measuring democratic consolidation

66 Studies in Comparative International Development / Spring 2001

Measuring Democratic Consolidation*

Andreas Schedler

The concept of democratic consolidation has become a pivotal concept in com-parative politics. In its most widespread acceptation, a “consolidated” democracyis one that is unlikely to break down. For all its apparent thinness and simplicity,this conceptualization poses considerable problems of operationalization and mea-surement. As the article argues, scholars have been relying on three basic strategiesto assess the survival prospects of democratic regimes. They have been studyingeither behavioral, attitudinal, or structural foundations of democratic consolida-tion. This article briefly examines those approaches that rely on different kinds ofempirical evidence as well as on different causal assumptions. On the basis of aquick revision of recent Latin American experiences, it concludes that in commonjudgments about democratic consolidation, behavioral evidence seems to trumpboth attitudinal and structural data.

Over the past decade, the concept of democratic consolidation has be-come “one of the most frequently used concepts in comparative poli-

tics” (Munck 2001). Observers have come to suspect, however, that much ofits successful career was built upon the quicksand of semantic ambiguity. Origi-nally, the idea of democratic “consolidation” was introduced as a “thin” con-cept to address the challenge of regime stabilization. It was thought to provideanswers to the vital question: When are democracies reasonably secure frombreakdown? Or in Giuseppe Di Palma’s felicitous formulation, “At what point… can democrats relax?” (1990: 141). Soon, however, the consolidation ofdemocracy developed into an “obese” concept that came to cover the wholepanoply of political problems “third wave” democracies have been confront-ing. The ensuing lack of clarity in the meaning of “democratic consolidation”has been a source of recurrent criticism.1 Yet the most devastating attacks havenot aimed at problems of conceptualization, but rather at problems ofoperationalization. Most prominently, Guillermo O’Donnell has harshly criti-cized students of democratization who tend to observe and measure degrees ofregime consolidation in “confusing” and “inconsistent” ways, on the basis of

Andreas Schedler is professor of political science at the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales(FLACSO) in Mexico City. He also chairs the Research Committee on Concepts and Methods (C&M) of theInternational Political Science Association. His current research focuses on democratization and electoralgovernance in Mexico in comparative perspective.

Studies in Comparative International Development, Spring 2001, Vol. 36, No. 1, pp. 66–92.

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“unwarranted generalizations,” “casually drawn” and “empirically untraceable”measurement categories, and unreliable indicators of “extreme ambiguity”(O’Donnell 1996a, 1996b). I have previously argued that the conceptual con-fusion that surrounds the term may be overcome. If we understand the empiri-cal contexts scholars face as well as the normative goals they pursue, weunderstand what they are referring to if they talk of democratic consolidation.Thus, “consolidating” democracy may involve the “positive” tasks of deepen-ing a fully liberal democracy or completing a semi-democracy. Or it may re-spond to the “negative” challenges of impeding the erosion of a liberaldemocracy or else, avoiding the breakdown of whatever minimal kind of de-mocracy we have in place (see Schedler 1998a). However, once we resolve thequestion of how to define democratic consolidation, we run into the even moreintricate problem of how to observe it.

Predictive Inferences

Unconcerned about other, competing meanings of democratic consolidation,the present article embraces the classical and most widespread definition thatconsiders a democratic regime to be consolidated when it is “likely to endure”(O’Donnell 1996a: 37), when we may expect it “to last well into the future”(Valenzuela 1992: 70). This “thin” conceptualization that equates consolida-tion of democracy with expectations of regime continuity takes three distinc-tive steps down the consolidological “ladder of generality” (see Figure 1). First,it is “negative” in the sense that its implicit normative goal is to avoid authori-tarian regressions rather than to achieve superior levels of democracy. Second,it is “forward-looking” insofar as it does not refer to historical records of demo-cratic stability, but rather to current expectations of future regime stability.Third, it adopts an “external” observer perspective that relies on expert judg-ments about the life expectancy of democratic regimes, rather than adoptingan “internal” participant perspective that relies on the subjective expectationsof political elites and citizens.2

For all its narrowness, even this “classical” conceptualization of democraticconsolida tion poses considerable difficulties when it comes tooperationalization. The basic problem resides in its reliance on expectations.Classical concept theory discusses the epistemological complexities that arisefrom concepts whose empirical referents are things “out there” in the objectiveworld, such as chairs, tables, and trees. Democratic consolidation does not fitthis scheme. The survival prospects of political regimes are not material ob-jects sitting “out there before or beyond mental and linguistic apprehension”(Sartori 1984: 24). They do not represent empirical facts we can see and touch,here and now. Rather, they represent intersubjective judgments on future de-velopments, which we form drawing on certain factual evidence, past as wellas present. Regime consolidation, thus, is not a thing, but an argument, not anobject, but an inference.

Accordingly, establishing empirical degrees of democratic consolidation isnot just a matter of observation, but of prospective reasoning. This compli-cates the traditional issue of observational validity, “that is to say, of whether


our observations (qualitative or quantitative) provide us with the informationabout the world that is appropriate to our concepts” (Collier and Adcock 1999:1). It complicates the already “complex choices we make in … connectingideas with facts” (ibid.). Whenever we apply abstract categories to the so-calledreal world, we need two kinds of rules. We need rules of evidence, that tell uswhat and how to observe; and we need rules of descriptive inference, that tellus what objective facts tell us about the concept we are using.3 Yet when tryingto assess the survival prospects of democratic regimes, we need an additionalset of rules. We need rules of predictive inference that tell us what present datatell us about the future.

When linking the present with the future, we have to introduce causal as-sumptions. In the study of democratic consolidation, the task ofoperationalization is therefore intrinsically linked with issues of causal assess-ment. The two are strictly inseparable. Unless we are prepared to make mere“black box” predictions that simply project past trends into the future withoutspecifying “mechanisms of reproduction” (Collier and Collier 1991: 29–39),our prospective reasoning presupposes causal assumptions. Any judgment ondemocratic consolidation in a given country must thus rest on both factualevidence and causal arguments. In other words, if we want to measure demo-cratic consolidation, we have to theorize about democratic stability.

To illustrate the profound difference between descriptive and predictive in-ference, let us assume that we want to know whether a given regime is demo-cratic or not. What do we need to do? We need (a) to define democracy, (b)

DemocraticConsolidation

Positive conceptions:completing and deepening

democracy

Forward-looking:expected stability

Negative conceptions:avoiding breakdown

and erosion

Backward-looking:past stability

Internalparticipant perspective

Externalobserver perspective

Figure 1Conceptions of Democratic Consolidation

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operationalize our definition, and (c) go out and check the facts. Let us thenassume that we want to know whether the democratic regimes we have identi-fied are consolidated or not. Let us assume further that we define consolida-tion in the terms laid out earlier, as expected regime stability. How should weproceed then? It is not sufficient that we translate our definition into bits andpieces of observable evidence. Available facts do not speak by themselves. Wemay ascertain post-electoral disputes, economic recession, or the presence ofguerrilla groups. But such factual data do not reveal by themselves to whatextent they determine the future of democracy. If we want to assess their im-plications for democratic continuity in the short to medium run, we need acausal theory that explains how post-electoral disputes, economic recession,or the presence of guerrilla groups affect regime stability in the given context.

The present article distinguishes three basic approaches that differ in theobjects of observation as well as in the causal assumptions they rely upon toassess degrees of democratic consolidation. As it argues, some students of re-gime consolidation look at political actors’ behavior, others at their attitudes,and still others at their structural environment. While we may comprehendbehavioral, attitudinal, and structural data as operational indicators that referto different levels of measurement, they also represent different levels of cau-sation (see Table 1). They form a chain of causation whose links are causallyembedded: (a) behavior appears as a proximate cause of regime stability, (b)attitudes work as a prime mover of behavior, and (c) structural contexts repre-sent a proximate source of both actors and attitudes. Put in simple graphicalterms:

Structural contexts actors and attitudes behavior democratic stability

The first and most basic assumption in this hierarchy of causal relations isthe premise that, in the last instance, it is political actors who sustain politicalinstitutions. We may regard this as the founding assumption of consolidationstudies: Democracy is neither a divine gift nor a side effect of societal factors;

Table 1Measuring Democratic Consolidation: Types of Evidence and Inference

Level ofMeasurementand Causation Object of observation Causal assumption

Behavioral foundations Observable behavior: factual and Institutions depend on actors.counter-factual. Past behavior (under stress) is

predictive of future behavior.

Attitudinal foundations Participant perspectives: strategies, Attitudes are predictive ofnorms, and perceptions. behavior.

Structural foundations Structural contexts: economic, Contexts (incentives andsocial, and institutional. constraints) shape actors and

attitudes.


it is the work of political actors. Even if not all scholars are equally interestedin uncovering the microfoundations of democratic governance, most of themwould agree that democracy comes to town, and settles down as “the onlygame in town,” only if (and as long as) actors decide to play by its basic rules.It is as simple as that: no democratic players, no democratic game.4 Not allstudents of democratic consolidation focus on proximate behavioral causesand indicators, though. As the article will outline in the following sections,many scholars, instead of studying actors’ manifest behavior, explore theirnormative motives, their strategic calculations, and their cognitive expecta-tions, as well as their socioeconomic and institutional environment, in order topredict the survival chances of a democratic regime.

The Behavioral Foundations of Democratic Stability

The usual way for a doctor to establish a patient’s physical condition is tolook for signs of trouble, for symptoms that would indicate the presence eitherof some acute disease or of potential threats to the future health of the patient.Scholars who try to determine the life expectancy of new democracies oftentake a similar route. They search the surface of politics for signs of democraticillness. If they encounter visible threats to democratic life, they will refuse toextend certificates of consolidation. By contrast, if the democratic waters lookcalm and the skies clear, they will be confident to diagnose a high degree ofregime consolidation. What constitutes visible symptoms of democratic trouble?What should democratic physicians look for? At a general level, the answer isstraightforward: They should look for instances of antidemocratic behavior. Ifpolitical actors engage in antidemocratic action, democracy is in trouble. Bycontrast, democracy appears to be safe if all relevant players conform to thebasic rules of the democratic game. This soft rule of exclusion that equatesdemocratic consolidation with the absence of antidemocratic behavior formsthe core of what many authors have come to call “behavioral consolidation”(Diamond 1999: 65–72; Linz and Stepan 1996: 5–6; Gunther et al. 1995: 7).

Antidemocratic Behavior

The search for symptoms carries strong intuitive appeal. But what does itimply in concrete operational terms? Despite the broad consensus that reignsin political science about the concept of liberal democracy, it is not entirelyclear what exactly is implied by the demand that actors “adhere to democraticrules of the game” (Gunther et al. 1995: 7). What are the basic rules of democ-racy? And how can we detect instances of rule violation? What are, that is, un-equivocal signs that actors have left the democratic consensus and stepped intothe forbidden territory of antidemocratic behavior? I propose that a “lean” cata-logue of actions that violate basic rules of the democratic game and thus, put thegame as such into question, should include three basic (interrelated) categories.

The use of violence. The “core symptom of failed institutionalization,” Elsteret al. write, “is violence” (1998: 27, emphasis removed). Political competitionwithin a liberal-democratic framework entails the unconditional renunciation

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of violence. Actors who pursue their political goals by force violate one of themost fundamental norms of democratic theory and practice. They play “an-other game” than their democratic counterparts, one that dangerously subvertsthe universal validity of democratic rules. The assassination of political com-petitors, attacks against the liberty, physical integrity, and property of politicaladversaries, the intimidation of voters and candidates, violent attempts to over-throw elected officials, ethnic and social cleansing, riots, and the expressivedestruction of public property—all these instances of politically motivated vio-lence indicate that the democratic prohibition of force is far from “consoli-dated” among the political actors.

The rejection of elections. In a representative democracy, to “conform to thewritten (and unwritten) rules of the game” (Diamond 1999: 65) centrally in-volves accepting the regime’s core institution: free and fair competitive elec-tions. If political parties (a) refuse to participate in democratic elections, (b)actively deny others the right to participate,5 (c) try to control electoral out-comes through fraud and intimidation,6 or (d) do not accept the outcomes ofdemocratic elections but rather mobilize extra-institutional protest, boycottelected assemblies, or take up the arms to overthrow elected authorities byforce, then democracy has clearly not “become the only game in town [where]no one can imagine acting outside the democratic institutions” (Przeworski1991: 26).

In contemporary Latin America, the “fraud syndrome” of parties allegingelectoral fraud whenever they lose, regardless of the real incidence of fraud,has not been entirely overcome.7 But, overall, political parties in the subconti-nent display a remarkable degree of democratic maturity in accepting electoralresults without resorting to extra-institutional protest. From the 81 protestedelections Robert Pastor (1999) counted worldwide between late 1989 and early1999, only four were held in Latin America and the Caribbean (in the Domini-can Republic in 1990 and 1994, in Mexico in 1991, and in Nicaragua in 1996).8

Still, one may ask the inverse question, whether the mere fact of participatingin elections renders overtly (or inwardly) antidemocratic forces democratic.Argentine’s Carapintadas, Pinochet’s unconditionals in Chile, and Venezuela’scoup mongers do not turn into credible democrats only by playing the electoralgame. As we have been seeing in Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, the threat of sub-verting democracy by democratic means is well and alive.

The transgression of authority. It is commonplace to affirm that liberal de-mocracy entails the rule of law, rather than the rule of men (or women, for thatmatter). Clearly, democratic officials “must give up the habit of placing them-selves above the law” (Carothers 1998: 100). Unless they do, the regime theypreside over may not qualify as democratic. Or if it does, it qualifies as an“illiberal democracy” (Zakaria 1997) at best, a plebiscitarian regime hostile tothe liberal principle of limited power. But the way elected officials exercisetheir power is consequential not just for the quality of democracy.9 It alsobears strong implications for the stability of democracy. As Larry Diamondstates, for a democracy to be consolidated, political actors have to “obey thelaws, the constitution, and mutually accepted norms of political conduct” (1999:69).10 But which kinds of violations of the law are serious enough to alert us


that democracy might be in danger? Certainly, nearly any kind if we are deal-ing with repeated acts committed in broad daylight and immune to legal perse-cution. But democratic alarm bells go off when public officials start ignoringthe legal boundaries of their office. When they start violating prevalent rulesof rule making, rule enforcement, rule interpretation, or conflict settlement,democrats have to be on watch. Isolated transgressions may have little impacton democratic stability. But as violations of rules and meta-rules develop intoa recurrent practice in salient cases, the prospects of democracy darken. Forinstance, heads of government who transgress the constitutional separation ofpowers by ignoring Congressional decisions or Supreme Court rulings raiseintense suspicions about their democratic credentials. They are suspected ofwishing to bring democracy down, and also of provoking conflicts that threatento bring democracy down. Ironically, though, the criterion of executive arbi-trariness and encroachment may lose its empirical relevance to the extent thatpresidents take Alberto Fujimori’s route of striving to constitutionalize au-thoritarian rule by expanding their constitutional powers (rather than violatingthem), while at the same time surrounding themselves with pliable institutions(rather than antagonizing them).

Causal Assessment

The preceding catalogue of manifest violations of democratic norms repre-sents a restrictive, minimal symptomatology of democratic threats. It only re-fers to behavior, without passing judgment either on democratic attitudes (thatmay be unknown) or on public declarations of democratic loyalty (that may beinsincere). Also, it includes only “disloyal” actions and leaves out the grayarea of “semi-loyal” behavior (see Linz 1978: 27–38). Such a restrictive andprogrammatically positivistic definition of antidemocratic threats should pro-vide relatively clear and universal criteria as to when symptom-oriented demo-crats may lean back and relax. However, it raises three methodological problemsthat complicate its application.

Causal thresholds. All types of antidemocratic behavior pose the problemof defining thresholds. How much do we need of antidemocratic behavior tostart worrying about democratic survival? Even acts of violence, as antidemo-cratic as they are in and by themselves, raise the question of how deeply theyaffect the stability of a given democratic regime. Some authors resolve thisissue semantically. They demand respect of democratic norms only of “politi-cally significant” actors whose “strategic location” turns their disloyal behav-ior into a “serious” challenge to the regime (Gunther et al. 1995: 7–8). Yet,even if one comes to conclude, for instance, that ETA terrorism in Spain doesnot pose any serious threats to democratic continuity, it would be difficult toargue that it is politically “insignificant” or “irrelevant.” It is their systemiccontext, not their intrinsic significance, that determines whether violent actsand violent actors threaten democratic governance.

The epistemology of crises. Even if a democratic regime does not show anyvisible manifestations of antidemocratic behavior, we may still distrust theappearance of democratic normality. The absence of antidemocratic symptoms,

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we may suspect, might not be a sign of good health but only the side-productof a felicitous conjuncture. Good health, after all, is not just a matter of lookinggood under favorable conditions. It is also a matter of withstanding adverse con-ditions. We can apply a similar logic to the observation of democratic stability. Ifa regime has been surviving under favorable conditions, we might be cautiousabout calling it “consolidated” if we suspect it might fall apart at the slightestwind. Rather than trusting the apparent democratic normality under the radiantsun, we might want to know whether the regime is able to weather stormy crisissituations. While the “logic of symptoms” we sketched earlier wants a democ-racy to avoid menacing crises, this “logic of testing” demands to see how theregime performs under stress. Its idealized endpoint of democratic consolida-tion lies in “a totally assured confidence in the ability [of the political regime]to withstand crises and shocks” (Burnell and Calvert 1999: 19).

The “logic of testing” assumes that democratic regimes confront two kindsof conditions or “states of nature” as game theorists would say: bad ones (cri-ses) and good ones (normality). It further rests on an epistemological assump-tion about the accessibility of truth: normality may be deceptive, crises arerevealing. Normal times, it suspects, may fail to show us how strongly demo-cratic the democrats are and how strong the antidemocrats really are. In thisperspective, crises may fulfill a vital epistemological or informational func-tion. They may bring to light many things that in “normal” democratic timesremain in the dark. Crises mobilize. They force actors to take sides, and to takerisks in the defense of democracy. As they unfold, they may come to revealactors’ sincere preferences, their true identities, as well as the actual relationsof power between democrats and authoritarians.

The well-known “one-turnover test,” as well as the more demanding “two-turnover test” of democratic consolidation, follow the same logic. They intendto measure the willingness of political actors to accept democracy not just as aroute to power but as “a system in which parties lose elections” (Przeworski1991: 10). Notoriously, the applicability of both rules of thumb is less thanuniversal. Both tests are exceedingly specific and context-insensitive. Giventhat they may err on both sides, they provide neither necessary nor sufficientindicators for assessing the democratic commitment of political competitors.They misclassify dominant party systems, where alternation in power may notoccur for decades, as well as presidential systems with non-reelection rules,where alternation in power may occur at each subsequent election (see Guntheret al. 1995: 12; Huntington 1991: 266). Still, both tests, even if not perfectlyreliable, are entirely valid. The way political actors handle instances of alter-nation in government constitutes an excellent indicator of their democraticcommitment.11

Non-linear effects. Regime crises introduce dramatic moments of uncertaintyinto democratic life. Whenever a fledgling democracy plunges into a seriouscrisis, we may observe three possible outcomes: (a) democracy breaks down;(b) the democratic regime slips into a debilitating pattern of recurrent crisesthat create a situation of permanent fragility; or (c) democratic actors manageto weather the crisis successfully and establish a lasting precedent of demo-cratic resilience. In other words, crises may be terminal, debilitating, or stabi-


lizing. The latter possibility, even if infrequent, should not be ruled out. Crisesmay be devastating. But they may also bear positive fruits. By definition, re-gime crises provoke sharp drops of confidence in the sustainability of democ-racy. But if democratic actors manage to get out of trouble as clear victors,they may be able to transform the antidemocratic threat into evidence of demo-cratic strength. If they manage to defuse the crisis, they may set valuable pre-cedents. By sending clear signals that antidemocratic action is both costly andcondemned to failure they may give way to the generalized conviction thatdemocracy is here to stay. Crises, thus, may have paradoxical or “dialectical”consequences. Both continual and occasional challenges may end up strength-ening democracy, rather than subverting it. Failed coups may help to preventfuture coup attempts. Threats of violence may reinforce norms of peacefulconflict resolution. The presence of disloyal actors may deepen the unity ofthe democratic coalition. The failed 1981 coup attempt in Spain represents theclassic instance of a consolidating “precedent setting conflict” (Valenzuela1992: 71) that opened up a brief parenthesis of dramatic uncertainty but in theend, as key actors (especially King Juan Carlos) aligned against the militaryuprising and put a swift end to it, effectively extinguished lingering fears aboutthe future of Spanish democracy.

In terms of the development of expectations, the “symptomatic” approach toconsolidation works in a simple linear way. We project past experience into thefuture. In so far as all relevant actors have played by the democratic rules, wemay expect they will continue doing so in the foreseeable future. In so far as theyhave refrained from toying with authoritarian games, we may conclude that de-mocracy is here to stay as “the only game in town.” The absence of manifestthreats creates latent feelings of security.12 The demand to test actors’ demo-cratic commitment under adverse conditions follows the same linear logic. Itonly adds an important qualification: Don’t trust your ship unless you have weath-ered a good storm. Yet, the dialectical unfolding of “stabilizing crises” rests on adifferent logic of causation: crises may breed stability. The paradox of crisesindicates that antidemocratic behavior may, or may not have linear effects.

The methodological problems of weighting causes, assessing causal rela-tions under counterfactual conditions, and estimating non-linear interactiveeffects may lead observers to reach opposite conclusions from identical be-havioral evidence. These problems actually explain the inconsistent treatmentantidemocratic behavior and democratic crises have received in studies of demo-cratic consolidation. Scholars make different predictive inferences from iden-tical facts depending on where they set the thresholds of causal significance;whether they trust behavioral evidence of democratic normality even in theabsence of crises; and to what extent they expect antidemocratic behavior toshow counter-intentional consequences. Since scholars have not been clearlyexplicating their grounds for reaching causal inferences, they have sometimesended up employing double standards in relatively arbitrary and confusing ways.For instance, as Guillermo O’Donnell has rightly complained, parts of the lit-erature suggest that “surviving ‘severe tests’ indicates ‘substantial’ or ‘suffi-cient’ consolidation in Southern Europe, but only ‘unconsolidation’ in the restof the world” (1996b: 168).

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The Attitudinal Foundations of Democracy

Like any other game, the democratic game requires actors to play by itsrules. Actors who play authoritarian games may sustain the facade of a demo-cratic regime. But they inevitably erode its foundations. To assess the survivalchances of democratic regimes, observers may not want to content themselveswith the simple absence of overt rule violations, nor wait for menacing crisesto erupt in order to learn about a democracy’s capacity to cope with stress.Rather, they may wish to ground their predictions in another kind of data—notin actors’ overt behavior, but in their preferences and perceptions. Rather thanscreening the surface of democratic politics for the eruption of deviant behav-ior, they may wish to dive into the deep waters of political attitudes in order tofind out whether actors’ normative, strategic, or cognitive rationality conformto the stability requirements of democratic governance.13

Normative Foundations

For many authors, democratic legitimacy—the genuine, non-instrumental,intrinsic support for democracy by political elites as well as citizens—consti-tutes the most important, and even defining element of democratic consolida-tion (see, for example, Diamond 1999, and Linz and Stepan 1996). Indeed,considerable empirical evidence supports the idea that actors’ regime prefer-ences matter for regime survival. At the higher end, the balance is unequivo-cal: No democracy embedded in a “democratic consensus” has ever brokendown. At the lower end, things look somewhat more ambiguous: Democraciesmay survive despite low levels of popular support. Still, there is little doubtthat high reserves of mass support provide a valuable cushion that help democ-racies to prevent the emergence of crises, as well as to overcome critical mo-ments as they arise.14

Anchoring the measurement of democratic consolidation in popular legiti-macy may give way to considerable complexities. In a simple switch of per-spective, any kind of causal variable may be turned into a dependent variable.Regime legitimacy, like all other structural variables, strongly invites us topursue such a backward chain of causal reasoning. After all, if legitimacy rep-resents “the key to democratic consolidation” (Merkel 1998: 59), its causesrepresent proximate conditions of democratic consolidation. But public atti-tudes toward democracy flow from many potential sources. As soon as onebegins to ask about the origins of democratic legitimacy, one steps into a diz-zyingly vast terrain of inquiry. Once converted into an intervening variable,democratic legitimacy acquires an expansionary logic that opens the door to apotentially boundless series of structural and institutional exigencies. Put sim-ply: If we make the attainment of regime consolidation dependent on the at-tainment of regime legitimacy, we make it dependent on whatever citizensdemand (or we think they demand) to confer legitimacy to the democratic re-gime. In the extreme, an emphasis on legitimation may come to imply thatdemocracies will consolidate only to the extent that they overcome their socio-economic constraints, their cultural handicaps, and their democratic deficits.


Luckily enough, empirically, neither history nor the economy fully deter-mine popular commitment to democracy. Rather, “citizens weigh indepen-dently—and much more heavily—the political performance of the system, inparticular, the degree to which it delivers on its promise of freedom and de-mocracy” (Diamond 1999: 192). In other words, the more democratic the re-gime, the more supportive its citizens. The apparent “causal primacy of politicalfactors” (Diamond 1999: 193) puts an important empirical brake on the opensearch for sources of legitimacy (and thus, conditions of consolidation). It mayimply that the poor and shallow “democracies with adjectives” (Collier andLevitsky 1997) that emerged in the third wave may be able to survive, but notto consolidate, unless they develop from mere “electoral democracies” intofully liberal democracies. Yet, it does not imply that these regimes must reachheaven on earth. As long as they get their political fundamentals right, citizensmay come to tolerate a good deal of disappointing performance in other areas.

Strategic Foundations

In the typical actor-centered transition analysis, democratic transitions un-fold as a four-player game between “hardliners” and “reformers” on the au-thoritarian side and “moderates” and “radicals” on the side of the opposition.15

Consolidation studies adopt a different analytical perspective. Some authorsaffirm that processes of transition and consolidation require asymmetric em-phases on choice versus structure, privileging “contingent explanations for re-gime transitions and structural explanations for regime consolidation” (Brattonand van de Walle 1997: 47, emphases removed). Yet studies of democratic consoli-dation usually do not bear out this structuralist expectation. Quite to the contrary,they are overwhelmingly actor-oriented. Still, the literature on democratic con-solidation conceptualizes actors and patterns of interaction in a manner that con-trasts markedly with the strategic analytical framework of transition studies.

Analyses of regime consolidation tend to reduce the standard four-playersetting of transitions to a simpler two-player format. Processes of consolida-tion are played out by democrats against antidemocrats (which implies de-emphasizing the internal differences within the two antagonistic groups). As Ihave discussed elsewhere, in many political realms, students of politics tend toconceive the dynamics of institutional change as a two-player game, as thestrategic interplay between “conservatives” and “agents of change” (Schedler1999a). In the context of democratic consolidation, “conservatives” translatesas democrats struggling to preserve the democratic status quo, while “agentsof change” translates as antidemocrats striving to subvert democratic institu-tions. Yet, in analyses of democratic consolidation, more often than not, re-markably little is left over of the dynamics, the excitement, and the uncertaintyof strategic interaction between the two antagonistic groups.

In fact, one might claim that the main goal of democratic consolidation liesin the gradual transformation of the conflictual two-player game (where demo-crats fight antidemocrats) into a consensual one-player game (where only demo-crats are left over), which is, of course, no game at all. For democracy to beconsolidated, many scholars demand a widespread democratic consensus

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to be established, in which “all politically significant groups … adhere todemocratic rules of the game” (Gunther et al. 1995: 7), “no significantnational, social, economic, political, or institutional actors spend signifi-cant resources attempting to achieve their objectives by creating a non-democratic regime” (Linz and Stepan 1996: 6), “no significant collective actorschallenge the legitimacy of democratic institutions” (Diamond 1999: 67), and“no one can imagine acting outside the democratic institutions” (Przeworski1991: 26).

To be sure, not all authors call for a normative consensus. But even rationalchoice theorists argue that a “self-enforcing” equilibrium presupposes coin-ciding interests between the players. The game theoretic democratic “equilib-rium” (like any other institutional equilibrium) is a state of converging interests.From this perspective, democracy can only survive when all major actors ac-quire a stake in its survival (Przeworski 1991). Converting democracy’s en-emies into its stakeholders usually presupposes two things. On the one hand,actors outside the electoral arena (such as soldiers and entrepreneurs) need toreceive institutional guarantees that safeguard their “vital” interests (such asmilitary prerogatives and property rights). On the other hand, political partiesoutside the government must see realistic chances to accede to power throughelections (or else, if they are permanent minorities, they must see their basicrights protected through veto powers and spheres of autonomy).16

Of course, the call for democratic convergence does make sense, be it on thebasis of common norms or converging interests. Strategic interaction betweenopposing actors always involves some minimal degree of uncertainty,17 andregime consolidation, after all, is supposed to create confidence in the futureof democracy by pushing the uncertainty over its continuance down to a mini-mum level. However, even if the consolidation of democracy as an end statemay be conditional on the termination of strategic confrontations between thefriends and foes of democracy, the path toward the uncontested reign of demo-crats, i.e., consolidation as a process, may well depend on the strategic interac-tion between democrats and antidemocrats.

In an early contribution to the literature, Guillermo O’Donnell laid out thecontours of such a “strategic perspective” on democratic consolidation. Theconsolidation of democratic regimes, he argued, requires that strategically so-phisticated prodemocratic actors succeed in strengthening their own camp whileneutralizing their antidemocratic adversaries and integrating neutral groups(1992: 18–24). In the same vein, Laurence Whitehead described the consolida-tion of democracy as a complex and non-linear “interactive sequence of moves”(1989: 79), while Samuel Valenzuela emphasized the critical importance of“precedent-setting political confrontations” (1992: 71–3). The subsequent lit-erature, however, has largely neglected such a strategic perspective that viewsthe process of democratic consolidation as an interactive game.18

Cognitive Foundations

The first questions a doctor asks when receiving a patient often concern hisor her self-perceptions: How have you been? How do you feel? Where does it


hurt? Even if the physician claims to possess superior expert knowledge, thepatient’s subjective self-knowledge is a good place to start the medical exami-nation. Still, a doctor will tend to dismiss a patient’s own estimates of his orher life expectancy. By contrast, in the world of social institutions, we mayconcede a prominent place to actors’ subjective expectations. Cognitive vari-ants of the new institutionalism in social science define institutions as inter-locking and self-reinforcing patterns of expectations.19 Some conceptualizationsof democratic consolidation adopt a similar perspective on democracy whenthey define democratic consolidation (or “institutionalization”) on the basis ofactor perceptions. This is true, for instance, for Samuel Valenzuela, as he pos-tulates that regime consolidation “reaches closure...when major political ac-tors as well as the public at large expect the democratic regime to last well intothe foreseeable future” (1992: 70).

In addition to their intrinsic informational as well as political value, actorperceptions may also have a significant causal impact on regime consolida-tion. Social expectations often have a self-reinforcing dimension.20 Put sim-ply: it is reasonable to expect that democracy will last if all major actors expectit to last. The “subjective” logic of self-perception may therefore provide im-portant data even for the external observer interested in establishing “objec-tive” probabilities of regime survival.

What do we know about actors’ perceptions of uncertainty in third wavedemocracies? Sad to say, not too much. Scholars usually reach their judgmentson democratic consolidation from an external observer perspective withoutasking political actors for their assessment, from an internal participant per-spective.21 Most opinion polls include some questions on normative attitudes(regime legitimacy) but do not cover cognitive perceptions (expectations ofcontinuity). In accordance with ingrained conventions of public opinion poll-ing, they ask their respondents whether they like democracy or not; they do notask them whether they believe democracy is here to stay or not. This is true,for instance, for the Latino Barometer data set initiated in 1995. Some periodicmass surveys, however, do ask direct questions on expectations of regime sta-bility. For instance, the New Democracies Barometer, that provides annual dataon political culture in post-communist Central-Eastern Europe since 1991, con-tains one question that addresses our concern. It asks respondents to estimatethe probability that the national legislature will be suspended over the next fewyears (see Table 2).22

What do the data reported in Table 2 tell us? Even a cursory look at thesefigures reveals several interesting things. First, countries differ markedly intheir average perceptions of democratic stability. By 1996, the general level ofconfidence in the future of democracy was high in the region. However, withonly two-fifths of the population believing it to be unlikely that parliamentmight be suspended, Poland was a clear outlier, almost 50 percentage pointsbelow the most confident country, Romania. Second, it is not only the levels ofconfidence that vary between countries. The trajectories differ, too. Between1991 and 1996, most countries experienced clear increases in their optimismabout democracy’s future. But progress was not linear, it was discontinuous. Itcame about through marked jumps in determinate years—in 1992 in Slovakia,

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in 1993/94 in the Czech Republic, and in 1995 in Bulgaria, Romania, andSlovenia. By contrast, Hungary displayed a stable pattern at a high level, whilePoland experienced pronounced fluctuations at a relatively low level of confi-dence in the future of democracy. Third, the data indicate a close associationwith levels of legitimacy (reported in the last column of Table 2 for the year1995). Yet, democratic confidence and democratic support do not match per-fectly. In Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, and Hungary expectations of stabilityand democratic legitimacy diverge a few percentage points. Again, Poland ap-pears as exceptional, with at least one-fourth of the citizenry expressing publicsupport for democracy, at the same time that they express concerns about itsviability.23 Fourth, the polling data partially diverge from expert judgementson states of democratic consolidation. For instance, Juan Linz and Alfred Stepanfound that by 1995 “Romania was the farthest from a consolidated democ-racy” of all the East-Central European countries they studied. At the same time,according to Table 2, Romanian citizens themselves were the most confidentwith respect to the survival chances of democracy in their country. All in all,

Table 2Percentage of Respondents Who Consider a Suspension of Parliament Unlikely,

Central-Eastern Europe, 1991–96*

1991 1992 1993/94 1995 1996 **LEG1995

Bulgaria 68.4 63.4 61.5 73.9 74.7 78

Czech Republic 60.3 63.2 71.4 79.7 80.0 74

Hungary 70.7 74.6 70.4 74.8 73.7 67

Poland 43.4 38.0 46.2 38.4 40.0 65

Romania 68.1 73.0 69.0 87.5 89.5 88

Slovakia 50.5 66.2 63.8 65.8 66.7 66

Slovenia 68.0 62.1 63.5 83.2 73.7 81

Sources: New Democracies Barometer, Paul Lazarsfeld Society, Vienna (data provided by HaraldWaldrauch, European Centre for Social Welfare Policy and Research, Vienna). Democratic legiti-macy 1995: Diamond 1999, Table 5.1, 176–7 (for Bulgaria, Romania, and Slovenia), and Plasser etal. 1997: Table 9, 123 (for all other countries).

* Questionnaire item: “Some people think this country would be better governed if parliament weresuspended and we did not have lots of political parties. How likely do you think this is to happen (inthis country) in the next few years?” Response categories: Very likely, maybe, unlikely, definitelynot. The table aggregates the last two categories.

** LEG 1995 = Democratic Legitimacy in 1995. Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Poland:Agree “Democracy is always better than dictatorship.” Bulgaria, Romania, and Slovenia: Disap-prove “If parliament was suspended and parties abolished.”


even a quick review of a few aggregate data confirms the idea that public per-ceptions of democratic consolidation follow their own logic whose compre-hension will require much more research and reflection on the cognitivefoundations of democratic institutions.

The Structural Foundations of Democracy

While curative medicine strives to make the most troublesome signs of ill-ness disappear, preventive medicine wishes to bring the most critical patho-genic factors under control. As we know, many diseases do not present anyvisible symptoms until it is too late to do anything. Also, given the state of ourknowledge about the sources of disease, it would be irresponsible to feign igno-rance and wait for health crises to break out in order to reveal the physical con-dition of our patient. If we translate our medical metaphor into the language ofregime consolidation, we come to expect a democratic regime to survive if itrests upon solid structural foundations (“sources of health”). Under the broadheading of “structural” approaches we may group those authors who emphasizesocioeconomic factors as well as those who stress institutional factors. Both theo-retical families do not look directly on democratic actors, behavior, or attitudes,but rather analyze the indirect societal and political conditions that encouragethe emergence of democratic actors, behavior, and attitudes.24

Socioeconomic Foundations

As is well-known, early post-World War II modernization theory put heavyemphasis on the socioeconomic bases of democracy. Today, after some de-cades of discredit, the theory has experienced a marked revival. Despite im-portant qualifications, Seymour Martin Lipset’s original probabilistic dictumstill holds: “The more well-to-do a nation, the greater the chances that it willsustain democracy” (Lipset 1981: 31). For instance, Adam Przeworski and hiscollaborators state that the “level of economic development has a very strongeffect on the probability that democracy will survive” (1996: 40–1). Accord-ing to their calculations, poor democracies below an annual per-capita incomeof 1,000 USD are “extremely fragile” while rich democracies whose per-capitaincome exceeds 61,000 USD are “impregnable and can be expected to liveforever” (1996: 41). In a similar estimation of numerical thresholds, SamuelHuntington establishes a “coup-attempt ceiling,” beyond which military coupsare unlikely to happen, at a GNP of 3,000 USD per capita as well as a “coup-success ceiling,” beyond which military interventions are unlikely to succeed,at 1,000 USD per capita (1996: 7). To synthesize, the current discussion sug-gests that levels of economic development do translate into important con-straints and opportunities for the consolidation of democracy. But they do notdeterminate the fate of political regimes. Outliers exist at low levels of eco-nomic development as well as at high levels of economic well-being.25

Along with levels and cycles of economic development, poverty and socialinequality have been persistent concerns of students of democratic consolida-tion, especially in Latin America, the continent of inequality. Extreme eco-

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nomic destitution and inequality tend to subvert the minimal conditions to ef-fectively exercise those equal rights that are constitutive to democratic citizen-ship (see Dahl 1989: 163–75). In addition to their normative consequences,extreme social inequalities and poverty also tend to menace the very stabilityof a democratic regime. As “[n]umerous analysts have argued...“a concern forgreater social and economic equality is absolutely necessary to enable formaldemocracy to become consolidated in any meaningful sense of the word” (Nylen2000: 127). In Latin America (as elsewhere), the relation between degrees ofsocioeconomic inequality and degrees of democratic consolidation has cer-tainly not been linear. Still, the prevailing levels of socioeconomic disparityhave indeed been posing “a constant challenge to democratic institutions”(Lamounier 1999: 172).

Institutional Foundations

The global revival of democracy has been a driving force in the revival ofinstitutional analysis in contemporary political science. Studies of democraticconsolidation have both contributed to and benefited from neo-institutionalinsights. The debate about the institutional foundations of “sustainable democ-racy” (Przeworski et al. 1995) has mainly revolved around the institutionaldesign of forms of government and electoral systems.26 In general, the litera-ture has conceived formal institutions primarily as incentive structures (thateither encourage or discourage antidemocratic behavior), and only secondarilyas structural constraints (that either allow or prohibit antidemocratic behav-ior). It has analyzed institutions as sets of rules that reward some kinds ofactors and some types of conduct, while punishing others. Electoral systems,for example, differ widely in the incentives they set for the institutionalizationof political parties, party-systemic fragmentation, and internal party discipline.27

By contrast, the debate has given much less attention to the possibility thatinstitutions may not just create certain incentives for democracy-enhancingand democracy-subverting behavior. They may also erect effective constraintsagainst certain kinds of antidemocratic behavior. The debate has not taken se-riously the possibility that democrats may succeed in “locking in” their regimepreferences, as much as some authoritarian elites succeeded in weaving insti-tutional safeguards of their vital interests into transition pacts.

In many transitional democracies, the key for “institutionalizing competi-tive elections” (Özbudun 1987) lies in the field of electoral governance—aninstitutional arena that political scientists have tended to neglect until recently(see Mozaffar and Schedler 2002). If democrats manage to put the central elec-tion management body beyond the reach of authoritarian manipulation, theyhave gone a good way towards institutionalizing democratic elections. Ofcourse, governments with authoritarian proclivities may still try to subvert andcontrol the electoral process by other means, such as the restriction of civiland political liberties. Yet, if election management bodies act as effective “agen-cies of restraint” (Collier 1999), antidemocratic actors at least “lack the capac-ity to postpone or falsify elections even if they did want to subvert the electoralprocess” (McFaul 1999: 10).


The Primacy of Proximity

How do the three basic perspectives on democratic consolidation relate toeach other? How do they perform if we apply them to concrete cases? In theintroduction, we postulated that behavior, attitudes, and structure form a hier-archy of independent variables that determine the stability of political regimes.Now, when estimating the democratic survival chances, it would seem plau-sible to weight causes in accordance with their causal proximity to the depen-dent variable, democratic stability. It would seem plausible to translate thehierarchy of causal relations into a hierarchy of predictive inferences. Primaryevidence for assessing degrees of democratic consolidation would thus derivefrom proximate causes. Evidence found at more distant levels of causationwould either confirm or qualify conclusions based on more proximate causes.But it would not override them. In short, under the assumption that more proxi-mate causes trump more remote causes, behavioral evidence defeats attitudi-nal evidence, while attitudinal evidence defeats structural evidence.

A cursory look at recent Latin American experiences suggests that authorsactually form their judgments on democratic consolidation in ways compat-ible with such a form of hierarchical reasoning. To what extent did SouthAmerica’s democracies look consolidated by the late 1990s? Let us begin withthe success stories. Today, few scholars would disagree with describing Uru-guay as “a consolidated and robust democracy” (Cason 2000: 86). But also inneighboring Argentina, democratic politics has become “normalized” and “rou-tinized” (Levitsky 2000: 57). The democratic regime “appears to be consoli-dated … support for existing institutions does not seem to be contingentanymore. Liberal democracy is now ‘the only game in town’” (Waisman 1999:122). Furthermore, it is hardly controversial that in contemporary Brazil “therisks of a sudden overthrow of democracy … seems [sic] very low” (Power2000: endnote 37). Arguably, in Chile, too, “there is considerable room foroptimism … Chileans have set the foundations for a promising future as ademocratic nation” (Valenzuela 1999: 240). By the end of the 1990s, evenBolivia seemed to have reached the calm harbor of democratic consolidation.By contrast, it seems clear that contemporary Colombia “remains far from con-solidating a democratic political regime” (Hartlyn and Dugas 1999: 249). Asimilar negative judgement applies to Ecuador’s “crisis-prone democracy”(Biles 1998) as well as to Paraguay’s post-hegemonic regime that has runthrough a succession of profound political crises (Valenzuela 1997). In addi-tion, during the 1990s, Venezuela, one of Latin America’s longstanding de-mocracies, slipped into a perilous process of crisis and “deconsolidation”(McCoy 1999; Levine and Crisp 1999).

What does available behavioral evidence tell us about the vicissitudes ofdemocratic consolidation in the subcontinent? Over the past two decades, allof South America’s democracies (except Uruguay) have run through seriouscrises of some kind—guerrilla violence, military unrest, riots, inter-branch con-flict, or economic collapse. As a rule, those crises have been clearly debilitat-ing, rather than consolidating. No Latin American democracy has run througha “stabilizing crisis” comparable to the failed 1981 military coup in Spain. The

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only possible exception is Guatemala, where the failure of president JorgeSerrano’s self-coup in May 1993 gave rise to “rapid and significant progresstoward the consolidation of democratic institutions” (McCleary 1997: 136).Overall, crises have progressed in a linear rather than dialectical fashion. Ratherthan setting precedents of democratic vitality, they have provided evidence ofdemocratic fragility. But crises have not worked out the same way everywhere.The overall balance of democratic crisis management is mixed. In Argentina,Bolivia, and Brazil, democratic politicians were able to drag their countriesout of vicious circles of hyperinflationary economic crisis and social unrest. Inaddition, Argentine president Carlos Menem was able to extinguish the flameof recurrent military insurrections the country experienced in the late 1980sand early 1990s by establishing firm civilian supremacy over the armed forces.By contrast, other democracies have not been able to break the chains of demo-cratic threats posed by organized political violence (in Colombia), militaryinsubordination (in Paraguay), mass protest, interbranch conflicts, and mili-tary arbitrage (in Ecuador). In the extreme, in Peru and Venezuela, democraticactors were unable to prevent their country from slipping into some kind ofplebiscitarian authoritarianism.

Let us briefly turn to some attitudinal and structural evidence of democraticconsolidation. Table 3 presents a thin indicator of the normative foundations ofdemocracy: the distribution of popular preferences for democratic rule. In addi-tion, it contains two conventional measures of democracy’s socioeconomic foun-dations: the Gross National Product per capita and the Gini Index. The data ondemocratic legitimacy, economic wealth, and social inequality cover all SouthAmerican democracies (except Guyana, Suriname, and Peru) by the mid-1990s.28

The table dichotomizes them into those that bear positive consequences andthose that carry negative implications for democratic consolidation, the latterbeing underlined. We set the following thresholds for “stabilizing” values that

42.0 60.1 56.5 57.2 46.6 59.1 .. 46.8

8,570 950 4,720 5,020 2,280 1,590 2,010 6,020 3,450

Table 3Indicators of Democratic Consolidation in South America, Mid-1990s

Arg Bol Bra Chi Col Ecu Par Uru Ven

Democratic 71 64 50 54 60 52 59 80 62legitimacy1

GNP percapita2

Note: Values classified as “negative” for democratic consolidation are underlined.

1. Percentage of respondents who agreed with the statement, “Democracy is preferable to any otherkind of government.” Source: Latino Barometer 1996, cited in Lagos (1997: 133).

2. In U.S. Dollars, 1997. Source: World Bank (1998: Table 1, 190-1).

3. Survey years: Bolivia 1990, Brazil 1995, Chile 1994, Colombia 1995, Ecuador 1994, Paraguay1995, Peru 1994, Venezuela 1995. Source: World Bank (1998: Table 5, 198-99).

Gini Index3 ..


are supposed to indicate reasonable degrees of democratic consolidation: fordemocratic legitimacy, at 66 percent or higher; for economic development, at aGNP of 3,000 USD per capita and higher; and for income distribution, at aGini index of 50 or lower.29 Overall, the picture that emerges from these fig-ures is less than rosy. Colombia and Paraguay score negative in all three as-pects, while Argentina and Uruguay display consistently positive values(although the table does not contain Gini data for either of the two). The re-maining countries show mixed though largely negative values.

How do common judgements on democratic consolidation relate to thesethin fragments of behavioral, attitudinal, and structural evidence? Apparently,expert judgments show a close fit with behavioral evidence, while they relatemore loosely to attitudinal and structural data. On the one hand, it appearsthat academic observers worry about the future of a democratic regime assoon as it experiences high levels of extrainstitutional conflict, while theystart relaxing as soon as political actors settle their disputes within the giveninstitutional framework. In fact, visible troubles tend to change perceptionsin an almost instant fashion. For example, social unrest that shook Argentinain late 2000 renewed worries about democracy facing “unpredictable risks”(Tokatlián 2001: 4) in the case of continued economic and institutional fail-ure. On the other hand, where countries display uniform attitudinal and struc-tural patterns (as indicated in Table 3) those data seem to confirm commonjudgements on democratic consolidation. The consistently negative valuesof Colombia and Paraguay reinforce the widespread impression of demo-cratic fragility, while the consistently positive values of Argentina and Uru-guay lend additional credence to the widespread impression of democraticresilience. Among the mixed cases of Table 3, Bolivia, Brazil, and Chile fallinto the category of presumptively consolidated democracies. The fact thatthey score badly in two of the three dimensions does not alter that basicjudgment. But it does add a strong note of caution: Low legitimacy appearsworrisome in all three countries, social inequality especially in Brazil andChile, and poverty in Bolivia. Inversely, the fact that Ecuador’s distributionof income does not look terribly bad from a Latin American perspectivedoes not make its democracy look consolidated. The same applies to Venezu-ela in the late 1990s, before its conversion into some sort of illiberal democ-racy by Hugo Chávez. The country was set on a path of institutional erosiondespite its relative wealth and despite the fact that its level of social inequal-ity is moderate by regional standards. In sum, our cursory glance at SouthAmerica’s democracies by the late 1990s seems to lend some tentative sup-port to our hypothetical reasoning on the hierarchical logic of predictive in-ference. It seems to confirm the idea that students of democratic consolidationtake their empirical clues primarily from behavioral, rather than attitudinalor structural, evidence. The latter mainly serves to qualify the former. If atti-tudinal and structural evidence coincide with behavioral data, judgments onregime consolidation based on behavioral evidence tend to be confident; ifthey diverge, they tend to be cautious.

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Conclusion

Processes of democratic consolidation come to a close when democracy lookssecure and democrats can relax. But when does democracy look secure? Whencan democrats relax? The present article, rather than directly responding tothis question, took a step back and asked when academic observers think thatdemocracy looks secure. When do scholars think that democrats can relax?How do they “observe” and “measure” the consolidation of democracy? Fromthe outset, the article puts much emphasis on the distinctiveness of the obser-vational task at hand. Observing democratic consolidation, it claims, is notjust a matter of defining and operationalizing our object of study. To inferpredictions of regime stability from given data we need to introduce causalhypotheses. Empirical assessments of democratic consolidation are dependenton theories of democratic stability.

This article distinguishes three basic approaches to the measurement of demo-cratic consolidation that differ in the empirical evidence they look at as well asin the causal relations they assume. As it argues, some scholars focus on the“behavioral foundations” of regime stability. They think that democrats can-not lean back and relax unless they have proven their capacity to roll backantidemocratic challenges, or else, unless no major political actors violate basicdemocratic rules anymore. Others privilege the “attitudinal foundations” of demo-cratic governance. They take democracy to be under risk unless all major politi-cal players develop the normative motives, strategic rationality, and cognitiveperceptions required to sustain a liberal-democratic regime. Still others drawour attention to the “socioeconomic foundations” of democracy. They recom-mend against lowering the guard unless the socioeconomic environment and theinstitutional setting look propitious for democratic continuity.

As the article argues in its final section, it is plausible to assume that inscholarly assessments of democratic consolidation, more proximate causes ofregime stability take precedence over more indirect causes. A quick glance atrecent South American experiences seemed to support the intuition: The threemodes of measurement and explanation are hierarchically ordered. Behavioralevidence overshadows both attitudinal and structural factors. It seems that,whether political observers hold a democratic regime to be sustainable or not,depends primarily on whether actors behave democratically or not. Counter-evidence at either the attitudinal or structural level may qualify conclusionsdrawn from behavioral evidence. But it will rarely override them.

Yet, in a concluding though somewhat self-subversive note, we may callattention to an ironic paradox of democratic consolidation. Democrats shouldbe warned against the possibility that their temptation to relax may be self-defeating. If they relax when democracy looks secure their relaxation may endup eroding democratic security. Perhaps, democrats can relax only if they arewilling to not ever relax. As M.S. Gill, president of India’s federal electioncommission, wisely states, “[a]n essential condition of making democracy se-cure is never to take it for granted” (Gill 1998: 167).


Notes

* I am indebted to the Austrian Academy of Sciences for supporting work on this article throughthe Austrian Program for Advanced Research and Technology (APART). Also, I am most gratefulto Ruth Berins Collier, Peter Burnell, David Collier, Michael Coppedge, Larry Diamond,Graciela Ducatenzeiler, Francis Hagopian, Robert R. Kaufman, James Mahoney, ScottMainwaring, Sebastián Mazzuca, Gerardo L. Munck, Martin Schürz, Richard Snyder, KurtWeyland, and the anonymous reviewers of SCID for their valuable comments. Many thanks,too, to Harold Waldrauch for sharing the New Democracies Barometer data. Naturally, though,all responsibility is mine.

1. On the “third wave” of global democratization, see Huntington (1991). On “thin” and “thick”concepts, see Coppedge (1999). For an analytic reconstruction of the manifold meanings ofdemocratic consolidation, depending on the empirical contexts and the normative goals ofresearch, see Schedler (1998a).

2. For an extensive discussion of “negative” versus “positive” concepts of democratic consolida-tion, see Schedler (1998a). On “backward-looking” versus “forward-looking” perspectives onregime consolidation as well as on “internal” participant versus “external” observer perspec-tives, see Schedler (1998b). On “ladders of generality,” see Collier and Mahon (1993).

3. George Lakoff’s “prototypes” or “idealized cognitive models” exemplify such rules of de-scriptive inference (see Lakoff 1984).

4. The causal presupposition of democracy’s actor-dependence goes hand in hand with an impor-tant qualification: Democratic structures depend on actors—but only to a certain degree.They are independent of individual actors. The democratic game is relatively immune tosubversive behavior by relatively weak and isolated actors; it does not break down unlessa sufficient number of resourceful actors drop out of the democratic camp. The actor’srelative independence of institutions poses the controversial task of setting thresholds:How many intrinsically democratic citizens does democracy need? When do terrorist activi-ties become a threat to a democratic regime? How much inequality can democracy endure?And so forth.

5. The reader might wish to qualify that statement in order to allow for the legitimate exclusion ofantidemocratic actors. Of course, it is problematic to determine who qualifies as “antidemo-cratic,” as contending parties may set up “a blatantly false depiction of democratically loyalopponents as disloyal” (Diamond 1999: 67). The status of the Italian Communist Party untilthe late 1980s is illustrative of the controversies that may surround the democratic credentialsof political actors. Nevertheless, postwar Austria and Germany, for example, have opted to baradvocates of nazi ideology from electoral competition by denying them the freedom of opinionas well as the right of association.

6. On the “menu of electoral manipulation” ruling parties have at their disposition, see Schedler(2002).

7. For example, on realities and discourses of electoral fraud in the Dominican Republic, seeHartlyn (1998: 245–55).

8. On the basis of the regular section “Election Watch” in the Journal of Democracy, Pastor codedas protested or “flawed” elections those contested by losing parties either through legal peti-tion, political protest, or boycott.

9. For a systematic development of the distinction between access to power and exercise of power,see Mazzuca (2000). On the concept of democratic quality, see Schedler (1996).

10. The demand to abide by “mutually accepted norms” seems to set an exceedingly high thresh-old. Yet, as the case of Chile in 1973 shows, it may not be a manifest violation of fundamentalrules by anyone that sets the stage for democratic breakdown. Rather, it may be the iterativetransgression of micro-rules by everyone (as well as an accompanying escalation of confronta-tional rhetoric) that erodes mutual trust between political actors.

11. Mainwaring et al. (2001: 37-65) discuss, with well-founded skepticism, a different problem:whether we should accept alternation in government as a defining criterion not of democraticconsolidation but of democracy itself.

12. Note that an emphasis on the origins of expectations avoids the tautological reasoning that char-acterizes certain variants of consolidation studies: Actors play by democratic rules if actors play

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by democratic rules. What we say here is that (scholars come to expect that) actors come toexpect that others will play by democratic rules if they indeed do so in a consistent manner.

13. Implicit in our triptych of “attitudinal foundations” is the idea that rationality is not a one-dimensional concept and, in any case, not reducible to either instrumental or strategic rational-ity. On the multi-dimensional nature of rationality, see, for example Habermas (1981) andBoudon (1998).

14. The ability of (some) democratic regimes to cope with low levels of legitimacy (at least for awhile) seems to confirm Adam Przeworski’s famous dictum about the secondary relevance ofpolitical legitimacy: “What matters for the stability of any regime is not the legitimacy of thisparticular system of domination but the presence or absence of preferable alternatives” (1986:51–2). Still democratic and authoritarian regimes are certainly not symmetric in their depen-dency on popular support. Democracy imposes high constraints and high costs on repressionwhile at the same time it opens up broad avenues for organizing dissent. For an extensivediscussion of the theoretical literature as well as the available empirical evidence on legitimacyand democratic consolidation, see Diamond (1999: Chapter 5).

15. For the “classical” statement of the 2-2-scheme, see O’Donnell and Schmitter (1986: 15–17and 63). Of course, not all authoritarian regimes permit the emergence of the full set of players(see Geddes 1999; Snyder 1998).

16. The reliance on self-interested strategic calculations opens the door to the possibility that ademocratic regime may accommodate a substantial number of antidemocratic actors, both atmass and elite levels, and still appear as basically “consolidated,” that is, unlikely to breakdown. Antidemocratic actors may display less than an active personal interest in democraticgovernance. They may just realize that they do not have the power to make their authoritarianpreferences prevail. Power stands at the very center of transition studies. The most prominenttypologies of regime change respond to the simple question: Who controls? Everybody seemsto agree that democratic transitions are power games. As students of political democratizationmove into the analysis of consolidation, however, they tend to leave behind the key variable ofpolitical science, power, in favor of an almost exclusive emphasis on preferences. Politicalactors may decide to play by the democratic rules not because they like them but because theyknow they are unable to change them. In Russia, for example, the “new balance of power” thatemerged by the mid-1990s among political actors (most of whom do not exhibit unambiguousdemocratic credentials) “appears to have fostered mutual agreement on a peaceful and democraticprocess for resolving conflicts. No actor or group of actors in Russia today believes that it can takepower by nondemocratic means” (McFaul 1999: 10). In other words, the democratic “equilib-rium” may be a (dynamic) equilibrium of power, not of values nor of interests. While the latteris a question of preferences, the former is a question of available choices.

17. Rational choice theory, though, tends to downplay the indeterminacy of political conflict throughits deterministic assumption that payoffs dictate outcomes—under the crucial condition thatone and only one equilibrium solution is available.

18. One notable exception is Wendy Hunter (1997). She reconstructs the gradual erosion of mili-tary prerogatives in democratic Brazil as the cumulative result of an iterated confrontationbetween democratic politicians and military actors.

19. For a discussion of the paradigmatic shift from normative to cognitive perspectives that char-acterizes sociological neo-institutionalism, see DiMaggio and Powell (1991).

20. On self-fulfilling (as well as otherwise consequential) expectations, see Schelling (1978: 115–8).

21. For a more extensive treatment of the methodological complexities of “internal” perspectiveson democratic consolidation, see Schedler (1998b: 10–14).

22. The item also asks respondents to assess the probability that the country will stop having “lotsof political parties.” The ambiguity of this additional dimension somewhat confounds the mean-ing of the question.

23. I say “at least” one fourth because the data are not, of course, individual data. It is thereforehypothetically possible (even if not quite plausible) that nearly all of the democratic respon-dents expect democracy to break down, while most non-democratic respondents think that theregime is here to stay. In this case, both democrats and antidemocrats would appear as over-whelmingly pessimistic.


24. As Ruth Berins Collier (1999:1–2) observed with respect to the democratization literature ofthe 1960s and 1970s, in both historical sociological and economic accounts of democratizationan “agential argument” was often “at least implicit.” Those theories hypothesized that democ-racy would emerge as certain pro-democratic social groups would emerge in the course ofeconomic modernization. Of course, one “cannot go seamlessly from structure to agency with-out a careful analysis” of actual actors, preferences, and strategies. Past as well as contempo-rary structural theories of democratization thus face the challenge of closing the explanatorygap between generic structures and generic outcomes by laying open their microfoundations.

25. For a balanced review of the literature until the early 1990s, see Diamond (1992). More re-cently, Scott Mainwaring reviewed the impact of economic development on democratic rule inLatin America, from 1940 to 1997. He finds that “the relationship between income categoryand democracy is far from linear” (29) and “democracy can endure under adverse economicand social conditions if the main actors are committed to democratic rules of the game” (2000:60). The “surprising resilience” of Latin American democracies since 1978 leads him to stress“the importance of combining structural and actor-oriented approaches” (ibid.: 60).

26. For the debate on systems of government, see, for example, Linz and Valenzuela (1994) andMainwaring and Shugart (1997). For the debate on electoral rules, see, for example, Diamond(1999: 99–111) and Taagepera (1998).

27. For instance, on the debilitating consequences of Brazil’s electoral rules, see Mainwaring (1999:243–62) and Power (2000: 25–30).

28. At that time, only Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, and Uruguay were classified as “free” countriesby the Freedom House Annual Survey of Political Rights and Civil Liberties (Karatnycky et al.1996). All others fell into the category of “partly free” countries, with Paraguay (7), Colombia(8), and Peru (9) showing the worst combined ratings of political rights and civil liberties. Weexcluded Peru from the table since after Alberto Fujimori’s self-coup in 1992, it has arguablyremained in the category of an authoritarian rather than semi-democratic regime (see, for ex-ample, McClintock 1999).

29. Of course, drawing neat distinctions between “stabilizing” and “destabilizing” values is a some-what artificial enterprise. Still, the implications of different cut-off points are quite transparent.The more stringent the criteria we define for regime consolidation, the lesser number of de-mocracies will fulfill them. For instance, Larry Diamond convincingly argues that “both logicand empirical evidence” suggest that “two-thirds is a minimum threshold” (Diamond 1999:68) of required popular support. Lowering the threshold to 60 percent would permit includingBolivia, Colombia, and Venezuela in the basket of regimes that dispose of a sufficient degreeof legitimacy. Similarly, if we chose Samuel Huntington’s “coup-success ceiling” of 1,000USD per capita, rather than his “coup-attempt ceiling” of 3,000 USD per capita (1996: 7), allSouth American democracies except Bolivia would appear to rest on solid economic founda-tions. By contrast, Gini indices show a certain bipolar distribution and are therefore less sensi-tive to alternative definitions of thresholds. They are either substantially lower or substantiallyhigher than our cut-off point of 50. Still, when compared to “advanced democracies” our thresh-old might seem exceedingly tolerant of income inequality. It is noteworthy, however, that CostaRica, the region’s long-standing democratic model in terms of democratic quality and socio-economic equity, does not fare much better. In 1995, it had a Gini index of 47 (World Bank1998: Table 5, 198).

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