Guillermo O'Donnell (1936-2011)

On October 29, Guillermo O'Donnell, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Notre Dame and senior fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies there, passed away in his native Argentina. A longtime member of the Editorial Board and later the International Advisory Committee of the Journal of Democracy and a regular contributor to its pages, he is widely regarded as the leading Latin American political scientist of the past half-century. A major conference in his honor is scheduled to be held in Buenos Aires on March 26-27 with the cosponsorship of the Universidad San Andrés, the Universidad Nacional San Martín, the Latin American Program of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Kellogg Institute for International Studies. We present below two tributes to O'Donnell: The first, written by Scott Mainwaring, comes from the website of the Kellogg Institute (http://kellogg.nd.edu/faculty/news/godonnell.shtml), which also contains more information about the conference and links to other tributes; the second was written especially for the Journal by O'Donnell's former coauthor Philippe Schmitter:

Scott Mainwaring, Director, Kellogg Institute for International Studies, University of Notre Dame:

Our dear friend and colleague Guillermo O'Donnell died yesterday afternoon in his native Buenos Aires at the age of 75, following a four-month battle against cancer.

O'Donnell was a giant in contemporary social science, known around the world for his unique intellectual creativity, his pathbreaking originality, and his passion for democracies that function decently. His scholarly work on authoritarianism and democracy established his international reputation as a brilliant and seminal thinker.

Closer to home, he played a pivotal role in creating and developing the Kellogg Institute for International Studies. As Kellogg's first academic director, he defined an exciting research agenda for the Institute and built an outstanding program of visiting fellows. . . .

O'Donnell's scholarly contributions can be grouped into three phases. Early in his career, he worked primarily on the origins of authoritarianism in South America, especially in the region's more developed countries. First published in 1973, Modernization and Bureaucratic Authoritarianism was a seminal work in understanding the origins of modern authoritarianism in Latin America.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Guillermo recognized that this was a new kind of authoritarian rule. Again unlike his contemporaries, he also understood that this new pattern of authoritarian rule had profound theoretical implications for understanding the relationship between modernization and democracy. He subsequently wrote many important papers about the nature of authoritarianism in Latin America.

In a second phase, O'Donnell was the pioneer in anticipating the wave of transitions to democracy that began in Latin America in 1978. With remarkable prescience, when Latin America was at the zenith of authoritarian rule, he correctly and almost uniquely understood that many of the awful dictatorships then in power were likely to be transient. He studied internal contradictions within authoritarian regimes and then analyzed the wave of transitions to democracy that resulted in part from the tensions within authoritarianism that he had analyzed earlier. Once again, he opened a new research question, hugely important both theoretically and in the "real" world. His 1986 coedited volume, Transitions From Authoritarian Rule (Johns Hopkins University Press), remains a classic. It is one of the most widely cited works in political science.

Beginning in the late 1980s, O'Donnell's attention turned to the severe deficiencies of most democratic regimes, again with a primary focus on Latin America. While countless other individuals observed these same deficiencies, nobody matched his acuity in the theoretical analysis of new issues that revolve around these shortcomings. He coined many important concepts that remain at the core of analyses of contemporary democracy. For example, his concept "delegative democracy" refers to democratic regimes in which the president and congress are democratically elected, but in which mechanisms of accountability are fragile. He contributed seminal articles on accountability, the rule of law, and the relationship between the state and democracy. His article, "Democracy, Law, and Comparative Politics" (Studies in Comparative International Development, Spring 2001), won the Luebbert Prize for the best article in comparative politics, awarded...