Lessons from Latin America

The “third wave” of global democratization may have begun in Southern Europe with Portugal’s April 1974 Revolution of the Carnations, but the first world region whose politics the third wave comprehensively transformed was Latin America. Beginning with an unprecedented free presidential election in Ecuador in 1978, a region once mainly associated with military coups and violent revolutions saw competitive elections and greater political freedom spread throughout most of the Hemisphere.

Among the scholars who studied Latin America’s political transformation—and came away with a wealth of insights that have enriched our understanding of democratic transition and consolidation the world over—no one ranks ahead of Argentine political scientist Guillermo O’Donnell. A longtime Journal of Democracy contributor and Editorial Board member, O’Donnell died in 2011 at the age of 75. His rich intellectual legacy prominently includes the pathbreaking four-volume work Transitions from Authoritarian Rule, coedited with Philippe Schmitter and Laurence Whitehead and published in 1986.

On 26–27 March 2012, the University of Notre Dame’s Kellogg Institute for International Studies, of which O’Donnell had been the first academic director, organized a conference in Buenos Aires entitled “Guillermo O’Donnell and the Study of Democracy” to reflect upon his scholarly achievements. The Journal of Democracy is proud to be able to offer on the following pages revised versions of three of the papers first presented on that occasion.

Steven Levitsky and María Victoria Murillo identify a pattern of institutional development, now common in many young democracies in Latin America and elsewhere, that is characterized less by continuity than by frequent and radical change. Next, Sebastián Mazzuca explores why some of the Latin American democracies that have taken a “left turn” over the last decade or so have fallen under the sway of powerful populist presidents, while others have resisted this trend. Finally, Scott Mainwaring and Aníbal Pérez-Liñnán analyze why democracies survive or break down, applying a new and mainly quantitative approach that focuses primarily on actors’ normative preferences for democracy and their policy radicalism or moderation.

The authors of these three essays offer O’Donnell not the false and shallow tribute of automatically agreeing with him or lifelessly applying his work, but the true and profound tribute of emulating his spirit of open-minded inquiry, taking new phenomena as they come and seeking insight into what makes free, popular, and law-based government not only emerge, but endure.

—The Editors