1
The historically proximate, yet thoroughly dissimilar, transitions to democracy of Spain
and Portugal in the 1970s offer scholars an extraordinary opportunity to analyze the enduring
impact on democratic systems of alternative beginnings – in a social revolutionary episode, as in
Portugal, or a consensual process of reform, as in Spain. Nonetheless, three decades after the
extraordinary events that began in Portugal late in April 1974, and nearly that long after the
carefully crafted successes of the Spanish transition, we lack a definitive examination of this
question. The two transitions on the Iberian peninsula have, of course, attracted enormous
interest not only from students of the two national cases but also from comparativists who have
found in one or the other of these two democratizing processes the basis for formulations of
wide-ranging conceptual usefulness. If the Spanish case has gained greater sustained recognition
in the comparative and theoretical literature, as best exemplified by the work of Linz and
Stepan,
1
the Portuguese case also attracted the interest of conceptually oriented comparativists
from an early date as reflected in Schmitter’s 1975 essay, “Liberation by Golpe”.
2
Nonetheless,
the questions posed by the most fundamental contrasts between the two cases remain largely
open – and somewhat understudied – in the scholarly literature. Indeed many scholars have
assumed that far from meriting special attention, the revolutionary nature of the Portuguese road
1
For the most carefully drawn scholarly characterization of the Spanish case, within the
context of a major comparative analysis of the global turn toward democracy, see Juan Linz and
Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South
America and Post-Communist Europe, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
2
See Philippe Schmitter, “Liberation by Golpe”, in Armed Forces and Society 2,
(November 1975). For a complete collection of Schmitter’s writings on the Portuguese
transition, see his Portugal: do Autoritarismo a Democracia. (Lisboa: Instituto de Ciencias
Sociasis, 1999).
Convention