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to democracy offered virtually no lasting consequences – except for the challenge of undoing
much of what was done in the first years following the April 25, 1974 captains’ coup, and the
revolution of the carnations.
In this paper I take the comparison between the two cases as an opportunity to repose an
old macropolitical question – on the relationship of revolution to democracy
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– and to reexamine
contemporary Spain and Portugal in a new light. I argue that the enduring legacy of Portugal’s
revolutionary road to democracy is at least as strong – and laden with positive consequences – as
the imprint left by Spain’s transition through negotiated reform. Continuing my ongoing
comparative work on the two cases, I examine here a number of relevant themes – including the
extraordinary breakdown of consensus in the Spanish case, especially over nationality questions;
major contrasts in labor market outcomes in the two cases; the fundamental divergence between
the neighboring Iberian countries on the role of women in the economy; a relatively pervasive
disparity over the nature of the public sphere and the proper role for the state; and others – and I
examine (all too briefly) two major recent political episodes, Spain’s experience with elections in
the aftermath of terrorism and Portugal’s thirtieth anniversary commemoration of April 25, for
the lessons they hold.
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The classic claim of Barrington Moore that stable democracy required a prior
revolutionary break with the past has been quite persuasively refuted by empirically well
grounded scholarship, but it does not necessarily follow that revolutionary origins – where they
are to be found – prove irrelevant for the nature or variety of democracy in a given case.
Convention