ABSTRACT
It is now regularly assumed in the growing literature on the new democracies of Mediterranean Europe that they have at last conformed to the type of liberal democracy common throughout western Europe. Thus Schmitter in his introduction to the collective study Transitions from Authoritarian Rule comments on the various contributions:
implicitly, they argue that these countries-Italy some time ago; Portugal, Spain and Greece more recently; and Turkey more ambiguously-have entered into, and can be expected to remain within, the range of institutional variation and patterns of political conflict characteristic of Western Europe as a whole.1
