1. The debate over transition is much broader than the ground covered in this paper, as the rich literature on Eastern European and Southern European cases demonstrates. The limitation to Latin America was a necessity imposed both by the theme selected for this Trend Report, and by time and resource limits. For case studies on transition in Latin America, see the following readers: O'Brien and Cammack, 1985; O'Donnell et al., 1986; Malloy and Seligson, 1987; Nunn and Portantiero, 1987; Baloyra, 1987b; Diamond et al., 1989; Stepan, 1989; Pastor, 1989; Solano et al., 1991; Salles, 1991; Drake and Jaksic, 1991; Lowenthal, 1991; Couffignal, 1992; Centro de Estudios Sociológicos, 1993; Sanchez López, 1993; Cuban Research Institute, 1993; Vellinga, 1993; Muños Garcia, 1993. Among case studies published in various journals, see Pion Berlin, 1991; Smith, 1991; Gleijeses, 1988; Loaeza, 1992; Corradi, 1995; Munck, 1994; Weyland, 1993; Power, 1991; Mainwaring, 1995; Silva, 1993; Rabkin, 1993; Lehoucq, forthcoming; Peeler, 1985; Rovira Mas, 1995; Stahler-Sholk, 1994; Prud'homme, 1996; Fox, 1994; Zermeño, 1995; Semo, 1995; Regadas Robles, 1995. Another aspect of transitions to democracy not treated in this paper is elections and parties, covered in this issue by Peschard and Valdés.

2. See Tilly, 1984.

3. For Schumpeter, `the democratic method is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people's vote' (1950: 269). To this definition, Dahl's definition of polyarchy added a number of rights and obligations: the freedom to form and join organizations; the freedom of expression; eligibility for public office; the right to vote; the right of political leaders to compete for support; access to alternative sources of information; free and fair elections; and institutions for making government policies depend on votes and other expressions of preference (1971:3).

4. In the 1950s, close to 80 per cent of the population in Latin America was under the poverty line, as defined by the Economic Commission for Latin America (CEPAL). This proportion declined slowly from then on to the 1980s when it started growing again. In the 1990s, some progress was made again. Presently, the overall level of poverty in the region is around 43 per cent, from a maximum of 60 per cent (Honduras) to a minimum of 10 per cent (Uruguay) and a median of 38 per cent (CEPAL, 1995).

5. This conception stands in sharp contrast with modernization's `civic culture', which assumed the existence of lively civic values despite the absence of citizen involvement in politics.

6. One of the problems, of course, was the conceptual laxity that led social scientists to call democratic regimes, such as peronism in Argentina or battlism in Uruguay, that included many authoritarian or clientelistic elements.

7. The `pendulum' approach to political change in Latin America is not a theory, merely a descriptive device.

8. For a thorough theoretical discussion of this problem, see Sewell, 1992.

9. In my opinion, the contradiction is only apparent. It is methodologically acceptable to treat a constraint on a changing process as given `structure', as for example the disunity between authoritarian elites in relation to changing coalitions between opposition forces. This does not mean that such disunity is given once and for all, but that we are looking at it at some point in time.

10. Przeworski (1991, 1996) has an answer to this argument which I examine in section IV.

11. For a more detailed description of these typologies, see Mainwaring, 1992b:318-324.

12. Many authors cite the pressure from the US as an external cause of democratization. Without denying the existence of such pressures and the general international ambiance favoring democracy, we must recognize that US governments have been less than straightforward about how and on which countries they exert `democratic' pressures. We do not hear, for example, of US pressures for democracy on China, Burma or Vietnam (of recent diplomatic recognition), but we hear far too much about pressures exerted on Cuba. Furthermore, US pressures rarely go beyond directing third world governments to `put on a democratic face', to use Przeworski's expression (1986:50), as in the case of Peru's Fujimori who may continue to govern by decree, as long as he has previously held elections and reestablished a façade parliament.

13. The definition adopted here is that proposed by Cohen and Arato as the `sphere of social interaction between economy and state, composed above all of the intimate sphere (especially the family), the sphere of associations (especially voluntary associations), social movements, and forms of public communications... and is created through self-constitution and self-mobilization... [and] institutionalized and generalized through law' (1992:ix). This definition is similar to although more complete than that proposed earlier by Stepan, namely `the arena where manifold social movements (such as neighborhood associations, women's groups, religious groupings, and intellectual currents) and civic organizations from all classes (such as lawyers, journalists, trade unions and entrepreneurs) attempt to constitute themselves and advance their interests' (1988:3-4). The sphere of civil society is opposed to that of political society, composed of organizations, such as political parties, unions, and lobbies that directly try to influence electoral choices and policy decisions.

14. See, in particular, Della Cava, 1989; Mainwaring, 1986, 1989; Alvarez, 1989; Keck, 1989; Dooner, 1989; Smith, 1982; Valenzuela, 1987; Saint-Géours, 1992; Massolo, 1986; Foweraker, 1989; Foweraker and Craig, 1990; Ramirez Saiz, 1986; Alonso, 1985, 1986; Calderón, 1986; Davis, 1989; Street, 1991; Cook, 1990; Hellman, 1991; Semo, 1995; Regadas Robles, 1995; and Zermeño, 1995. Also see the more recent book-length contributions reviewed in this issue.

15. This problem may be illustrated with the case of Mexico, whose transition is still incipient 25 years after it was launched in the early 1970s under president Echeverría. Yet Mexico all along has had all the appearances of the sluggish, inefficient and overly insulated system of government signalled by Di Palma (1990) as marked for transition. To this may be added the mounting discredit of the ruling elite since the 1980s for its economic mismanagement and episodically publicized corruption. Yet Mexico, until recently, had no problem with power succession, a major obstacle to the perpetuation of military rule, and internal divisions in the official party likely to weaken the power of the one-party state were kept safely behind doors, at least until very recently. Therefore, the `signs' considered key, as we shall see, to the starting point of transitions in Southern Cone countries do not point to the same reality in Mexico. Instead, we witness plan after plan of aborted `political' or `party' reform, and long series of strategic electoral games, marred by political assassinations and claims and counterclaims of fraud, all of which are extremely difficult to interpret as `transition', rather than more simply as `decomposition' (Cornelius, 1996).

16. There is, however, a problem of logic here, insofar as mass unrest is also produced by agents, yet is treated by most analysts as a structure of opportunity for elites to take the initiative of change. The importance of popular movements in unleashing crises of legitimacy in authoritarian regimes is thereby relegated to the role of background condition.

17. This process is typified as `second try' by Huntington, who opposes it to the cyclical (pendulum), interrupted, direct transition or decolonization types of democratization (1991).

18. Good scholarship would require that the tension between movement and opposition leaders and their rank and file members be reflected in the bargaining process taking place between these leaders and incumbents. The literature on transitions, nevertheless, tends to treat these leaders as free agents who feel under no pressure to respond to the demands and expectations of their followers, an assumption that does not seem warranted, especially in the case of social movements usually mobilized around very concrete demands.

19. The latter is inferred from the existence of parliaments, rather than from the way they function, however. For example, `decretismo' among elected presidents which bypasses parliament (as practiced by Mennen and Fujimori) is usually not considered serious enough to question the democratic character of the country in question. Other analysts prefer to call such regimes `authoritarian electoral regimes' (Petras and Vieux, 1994).

20. This is a play on words in Spanish which translates literally as `dictatorsoftship' and `democtatorship'. Schmitter considers Mexico a democradura, implicitly saying that Mexico has achieved for decades what young would-be democracies of the Southern Cone are barely acquiring. The longevity of Mexico's `hard' democracy suggests that it is not so easy to go from there to a minimally acceptable unqualified democracy.

21. As evidenced in the murder of over 400 militants of the Party of Democratic Revolution (PRD) in the last five years.

22. Inferences from outcomes to antecedents is a logical fallacy, unfortunately a common one. It treats as cause what may merely be a temporal antecedent, reasoning in this case that if a regime broke down, it must have been unconsolidated. By contrast, a theoretical rationale would ask by what criteria could one characterize the regime as consolidated or unconsolidated regardless of what actually happened (i.e., as an antecedent that can be hypothesized to lead to a probable outcome, based on a plausible argument).

23. All analysts agree that commitment to `rules of the game' among relevant political forces is the guarantee of consolidated democracy, but none goes into enough detail to make such rules analytically manageable. In practice, these rules cover a very wide terrain, from rules of electoral competition to rules on the treatment of opposition once elections are lost and won; on how to construct a governmental program without alienating the opposition or important minorities; on how to accept contestation and criticism of said governmental program; on the inclusion of opposition forces in the administration, etc. In concrete situations, it may therefore be difficult to assess whether the `rules of the game' are consolidated, as typically some will and others won't (just as in old consolidated democracies).

24. This enumeration was drawn from Loveman, 1994.

25. See note 13.

27. This is exemplified in Mennen's `siganme' (`Follow me') campaign motto.

28. Tilly and Rule (1972) distinguish between contenders for power who collectively apply their resources to influence government, polity members who have been successful in their claims as actors and can routinely expect to benefit from governmental policies, and challengers who stand outside of the political process and must mount a believable threat in order to be regarded as worth including in the group of contenders. Closer to Latin America, Brachet-Marquez (1994) argues that subordinate classes in postrevolutionary Mexico are able to benefit from policy concessions whenever they are able to mount a believable threat to the stability of the state.

29. I am here explicitly challenging the idea that democratic consolidation is just a matter of people getting used to the new procedures, as proposed by Whitehead when he writes: `the hallmark of this process [consolidation] will be that the many uncertainities of the transition period are progressively diminished as the new assumptions and procedures become better known and understood and more widely accepted' (1989:79).

30. For a view of this literature, see Centeno, 1994. Also see Bresser Pereira et al., 1993; Nelson, 1994; Smith et al., 1994; the special issue `Economic Reform and the Market' of the Journal of Democracy, 1994; Przeworski et al., 1995; Haggard and Kaufman, 1992, 1995.

31. I am here referring to the problem which the Cortés paper in this issue explains in more detail, namely the danger of confusing empirical indicators and theoretical referents.

32. Fox (1995) explores these difficulties as he describes the process of construction of new state regulatory institutions in Mexico in four rural policy areas within the context of promarket economic reforms.

33. Recent Mexican history provides examples of both rational and irrational collective action: the first represented by the EZLN movement in Chiapas, which uses force in order to be included among the actors renegotiating the pact of domination in Mexico; and the EPR in the states of Guerrero and Oaxaca, born of extreme poverty, desperation and the remnants of the guerrilla movement cadres of the 1970s. The latter, lacking in any constructive program, only knows terrorist tactics which can earn sympathy from other social groups only as long as it targets the judicial police, responsible for countless violations of human rights all over the country.

34. In Brachet-Marquez, 1994b and 1996, I conceptualize society as a nexus of state mediated pacts of domination between political actors, which are periodically renewed and transformed at critical junctures.

35. This was exactly David Collier's recommendation (1976) nearly 20 years ago when the study of authoritarianism was coming to a dead end, due to its overly monolithic and static conceptualization of regime.

36. See, in particular, Davis and Brachet-Marquez, forthc. where we show the relations over time between indicators of participation, contestation and policy accommodation in Mexico from the 1930s to the 1990s.

37. As an example, during the `dirty war' in Argentina (1966-1983), 30,000 persons were killed (22,000 identified, and 8,000 `disappeared'). To obtain such results, the military had to arrest and process approximately half a million persons and exercise surveillance over close to four million. This vast operation required the cooperation and collaboration of millions of private citizens whose cooperation can be counted on in the future, in the event that the military deem it necessary to save their country from democracy (conversation with Carlos Marin, sociologist and former political prisoner).

38. See the essays in Chalmers et al. (1992).

39. Borón (1992) argues that the right is not a homogeneous group, but an amalgam of conservatives, liberals and fascists in different proportions. He also argues that the kind of democratic transition that takes place depends on what strand dominates.

40. In some cases, such as Mexico or Central America, the first transaction is more difficult to negotiate, but that is due to specific conditions not shared by other countries.

41. Strictly speaking, an authoritarian government cannot be considered corrupt or arbitrary except as a pleonasm, because, by definition, there is no limit to what it is entitled to do. In that context, the law is an instrument to be used selectively by those in power, and public moneys and offices to be distributed with absolute discretion and no regard for the difference between public and private. Therefore, when we speak of corruption or illegality, we are implicitly referring to democratic norms.

Democratic Transition and Consolidation in Latin America: Steps Toward a New Theory of Democratization

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