Democratisation
The Demise of Dictatorships and Birth of Democracies
Dictatorships come to an end in various ways. They can be
ended by such `accidental' events as the death of a personalist
dictator, or a foreign invasion that conquers the regime's country .
More purposefully, a regime leader may end a party's rule by
misappropriating power (see Chapter 6), or the party's expropriation
may instead arise from a military coup or a spontaneous
revolution by the people . But there have also been many cases,
especially among military regimes, of relatively voluntary handing
over of power to the people - a relinquishing of public
offices and powers .
Relinquishing involves a voluntary transferral of power rather
than a biological loss of power through death in office, or a
political loss of power through being expropriated by seizure
or misappropriation . However, various forms of force or pressure,
such as armed insurrection or demonstrations of popular
discontent, may contribute to the decision to relinquish power,
if only by altering the regime's assessment of whether holding
power is worth the effort or odium . Therefore relinquishing
power involves degrees of `voluntariness' and in extreme cases
may mean little more than making the best of a virtually hope less
situation, with the regime's opponents likely to seize power
in the near future . Such a situation comes very close to being
a case of orderly expropriation rather than relinquishment
of
being a surrender rather than a transferral
. But in cases of
orderly expropriation, in which the seizure of power ends in
surrender negotiations and agreements, the regime has already
188
Democratisation 189
lost the use of its public powers - it has lost control of the
streets and of society - and its public offices are all it has left
to surrender.
Whether ended by death, expropriation or relinquishment,
a dictatorship has often been replaced by simply a different
type of non-democratic regime . The death of a personalist ruler
has often resulted in a return to the preceding party or military
type of dictatorship . And the ending of a party or personalist
dictatorship by military coup has often resulted in the establishment
of a military regime .
However, in recent decades democratisation has become the
most common result of a dictatorship's demise-. Democracy,
even if only short-lived, has always been a common ending of
military dictatorships, but it became the common ending of
party and personalist dictatorships, too, when most of the existing
examples of these regimes were democratised in the 1980s and
early 1990s as part of what has been termed history's `third
wave' of democratisation.
The Third Wave of Democratisation
In the early 1990s Huntington used this term to describe
the wave of democratisation that was still sweeping through
the world and which he viewed as having begun in 1974 with the
pro-democracy military coup that overthrew Portugal's longstanding
dictatorship (Huntington, 1991 : 3) . He referred to it
as the third wave to distinguish it from the two earlier periods
of relatively frequent transitions to democracy : the first, `long'
wave of democratisation in 1828-1926, and the second, `short'
wave in 1943-62 (ibid.: 16) . He pointed out that in 1990 the
actual proportion of democratic states in the world (45 per
cent) was still no higher than its previous peak in 1922 (ibid.:
26) . But the democratisation of numerous states in Africa during
the early 1990s would give the democratic states a large
majority - compared to being very much in the minority (25
per cent) before the onset of the third wave of democratisation.
Huntington also made an impressive attempt at explaining
why this wave of democratisation occurred . He suggested that
five `independent variables' played significant roles in bringing
it about:
190 Non-Democratic Regimes
1 . authoritarian regimes' increasing legitimacy problems, including
problems with (economic) performance legitimacy;
2. the social effects of the 1960s rapid economic growth, such
as the expansion of the middle classes ;
3. changes in the political attitudes of the Catholic Church,
which nationally and internationally became opposed to
authoritarian regimes ;
4. changes in external actors' policies, such as the Soviet Union
abandoning its policy of intervening militarily to maintain
communist rule in Eastern Europe; and
5. the `snowball' or `demonstration' effects (see Exhibit 8.1),
enhanced by increasingly effective international mass media,
as earlier transitions in the wave of democratisation
stimulated people in other countries to attempt similar regime
changes (Huntington, 1991 : 44-5) .
However, explanations or explanatory theories of democratisation
have their limitations when used to analyse the ending
of dictatorship - the expropriation or relinquishing of power
- that has led to the birth of democracy . They seldom provide
a systematic analytical framework that (a) focuses on a few crucial
elements in the ending of a regime, such as the strength of
opposition to the regime, and (b) defines these elements in
sufficiently broad terms to incorporate a wide range of more
specific, explanatory factors - such as the changes in the political
attitudes of the Catholic Church and the `snowball' or
`demonstration' effects of democratisation .
Another limitation of theories of democratisation is that they
usually do not explain important regional or regime-type variations
in the way that dictatorships are democratised and in
their vulnerability to a wave of democratisation . Usually theories
of democratisation have to be supplemented by explanations
of democratisation in a particular region or in relation to a
particular type of dictatorship. (The regional explanations may
take the form of theories explaining why democratisation occurred
in a particular region, such as in Latin America or Africa,
or they may take the less explicit form of a general or global
theory including explanations for regional variations
.) The need
for regional explanations can be seen in the regionally `biased'
manner in which the 1970s-90s wave of democratisation swept
through the world . The lack of democratisation in the Middle
Democratisation 191
Exhibit 8 .1 The Domino, Snowball or Demonstration
Effect
i
n important factor in transitions from dictatorship to democracy
is popularly known as the 'domino' or 'snowball' effect . The 'domino'
metaphor had originally been used in Cold War rhetoric to highlight
the danger that communist revolution would spread rapidly
from one Asian country to another . By the 1980s, though, it was
'democratic dominoes' that were increasingly evident as many
military regimes in Latin America and Asia succumbed to democratisation
. Starr's (1991) statistical analysis of 1974-87 democratisation
- a period in which transitions were predominantly from
military rule - concluded that such a 'domino' effect did exist,
though domestic factors made a country 'ready' for democratisation
or produced 'barriers' against this external democratising effect.
Moreover, his analysis indicated that the domino or snowball
effect was evident regionally as well as globally, as it concluded
that a powerful regional effect was evident in Latin American
democratisation-in 1984-86 . The standard technical term for such
a global and/or regional phenomenon is 'diffusion effect', but it
is also referred to as an 'emulation', 'modelling' and (most frequently)
'demonstration' effect (ibid.: 357, 360, 369, 377) . A
demonstration effect seems the best description of how the diffusion
of democratisation globally and regionally can have a
cumulative influence . For continual demonstrations of successful
democratisation in other countries seem to both reduce the military'4,
political self-confidence and raise the self-confidence of its
civilian opponents (see Table 8.1).
East is an awkward anomaly that requires - and has produced
- more in the way of explanation than simply pointing the
finger at Islam (Salamé, 1994) .
Furthermore, the third wave of democratisation swept through
the other regions of the world in an almost sequential manner:
southern Europe in the mid-1970s, Latin America and Asia
in the later 1970s and the 1980s, Eastern Europe in 1989, and
Africa in the early 1990s . In the African case the regional wave
of democratisation not only removed the surviving African oneparty
states, but also virtually annihilated what had for decades
been the world's largest body of military regimes . In 1989 more
than 30 of the 48 countries of (sub-Saharan) Africa were ruled
by some form of military regime, but six years later there were
192 Non-Democratic Regimes
only three clear-cut examples of such regime (Wiseman, 1996:
1-2) . Many experts on Africa have offered regional explanations
for this dramatic democratisation (ibid. : 35-6; Bratton and Van
de Walle, 1992) but what particularly needs regional explanation
is why the African region lagged behind Latin America and
Asia before so quickly making up for lost time .
Regional explanations are also required to deal with anomalies
in the way that a particular variety of regime has succumbed to
democratisation . The communist regimes show a distinct regional
variation in their democratisation, for the three major Asian and
sole Latin American examples of communism survived the global
democratisation that brought down the other communist regimes
(and also the other varieties of dictatorship in their own regions) .
Moreover, there is a sequential anomaly in the democratisation
of the other communist regimes . For while the East European
cases unexpectedly collapsed in 1989, both traditionally liberal
Yugoslavia and the (for several years previously) liberalising Soviet
Union lagged behind and were still not centrally democratised
as late as 1991 . This anomaly is partly explained by regional
explanations of why the six East European communist regimes
were so vulnerable to democratisation in 1989 .
Regional explanations of the dramatic collapse of the East
European regimes in late 1989 have tended to emphasise three
factors (Berglund and Dellenbrant, 1991) :
• There was a legitimacy `crisis' arising not only from the
regimes' lack of democracy and long history of being virtual
client regimes of the Soviet Union (the seemingly puppet
rulers of its East European satellite states), but also from the
regimes' inability to meet economic aspirations encouraged
by communist ideology and by comparisons with Western
Europe (Holmes, 1986: 100, 102-3 ; Przeworski, 1991: 2) •
• Secondly, there was the change in attitudes in a now liberal
ising
and partially democratising Soviet Union, especially what
appeared to be the abandoning of the long-standing Soviet
doctrine of intervening militarily to preserve communist rule
in Eastern Europe as in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia
in 1968 (Karl and Schmitter, 1991 : 158; Stokes, 1993: 21, 99;
Przeworski, 1991: 5) .
•
	
Thirdly, a regional snowball or domino effect initiated by
the Polish communist regime's willingness
Democratisation 193
(a) in early 1989 to formally negotiate with the pro-democracy
opposition,
(b) in April to agree to a series of political concessions that
included an almost immediate limited democratisation
and promises of full democratisation in a few years time,
(c) in June to implement this agreement by allowing free
elections to the agreed quota of seats in parliament, and
(d) in August to allow the installation of a predominantly
non-communist government (Welsh, 1994: 386; Przeworski,
1991 : 3-4, 55) .
In addition to regional explanations there is also a need for
supplementary theories or explanations that can account for
why the military type of dictatorship - the apparently most
powerful type - is actually the most vulnerable to democratisation.
A striking anomaly of the 1970s-80s democratisation is
that until 1989 many military regimes but virtually no party
regimes had succumbed to democratisation. Moreover, the 1989
collapse of communism began with the military4ed relinquishing
of power in Poland (Przeworski, 1991: 4, 6, 78), where
communism had been taken over by the military in 1981 (complete
with all the trappings of coup, martial law, military junta
and eventual `civilianisation') and was still headed by a military
man in civilian garb, General Jaruzelski .
As the military regime is so vulnerable to democratisation,
the most likely place to find an analytical framework for examining
the democratising demise of dictatorships is in the analyses
of the demise of military regimes. After developing such a framework,
the next step is to find a typology of transitions (from
military dictatorship to democracy) that can provide the basis
for a `global' set of regional explanations of democratisation.
Then attention will return to the other types of dictatorship,
the personalist and party, which have been more reluctant
than the military to relinquish the power they have seized or
misappropriated.
The Military's Relinquishing of Power
The military has shown a much greater tendency than parties
or personal rulers to relinquish power. In part this is because it
194 Non-Democratic Regimes
is so difficult for any other organisation or group within society
to seize power from the military. But the tendency towards
relinquishment is more because the military has often seized
power without intending to retain it for the longer term. As
Nordlinger pointed out, the military's common lack of commitment
to retaining power on a long-term basis `helps to account
for the low average life span of military regimes', which he
calculated to be only about five years (1977 : 143, 139) .
When Nordlinger sought to distinguish the paths through
which military regimes were replaced by civilian rule, he included
voluntary disengagement (with or without intra-military
or civilian pressure) as `by far' the most common path (ibid. :
141) . Furthermore, the other two paths that he identified countercoups
and civilian opposition - seem only variations of
the standard form of voluntary disengagement, differing only
in form and/or in degree of voluntariness . For the several instances
he mentioned of a countercoup's leading to the
relinquishing of power by the new military government are also
ultimately cases of voluntary withdrawal by the military ; the
distinctive feature is one of form in the sense of there being a
two-stage process initiated by a countercoup . As for the military
being `forced to relinquish their power by extensive civilian
opposition', such opposition is described as `civilian pressures,
demonstrations, strikes, and riots', not armed insurrection, and
Nordlinger's two examples also involved military disunity and
the refusal of some officers to support their leaders' retention
of power (ibid . : 139). In fact he argued that no military regime
supported by a united officer corps determined to retain power
had ever been overthrown by civilians alone .
The military's relinquishing of power is usually described as
its withdrawal or disengagement from power or politics. In the
early 1990s Welch concluded that there was still no widely accepted
`paradigm' for the study of military withdrawal/
disengagement even though there had been over 80 cases of
military disengagement in the 1940s-80s, of which more than
a third were `through a scheduled, planned withdrawal after
holding elections' (Welch, 1992 : 324, 334) .
However, theorists of military dictatorship have long been
aware of the issue of withdrawal/ disengagement and have addressed
it within their wider discussions of military rule . Long
before Nordlinger raised the issue, Finer in 1962 had discussed
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196 Non-Democratic Regimes
the `return to the barracks' (1976 : 32, 174-8) and Huntington
had explored the issue of retaining/relinquishing power in
connection with the veto coups of mass praetorianism (1968:
233-7) . By the 1980s there were more specialised discussions
of the topic of withdrawal/ disengagement, such as Clapham
and Philip's (1985) analysis of the political dilemmas of military
regimes, Sundhaussen's (1985) of military-regime stability
in Southeast Asia, and Welch's of military disengagement in
Africa and Latin America (1987 : 20-4) . Moreover, these writers
from the 1960s to the 1980s identified a large number of different
factors affecting withdrawal/ disengagement, with its
relinquishing and transferral of power to civilians (see Tables
8.1 and 8 .2) .
Many of the factors affecting military withdrawal/disengagement
have been incorporated into systematic analyses of the
issue. By the 1980s, Finer was applying his disposition/opportunity
framework (see Chapter 3) to the military's withdrawal
from power . Although it was Sundhaussen who had first suggested
this application, he later preferred a reasons/preconditions
framework for analysing military withdrawal (Sundhaussen, 1985 :
272-5) . Finer, too, abandoned the term `opportunity' in favour
of `societal conditions which invite withdrawal', and he
also revamped the notion of `disposition' to include necessary
conditions as well as motivations (Finer, 1988 : 299-305) . His
framework was therefore less like a disposition/ opportunity
analysis than Nordlinger's examination of withdrawal had been,
as the latter had focused on `disengagement motives' and had
included the opportunity-like proviso that these motives will
motivate a withdrawal `as soon as an acceptable transition to
civilian rule can be arranged' (Nordlinger, 1977 : 141) .
Adapting the Finer-style motive/means/opportunity calculus
of usurpation (see Chapter 3) to fit withdrawal would have several
advantages, such as being able to apply the same framework
to both the entrance and exit of the military from power
. It
would not cover exit from power, though, in such an involun
tary
and therefore `motiveless' form as expropriation through
defeat by foreign or domestic forces or misappropriation by a
personalist ruler . Moreover, there appear to be so many di$1culties
in adapting the motive/means/opportunity framework
to fit withdrawal/ disengagement that it may be better to aP proach
the issue from the perspective of ceasing to retain power
Democratisation 197
TABLE 8.2
The calculus of transferral of power Factors
affecting when/how/to whom
Sundhaussen, 1985)
2. Protecting its
corporate autonomy
under future civilian
government
(O'Donnell and
Schmitter, 1986)
Individual self-interest
1 . Protecting governing
and internal-security
officers from
retaliation/retribution
(Huntington, 1968;
Sundhaussen, 1985 ;
O'Donnell and
Schmitter, 1986)
Motive Means Opportunity
Ideological/national 1. Negative: division l . Civilian successors
interest over issue of will not ignore
1. Protecting national appropriate time to interest/policy
interest or withdraw preferences of the
ideological goals (Nordlinger, 1977) military (Nordlinger,
(Welch, 1987; 2. Positive : internal 1977; Sundhaussen,
Sundhaussen, 1985) consensus/cohesion 1985; Finer, 1988;2. Protecting regime's to withdraw Welch, 1987)
work in pursuit of (Sundhaussen, 2. Civilian successors
national interest 1985; Finer, 1988) are a potentially
or ideology
stable and peaceful
(Sundhaussen, 1985; party or party system
Finer, 1988)
(Sundhaussen, 1985;
Finer, 1988; Welch,
Corporate self-interest
1987)
1 . Protecting military
and its corporate
interests from
retaliation /retribution
(Huntington, 1968 ;
198 Non Democratic Regimes
rather than that of withdrawal from power . Instead of looking
at the loss of power, this framework would be concerned with
the continuing or discontinuing retention of usurped power.
The Calculus of Retention
Any calculus of retention will differ significantly in content in
motives and factors - from the calculus of usurpation described
in earlier chapters . Rustow pointed out long ago that
those `factors that keep a democracy stable may not be the
ones that brought it into existence', and the same could be
said of dictatorships ; he himself noted that military dictatorships
`typically originate in secret plotting and armed revolt
but perpetuate themselves by massive publicity and alliances
with civilian supporters' (Rustow, 1970 : 346, 341) . It is not only
this `means' aspect which will have changed as the military moves
from usurping to retaining power . New individual and corporate
self-interested motives are likely to develop as the military enjoy
the fruits of office, and any initial commitment to ideological
or national-interest motives may evaporate .
Moreover, new motives that actually discourage the retention
of power will probably arise . Just as there are motives which
inhibit the military from seizing power (see Chapter 3), so there
are motives which discourage the military from retaining power
(see Table 8.1) . Therefore, as with the calculus of usurpation,
there is a `balance sheet' of motives `for' and `against' ; when
motives discouraging retention outweigh those favouring retention,
the military is on balance motivated to relinquish power
rather than to continue retaining it . Even if on balance there
is a motive for retention, this may be too weak to motivate the
military to retain power when it faces declines in the means
and/or opportunity for retention .
A balance-sheet approach also has to be taken to assessing
the means of retaining power and the opportunity for retention.
Analysts of military regimes usually mention only `negative'
factors, which detract from or produce a decline in the military's
means/ opportunity for retention of power (see Table 8 .1) •
But, as Rustow pointed out, there are also factors that keep a
(military) regime stable and that military dictatorships use to
perpetuate themselves . These factors which favour or contribute
to the retention of power can be presented in terms of means
Democratisation 199
and opportunity, as being `positive' means/ opportunity factors
that have to be weighed against the negative factors in order
to arrive at a balanced assessment of the strength of a regime's
means or opportunity . For example, Rustow's reference to
military dictatorships' perpetuating themselves through civilian
alliances can be viewed as a positive `means' factor, favouring
or contributing to retention . As for positive `opportunity' factors,
a substantial list of opportunity factors favouring retention
can be produced by simply reversing well-recognised negative
factors (see Table 8.1) . For example, the negative factor of
`negative economic trends' can be reversed to become the
positive factor of `positive economic trends', which may or may
not be present in any particular regime's balance of opportunity
factors.
Therefore when analysing a particular regime, `calculating'
whether that regime will continue to retain power is a matter
of assessing the overall balance of positive and negative motives,
means and opportunity (see Figure 8.1) . The same
`calculation' is required when analysing why a particular regime
did not continue to retain power and instead relinquished it
through a democratisation or other form of transferring power.
Usually a few obvious changes in motives and/or factors can
be readily identified as the likely cause of the shift from retention
to relinquishment of power . The means/ opportunity factors
of the calculus of retention can also be used to help assess
whether there will be, or why there was, an expropriation of
the regime by domestic forces .
The Calculus of Transferral
The relinquishing of power, though, needs one further application
of motive/means/opportunity - namely, to the actual
transferral of power. For clearly the power must be relinquished
to some other organisation, social group or person . A `calculus
of transferral' (see Table 8 .2) provides a systematic examination
of the issue of to whom the relinquished power is being transferred,
such as to an allied party or to the people through free
elections . Although the military's transferral of power is usually
viewed in terms of democratisation, in the 1960s Finer and
Huntington were interested in the decades-old Mexican example
of the military actually building and transferring power to an
200
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Democratisation 201
official party - and since then there have been other examples
of transferral to a party, such as in Cuba, Taiwan and Iraq
(Finer, 1976: 180; Huntington, 1968: 239-62) .
There is also the associated issue of how the transferral takes
place. In the case of transferral of power to the people, for
instance, this may be through
(a) elections that have been unilaterally scheduled, organised
and supervised by the military ; or
(b) a negotiated agreement with civilian representatives, covering
the whole process of transition to democracy ; or
(c) the military simply abandoning power and leaving it to
civilians to sort out how democracy will be established .
Finally, there is the `tactical' issue of when the relinquishment/
transferral occurs . The military's basic motivation to relinquish
power may be too weak to avoid delays and interruptions caused
by negative factors in the calculus of transferral . Among these
negative factors are the self-interested motive of protection from
retribution, and the `means' problem of the military itself being
divided over whether it is the appropriate time to withdraw
(see Table 8 .2) . There are also more positive factors to take
into account, though, and in fact the calculus of transferral with
its open-ended questions of when, how and to whom - is
in some respects the most complex application of the motive/
means/ opportunity framework.
Both the calculus of transferral and the calculus of retention
are better suited to analysing a particular case than to
categorising, comparing and contrasting a number of different
cases. For there are simply too many possible combinations of
particular motives and means/opportunity factors ; the various
combinations cannot be presented as a few general or schematic
`types' that can be used for classification and comparison/
contrast on a global, regional or other basis . Such types can
be found, though, in the classic study of transitions from dictatorship
to democracy, and its typology of transition covers
the transferral as well as relinquishment of power by the military.
202 Non Democratic Regimes
Transitions to Democracy
There emerged in 1986 (O'Donnell, Schmitter and Whitehead)
the massive collaborative study, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule :
Prospects for Democracy, containing more than 20 contributions
from a wide range of country, regional and thematic experts .
Although these contributors usually referred to `authoritarian'
rather than specifically military regimes, virtually all the Transitions
examples were of transitions from military regimes
to democracy. Most of the country-studies included were of
1970s-80s (actual or likely) transitions from military rule, and
encompassed a wide variety of cases drawn from southern
Europe and Latin America. The Transitions study's `tentative
conclusions' were presented in a long essay by O'Donnell and
Schmitter . As they acknowledged (1986: 38), their analysis was
heavily influenced by Rustow's (1970) pioneering work on transitions
to democracy.
He had categorised the transition to democracy into three
phases:
1. prolonged struggle between polarised but evenly matched
political forces;
2. the negotiation of a compromise agreement by the political forces'
leaders which leads to the institutionalising of democratic
procedures; and
3 . the habituation of democratic procedures, which gradually
enlarges the degree and range of consensus (1970: 352-8,
362-3) .
O'Donnell and Schmitter followed Rustow in emphasising the
role of compromise agreements - which they referred to as
`pacts' - in transitions to democracy, but they retailored his
approach to better fit transitions from military rule . They
defined a pact as an explicit compromise agreement that (a)
seeks to redefine the political rules of the game and (b) is
based on mutual guarantees that protect the vital interests of
the pact-makers (1986: 37) .
Patted Transitions
A military extrication pact precedes any pacts made between
political parties or social forces during the transition from military
rule to democracy. The extrication aspect of the pact arises
from the officers' desire to `begin to extricate themselves from
direct responsibility for ruling', and includes a growing awareness
within the officer corps that the regime will soon - `in
the foreseeable future' - have to seek `some degree or some
form of electoral legitimation' (ibid.: 39, 16) . The patted aspect
of the military's extrication arises from the mutual guarantees
exchanged with civilians. In an extrication pact the military
leaders guarantee civilian representatives that there will be a
liberalising restoration of individual rights and of some opportunity
for civilians to contest the military regime's policies. In
exchange the military are guaranteed that civilians will (a) not
seek retribution for repressive `excesses' committed by military
officers, and (b) not immediately or too insistently demand
democratisation, let alone resort to disruptive or even violent
measures against military rule (ibid.: 40) .
The military extrication pact seems to arise in situations similar
to those in Rustow's model of negotiated compromise between
equally matched, stalemated political forces . But after the pact
is made, the balance of power or political strength shifts dramatically
in favour of the civilians. The military have initially
conceded - through the extrication pact - only an immediate
liberalisation of the regime and the prospect of limited, not
full, democratisation : `elections scheduled for an undefined
future and, then, for insignificant offices only' (ibid. : 57) . But
this liberalisation leads to such a post-pact strengthening of
the civilian public and weakening of the military that the regime
is propelled into a full democratisation . For `once a government
signals that it is lowering the costs [in fear and actual injury]
for engaging in collective action and is permitting contestation
on issues previously declared off limits', it soon finds itself facing
a `repoliticized' society - what is termed a resurrection of civil
society (ibid. : 48-9) .
Although this may well involve the resurgence and/or establishment
of political parties, most of the political mobilisation
usually comes from social groups and organisations (ibid. : 49,
57) . In particular, human-rights activists and organisations
Democratisation 203
204 Non-Democratic Regimes
stimulate the public's ethical revulsion (often exacerbated by
evidence of pervasive corruption) towards the regime's activities.
Another particularly significant group is the working class,
which has (re-)acquired a capacity for collective action and has
been radicalised by its years of political and workplace subordination.
Moreover, the various groups and organisations involved
in this resurrection of civil society may join together to form
what is termed a popular upsurge, in which `all support each
others efforts toward democratization and coalesce into a greater
whole' - which calls itself `the people' (ibid . : 53-4) .
With or without a popular upsurge, the resurrection of civil
society propels the military into bringing forward the pactenvisaged
elections and extending their scope to produce a
full rather than limited democratisation (ibid.: 57) . In deciding
to transfer power to the people, the now morally discredited
military is opting for (relatively orderly) party politics instead
of street politics, and it also seems to be calculating that instituting
democratisation will enable it to divide and conquer
opponents and garner support for its favoured candidate/party
from a grateful public (ibid.: 57-8) . More importantly, the military
has no other realistic means of solving its political problem,
for the resurrection of civil society has raised to unrealistic
levels the `perceived costs' of either a return to repression or
a (counter)coup by hardline officers - even hardliners are `likely
to hesitate before the prospect of provoking a civil war' (ibid .:
53, 55) .
However, although the Transitions conclusions lavished much
attention on describing pacted transitions, there seem to be
few actual examples of this type of transition among its country
studies. The Introduction to its collection of Latin American
country-studies admits that the only instances of explicit pacting
occurred in Venezuela and Colombia in the late 1950s and, to
a partial extent, in Uruguay in the early 1980s - where the
agreement `was barely implemented, if at all', and was `extremely
short-lived' (O'Donnell, 1986: 11-12) . Nor did an explicit militaryextrication
pact occur in any of the transitions included in the
southern European country-studies .
Other regions of the world seem just as bereft of military
extrication pacts. Explicit pacts did not appear in the Asian
1980s-90s transitions from military rule to democracy
: in
Pakistan, Bangladesh, Thailand, the Philippines and South Korea
.
Democratisation 205
Even the numerous African transitions do not show evidence
of pacting: more than two dozen military regimes were democratised
in 1990-95 but the `phenomenon of elite pacting' had
`few echoes in Africa' (Wiseman, 1996: 158) . The national conferences
on constitutional matters that became quite common
in parts of Africa in the early 1990s are only superficially similar
to an extrication pact. In reality they differed from pacting
in not only their size, procedure and wide range of civilian
representatives, but also in their effect (ibid . : 84-94) . For they
tended either to be the medium for surrender agreements (for
orderly expropriations of military regimes) or, in contrast, to
be diversionary tactics by rulers who went on to thwart the
conference's ambitions .
In fact, apart from Uruguay, the only 1970s-90s example of
an explicit military-extrication pact seems to have occurred during
the Polish communist regime's democratisation in 1989 (Stokes,
1993: ch. 4) . As was noted earlier in the chapter, the military
wing of the Communist Party had in December 1981 staged a
dramatic military takeover aimed at attacking the country's economic
crisis and eliminating Poland's massive independent trade-union
movement, Solidarity (Brooker, 1995: 210-16) . But in 1988 this
by now `civilianised' regime's party leader, General Jaruzelski, agreed
to political negotiations with leaders of Solidarity in order to halt
waves of (economically motivated) strikes.
The resulting roundtable negotiations eventually produced
accords, announced in April 1989, which seem to be a militaryextrication
pact but one which contained more concessions than
a `typical' extrication pact. For an almost immediate limitedscope
democratisation (with elections in which only 35 per cent
of parliamentary seats could be contested by non-communist
or non-puppet parties) was to be followed by full democratisation
in 1993. However, in typical `pacted' fashion, the limited-scope
elections produced an unexpected situation that the regime
could not control (though in parliament rather than the streets)
as the regime lost control of its long-standing puppet parties .
In August, President Jaruzelski accepted a non-communist prime
minister and predominantly non-communist government,
bringing to a close his military rule as well as the Polish
communist regime .
The pacted transition would not seem so rare if it had been
depicted in terms of political balance and compromise
206 Non Democratic Regimes
agreements between the military and their civilian opponents,
rather than explicit pacts . Later analysts of transitions to democracy
recognised that they often involve implicit or tacit
negotiations and agreements (Huntington, 1991 : 114, 139-40,
165-7 ; Haggard and Kaufman, 1995 : 118) ; and the `pacted'
transition could readily be defined as arising from a situation
where military and civilians are quite evenly matched in political
strength, engage in explicit or implicit/tacit negotiations and
compromise agreements, and see the agreed-upon liberalisation
develop unexpectedly into democratisation .
Nevertheless, relatively few transitions from military rule to
democracy begin with the military and its civilian opponents
quite evenly matched in political strength . O'Donnell and
Schmitter recognised that transitions may also begin when the
military is in a politically weaker or stronger position than it
enjoys at the outset of a pacted transition. They acknowledged
that the military may be in such a weak political position that
it relinquishes power without securing a pacted exchange of
mutual guarantees (O'Donnell and Schmitter, 1986: 39) . And
they also pointed to situations where, in contrast, the military
is in such a strong position that it can actually `dictate the
emerging rules of the game' rather than negotiate a compromise
agreement (ibid.: 39) . Therefore the Transitions conclusions
offer three types of transition from military rule to democracy:
1 . the dictated transition by a politically strong military ;
2. the pacted transition by a military quite evenly matched with
its civilian opponents ; and
3 . what might be termed the `abdicated' transition by a politically
weak military .
Other Types of Transition - The Abdicated and the Dictated
Although the abdicated and dictated types were only briefly
described in the Transitions conclusions, at least there was a
more explicit analysis of retention/ transferral motives and
means/ opportunity factors than appeared in the description
of the pacted type . The abdicated type of transition involves a
relatively straightforward and quite familiar type of military relinquishment/transferral
of power (O'Donnell and Schmitter
,
1986 : 39, 20-1, 35) . It occurs when the military is discredited
,
Democratisation 207
in disarray, or under seemingly irresistible pressure (actual or
potential) to relinquish power . In addition to these and other
familiar means/ opportunity factors, Transitions mentions various
familiar aspects of the corporate self-interest motive - only one
of which had not been identified by analysts of military withdrawal
(see Table 8.1) . What seems to distinguish this type of
transition from the pacted type is that the military views immediate
and full democratisation as an acceptable price to pay to
enable it to escape a deteriorating situation . There may even
be cases where the transition is actually imposed on the regime
by its mobilised civilian opponents . On the other hand, Transitions
acknowledged that even in an abdicated transition the
process can be complicated by the military's (predictable calculus
of transferral) concerns about its corporate autonomy under a
civilian government, and about the fate of those officers directly
responsible for repression (see Table 8.2) .
The (Sub)types of Dictated Transition - the Relinquishing' and the
Tacted-like' The dictated type involves a more complex transition
than the abdicated type, perhaps because there is less obvious
reason for a politically strong military to relinquish power . In
fact there seem to be two different types of dictated transition
(see Figure 8.2) . In the more straightforward, `relinquishing'
type the military initiates a fully intended relinquishment of
public offices and powers through democratic elections - and
its only pact-like feature is that the military is sometimes willing
to negotiate with civilians over the details of the transition.
In the other, `pacted-like' type the military is initially seeking
only some form or degree of electoral legitimacy - not a relinquishment
of power - but this leads on to a full democratisation
in a somewhat similar (though more controlled) fashion to a
pacted transition . The relinquishing type is the more common
of the two, and it was seen earlier that there were dozens of
cases in the 1940s-80s of the military using elections to stage
planned and scheduled relinquishments of power . Yet this type
of dictated transition was not explored by the Transitions conclusions,
which instead described the rarer and more pacted-like
type of dictated transition from military rule .
O'Donnell and Schmitter's example of a military dictated
transition, the one initiated by the 1964-85 Brazilian regime,
was certainly not a case of planned and scheduled relinquishment
208
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Democratisation 209
of power by means of elections. Instead, it was a case of the
military's initially seeking some electoral legitimation through
instituting limited democratisation or liberalising its democratic
disguise, and ending up with a somewhat unexpected but still
controlled relinquishment of power . (In Brazil the 1974 liberalisation
of its democratic disguise was not followed by full
democratisation until the later 1980s, as will be seen in Chapter
9 .) In such cases as the Brazilian, one of the reasons for
seeking some electoral legitimacy is that the socioeconomic
success of the regime has resulted not only in `a less active
and aggressive opposition', but also in the regime being overconfident
about the level of its public support, with the regime
hoping to secure not just an electoral majority but a `comfortable
majority' (O'Donnell and Schmitter, 1986 : 20) .
However, this electoral overconfidence is not so much a motive
as an opportunity factor, reducing the regime's opportunity
for retaining power . For the overconfidence about its popular
support encourages the regime to begin an electoral initiative
that unexpectedly leads on to full democratisation . The actual
motive for this initiative seems to be the desire for :
1. electoral legitimation of an internal succession to the regime's
key office (in the Brazilian case it was one army general
succeeding another as the country's President) ; and
2. the favourable response of international public opinion to
the regime's leaders `following through on their original claims
to be preparing the country for a return to democracy' (ibid.).
Although the authors were doubtless well aware of the dominance
of democratic ideology in Latin America (see Chapter 5), they
do not mention the likely favourable response of domestic public
opinion to an electoral initiative or mention the possibility that
the military's claims of democratic intent may be quite genuine
. In fact the Transitions conclusions never considered the
possibility that authoritarian regimes may have ideological or
national-interest motives for relinquishing power . Similarly, the
Transitions conclusions did not consider the military regimes'
tendency towards comparatively short-lived rule (when compared
with other authoritarian regimes), even though this tendency
was widely recognised by analysts of military regimes and would
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210 Non-Democratic Regimes
be recognised in later analyses of democratic transitions
(Huntington, 1991 : 117; Haggard and Kaufman, 1995 : 11, 13) .
The Global and Regional Distribution of Dictated Transitions The
dictated type seems to have been the prevalent type of transition
in Asia during its 1980s wave of democratisation . The most
complex example is Taiwan's long transition to democracy, which
occurred against the backdrop of a military regime having gradually
transferred power to its official party, the Kuomintang, which
in turn was only gradually implementing a dictated transition
- the martial-law decree inherited from the military regime was
not revoked until 1986 (Cheng, 1989 : 489)! This dictated transition
also displayed some pact-like features, including a continual
informal dialogue that led to formal negotiations between the
regime and a civilian opposition which had occasionally used
sizeable public demonstrations to support its position . The South
Korean transition from military rule was a more straightforward
case. It not only lacked the extra complications of a
preceding military-to-party transferral but also occurred at a
more rapid pace and was accompanied by more open or dramatic
use of public demonstrations by the regime's civilian
opponents . The dictated type also occurred in Pakistan and
Thailand, and the only exception to the rule seems to have
been the expropriation of Marcos's military-supportive regime
in the Philippines by a combination of some military rebels
and masses of `people power' .
In comparison, the dictated type of transition was less prominent
in South America's 1980s wave of democratisation . It
appeared in Brazil and perhaps Peru (which was on the borderline
with an implicitly pacted transition) ; but the Uruguayan
transition was pacted, the Bolivian was a stop-go combination
of pacted and abdicated, and the Argentinian was an abdicated
transition . Moreover, Africa's 1990s wave of democratisation
saw a huge number of transitions from military rule to democracy,
but few examples of the dictated type of transition . African
military regimes were `more reticent about handing power
back to civilians' than were their South American counter parts,
and what have been termed `managed transitions' were
initiated `either without great sincerity or in response to popu
lar
protest and pressures' (Bratton and Van de Walle, 1994
:
481) .
Democratisation 211
Even such a superficial `global' survey of the incidence of
dictated transitions shows the advantages of using the Transitions
dictated/ pacted/ abdicated typology in global and regional
comparisons. Moreover, Transitions could claim to have offered
a whole new dimension to retention/ transferral analysis of
particular cases of transition by raising the issue of the relative
strength of groups within the military.
Hardliners and Softliners
In a pacted type of transition `there is no transition whose
beginning is not the consequence - direct or indirect - of
important divisions within the authoritarian regime itself, principally
along the fluctuating cleavage between hard-liners and
soft-liners' (O'Donnell and Schmitter, 1986 : 19) . A transition
does not begin until the softliner faction, group or body of
opinion is sufficiently strong to defeat, politically or militarily,
the regime's hardliners (ibid. : 16) .
The issue of internal divisions within the dictatorship was
also raised by later analysts of transition. Huntington (1991)
distinguished between `standpatters' and liberal or democrat
`reformers' and viewed the relative strengths of the two groups
as a crucial factor in determining what type of transition would
occur . If reformers are in power, there will be transformation
(dictated type) ; a political balance between them and standpatters
will lead to transplacement (pacted type) ; and if standpatters
are in power, there will be replacement (abdicated type or expropriation)
(Huntington, 1991 : ch. 3) . The military's `cohesion'
was also an important issue in Haggard and Kaufman's (1995)
analysis of transition . As they pointed out, a decline in the
consensus within the military about the desirability of retaining
power tends to lead to an attempt to negotiate an exit
from power (Haggard and Kaufman, 1995 : 12, 102) .
However, both these later analyses of transition viewed the
presence of personalist rule as being the most decisive internal
-'within regime' or `within military' - political factor affecting
transition. Haggard and Kaufman argued that military `cohesion
is greatest where personalist rulers have gained control
over both the government and the military establishment', and
that such personalist-based cohesion strengthens the military
regime's capacity to withstand pressures to relinquish power
212 Non Democratic Regimes
(1995 : 12, 79) . Huntington viewed personal dictatorships as a
separate type of non-democratic regime and argued that `leaders
of personal dictatorships were less likely than those of military
and one-party regimes to give up power voluntarily' (1991: 110-11,
120-1) . And when Transitions' remarks about personalist rulers
are examined, it appears that the dictate d/pacte d/ abdicated
typology will have to be expanded to accommodate the peculiarities
of personalist rule .
Transitions from Personalist Rule
Within Military Regimes
In the Transitions conclusions, O'Donnell and Schmitter pointed
out that none of the personalist military dictators mentioned in
the country-studies had initiated transitions, which therefore
had to wait for the dictator to die or be overthrown by a military
countercoup (1986 : 34-5) . A famous example of transition
following removal by death was the manner in which the Spanish
transition to democracy took place only after General Franco's
long-lasting personalist rule finally ended in 1975 with his death
by natural causes. However, the personalist ruler's removal from
power by death, incapacity or even retirement does not necessarily
open the way for a transition to democracy . As was noted in
Chapter 5, there are several instances of a personalist ruler
heading a ruler-type military regime, in which the military as
an organisation is independently committed to the permanence
of some form of military rule. In such cases the military can
hardly be expected to institute a transition to democracy just
because the personalist ruler happens to have died or been
incapacitated. For example, after Nasser's death in 1970 the
Egyptian military backed the succession of another ex-officer,
Sadat, and after his less personalist rule was ended by assassin ation
in 1981, the military supported the succession of
Vice-President and ex-General Mubarak - who in turn has established
a new form of mildly personalist rule .
As for removal by a military countercoup, this is unlikely when
the regime is so highly personalist that the military has lost its
professional/ corporate autonomy and become an instrument
of personal rule . In fact O'Donnell and Schmitter noted that a
Democratisation 213
civilian `armed insurrection seems the only way for regime change
and eventual democratization' in such `sultanistic' dictatorships
as the Somozas' former regime in Nicaragua (1986 : 32-3) . However,
less highly personalist rulers are much more likely to be
removed by the military (whether in a factional or corporate
coup), and in fact this is the commonest form of countercoupproduced
transition . Three of Nordlinger's four examples of
countercoup-produced two-stage withdrawals involved the military
removing personalist military dictators in 1955-58: Perón
of Argentina, Rojas Pinilla of Colombia and Perez Jiménez of
Venezuela (1977 : 140) . Nor has this been a solely 1950s phenomenon
. In 1989 General Stroessner's long-standing personalist
regime in Paraguay (see Chapter 6) was overthrown by a coup
led by his senior army commander, who then presided over a
long transition period that culminated in the 1993 elections.
Such anti-personalist democratising countercoups are also to
be found outside Latin America, as in the classic example that
occurred in the African state of Mali in 1991-92 (Vengroff and
Kone, 1995) .
The countercoup which removes a personalist ruler is usually
motivated by a desire to take the military out of politics in
order to prevent any further erosion of its professional integrity
(O'Donnell and Schmitter, 1986 : 34-5) . However, the
question of motive is significant only when analysing particular
cases, such as when applying the calculus of retention . The more
important question is how to categorise these cases of a twostage
relinquishing of power produced by an anti-personalist
democratising countercoup .
The Anti-Personalist and Personalist Types of Transition Although
it will add further complications to an already complex typology,
an `anti-personalist' type should be added to the dictated/
pacted/abdicated typology of transitions to democracy . After
all, the countercoup that removes the personalist dictator is
an integral part of two-stage transitions and may have as great
an impact upon how the transition unfolds as an explicit pact
does in a pacted type of transition . For example, the military's
removal of a hated dictator may politically strengthen a formerly
discredited and demoralised military, allowing it to carry
out a dictated rather than abdicated style of transition . In contrast,
the ending of a dictator's repressive rule may lead to a
214 Non Democratic Regimes
popular upsurge that leaves the military with little option but
to seek an abdicated style of transition .
The Transitions typology of transitions has to be expanded
anyway to incorporate a personalist type of transition . For although
personalist rulers are typically reluctant to relinquish power,
there have been occasions when a (not highly) personalist ruler
has in fact initiated a transition from military rule . Among the
more recent cases were Pinochet's 1988-89 democratising referendum
and elections in Chile, and the young military leader
of Ghana, Rawlings, completing a transition to democracy in
1992 . Therefore, if it is to cover the full range of transitions
from military rule to democracy, the Transitions typology needs
to be expanded to include a `personalist' as well as an `antipersonalist'
type (see Figure 8.3) . In the latter type the removal
of a personalist ruler begins what will become a dictated, pacted
or abdicated style of transition ; in the former type a personalist
ruler himself begins what will become one of these styles of
transition. Some new motives and factors will have to be added
to the calculus of retention when it is applied to a case of
personalist relinquishment of power, but such factors as the
`electoral option' are better described in relation to personalist
transitions that involve a civilian personalist ruler and an
official party.
Within Party Regimes
The general tendency of personalist rulers to refrain from relinquishing
power is found among party as well as military
dictatorships . And in fact by the 1990s there were analyses of
transition focused specifically on neopatrimonial personalist types
of regime, irrespective of whether the regime was military or
civilian .
Snyder's (1992) analysis of the removal of these intransigent
neopatrimonial personalist rulers, civilian as well as military,
argued that an autonomous military is the most likely remover
of a personalist dictator . He contended that only if `the military
lacks sufficient autonomy' to remove a (civilian or military)
personalist ruler, is there then an opportunity for him to be
removed by a revolutionary movement (Snyder, 1992 : 380-1)In
their later, regional study of African transitions from (civilian
as well as military) neopatrimonial rule, Bratton and Van
Democratisation 215
FIGURE 8.3
Two additional (personalist) types of transition to democracy
Dictated
	
Pacted style
	
Abdicated
style
	
style
De Walle noted the general reluctance of neopatrimonial rulers
to relinquish power, and confirmed that this reluctance is
most pronounced in the most extreme case of neopatrimonial
rule, the `personal dictatorship' (1994 : 462, 475) . Therefore,
African dictatorships' frequent tendency to degenerate into personalist
rule may partly explain why Africa lagged behind other
regions in shifting from dictatorship to democracy; its dictatorships'
reluctance to relinquish power is what would be
expected of personalist rulers (Wiseman, 1996: 18-19; Bratton
and Van de Walle, 1994: 454, 459) .
Anti-Personalist Transitions Within Party Regimes It was in the
Eastern European communist state of Romania that a civilian
personalist ruler paid the ultimate price for his reluctance to
relinquish power (Stokes, 1993: 52-8, 158-66) . By the 1980s
the party boss, Ceausescu, had established a quasi-monarchical
and repressive form of personalist rule, but his personalist regime
quickly crumbled when in December 1989 he prodded
the military into a bloody attempt to repress the public protests
which had broken out in the city of Timisoara . A mixture
of military opposition, internal revolt within the party, and quickly
spreading popular uprising led to his execution on 25 December
and the party rebels' NSF movement presiding over democra-
tisation.
Personalist Anti-personalist
(Usually not highly) (Usually not highly)
personalist ruler personalist ruler removed by
initiates transition military countercoup or party
Dictated Pacted style Abdicated
Military or party then
style style
'completes' transition
216 Non Democratic Regimes
Some six weeks earlier, the much milder party boss of
communist Bulgaria, the elderly Zhivkov, had been peacefully
removed from power by senior communists in the first stage of
an anti-personalist transition (Stokes, 1993 : 147-8; Bell, 1993 :
86-9) . The new leaders soon publicly committed themselves to
democratisation and in January the regime began roundtable
negotiations about elections (held a few months later) with
the Union of Democratic Forces, which had been formed by
the now many pro-democracy parties and organisations - most
of them created after Zhivkov's removal .
Personalist-type Transitions and the Electoral Option In African party
dictatorships, though, long-standing personalist rulers reluctant
to relinquish power were pressured by the public into a personalist
transition . By 1990 only four one-party states were still
in the hands of their original and now aged founding leaders :
Kaunda in Zambia, Banda in Malawi, Houphouet-Boigny in the
Ivory Coast and Nyerere in Tanzania (who was soon to retire
in favour of his deputy) . In Zambia and Malawi the no-longerpopular
founding leaders resisted for a time the growing pressure
for democratisation, but eventually held democratic presidential
and legislative elections in which they and their decrepit
parties were defeated (Van Donge, 1995 ; Venter, 1995) .
In contrast, founding leader Houphouet-Boigny of the Ivory
Coast responded to public demands for multiparty elections
by quickly initiating a dictated style of personalist transition
that gave him a new degree of electoral legitimacy (Crook, 1995) .
As he was still respected and even admired by much of the
public and had revitalised his party in the 1980s, he was in a
strong electoral position and in fact went on to win over 80
per cent of the vote in the presidential election, and led his
party to an even larger victory in the legislative elections .
Therefore the prospect, or even only the possibility, of winning
democratic elections may be a major factor in personalist
rulers' decisions to initiate dictated-style transitions or pressured
abdicated-style transitions . It must be included as an opportu nity
factor whenever the calculus of retention is being applied
to a personalist ruler . For just as a successful military regime's
overconfidence about its popular support can lure it into an
electoral initiative, so may a personalist ruler view competing
in democratic elections as a more attractive option than conDemocratisation
217
tinuing to struggle to hold on to power dictatorially. Some
overconfidence about electoral prospects is likely to be found
not only among the more successful personalist rulers, but also
among those rulers whose backs are against the wall - irrational
assessments of election prospects are understandable instances
of wishful thinking in adversity (Przeworski, 1991 : 65) .
Moreover, the electoral option is also available to military
personalist rulers. For example, in the earlier-mentioned case
of Rawlings in Ghana he had good prospects for electoral success,
having provided the country with a decade of `purposive, effective,
dynamic and relatively incorrupt personalist rule', and his electoral
prospects were likely to decline if he did not soon fulfil
his already frequent promises to `pass power to the people'
(Haynes, 1995: 99, 101) . Similarly, when Pinochet held the (constitutionally
prescribed) referendum on whether he should
continue as President or hold democratic elections, he doubtless
felt some hope of winning the referendum - and in fact
he did manage to win some 44 per cent of the vote . It is in
this somewhat paradoxical combination of (a) reluctance to
relinquish power, and (b) hope of electorally regaining relinquished
power that the personalist ruler, whether civilian or
military, is more like a ruling party than a ruling military .
Democratisation of Party Dictatorships
The Durability of Party Dictatorships
Until the 1980s party dictatorships had displayed a marked
reluctance to relinquish power . In contrast to the transitoriness
of the common form of military regime, party regimes seemed
more committed to retaining power and almost invariably were
brought to an end only by armed force . The two fascist dictatorships
had been destroyed by foreign invasion in the 1940s,
and many of the African one-party states were overthrown by
military coups from the 1960s onwards . Five of the newly
established African one-party states had been removed in the
mid-1960s and the attrition continued at a much reduced rate
into the 1970s-80s (McKown and Kauffman, 1973 : 56, 56 table 1 ;
Decalo, 1989) . But this had been a vulnerability to military coups,
not to instituting transitions to democracy. (Only Senegal had
218 Non-Democratic Regimes
seen a transition from one-partyism to a form of multiparty
democracy and, as will be seen later, there was reason to be
dubious about its democratic credentials .) Moreover, until the
1980s none of the world's many communist regimes had
succumbed to military coup or democratisation, and in fact
they appeared to be the most durable of dictatorships. There
were no theories and analyses of party `withdrawal' or `disengagement'
from power .
Such durability was not simply a result of the party regimes
having become personalist and therefore displaying the typical
reluctance of personalist rulers to relinquish power . It is true
that most party dictatorships have degenerated into personalist
rule, but those which escaped this trend (or revived after the
death of their personalist ruler) have been no less reluctant to
relinquish power . As has often been pointed out, the greater
durability of the party regime, as compared to the common
form of military regime, is partly due to the party's `stronger'
motivation to retain power, with a party usually differing from
the military in its views of ideological rectitude, the national
interest and corporate and individual self-interest (as was seen
in earlier chapters) .
What makes the party dictatorships' durability all the more
striking is the party's relatively weak means of retaining power,
when compared to the coercive capacity of a military regime .
In most cases the party is similar to personalist rulers in having
to rely on its control over the military to secure such a massive
capacity for the use or threat of force . Therefore the party
(and most personalist) dictatorships are vulnerable to expropriation
by a military coup, as in the many African cases, and
to expropriation by a revolution, as when the communist regimes
in East Germany and Czechoslovakia were overthrown in late
1989 by two of history's very rare examples of peaceful and
spontaneous revolution .
So it is likely that in some cases a decision to relinquish
power was swayed by doubts about whether the military could
be relied upon to defend the regime . The military's failure to
do so during the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe
has been likened to `the proverbial "dog that did not bark"'
(Bunce, 1995: 98) . Such political unreliability must also have
had a `demonstration effect' that probably reached as far as
Africa . In fact parties' and rulers' doubts about the political
Democratisation 219
reliability of their military may have been one of the reasons
why such a large proportion of the many party and party-personalist
dictatorships that came to an end in the 1980s-90s did so through
relinquishments of power .
Considering how many of the party regimes opted to relinquish
power, it is not surprising that the Transitions approach
(O'Donnell and Schmitter, 1986) was soon applied to analysing
transitions from party dictatorship to democracy . The influence
of the Transitions approach and terminology is evident in
comparative studies of party dictatorships' transition to democracy
(a) in Latin America, Southern and Eastern Europe, (b)
in Central and Eastern Europe, and (c) in the Soviet Union
(Karl and Schmitter, 1991 ; Welsh, 1994; Bova, 1991) . There
was a tendency, though, to focus on the pacted type of transition
,rather than applying all three basic types suggested by the
Transitions approach . The basic dictated/pacted/abdicated
typology, plus the occasional `surrender' to expropriation, is
in fact all that is required when classifying (non-personalist)
party dictatorships' transitions to democracy; thankfully there
is no need to develop any new types .
Applying the Calculus of Retention and Transferral
In contrast, the calculuses of retention and transferral require
some significant changes to their lists of motives, means and
opportunity when they are applied to party dictatorships . As
was noted earlier, the party has different and stronger motivation
than the military to retain power but has inherently weaker
coercive means of doing so - having to rely on control over
the military as its means of wielding military-style coercion . This
inherent weakness in the party's coercive means of retaining
power cannot be alleviated by the inherent strength of its noncoercive
means, such as its possession of politically skilled
personnel and an organisation specialising in political mobilisation
and indoctrination . Therefore loss of control over the
military will always be a crucial `negative' factor that may nullify
a party's means of retaining power and will dominate any party's
calculus of retention .
Similarly, the differences between a ruling party's and a ruling
military's `life after dictatorship' have important implications
for parties' retention/relinquishment as well as for the `to whom,
220 Non Democratic Regimes
how, when' of transferral . A party which relinquishes power
lacks the secure corporate role and individual careers awaiting
an army which returns to the barracks. Moreover, the party
will also lack the military's capacity to exercise indirect rule,
from the barracks, over at least those policies that affect its
corporate interests - as occurred in Brazil and, to varying degrees,
in other Latin American countries after their 1980s
democratisation (Stepan, 1988 : chs 6-8 ; Pion-Berlin, 1992) .
Nor will the party usually have the military's at least potential
capacity to return to power through a coup or the threat of a
coup.
But, unlike the military, a party does have an immediate `second
chance' to regain power constitutionally; like a personalist
ruler, it can use democratic means to reacquire public office
and powers . In fact a party usually has better prospects than a
personalist ruler of political survival under democracy ; the party
faces lower `downside' risks and has better long-term prospects
of eventual success . For even if a party loses the initial democratic
elections, it may (1) win sufficient seats in parliament to
participate in a coalition government or play a significant role
in the legislature, and/or (2) survive `to fight again another
day' in later elections (Huntington, 1991 : 120) .
The Electoral Option
The electoral option can therefore be a particularly powerful
factor in a party's decision to relinquish power, especially when
accompanied by overconfidence or wishful thinking. It is very
likely that the electoral option had a major influence on the
earlier-mentioned Romanian and Bulgarian cases of civilian antipersonalist
transition . And the Communist Party leaders who,
respectively, rebelled against Ceausescu and removed Zhivkov
saw their electoral expectations realised when their renamed
and revamped parties duly won the first post-dictator elections.
So it is not surprising to find ruling parties in non-personalist
regimes, too, opting to relinquish power in the expectation or
hope of regaining it through democratic means .
However, the Sandinista revolutionary regime in Nicaragua
provides a classic example of electoral overconfidence (Vickers,
1990 ; Williams, 1994) . The Sandinistas instituted a dictated
transition in the late 1980s with every expectation of electoral
Democratisation 221
triumph and hoping that an unquestionable democratisation
would reassure potential foreign-aid donors, remove the threat
of US military intervention and end the war with the counterrevolutionary
Contras . In fact the party was so unprepared for
defeat in the 1990 elections that a post-election pact had to be
negotiated to ensure its smooth exit from office.
In Eastern Europe a similar result occurred when the communist
regime in Hungary confidently sought a dictated type
of transition (Stokes, 1993: 91, 100-1, 132-4; Swain and Swain,
1993 : 69-74) . Political reformers began to take over the regime
in early 1989 and initially hoped to use a controlled transition
to tame the burgeoning pro-democracy opposition and remain
the country's most powerful political force . By June the Communist
Party was seeking to secure its place in the transition
'by entering roundtable negotiations with the democratic parties,
now united into the Opposition Roundtable . But it took until
September to reach an agreement, and further controversy and
revisions would see the election date put back until March/
April 1990. The increasingly powerful democratic opposition
was able to transform the drawn-out negotiations into a virtual
surrender by the communists - leading to Hungary's democratisation
being dubbed the `negotiated revolution' . Moreover,
although the communist leaders believed they could perform
very well in democratic elections, their democratised and
renamed party would actually win less than a tenth of the seats
in the 1990 parliamentary elections .
In contrast, the African ruling parties proved remarkably
successful in winning transition elections. The remaining handful
of party dictatorships which had not fallen to military coups in
the 1960s-80s and were free of personalist rule in the early
1990s were able to reacquire electorally their relinquished power .
In Tanzania the recent successor of founding leader Nyerere
quickly instituted in 1990 a preemptive-procrastinating dictated
transition that preempted the development of pro-democracy
opposition but inordinately prolonged the transition process,
with elections not being held - and won - until 1995 (Baregu,
1994: 169-70) . In neighbouring Kenya a much more established
successor-leader, Moi, and his party were much more reluctant
to begin transition but were still able to win the 1992 elections,
thanks largely to the splitting of the opposition vote among
three parties (Wiseman, 1996: 60-1, 108, 135-6) . A similar
222 Non-Democratic Regimes
approach was taken by the Cameroon ruling party and its
well-established successor-leader, Biya, producing similarly
unconvincing election victories that again relied largely on a
splintering of the opposition vote (Van de Walle, 1994 : 143-7) .
However, not all the African party dictatorships completed a
transition to democracy. In Sierra Leone the process was aborted
in 1992 by a military coup, and in Angola it ended in the UNITA
opposition claiming electoral fraud and returning to its civil
war against the MPLA regime . Despite the Angolan debacle,
one of the features of African transitions from dictatorship
to democracy was the avoidance of state disintegration in a
region that has suffered from ethnic/tribal divisions and even
civil wars (Wiseman, 1996 : 111 ; Clapham and Wiseman, 1995 :
223 4) . Although several African states did collapse into anarchy
in the early 1990s, they did not do so while engaged in
democratisation . The lack of state disintegration during democratisation
was partly due to such `technical' factors as the absence
of federalism but, whatever the reason, the result was a striking
contrast with the fate suffered by Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union
as their communist regimes collapsed .
Democratisation and Disintegration - Yugoslavia and the Soviet
Union The communist regime in Yugoslavia had decentralised
so much power down to the six republics comprising its federal
state that democratisation proceeded separately in the various
republics, with elections being held in March-April 1990 in
Slovenia and Croatia, but not until December 1990 in Serbia,
Montenegro, Macedonia and Bosnia . More importantly, democratisation
quickly took on an ethnic-nationalist aspect as not
only the regional remnants of the Communist Party (notably
in Serbia under Milosevic's leadership) but also the democratic
opposition played the nationalist card - with Bosnia seeing each
of its three ethnic groups establish its own party. The separatist
tendency led in 1991-92 to secessions by Slovenia, Croatia,
Macedonia and Bosnia - producing a rump Yugoslavia comprising
only Serbia and Montenegro.
The huge multiethnic federal state known informally as
the Soviet Union (formally as the Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics) did not survive the partial democratisation of its
communist regime, disintegrating completely in 1991 into its
Democratisation 223
15 federated republics (see Exhibit 8.2) . As will be described
in the next chapter, not all the new states that emerged from
the former Soviet Union would soon complete the transition
to democracy - some would remain what will be termed
`protodemocracies' .
Protodemocracies
A protodemocracy arises when an emerging democracy suffers
from serious limitations that prevent the transition to full democracy
from being completed . These limitations raise concerns
about whether democracy will in fact be attained and whether
the country might even slide back into a form of dictatorship .
A protodemocracy can continue in this state of limbo for several
years, extending well beyond the period where the calculus
of transferral is applicable, and the situation may involve undemocratic
elements that played little or no part in the initial
transition from dictatorship to protodemocracy. Therefore the
forms of limited democracy associated with protodemocracy are
quite different from the explicitly limited democratisation that
may occur in the initial stages of transition from dictatorship,
such as in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, in Communist
Poland in April-August 1989, and in the plans of a military
regime instituting an explicitly pacted transition .
The question or issue of whether a country is protodemocratíc
rather than truly democratic arises mostly in transitions from
party dictatorships, especially from personalist party regimes .
The issue is particularly likely to arise when a former ruling
party and/or personalist ruler wins the democratic elections
which are meant to complete the transition to democracy . An
early case of dubious and seemingly incomplete democratisation
occurred in the West African Islamic country of Senegal .
Years before the 1989-93 wholesale democratisation of party
dictatorships, Senegal experienced a dictated, unpressured transition
from one-party state to multiparty democracy . The
transition had been initiated in the mid-1970s by the country's
personalist leader and philosopher-poet, President Senghor, and
had apparently been completed soon after his 1980 retirement
by his protégé-successor, the technocratic President Diouf .
However, the massive electoral victories won by Diouf and
1
224 Non-Democratic Regimes
Exhibit 8 .2 Disintegration of a Superpower: The Soviet
Union
The most surprising and significant example of democratisation
of a party dictatorship in the 1980s-90s occurred in the communist
superpower, the Soviet Union; but the process was not
completed before this federal state disintegrated into its constituent
republics (most notably the republic of Russia), thereby ending
a superpower as well as the oldest communist, and party, regime
(Brown, 1996 ; Gill, 1994; Bova, 1991) . The Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics or 'Soviet Union' was a formally federal state
comprising fifteen republics (often with a strong ethnic-national
aspect) that was under the centralised control of the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union . In the later 1980s the new party and
regime leader, General Secretary Gorbachev, and his reform coalition
instituted a revitalisation or reinvigoration of the Soviet system
- including a liberalisation and limited democratisation . Within a
few years there were indications of a personalist transition to
democracy as Gorbachev moved to strengthen his personal position
(culminating in 1990 with his indirect election to the powerful
new state post of executive President), encouraged a weakening
of the party's control, and sought to win over the party to a socialdemocratic
rather than Leninist approach to politics .
But the limited democratisation of the late 1980s produced a
'democratic opposition' that became so splintered and diverted
by ethnic-nationalist concerns that in 1990-91 the issue of separatism
increasingly overshadowed democratisation. The separatist
issue took on a constitutional as well as political aspect when the
massive Russian republic declared its political sovereignty and
the supremacy of its laws over those of the Soviet Union . As
most other republics followed suit, by 1991 the Soviet Union was
in danger of disintegrating into its component republics .
President Gorbachev was able in April-August 1991 to negotiate
a treaty, with Russia and some other republics, which would
have secured a continuing but much looser federalism . However,
the formal signing of the treaty was preempted by the attempted
anti-Gorbachev coup in August, which had the typically radicalising
effect of a failed counter-revolutionary coup . Moreover, President
Yeltsin of the Russian republic had become a hero as the leader
of the widespread opposition to the coup, capitalising on his democratic
prestige as Russia's directly elected President . Therefore
Gorbachev was in no position to resist the pressure to wind up
the Soviet Union. In December it was replaced by a loose confederation
termed the Commonwealth of Independent States .
Democratisation 225
his party in the elections of 1983 and 1988 seemed to fall well
short of the democratic ideal . In addition to opponents' claims
of electoral malpractices (and to the biased ban on electoral
coalitions), there was the more important issue of whether the
state's patronage resources and opportunities had been used
to reduce the competitiveness of elections . (As will be seen in
Chapter 9, this subtle tactic has been used by democratically
disguised dictatorships to ensure that their elections are only
semi-competitive .) Even a sympathetic analyst of Senegalese
democracy emphasised the role of the Senghor-constructed party
machine - and the support it received from local Islamic leaders
and organisations - in delivering the massive, crucial rural vote
to Diouf (Wiseman, 1990 : ch. 9) . Less sympathetic analysts
contended that the Senegalese electoral game was played with
`loaded dice' and pointed to the use of the state's patronage
resources to `buy' the electoral support of these locally influential
Islamic figures (Tordoff, 1993: 116-7) . Similarly, an account
of Senegal's new `semidemocracy' argued that democracy was
limited by the influence of the state and by patron-client politics
- and that local Islamic leaders maintained their hold on
the countryside (Coulon, 1988) .
The post-1988 wave of democratisation of party dictatorships
brought many new cases of dubious, incomplete democratisation
. For example, in addition to such debatable cases as the
Bulgarian ex-Communist Party's election victory or HouphouetBoigny's
overwhelming victory in the Ivory Coast, there were
several relatively clear-cut cases of elections falling short of
democratic standards (Bell, 1993: 88-9; Crook, 1995 : 13-20) .
In Europe, the Romanian ex-communists' National Salvation
Front used undemocratic measures to help win overwhelming
presidential and parliamentary victories (Stokes, 1993: 174-5) .
In Africa, the ex-ruling parties in Kenya and in Cameroon
benefited from undemocratic practices as well as from the splitting
of the opposition vote when they won their (earlier-cited)
unconvincing election victories. These protodemocracies and
their counterparts in the former Soviet Union are also examples
of the wider notion of `semidemocracy' which will be described
in the following chapter .