ABSTRACT
Impressed by the democratization processes that occurred in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, many scholars rebelled against what they saw as a sterile preoccupation with structural constraints. They focused on ways in which political actors and the broader public could bring about democracy during political openings. This new literature came to be known as transition theory, and it dominated the field in the early 1990s. It was followed by attempts to understand the independent causal role of institutions, such as electoral systems, regime subtypes, and the state. These analyses met the objection that both the choice set of actors and the institutional settings were heavily constrained by deeper factors. This situation motivated different approaches to integrate structural, institutional, and agency-based factors into unified explanatory frameworks. However, while the idea of integration is appealing because of its promise to provide more comprehensive explanatory models, it is very difficult to do so in a convincing way.
