they deal with the entire history of a country's experience with democracy. This includes the whole range of phenomena: instauration, breakdown, reequilibration and consolidation of democratic government; periods of democratic persistence, crisis, authoritarianism, and renewal; and all of the ambivalences and oscillations in between. In the process we consider each country's early cultural traditions, analyze (where relevant) the colonial experience, consider all of its post-independence history, but give special emphasis to post-World War II developments. Whereas most other works cut horizontally through the history of countries to focus on limited time spans and particular processes (usually ignoring the phenomena of democratic consolidation and stability),¹⁸ our study cuts vertically through historical phases in order to explain the overall path of a country's political development.

9

While it can be enormously fertile, this historical approach is not
without certain methodological problems. In particular, it runs the risk of
attributing contemporary political patterns to antecedents far removed in
time, without clearly demonstrating that those factors (or characteristics
resulting from them) are operating at a later time and account for the
failure or success of democracy. The past, to be relevant, has to be in one
way or another present at the time the realities we want to explain happen.
We feel, however, that within the constraints of space, the authors of the
case studies have generally avoided accounting for events at time t²⁰ by
reference to factors which appear only at time t¹ or t⁵, although sometimes
the link with t¹⁹ might have been made more explicit.

The result is an eclectic but also very rich analysis of the
opportunities and obstacles for democracy in the developing world today.
Indeed, it is the very richness of our study that presents to ourselves, as
perhaps it will to many of our readers, the greatest frustration. As our
colleague Robert Dahl remarked at a recent scholarly meeting where our work
was discussed, a key problem with the previous generation of work on
democracy was the paucity of comparative evidence in relation to the
abundance of theorizing; whereas the current generation of work, including
this comparative study, appears destined to suffer from an abundance of
evidence for which there will be a relative dearth of theory. Readers of
Volume One in this series will find no shortage of theoretical arguments and
lessons drawn from this study. But we concede that these are not integrated
into a single, all-encompassing theory, and that it will be some time (if
ever) before the field produces one.

We began our study by inviting distinguished comparativists and country

10

specialists to write case studies of individual country experiences with
democratic and authoritarian government. Each of our authors was given the
same broad set of guidelines, flexible enough to permit them to do justice
to the uniqueness of the society and its history, but structured enough so
that each case study would share a common conceptual orientation, analytical
purpose and framework for organizing the material.

The first section of each chapter was to review the country's political
history, describing the major experiences with democratic and nondemocratic
government, including the structure, nature and characteristic conflicts and
tensions of each regime. The second section would explain the fate of each
regime (especially each democratic one), why it persisted or failed or
evolved as it did, why successive ones emerged as and when they did.
Alternatively, authors were given the option of combining these tasks of
historical review and analysis, which many did. In a third (or second)
section, the author was asked to offer a summary theoretical judgement of
the factors that have been most important in determining the country's
overall degree of success or failure with democratic government. This
theoretical analysis was intended to abstract across the various regimes and
events to identify for that country the most consistently significant and
salient factors, from among the broad inventory of variables in our project
outline (and any others we might have neglected). Finally, each author was
asked to consider the future prospects for democratic government in the
country, along with any policy implications he or she might wish to derive.
In addition, each author was asked to assess (somewhere in the chapter) the
country's overall experience with democratic government, using a six-point
scale we had constructed (of ideal types ranging from stable and

11

consolidated democratic rule to the failure or absence of democracy).¹⁹

The task we gave those who wrote our case studies was an imposing one. What made it even forbidding -- and sometimes (especially for countries with long and variegated political histories) nearly impossible -- was the space constraint we were forced to impose as a result of the economic realities of contemporary book publishing. Thus, each author was compelled to be selective and often painfully brief, both in the treatment of important historical developments and in the analysis of theoretical variables. Although we have sought to make our case studies readily accessible to readers with little or no prior knowledge of the country -- in part to encourage the wide reading across regions we feel is essential -- we could not avoid giving many key problems and events little or no attention. Our readers are thus cautioned that the case studies provide no more than capsulized surveys of a country's experience, which will hopefully inspire wider study from among the many other sources they cite.

The theoretical framework for the study grew out of an extensive review of the previous literature, one which appears in Volume One. The ten theoretical dimensions in this framework covered the gamut of factors that various theoretical and empirical works have associated with democracy: political culture; regime legitimacy and effectiveness; historical development (in particular the colonial experience); class structure and the degree of inequality; national structure (ethnic, racial, regional and religious cleavage); state structure, centralization and strength (including the state's role in the economy, the role of autonomous voluntary associations and the press, federalism, and the role of the armed forces); political and constitutional structure (parties, electoral systems, the

12

judiciary); political leadership; development performance; and international
factors.

These broad dimensions encompassed dozens of specific variables and
questions, from which we derived 49 tentative propositions about the
likelihood of stable democratic government. Obviously, it would have been
foolish to pretend that our study could have "tested" these propositions. In
spite of having 26 countries, we still had the problem of "too many
variables, too few cases" to enable us to reach any definitive conclusions
about the effects of these variables. But we did believe that the evidence
and conclusions from 26 carefully selected cases, if structured
systematically, could shed much light on how these variables affected the
democratic prospect, and how these effects might vary with other conditions.

## Concepts, Definitions and Classifications

Depending on the individual, ideology, paradigm, culture or context,
the term "democracy" may mean many different things. In fact, it is
reflective of the political climate of our time that the word is used to
signify the desirable end-state of so many social, economic and political
pursuits, or else to self-designate and thus presumably legitimate so many
existing structures. Hence, it is imperative that we be as precise as
possible about exactly what it is we are studying.

We use the term democracy in this study to signify a political system,
separate and apart from the economic and social system to which it is
joined. Indeed, a distinctive aspect of our approach is to insist that

13

issues of so-called "economic and social democracy" be separated from the
question of governmental structure. Otherwise, the definitional criteria of
democracy will be broadened and the empirical reality narrowed to a degree
that may make study of the phenomena very difficult. In addition, unless the
economic and social dimensions are kept conceptually distinct from the
political, there is no way to analyze how variation on the political
dimension is related to variation on the others. But most of all, as we will
argue shortly, we distinguish the concept of political democracy out of a
clear and frankly expressed conviction that it is worth valuing -- and hence
worth studying -- as an end in itself.

In this study, then, democracy -- or what Robert Dahl terms "polyarchy"
-- denotes a system of government that meets three essential conditions:
meaningful and extensive <u>competition</u> among individuals and organized groups
(especially political parties) for all effective positions of government
power, at regular intervals and excluding the use of force; a "highly
inclusive" level of <u>political participation</u> in the selection of leaders and
policies, at least through regular and fair elections, such that no major
(adult) social group is excluded; and a level of <u>civil and political
liberties</u> -- freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom to form
and join organizations -- sufficient to ensure the integrity of political
competition and participation.²⁰

While this definition is, in itself, relatively straightforward, it
presents a number of problems in application. For one, countries that
broadly satisfy these criteria nevertheless do so to different degrees. (In
fact, none do so perfectly, which is why Dahl prefers to call them
polyarchies). The factors that explain this variation at the democratic end

14

of the spectrum in degrees of popular control and freedom is an important
intellectual problem. But it is different than the one which concerns us in
these four volumes, and so it is one we have had largely to bypass. This
study seeks to determine why countries do or do not evolve, consolidate,
maintain, lose and reestablish more or less democratic systems of
government.

Even this limited focus leaves us with conceptual problems. The
boundary between democratic and non-democratic is sometimes a blurred and
imperfect one, and beyond it lies a much broader range of variation in
political systems. We readily concede the difficulties of classification
this variation has repeatedly caused us. Even if we look only at the
political, legal and constitutional structure, several of our cases appear
to lie somewhere on the boundary between democratic and something less than
democratic. The ambiguity is further complicated by the constraints on free
political activity, organization and expression which may often in practice
make the system much less democratic than it might appear on paper. In all
cases, we have tried to pay serious attention to this actual practice in
assessing and classifying regimes. But still this has left us to make
difficult and in some ways arbitrary judgements. For countries such as
Turkey, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Colombia and Zimbabwe, the decision as to
whether these may today be considered full democracies is replete with
nuance and ambiguity.

We have alleviated the problem somewhat by recognizing various grades
of distinction among less-than-democratic systems. While isolated violations
of civil liberties or modest and occasional vote-rigging should not
disqualify a country from broad classification as a democracy, there is a

15

need to categorize separately those countries which allow greater political
competition and freedom than would be found in a true authoritarian regime
but less than could justifiably be termed "democratic." Hence, we classify
as semi-democratic those countries where the effective power of elected
officials is so limited, or political party competition is so restricted, or
the freedom and fairness of elections so compromised, that electoral
outcomes, while competitive, still deviate significantly from popular
preferences; and/or where civil and political liberties are so limited that
some political orientations and interests are unable to organize and express
themselves. In different ways and to different degrees, Senegal, Zimbabwe,
Malaysia and Thailand fit in this category. Still more restrictive is a
hegemonic party system, like that of Mexico, in which opposition parties are
legal but denied -- through pervasive electoral malpractices and frequent
state coercion -- any real chance to compete for power. Descending further
down the scale of classification, authoritarian regimes permit even less
pluralism, typically banning political parties (or all but the ruling one)
and most forms of political organization and competition, while being more
repressive than liberal in their level of civil and political freedom.

Paying close attention to actual behavior, one may distinguish a sub-set of
authoritarian regimes which we call pseudo-democracies, in that the
existence of formally democratic political institutions, such as multi-party
electoral competition, masks (often in part to legitimate) the reality of
authoritarian domination. While this regime type overlaps in some ways with
the hegemonic regime, it is less institutionalized and typically more
personalized, coercive and unstable. Nevertheless, we prefer not to ignore
the democratic facade, because, as we argue in Volume One, its coexistence

16

with an authoritarian reality may generate distinctive problems for a
transition to democracy.

Democratic trappings aside, authoritarian regimes vary widely in the
degree to which they permit independent and critical political expression
and organization. By the level of what the regime allows, one can
distinguish between what O'Donnell and Schmitter call "dictablandas," or
liberalized autocracies, and "dictaduras," harsher dictatorships which allow
much less space for individual and group action.²¹ By the level of what
groups in the society recurrently demand (which may or may not overlap with
the above), one can distinguish, as we do in Volume One, between
authoritarian situations with strong democratic pressures and those with
weak democratic pressures. In selecting cases for this study, our bias was
toward the former. Finally, of course, are the _totalitarian_ regimes, which
not only repress all forms of autonomous social and political organization,
denying completely even the most elementary political and civil liberties,
but also demand an active commitment by the citizens to the regime.²²
Because our concern in this study was primarily with democracy, these
regimes (mainly now the Communist ones, although not all of them are
totalitarian) were excluded from our analysis.

The "dependent variable" of our study was concerned not only with
democracy but also stability -- the persistence and durability of democratic
and other regimes over time, particularly through periods of unusually
intense conflict, crisis and strain. A _stable_ regime is one that is deeply
institutionalized and consolidated, making it likely therefore to enjoy a
high level of popular legitimacy. (As we argue in Volume One, the
relationship between stability and legitimacy is an intimate one.) _Partially_

17

_stable_ regimes are neither fully secure nor in imminent danger of collapse. Their institutions have perhaps acquired some measure of depth, flexibility and value, but not enough to ensure the regime safe passage through severe challenges. _Unstable_ regimes are, by definition, highly vulnerable to breakdown or overthrow in periods of acute uncertainty and stress. New regimes, including those that have recently restored democratic government, tend to fall in this category.

## The Selection of Countries

One of the limitations as well as values of our enterprise is the great heterogeneity or multiple dimensions of the 26 countries included. The value is that the country studies provide us with insights into the whole range of factors relevant to our study, rather than limiting us to those variables for which there are data for all countries of the world (as with the social and economic statistics of the UN and the World Bank) or those factors shared by a relatively homogeneous set of countries. The major disadvantage, however, is that -- unless we turn to studies and data not included in our volumes -- the lack of statistical representativeness (which is anyhow dubious in dealing with states) precludes a statistical approach to testing hypotheses. In fact, our introductory volume contains a substantial quantitative analysis, based on data for over 80 countries, of the relationship between socioeconomic development and democracy, one which is basically positive.²³ But for the most part, we believe that the study of 26 carefully chosen countries, by scholars familiar with each of them, guided

18

more or less by the concepts and issues suggested, provides us with a better
understanding of the complex problems involved.

The criteria for the selection of countries were complex, and although
not ad hoc do not entirely satisfy our plans and ambitions for the well
known reasons encountered in any such large-scale comparative project. The
foremost, perhaps debatable, decision was to exclude Western Europe, the
North American democracies, Australia and New Zealand, and the most advanced
non-western industrial democracy, Japan -- although their historical
experiences are analyzed separately in Volume One. Essentially, these are
the OECD countries, members of the Paris-based Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development.²⁴ All of these countries have been stable
democracies since World War II, if not earlier, with the exceptions of
Greece, Portugal and Spain, which joined the club in the mid-seventies and
have been stable democracies for over ten years. The Southern European
experience, however, enters into our thinking and will occasionally be
mentioned (if for no other reason than that it is an area of scholarly
interest of one of the editors). All in this first group of countries
excluded from our study are advanced industrial, capitalist democracies with
higher per capita gross national products than the most developed of the
countries we included. (The one exception is Portugal, whose per capita GNP
is lower than a few of our developing countries, including Argentina and
South Korea).

Another basic decision was not to include any Communist countries. One
of their distinctive characteristics is that in those with a more or less
democratic past (some in Eastern Europe), the absence of democracy is
explained more by the power politics of Soviet hegemony than by any internal

19

historical, social, economic, political or cultural factors (although these
might have been important before 1945). Another crucial distinction is that
there is little prospect among them of a transition to democracy, but only
of liberalization of Communist rule. Outside of Eastern Europe, Communist
countries have little or no past democratic experience, and the present
Communist rule excludes for the foreseeable future any real debate about
political democracy in the sense defined by us.

Less justifiable, perhaps, is the exclusion of most of the Islamic
world from Morocco to Iran, in particular the Arab world. In part, this
stemmed from the limits of our resources, which were stretched thin by the
scope of the project. But it was a decision made also in response to
theoretical priorities. With the exception perhaps of Egypt, Lebanon and
certainly Turkey (which appears in our Asia volume), the Islamic countries
of the Middle East and North Africa generally lack much previous democratic
experience, and most appear to have little prospect of transition even to
semi-democracy, much less to democracy. However, our study does not
completely ignore the Islamic world. In addition to the "secularized"
Islamic polity of Turkey, we include Pakistan, which shared until partition
the history of British India and has tried democracy; Malaysia, a multi-
ethnic, multi-religious but predominantly Muslim polity with significant
democratic institutions; Senegal, an African Muslim country whose recently
evolved semi-democracy is coming under growing challenge from Islamic
fundamentalist thinking; and the farthest outpost of Islam, Indonesia, with
its syncretic cultural traditions. These five Islamic countries, with their
heterogeneity, are not a sample of the world's Islamic polities and
therefore will not enable us to explore in sufficient depth the complex

20

relationship between Islamic religion and society and democracy.

Otherwise, our 26 countries are quite representative of the heterogeneous world of those loosely called "Third World" or "developing" countries. These terms are largely misleading, and we want clearly to disidentify ourselves from assuming that such a category is scientifically useful in cross-national comparisons. Certainly it seems ridiculous to put Argentina or Uruguay or South Korea in the same classification of countries as Ghana, Papua-New Guinea or even India, in terms of economic development, social structure or cultural traditions, and prospects of socioeconomic development. Although one might argue that except for political and military interference all countries are likely to "develop" economically and socially at one pace or another, some of the countries included have been underdeveloping or at least stagnating. All, however, are less developed economically and less stable politically than the established, industrialized democracies of Europe, North America, Australasia and Japan. And all share the same pressure from within to "develop" economically and socially, to build stable political institutions, and -- as we argue in Volume One -- to become democracies, whatever the probabilities of their success in doing so. In this sense, all of these countries may be considered "less developed," or as we most often term them, for lack of a better common label, "developing."

Some readers might feel that all the countries in our study share one characteristic: that they have capitalist economic systems (although some have tried various socialist experiments), but such a characterization again becomes in its vagueness almost meaningless. To what extent can a dynamic, industrial, export-oriented capitalist economy like South Korea be covered

21

by the same term as Uganda, whose population lives largely from subsistence agriculture, with a small native entrepreneurial class based heavily in the informal sector, or to other African countries in which business class formation entails more the access to and abuse of power to attain wealth than productive economic activities (which are subject to interference by the state if not extortion by the rulers)? Certainly the term "capitalist economy" covers too much to be meaningful sociologically when it is used simultaneously to describe advanced, industrial, market-oriented economies; state-dominated economies in which much of private enterprise is relegated to the informal sector; and largely subsistence peasant agricultural societies, with isolated (and often foreign-owned) capitalist enclaves.

For the sake of argument, we might agree that all our countries have non-socialist economic systems, which therefore allows us to ask questions about how "capitalism" in its very different forms may be related to democracy. We start from two obvious facts. First, all democracies (in our sense) are to some degree capitalist. Some are capitalist welfare states, with extensive public sectors and state regulation of the economy; some are capitalist with social democratic governments and more or less mixed economies. But in all of the world's political democracies, prices, production and distribution of goods are determined mainly by competition in the market, rather than by the state, and there is significant private ownership of the means of production. Second, there are many capitalist countries with non-democratic governments. But interestingly, among this latter group, those most advanced in their capitalist development (size of market sector of their economy, autonomy of their entrepreneurial class) are also those which have been most exposed to pressures for democracy, leading

22

in many cases to the emergence or return of democratic government -- despite
the forceful arguments of some theories which postulated that the
authoritarian regimes they suffered were more congruent or functional for
their continued capitalist development. In addition, it is not clear how
much certain types of non-socialist authoritarianisms -- particularly
Sultanism²⁵ -- are compatible with the effective functioning of a capitalist
economy.

Certainly, our effort can make a contribution to the ongoing debate
about the relationship between capitalism and democracy, and the even more
lively one on the relationship between dependent, peripheral capitalism and
democracy. This we seek to do in our theoretical reflections in Volume One.
In doing so, we emphasize that our study did not begin with any priori
assumption equating democracy with capitalism. To reiterate an earlier
theme, democracy as a system of government must be kept conceptually
distinct from capitalism as a system of production and exchange, and
socialism as a system of allocation of resources and income. The fact that
(to date) one does not find democracy in the absence of some form of
capitalism is for us a matter of great theoretical import, but we do not
assume that this empirical association must hold inevitably into the future.
In our theoretical volume, we suggest why state socialism (which some would
insist is only state or statist capitalism) has been so difficult to
reconcile with political democracy, and ponder what alternatives to
capitalism might potentially be compatible with democracy.

Culturally, our effort includes the Christian societies of Latin
America, India with its mosaic of traditions including the distinctive Hindu
culture, five largely Islamic societies, two Buddhist countries, one mixture

23

of Buddhism, Confucianism and Christianity, and several African countries which have experienced what Mazrui calls the "triple heritage" of Christianity, Islam, and traditional African religion and culture. Unfortunately, the limited treatment in our country studies does not adequately enable us to deal with the complex issues of the relation between democracy and religious and cultural traditions, although we are unable to ignore them.

One of the most complex and intractable problems in our world is the tension bewteen the model of ethnically, linguistically and culturally homogeneous societies that satisfy the ideal of the nation-state and the multi-ethnic, multi-lingual societies that face the difficult task of nation- or state-building in the absence of the integration and identification we normally associate with the idea of the nation-state. Certainly even in Europe, before the massive and forced transfers (if not destruction) of populations, most states did not satisfy that ideal, but outside of Europe and Latin America, even fewer do. In our study, only a few Latin American countries -- Costa Rica, Venezuela, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, perhaps Colombia -- seem to satisfy that model. Others, like Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Mexico and above all Peru include not only descendants of the conquistadores and European immigrants but also substantial populations (intermixed to varying degrees with the above) of Indians and descendants of black slaves. To the list of the relatively homogeneous countries could be added South Korea, Turkey (with some significant minorities), and Botswana (which still has major sub-tribal divisions). Our remaining cases confront us with the problem of democracy in ethnically and culturally divided societies, some of them, like Sri Lanka,

24

with populations linked culturally with another, neighboring country.

One experience that almost all of the countries in our study share is a previous history of domination by an outside imperial power. Only Turkey and Thailand have been continuously independent countries and only in the latter do we find a continuity with a pre-modern traditional monarchy. Our study therefore does not cover a sufficient number of countries to deal with the question: does continuous legitimacy of rule by an indigenous state facilitate both modernization and ultimately democratization, by contrast with the historical trauma of conquest and colonial domination?

For those who have raised the question of the relation between size and democracy,²⁶ our study includes the largest (most populous) democracy, India, and some of the smallest. In each part of the world it includes the largest country and at least some significant smaller ones: Brazil and Costa Rica, Nigeria and Botswana, India and Sri Lanka. Since the major countries — with their political influence and their capacity to serve as models — occupy a special position in their respective areas, where some speak of sub-imperialisms, we feel our selection on this account is well justified.

In addition to trying, as much as possible, to maximize variation in our independent variables, we have also sought a richly varied pool of cases with regard to our dependent variable, stable democracy. Save for the deliberate exclusion of countries with no prior democratic or semi-democratic experience, or no prospect of a democratic opening, our study encompasses virtually every type of democratic experience in the developing world. Some of our countries are now democratic, some are semi-democratic, some are authoritarian, one is a hegemonic regime. Some of the democracies have been relatively stable for some time (such as Costa Rica and, so far at

25

least, Botswana and Papua-New Guinea); some have persisted in the face of
recurrent crises and lapses (India, and now less democratically, Sri Lanka);
and some have been renewed after traumatic and in some cases repeated
breakdowns (e.g. Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina). Some countries have
experienced recurrent cycles of democratic attempts and military
interventions, from which Turkey has managed to emerge with a generally
longer and more successful democratic experience than Thailand, Ghana or
Nigeria. We have countries in varying stages of transition to democracy at
this writing, from the recently completed but still fragile (the
Philippines), to the partial or ongoing and still undetermined (South Korea,
Uganda, Pakistan), to the prospective (Nigeria), to the obstructed
(Chile).²⁷ And still we have at least one case (Indonesia) of a failed
democracy that seems to have been consolidating a distinctive form of
authoritarian rule.

The sheer number of our case studies compelled us to break them up for
publication into several volumes. This presented another editorial dilemma.
We have opted for the established mode of division into regional volumes, as
this follows the dominant organizational logic of scholarship, instruction
and intellectual discourse in the field. But we hasten to underscore our
feeling that this is not the most intellectually fruitful or satisfying way
of treating such material. It would perhaps have made more sense to group
the cases by the characteristic types of regimes and problems they have
experienced. But any method of division inevitably breaks the unity of our
26 cases and disperses the multitude of different comparisons that spring
from them. We know of no solution to this problem other than to invite our
readers to read widely across the three regional volumes, and to work back

26

and forth between the theory in our introductory volume and the evidence in
our cases, as we ourselves have attempted to do over the past three years.

The Normative Question: Why Study Democracy

Finally, we cannot close this introduction to our work without
confronting the question (or critical challenge) that is often put to us:
Why study political democracy at all? Some critics suggest it is the wrong
problem to be studying. They ask: Are there not more pressing issues of
survival and justice facing developing societies? Does the limited question
of the form of government not conceal more than it reveals? Others contend
our choice of topic betrays a value bias for democracy that is misplaced.
They ask (or assert): If in some societies democracy in our (liberal) sense
has to work against so many odds, as our research unveils, is it worth
striving for it, and encouraging an opposition that purports to establish
it, or are there alternatives to democracy that should be considered, and
whose stability should be supported?

We wish to state quite clearly here our bias for democracy as a system
of government. For any democrat, these questions carry serious implications.
The former suggest that economic and social rights should be considered more
important that civil and political liberties. The latter implies granting to
some forms or cases of authoritarian rule the right to use coercive
measures, in the name of some higher good, to suppress an opposition that
claims to fight for democracy. For ourselves, neither of these normative

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suppositions is tenable.

If there were many non-democratic governments (now and in the past)
committed to serving collective goals, rather than the interests of the
rulers, and ready to respect human rights (to refrain from torture and
indiscriminate violence, to offer due process and fair trial in applying
laws which, even if anti-liberal, are known in advance, to maintain humane
conditions of imprisonment, etc.), we might find these questions more
difficult to answer. However, non-democratic regimes satisfying these two
requirements are few, and even those which begin with a strong commitment to
the collectivity and sensitivity to human rights often become increasingly
narrow, autocratic and repressive (although these trends, too, are subject
to reversal).

We emphasize the service of collective goals to exclude those
authoritarian systems in which the rulers blatantly serve their own material
interests, and those of their family, friends, cronies and clients; and to
exclude as well those systems serving a narrowly defined oligarchy or
stratum or a particular ethnic or racial group (which might even be the
majority). But even excluding such transparent cases (the majority,
unfortunately), who is to define those collective goals, if we disqualify
the majority of citizens from doing so? Inevitably, it means a self-
appointed minority -- a vanguard party, a charismatic leader and his
followers, a bureaucracy, army officers, perhaps intellectuals or "experts"
working with them. But why should their definition of societal goals be
better than that of any other group with a different conception of the
collective good? Only if we were totally certain that one ideological (or
religious) conception is the expression of historical reason -- true and

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necessary -- would we be forced to accept such an authoritarian alternative
as better than democracy. To do so, as we know, justifies any sacrifices and
ultimately terrible costs in freedom and human lives. The option between
ultimate value choices would inevitably be resolved by force. Thus democracy
-- with its relativism and tolerance (so disturbing to those certain of the
truth), and its "faith" in the reasonableness and intelligence of the common
men and women, including those uneducated and those with "false
consciousness" (a concept that assumes others know better their real
interests), deciding freely (and with a chance to change their minds every
four or five years) and without the use of force -- seems still a better
option.

Of course, even committed democrats know that the empirical world, and
so the normative issue, is full of variation and ambiguity. But this should
not lead to intellectual and political confusion. A few authoritarian
regimes which manifest commitment to collective goals and human rights might
have redeeming qualities, particularly if they are stable and do not require
excessive force to stay in power. But that does not make them democracies.
Their supporters should be free to argue the positive aspects of their rule,
without ignoring or denying the negative ones, but they should not attempt
to claim that they are democracies. Not all non-democracies are totally bad.
Nor are all democracies, and especially unstable democracies, good for the
people. But certainly non-democracies are not likely to achieve those social
and moral goals that require democratic institutions and freedoms.

Therefore, from the point of view of a democrat, they will always be
undesirable. Moreover, should they turn out to betray the ideals and hopes
of their founders (as they have done so repeatedly), there is no easy way to

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oust them from power by peaceful means. Indeed, the almost law-like
inevitability of the abuse and corruption of authoritarian power throughout
history constitutes, we believe, one of the most compelling justifications
for the institutionalized checks and accountability of a democracy.

For all these reasons, we (along with an increasing proportion of the
world's population) value political democracy as an end in itself -- without
assuming that it is any guarantee of other important values. And we believe
that a better understanding of the conditions for it is a worthwhile
intellectual endeavor, which does not require us to deny the positive
accomplishments of some non-democratic regimes and the many flaws of
democratic governments and societies.

Larry Diamond
Juan J. Linz
Seymour Martin Lipset

Stanford, California

September, 1987

1. Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan, eds., *The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes* (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).

2. Arend Lijphart, *Democracy in Plural Societies: A Comparative Exploration* (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); Donald L. Horowitz, *Ethnic Groups in Conflict* (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).

3. G. Bingham Powell, *Contemporary Democracies: Participation, Stability and Violence* (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982).

4. Myron Weiner and Ergun Ozbudun, eds., *Competitive Elections in Developing Countries* (Washington: American Enterprise Institute, 1987).

5. Guillermo O'Donnell, Philippe C. Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead, eds., *Transitions from Authoritarian Rule* (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).

6. Giovanni Sartori, *The Theory of Democracy Revisited* (Chatham, New Jersey: Chatham House Publishers, 1987).

7. Gabriel A. Almond and James S. Coleman, eds., *The Politics of the Developing Areas* (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), p. 3.

8. Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, *The Civic Culture* (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963).

9. Notable early works here were Daniel Lerner, *The Passing of Traditional Society* (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1958); Seymour Martin Lipset, "Some Social Requisites of Democracy," *American Political Science Review* 53 (1959), pp. 69-105; and *Political Man* (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1960), pp. 27-63; and Karl W. Deutsch, "Social Mobilization and Democracy," *American Political Science Review* 55 (1961), pp. 493-514.

10. Samuel P. Huntington, *Political Order in Changing Societies* (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968).

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11. Barrington Moore, Jr., *Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy* (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966).

12. Leonard Binder, James S. Coleman, Joseph La Palombara, Lucian Pye, Sidney Verba and Myron Weiner, *Crises and Sequences in Political Development* (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971). The work of this committee, and the evolution of political development studies from the 1960s to the present, is surveyed in a sweeping and erudite review by Gabriel Almond, "The Development of Political Development," in Myron Weiner and Samuel P. Huntington, eds., *Understanding Political Development* (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1987), pp. 437-90.

13. Robert A. Dahl, *Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition* (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1971).

14. See for example Stein Rokkan, *Citizens, Elections, Parties: Approaches to the Comparative Study of the Processes of Development* (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget (Scandinavian University Press), 1970).

15. Almond, "The Development of Political Development," pp. 444-50.

16. Peter Evans, *Dependent Development* (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 25-54.

17. Guillermo O'Donnell, *Modernization and Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism: Studies in South American Politics* (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, University of California, 1973); see also, David Collier, ed., *The New Authoritarianism in Latin America* (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).

18. This neglect is to some extent overcome in Arend Lijphart's creative and enterprising study, *Democracies: Patterns of Majoritarian and Consensus Government in Twenty-One Countries* (New Haven: Yale University

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Press, 1984). However, the focus is mainly on political structure, and the
comparison is limited to the continuous and stable democracies of the
advanced, industrial countries.

19. Specifically, the points on this scale were: 1) _High success_ -- stable and uninterrupted democratic rule, with democracy now deeply institutionalized and stable; 2) _Progressive success_ -- the consolidation of relatively stable democracy after one or more breakdowns or serious interruptions; 3) _Mixed success_ -- _democratic and unstable_ (e.g., democracy has returned following a period of breakdown and authoritarian rule, but has not yet been consolidated); 4) _Mixed success_ -- _partial or semi-democracy_; 5) _Failure but promise_ -- democratic rule has broken down, but there are considerable pressures and prospects for its return; 6) _Failure or absence_ -- democracy has never functioned for any significant period of time and there is little prospect that it will in the coming years.

20. Dahl, _Polyarchy_, pp. 3-20; Joseph Schumpeter, _Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy_ (New York: Harper and Row, 1942); Lipset, _Political Man_, p. 27; Juan Linz, _The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Crisis, Breakdown and Reequilibration_ (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. 5.

21. Guillermo O'Donnell and Philippe C. Schmitter, _Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies_ (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).

22. The distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes has a long intellectual history predating its fashionable (and in some ways confusing) use by Jeanne Kirkpatrick ("Dictatorships and Double Standards," _Commentary_ 68, 1979, pp. 34-45). See Juan J. Linz, "Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes," in _Handbook of Political Science_, Fred I. Greenstein

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and Nelson W. Polsby, eds, (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1975), vol. 3, pp. 175-411.

23. For a review of the literature on the subject from 1960 to 1980, see the expanded and updated edition of Lipset's *Political Man* (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), pp. 469-76.

24. In point of fact, the 24-member organization also includes Turkey, but its per capita GNP ($1160 in 1984) clearly places it among the middle ranks of developing countries (at about the level of Costa Rica or Colombia, for example).

25. Linz, "Totalitarianism and Authoritarianism," pp. 259-63.

26. Robert A. Dahl and Edward Tufte, *Size and Democracy* (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1973).

27. One of the most important countries in the world now struggling (against increasingly forbidding odds, it appears) to develop a full democracy -- South Africa -- we reluctantly excluded from our study, not only because it has lacked any previous experience with democracy (beyond its limited functioning among the minority white population), but because the context of pervasive, institutionalized racial domination generates a number of quite distinctive obstacles and complexities. Although we feel our theoretical framework has much to contribute to the study of the conditions and prospects for democracy in South Africa, the unique character of that problem may make it more suitable for exploration through monographic studies, of which there is a proliferating literature. See for example, Arend Lijphart, *Power-Sharing in South Africa* (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, University of California, 1985), and Heribert Adam and Kogila Moodley, *South Africa Without Apartheid: Dismantling Racial*

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