Do Types of Regime Transitions Matter? Enduring Legacies of Paths to Democracy

• In Event: Critical Junctures: Juxtaposing Methods, Triangulating among Divergent Findings

Abstract

Transitions to democracy appear to offer a prime example of just the sort of ‘critical juncture’ that has animated a large and important literature on historical causation and its implications for social science. After all, by definition, democratization involves highly consequential institutional change, thereby meeting the first major condition for the applicability of this framework in empirical analysis. Moreover, instances of this type of macropolitical transformation follow enormously divergent scenarios that vary substantially across cases; the existence of large differences between cases in their pathways of regime change is uncontestable. If variation between pathways to democracy actually conditions the direction and nature of political life in new democracies, this phenomenon would stand as an important example of how ‘critical junctures’ shape political life for long periods of time after they take place. Nonetheless, decades after the beginning of the ultimately global ‘Third Wave’ of democratization in April 1974, there is still no scholarly consensus on whether pathways to democracy do indeed generate their distinctive legacies. Early efforts to build a theoretically oriented literature on this point failed to produce intellectual closure or agreement. Some eminent scholars have instead suggested that democratization offers a useful example of the causal process of ‘equifinality’ in which different pathways, in this instance different types of transition, lead to the same result. I address these sharply divergent perspectives through an in-depth multi-method study of Spain and Portugal – i.e., a strategically chosen paired comparison of two transitions that took place in long similar neighboring countries but which followed nearly polar opposite pathways of change. Based on the extensive evidence deployed in these two case studies, I conclude the different types of transitions are highly consequential for subsequent outcomes. The argument emphasizes the importance of cultural legacies of democratization pathways that shape democratic political life and, as a result, major subsequent outcomes.

Author

• Robert M. Fishman, Carlos III University, Madrid