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Introduction
In recent years the democratization literature has shifted gears from its traditional
concern with the causes behind the transition to democracy to the conditions that
facilitate “democratic consolidation,” understood to represent the process through which
democratic institutions and practices become firmly rooted in society.
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Driving this new
research agenda is the distressing reality that the majority of nations that in recent
decades have embraced democratic governance remain in some kind of transitional
limbo, a condition in which democracy is neither consolidated nor about to experience a
breakdown.
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Prominent among the factors currently being debated in the democratization
literature as affecting the consolidation of democracy is the precise manner in which
democracy is introduced into the nation. In other words, how a country enters democracy
appears to determine the prospect for democratic sustainability. As contended by Terry
L. Karl: "The mode of transition sets the context within which strategic interactions take
place, which in turn determines whether political democracy will emerge and survive and
what type of democracy will be institutionalized."
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The argument that the mode of transition plays a significant role in determining
the fate of the project of democratic consolidation resonates most powerfully in
connection with so-called "pacted-transitions." They are characterized by the absence of
the collapse of authoritarian institutions, and most importantly, by the prominence of
"explicit agreements made and negotiated between the authoritarian incumbents and the
opposition” for the purpose of moving the polity from authoritarian to democratic rule.
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In the nations in which these agreements have been successfully deployed, they have
incorporated numerous political and economic bargains covering a wide range of issues
from human rights abuses, to inflation policy, to the creation of new political institutions.
Drawing sustained theoretical attention to transition pacts is the seemingly
schizophrenic effects they are thought to impart upon the politics of democratization. On
the one hand, democratization theorists regard transition pacts as a brilliant strategy for
initiating democracy given their usefulness for diminishing political uncertainty,
expediting the resolution of socio-economic conflicts and integrating the nascent
democratic political class. On the other hand, these same theorists warn about the
perilous political legacy that such pacts leave behind for the new democracy that in the
long-term is likely to compromise its consolidation. Among the many negative side
effects attached to transition pacts are the subversion of democratic principles, the
transfer of authoritarian vices into the new democratic regime, and the potential for the
marginalization of civil society at the very juncture when collective actors begin to assert
themselves politically. Thus, a flawed or frozen democracy, rather than a vibrant and
consolidated one, is generally suggested as the expected political product of a pacted-
transition. This argument has been made most forcefully by Karl, who writes that: “Pacts
hinder the prospects for the future democratic self-transformation of the society, economy
or polity thereby producing a frozen democracy.”
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In the present study I take on the conventional wisdom about transition pacts and
their consequences on democratic consolidation. I argue, first, that this theoretical
understanding is unduly rigid and deterministic because it casts a uniformly negative
view about the effects of pacted transitions on the consolidation of democracy.
Consequently, it fails to explain national experiences in which transition pacts have not
only facilitated the transition to democracy but democratic consolidation as well.
Convention