ABSTRACT
The study of democratic regimes has been marked in the last two decades by a switch from the search for socioeconomic prerequisites for democracy, in line with the tenets of modernization theory, to the analysis of interdependent choices and decisions made by actors in the open and fluid context of democratic transitions. The wave of such transitions beginning in Portugal and Spain in the mid-1970s refocused the attention of students of comparative politics on the contingent outcomes produced by various strategies employed by elite political groups within authoritarian governments and prodemocracy oppositions. 1 The contrasting circumstances and different paths to democracy across Southern Europe and Latin America cast increasing doubt on those approaches that stressed particular class configurations, education levels, and other structural variables. Spanning the divide between the two schools, however, is the assertion that domestic factors, whether elite bargaining and negotiation or economic development, are paramount in determining whether a nation makes the transition to democracy and is successful in entrenching the new postauthoritarian constitutional arrangements. In their seminal work on democratic transitions, one of the most confident conclusions reached by Guillermo O'Donnell and Philippe Schmitter is that for each of their contemporary cases, “domestic factors play a predominant role in the transition. . . . there is no transition whose beginning is not the consequence—direct or indirect—of important divisions within the authoritarian regimes itself” (1986, p. 19). Even those later commentators detailing the role of international factors have continued to uphold the centrality of domestic conflicts and coalitions. 2
