ABSTRACT

Guillermo O’Donnell is Helen Kellogg Professor o f Government and International Studies at the University o f Notre Dame. The present essay has been abridged from a longer paper that he presented at a June 1997 conference cosponsored by the International Forum for Democratic Studies and the Institute for Advanced Studies (Vienna). A more extensive andfully annotated version o f this essay will appear, together with comments by Philippe Schmitter, Richard Sklar, and Marc F. Plattner, in The Self-Restraining State: Power and Account-ability in New Democracies, a volume edited by Andreas Schedler, Larry Diamond, and Marc F. Plattner that is forthcoming from Lynne Rienner Publishers.