We did not invent the concept of \u201ctransitology,\u201d but Guillermo O\u2019Donnell and I\u00a0have been repeatedly associated with it and even blamed for its existence.<\/p>\n
When\u00a0we wrote Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusion about Uncertain\u00a0Democracies, we had virtually no existing literature to draw upon. Books and articles\u00a0on how \u2018real-existing\u2019 democracies functioned and managed to survive constituted a\u00a0sizeable library. Those on how these regimes came to be democratic might have\u00a0filled a few shelves \u2013 and most of them consisted of historical descriptions of single\u00a0cases.<\/p>\n
For the most part we ransacked the case studies produced by the other\u00a0participants in the Woodrow Wilson Center project, but both of us also reached back\u00a0to the classics of political thought. I personally found a lot of inspiration in the work\u00a0of Niccol\u00f2 Machiavelli who, I discovered, had been grappling some time ago with\u00a0regime change in the opposite direction, i.e. from \u2018republican\u2019 to \u2018princely\u2019 rule.<\/p>\n
My\u00a0hunch is that Guillermo reached similar conclusions based on his critical reading of\u00a0the literature on established liberal democracies that assumed the prior need for a\u00a0lengthy list of requisite conditions and, hence, the virtual impossibility for any\u00a0newcomers to enter this select and privileged group of about twenty regimes.<\/p>\n
Neither of us could imagine that the fledgling efforts we were observing in\u00a0Southern Europe and Latin America in the early 1980s would soon be followed by\u00a0almost seventy other regime transformations in all regions of the world.ii In each\u00a0case, the declared (and publicly supported) objective was to become democratic \u2013\u00a0more or less according to the norms and practices of those twenty or so forerunners\u00a0in Western Europe, North America and Oceania.<\/p>\n
These surprise events, especially the ones in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, presented us with an \u00a0extraordinary scientific opportunity and intellectual risk \u2013 not to mention a lot \u00a0normative satisfaction. Could the concepts, assumptions, hypotheses and \u201ctentative \u00a0conclusions\u201d that we had derived from the early cases be stretched to fit a much larger set of countries with very different starting points in terms of prior regimes, \u00a0historical experiences and cultural norms? Needless to say, the Arab Spring that began in 2010 offers an even greater challenge to transitologists, since these\u00a0countries had so often been declared \u201cBeyond the Pale\u201d of democracy for cultural \u00a0(Arab) or religious (Muslim) reasons.<\/p>\n
The pretence of this neo- and, perhaps, pseudo-science is that it can explain \u00a0and, hopefully, guide the way from one regime to another or, more specifically in the \u00a0present context, from some form of autocracy to some form of democracy. Its \u00a0subject matter consists of a period of time \u2013 a liminal one of varying length \u2013 that \u00a0begins with the demise of one more or less established (if not legitimate) set of rules for the exercise of power and ends with the consolidation of another set of rules. Its intrinsic value rests on the assumption that choices made during this period will have \u00a0an enduring effect upon the eventual outcome \u2013 either upon the type of regime that ensues and\/or the quality of its performance.<\/p>\n
Its founder and patron-saint, if it has one, should be Niccol\u00f3 Machiavelli. For the \u00ab\u00a0wily Florentine\u00a0\u00bb was the first great political theorist, not only to treat political \u00a0outcomes as the artefactual and contingent product of human collective action, but also to recognize the specific problematics and dynamics of regime change.<\/p>\n