A rend Lgphart

The Southern European Examples of

Democratization: Six Lessons for Latin
America*
THE RETURN TO DEMOCRACY OF SPAIN, PORTUGAL, AND

Greece in the 1970s is an encouraging and inspiring example to

democrats everywhere - but especially to Latin American
demccrats because of their regions close historical and cultural
ties with two of the Southern European countries. However,
apart from the general feeling of optimism that the Southern
European experience legitimately engenders, are there any
specific lessons and lessons specifically relevant to Latin America
that can be learned from it? In this article, I shall suggest six such
lessons. Some of these are positive lessons - examples to be
followed, such as choosing a form of democracy that is suitable to
a countrys size and to its political and social divisions; others are
negative - examples to be avoided, such as Portugals and
Greeces experimentation with a presidential form of
government. Some lessons are based on common characteristics
of the new Southern European democracies; others concern traits
on which they differ.
In a recent co-authored study of these three newly democratic
countries, plus Italy, the fourth Southern European democracy, I
have shown that the differences among them are more important
than the similarities: differences in their forms of democracy and
in the process of moving from authoritarian to democratic
regimes. The differences in their forms of democracy are
particularly striking. As I have argued in my book Democracies,
*This article is a revised version of a paper presented at the International Seminar on
Las Perspectivas de la Estabilidad Democritica en 10s Paises Andinos, organized by the
Department of Political Science of the Universidad de 10s Andes, in Villa de Leyva,
Colombia, August 8- 12, 1988.
I.
Arend Lijphart, Thomas C. Bruneau, P. Nikiforos Diamandouros, and Richard
Gunther, A Mediterranean Model of Democracy? The Southern European Democracies
in Comparative Perspective, West European Politics, 11, 1, January 1988, pp. 7-25.

SIX LESSONS FOR LATIN AMERICA

69

two basic forms of democracy, majoritarian and consensus, differ

along two dimensions.' Each of these dimensions is divided in
four categories in Figure 1, creating a matrix with sixteen cells.
The democracies classified in these cells are the three newly
democratic Southern European countries plus the twenty-one
democracies that have been continually democratic since the end
of the Second World War; since France underwent a major
change in democratic regime in 1958, the French Fourth and
Fifth Republics are treated as two separate cases.
The executives-parties dimension is based on a cluster of five
characteristics of the party and electoral systems and of the
arrangement of executive power. The majoritarian and the
contrasting consensual elements are 1) single-party governments
versus broad coalition governments, 2) executive dominance
versus executive-legislative balance, 3) two-party versus
multiparty systems, 4) parties that differ mainly with regard to
socio-economic issues versus parties divided by religious,
cultural, foreign policy, and regime support issues as well, and 5)
plurality or first-past-the-post electoral systems versus
proportional representation. Each of these contrasting
characteristics represents a continuum from pure majoritarianism
to pure consensus democracy; they were operationalized and
scores on them were assigned to the 25 democratic systems. Since
these scores use different scales, they were all standardized (so as
to have a mean of 0 and a standard deviation of 1). The total
scores on the executives-parties dimension as a whole are the
averages (again standardized) of the five individual scores.
Democracies that are majoritarian on the executives-parties
dimension are shown in the top half of Figure 1, the consensus
democracies at the bottom.
The second dimension has to do with the three related variables
of 1) government centralization, measured in terms of the central
government's taxing powers, 2) constitutional flexibility, ranging
from an unwritten constitution to a written constitution that is
difficult to amend and protected by judicial review, and 3)
unicameralism versus strong bicameralism. Since these
differences are commonly associated with the contrast between
federalism and unitary government, this dimension is called the
federal-unitary dimension. The country scores on this dimension
are again the standardized averages of the three standardized
Arend Lijphart, Democracies: Patlerns ofhfajoritarian and Consensus Government in TwentyOne Countries, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1984.

70

GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION

FIGURE 1
Twenty-Five Democracies Chsijied According to the Two Majoritnrian-ConsensusDimensions
I1 Federal-unitary dimension
Strongly
Strongly
majoritarian Majoritarian Consensual consensual
~

Strongly
majoritarian

New
Zealand
United
Kingdom

Iceland

Belgium
Denmark
Norway
Portugal

Israel

Finland
France IV
Netherlands

Consensual

Strongly
consensual

Austria

France v
Spain
Luxembourg
Sweden

Majoritarian
I
ExecutivesParties
Dimension

Greece
Ireland

Australia
Canada
United
States
Germany
Japan

Switzerlan

Notes: 1. The dividing points between the four categories of each dimension
are the standardized means of .75, 0. and - .75.
2. The period covered is approximately 1945-80 for most of the
countries and approximately 1975 - 86 for Spain, Portugal and
Greece.
Source: Adapted from Arend Lijphart, Thomas C. Bruneau, P. Nikiforos
Diamandouros, and Richard Gunther, A Mediterranean Model of
Democracy? The Southern European Democracies in Comparative
Perspective, West European Politics, 11, 1 January 1988, p. 12.

scores. The unitary (majoritarian) democracies are shown on

the left-hand side of Figure 1, the federal (consensual)
democracies on the right.
As Figure 1 shows, there are relatively few democracies that
occupy an extreme position on both dimensions. New Zealand
and the United Kingdom are unambiguous examples of the
majoritarian model and Switzerland of the consensus model.
Israel is a virtually perfect example of majoritarianism on the first
dimension and unitary government on the second; Australia,
Canada, and the United States exhibit the exactly opposite
characteristics to a high degree. Most of the other countries -

SIX LESSONS FOR LATIN AMERICA

71

including the four Southern European democracies, italicized in

the figure - are more in the middle. Spain, Portugal, Italy,
Greece clearly do not form a distinctive cluster: they are located
in different and non-contiguous cells, and they differ from each
other particularly as far as the executives-parties dimension is
concerned.
Spains, Portugals, and Greeces contemporaneous democratization in the 1970s should not divert our attention from the
different circumstances of their return to democracy. For one
thing, their previous authoritarian periods were of widely
different durations: a mere seven-year interlude in Greece,
compared with more than a third of a century of authoritarianism
in Spain, and almost half a century in Portugal. Moreover, their
authoritarian regimes came to an end as a result of very different
events: the dictators death in the case of Spain, war and
institutional exhaustion in Portugal, and a combination of
internal crisis and foreign-policy adventurism in Greece. Finally,
the transition to democracy occurred under quite dissimilar
ideological leaderships: the conservatives in Greece, the leftleaning military in Portugal, and a broad coalition in Spain that
practised what was referred to as the politics of consensus.
There are also important differences within Latin America to
be noted, as well as differences between Southern Europe and
Latin America. In the concluding part of this article I shall
consider to what extent the inter-regional differences affect the
relevance of the Southern European lessons to the Latin
American situation. But let me first turn to the substance of these
lessons.
LESSON ONE: OPPORTUNITIES FOR DEMOCRATIC ENGINEERING

In contrast with the striking differences among the Southern

European democracies with regard to their forms of and
transitions to democracy, there are many background
characteristics that they have in common - cultural, social,
economic, historical-developmental, and geographical. For
instance, in addition to their shared Southern European
geographical location, they are economically less developed than
most other European countries. Spain, Portugal, and Italy have
agricultural sectors characterized by latifundia in the south and
small farms in the north - a division that has strongly affected
politics in the past and present. These same three countries share

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GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION

a Latin culture and also a common religious condition; unlike in

many other European countries, there was never a CatholicProtestant split but a deep and politically very salient clericalanticlerical cleavage.
The contrast between these similarities in background
conditions and the differences with regard to type of democratic
regime and the process of democratization is theoretically very
significant. It reveals the limitations of socio-economic and
cultural reductionist arguments: political institutions and the
basic rules of the game of democratic politics are not merely a
superstructure that grows out of a socio-economic-cultural base.
Politics, including democratic politics, has an independent life of
its own.
This theoretical conclusion has a significant practical
relevance. It means that there is ample room for political and
constitutional engineering. While politics remains the art of the
possible, democratic engineers need not feel too constrained in
making the necessary choices of rules and institutions that will
serve their democratic systems best.

LESSON TWO: DEMOCRACY IN DIVIDED SOCIETIES

Several conclusions as well as practical lessons emerge when we

try to explain why particular countries occupy particular positions
in Figure 1. There are three explanations: the degree of
pluralism, population size, and the influence of the majoritarian
Westminster model on countries with a British heritage. The first
and second contain positive practical lessons, the third a negative
lesson.
Let us turn to the question of pluralism first. Figure 1 shows a
connection between both dimensions of the majoritarianconsensus contrast on the one hand and the degree to which the
countries are plural societies on the other. Plural societies are
societies that are sharply divided along religious, ideological,
linguistic, cultural, ethnic, or racial lines into virtually separate
sub-societies with their own political parties, interest groups, and
media of communication. No country is either completely plural
or completely nonplural, of course, but we can make a rough
threefold classification into plural, semiplural, and nonplural
societies. As we move from the upper left-hand corner to the
lower right-hand corner of Figure 1, we encounter plural and
semiplural societies with increasing frequency. The four cells on

SIX LESSONS F O R LATIN AMERICA

73

the diagonal from Israel to Australia contain nonplural societies

(Denmark, Norway, Portugal, and Australia) and plural and
semiplural ones in approximately equal numbers. Above and to
the left of this diagonal, all countries except Austria, the French
Fifth Republic, and Luxembourg are plural or semiplural; below
and to the left of the diagonal, only one country -Japan - is
nonplural. Of these four exceptions, Austria is probably not really
deviant; my coding system probably resulted in a too high
majoritarian score for this country on the first d i m e n ~ i o nThe
.~
other three are true exceptions, but the important point is that
there are only three such deviant cases out of a total of 25. The
relationship would be even stronger if it were not for the other two
factors - British political traditions and population size - that
also have strong influence. I shall discuss these subjects shortly.
The general pattern is that countries with significant societal
divisions tend to adopt forms of democratic government that can
accommodate these divisions, namely, rules and institutions of
consensus democracy. And the practical lesson for political
engineers is explicitly to take such deep divisions and differences
into account wherever they exist and to be creative and
constructive in establishing the appropriate consensus-oriented
and consensus-inducing democratic arrangements. Moreover, it
is important not to think of plural societies too narrowly as
countries divided by ethnic or other primordial cleavages.
Consensus democracy is clearly needed by all countries that have
deep divisions of any kind or that face immense problems,
including countries with a recent history of military dictatorship
and civil war, countries with huge socio-economic inequalities,
and so on. Many Latin American countries can be described in
these terms.
If we look at the placement of the four Southern European
democracies in Figure 1, we see that, as expected, religiously and
ideologically divided Italy and linguistically plural Spain are
located to the right of nonplural Greece and Portugal. On the
One of the reasons for Austrias high majoritarian score is that the country was
governed from 1949 to 1966 by a grand coalition of the large Socialist and Peoples
Parties, neither of which had a majority in parliament. Technically, therefore, this
coalition had to be classified as a highly majoritarian minimum winning coalition (or
bare-majority coalition) in spite of the fact that together these parties enjoyed
overwhelming parliamentary support. If the minimum-winning criterion could be relaxed
so as to allow the Austrian grand coalition to be classified as an inclusive oversized
coalition government, Austria would move down one cell in Figure 1.

74

GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION

other hand, it is surprising that on the executives-parties

dimension Greece is among the most majoritarian regimes and
that Spain is on the majoritarian side, too, given the severe
political and ideological divisions in these countries in the recent
past and the continuing cultural-linguistic cleavages in Spain.
Greece had single-party majority cabinets between its return to
democracy in 1974 and the middle of 1989, and Spain has
abandoned its earlier reliance on the politics of consensus and
has had one-party majority governments since 1982. This
emphasis on straight majority rule has not led to a serious crisis,
mainly because the ruling parties have behaved with moderation,
but it has entailed a serious risk for these newly democratic
countries - a risk that I would not want to recommend as an
example to be followed.

LESSON THREE: PR AND PROPORTIONALITY

The next lesson follows immediately from the above point. What
has made single-party majority cabinets possible in Spain and
Greece is that their parliamentary elections have resulted in many
victories for one party; this is true for four of the six elections in
Greece held so far (the 1989 elections are the exception) and in the
last three of the five Spanish elections. It is important to note that
six of these seven one-party majorities won at the polls were what
Douglas W. Rae calls manufactured majorities: a party winning
a majority of the legislative seats with only a minority of the
popular vote.4 Such manufactured majorities are quite common
in plurality systems but rare under proportional representation
(PR). Spain uses P R but applies it in small districts, which
discriminates against minor parties and in favour of the large
parties. Until the 1989 elections, Greece used a PR system that
was usually referred to as reinforced P R Y ,but what was being
reinforced was the large parties rather than proportionality.
The lesson to democratic engineers is: if you want to encourage
power-sharing coalition government instead of one-party rule,
and if you want to avoid the artificial manufacturing of
majorities, you should choose a PR system that is proportional in
reality as well as in name - unlike the Spanish and Greek
examples. This lesson is of special importance to Latin America
Douglas W. Rae, The Political Consequences
University Press, 1967, p. 74.

of

Electoral Laws, New Haven, Yale

SIX LESSONS FOR LATIN AMERICA

75

since many countries in this region have strong traditions of

conducting their legislative elections by PR. It is worth noting
that these traditions constitute an unexpected deviation from the
United States model of mainly plurality and majority electoral
systems; as I shall show later, the American model of democracy
is very strong in Latin America in other respects, especially as far
as the reliance on presidential forms of government is concerned.
It should also be pointed out, however, that presidentialism
and P R elections of the legislature are related to each other:
presidentialism tends to limit the operation of PR. The reason is
that the presidency is the biggest political prize to be won and that
only the largest parties have a chance to win it. This creates a
major advantage for the large parties and a disadvantage for the
smaller ones not only in the presidential elections themselves but
also indirectly in the legislative elections even when the latter are
conducted by PR. As Matthew Shugart has pointed out, this is
especially the case when the legislative election is held at the same
. ~ addition to
time or shortly after the presidential e l e ~ t i o n In
this indirect effect of presidentialism on limiting proportionality
and minority representation, presidentialism also has a direct
negative effect on proportionality, of course: the fact that a
presidential election entails the election of one person necessarily
means that plurality or majority methods have to be used and that
P R is logically excluded.

LESSON FOUR: THE TRADITION OF PRESIDENTIALISM

The second explanation of the configuration of democracies in

Figure 1 has an indirect but quite important relevance to our
concerns: the countries with a British political heritage (Britain
itself, New Zealand, Ireland, Australia, Canada, and the United
States) are all highly majoritarian on the executives-parties
dimension and are all located in the top row of the figure. The
influence of the Westminster model as a normative example has
tended to interfere with the need for more consensual
arrangements in some of the countries. In particular, had it not
been for the strong British influence, it is quite unlikely that

Matthew S. Shugart, Duvergers Rule and Presidentialism: The Effects of the

Timing of Elections, paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political
Science Association, Washington, D.C., 1988.

76

GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION

linguistically plural Canada would have developed along such

strongly majoritarian lines (on the first dimension).
There are other examples of dominant and potentially
dangerous foreign models that have been obstacles to an optimal
choice of democratic type based on a countrys needs. The
presidential form of government of the French Fifth Republic was
such a model for Portugal and Greece; because of the fortunate
circumstance of having a monarchy, Spain escaped this influence.
And the US presidential model has had a powerful impact in
Latin America. Without going into a full evaluation of the
advantages and disadvantages of presidentialism, let me
emphasize two serious problems.6 One is that it entails a strong
predisposition toward majoritarian democracy: it means the
concentration of all executive power in the hands of one person,
which is incompatible with broad coalition government and
power-sharing. Guillermo ODonnell notes the infrequent
recourse to formal and explicit political and economic pacts as
transitional devices in Latin America, in contrast with pactismo in
Southern Europe. He tries to explain this phenomenon in terms
of popular pressures that make compromises difficult and in terms
of the absence of strongly institutionalized party system^.^ In
addition, it seems to me, presidentialism is to blame: by its very
nature it is inimical to collective and collegial decision-making
and hence to compromises either on an ad hoc or regularized
basis. Moreover, where pacts have been successfully established
in presidential regimes, as in Colombia and Venezuela, they have
entailed more drastic limitations on democratic participation and
the rights of oppositions than similar pacts in more flexible
parliamentary systems.
The second major problem of presidentialism is that it is based
on the principle of separation and balance of executive and
legislative powers but that, in practice, most presidential systems
have found it impossible to achieve this balance. The United
States itself is an exception, although historically it has also
experienced swings between, in Woodrow Wilsons words,
For an excellent and much more extensive analysis, see Juan J. Linz, Democracy,
Presidential or Parliamentary: Does It Make a Difference?, paper presented at the
Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, 1987.
Guillermo ODonnell, Introduction to the Latin American Cases, in Guillermo
ODonnell, Philippe C . Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead (eds), Transitions from
Authoritarian Rule: Prospects for Democracy, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press,
vol. 2, pp. 11-12.

SIX LESSONS FOR LATIN AMERICA

77

Congressional government and the so-called imperial

presidency .* The usual interpretation of presidential power in
Latin America is that is has overwhelmed the power of the
legislature and that it has tended to turn into dictatorial power.
One typical response to this danger has been to limit the
presidents right to be re-elected. As Harry Kantor points out,
however, such rules are infractions upon true democracy, which
demands that voters be allowed to vote for whomever they
choose.g I would add that they also conflict with the democratic
assumption that the opportunity to be re-elected is a strong
incentive for elected officials to remain responsive to the voters
wishes. The fact that parliamentary executives do not need to be
limited by such basically undemocratic rules shows that they are
much safer for democracy. In addition to restrictions on
presidential succession, many other limitations on presidential
prerogatives have often been adopted, based on the same fear of
too strong presidential power. Ironically, this has often meant
that presidents have become virtually powerless and frustrated. In
fact, the increasingly prevalent interpretation of the problem of
presidentialism in Latin America is that presidents suffer from too
little instead of too much power.
Portugal had a French-style presidential government - a
strong president combined with a cabinet dependent on the
legislatures confidence - from 1976 to 1982. The constitution
gave the president extensive powers, and his popular election
added to his political stature. However, the presidents powers
were severely reduced in the 1982 constitutional revision and,
although popular election was not changed, Portugal reverted to a
parliamentary system - similar to the Austrian, Irish, and
Icelandic parliamentary systems which have weak, albeit
popularly elected, presidents, too. Greece also adopted a strong
presidency, inspired by the French model, although the president
was not popularly elected; President Constantine Karamanliss
great personal prestige partly compensated for this lack of popular
legitimation. The 1986 constitutional amendments eliminated
* See Fred W. Riggs,The Survival of Presidentialism in America: Para-Constitutional
Practices, International Political Science Reuiew, 9, 4, October 1988, pp. 247 - 78.
Harry Kantor, Efforts Made by Various Latin American Countries to Limit the
Power of the President, in Thomas V. DiBacco (ed.), Presidential Power in Latin American
Politics, New York, Praeger, 1977, pp. 23 - 24.
See Scott Mainwaring, Presidentialism in Latin America: A Review Essay, Latin
A m i c a n Research Review, forthcoming, 1990.

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GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION

almost all of the special powers of the president, making the

regime unambiguously parliamentary.
These Portuguese and Greek examples of constitutional
adaptation should be regarded as positive and highly instructive
models to democrats, especially in the Western hemisphere, who
are predisposed to think in presidential terms. Shifting from
presidential to parliamentary government entails a drastic and
difficult, but clearly not impossible, regime change. O n the other
hand, there are two reasons why such a change was easier for
Portugal and Greece than it would be for the Latin American
democracies. One is that the French presidential model already
contains some parliamentary features - the model is, in fact,
often called merely semi-presidential - and hence that it can be
turned into parliamentarism more easily than the US presidential
model. Secondly, presidential government in Greece and
Portugal did not last long enough to become a firm tradition,
while the problem in Latin America is not just the influence of the
US presidential model but also the fact that presidentialism has
become a strong Latin American tradition, too.
LESSON FIVE: POPULATION SIZE, DECENTRALIZATION, AND
FEDERALISM

Let us now turn to the third and last explanation of the

distribution of the 25 democratic systems in Figure 1 : the
respective sizes of the countries populations. Figure 1 shows that
this variable is correlated with the federal-unitary contrast,
although the relationship ir: obviously not a perfectly monotonic
one. As we move from strong majoritarianism (unitary
government) on the left to strong consensus (federalism) on the
right, we find that population size tends to go up. The most
striking exceptions are the United Kingdom which, in terms of
this explanation, is placed too far to the left in the figure, and
Switzerland which is similarly much too far on the right-hand
side. The four Southern European democracies display roughly
the differences that we would expect on the basis of their different
population sizes: the two smaller countries, Greece and Portugal,
with populations of about ten million each, are located higher
than Spain and Italy, which have respectively about four and six
times larger populations.
It is not surprising that we find this link between population
size and type of democracy: larger countries need more provisions

SIX LESSONS F O R LATIN AMERICA

79

for regional autonomy and more of the supporting federal

institutions than small countries. The practical lesson for
democratic engineers is that the form of democracy chosen should
be appropriate to their particular country in this respect.
Democracies do not have to be formally federal in order to be
rated as federal (consensual) in Figure 1. The criteria for
classification on the federal-unitary dimension are the degree of
government centralization, the organization of the national
legislature (unicameralism versus strong bicameralism), and
constitutional flexibility; in other words, whether or not a country
is formally federal is not a criterion, And, in fact, of the nine
countries classified in the consensual and strongly consensual cells
on the federal-unitary dimension in Figure 1, three are formally
unitary states: Japan and our two more federal Southern
European countries, Spain and Italy. On the other hand, formal
federalism does appear to be a factor of considerable importance:
the six countries that have explicit federal constitutions are all on
the right-hand side of the figure, and five of the six are on the far
right-hand side. In Latin America, there is a similar relationship
between population size and formal federalism. Most of the larger
countries have federal constitutions - Brazil, Mexico,
Argentina, and Venezuela - but there is no strong tradition of
actual government decentralization. For instance, Daniel J .
Elazar states that in Mexico the states exercise limited autonomy
[under] a very strong federal government, and he describes
Argentina as a federation in which most power is lodged in the
federal capital. O n the other hand, Colombia is a decentralized
unitary state in which decentralization is maintained by the
strong demands for autonomy that exist in some of the major
provinces.
In the previous section, I emphasized the negative influence of
the United States model of presidential government. I should now
state with equal emphasis that in two other respects the US model
should be regarded as beneficial for the Latin American
countries, since the model also includes federalism and a strong
written constitution; I shall discuss the latter in the next section.
As far as the federal model is concerned, Sir Arthur Lewiss
analysis of the failure of democracy in West Africa is highly
pertinent. H e attributes a large part of the blame to the pernicious

I Daniel J. Elazar, Arrangements for Self-Rule and Autonomy in Various Countries

of the World: A Preliminary Inventory, in Daniel J. Elazar (ed.), Federalism and Political
Znfegration, Lanham, Maryland, University Press of America, 1984, pp. 230 - 31.

80

GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION

influence of the majoritarian model, including its unitary and

centralist bias. These states would have fared better if they had
not had to assume that British and French constitutional ideas
were superior to all others. With an American heritage, they
would have taken the federal idea for granted, and it would have
been the centralizers who were arguing an unpopular case. He
concludes that the West African countries will need much unbrainwashin
before they grasp their problems in true
perspective? Lewis would undoubtedly regard the Latin
American countries as very fortunate for not having to undergo
the same un-brainwashing due to the strong influence of the US
model.
Because the federal component of the US model must be
judged positively but the presidential component negatively, it is
important to stress that the two are not logically linked with each
other. Klaus von Beyme points out that right into the twentieth
century the prejudice persisted vigorously that federalism and
parliamentary majority government could not be combined.
Citing the Argentinian, Brazilian, Mexican, and Venezuelan
examples, he adds that this message was taken especially to heart
in Latin America. Among Europeans, the examples of federalcum-parliamentary government in Australia and Canada were
long ignored, and it is only after the adoption of the similar
constitutional mixes in Austria and West Germany that this
prejudice has died out - at least in Europe.13 To the extent that
the myth persists in Latin America, it also deserves to die out
there.
LESSON SIX: CONSTITUTIONAL PROTECTION

While the new Southern European democracies have different

positions on the federal-unitary dimension, they are strikingly
alike with regard to one of the variables that goes into this
dimension: the rigidity of their constitutions. All three have
written constitutions that can be amended only by extraordinary
majorities and are protected by judicial review. Their emergence
from dictatorial rule accounts for much of this similarity. Of the
other democracies in Figure 1 only seven have equally firm and
W. Arthur Lewis, Politics in West Africa, London, Allen & Unwin, 1965, p. 55.
Klaus von Beyme, America as a Model: The Impact ofAmrican Democracy in the World,
New York, St Martins Press, 1987, p. 76 (italics omitted).
l3

SIX LESSONS FOR LATIN AMERICA

81

protected constitutions, and three - Austria, Germany, and

Japan - have similar backgrounds of authoritarianism.
Since this background is unfortunately also common in Latin
America, the Southern European model of strong constitutional
protection is a positive example. Flexible constitutions, such as
the unwritten constitutions of Great Britain and New Zealand
and the surprisingly many written constitutions that can be
amended by majority rule and/or are not protected by the courts
ability to test the constitutionality of laws, are a luxury that some
older and completely self-confident democracies may be able to
afford. It is a luxury that cannot be recommended for new and
less firmly established democratic systems.
As indicated earlier, constitutional rigidity and judicial review
are important parts of the US model of democracy; Karl
Loewenstein even called them Americas most important
export. l 4 In fact, it can be argued that judicial review is a logical
corollary of both separation of powers (presidential government)
and division of powers (federalism) since an impartial authority is
needed to decide where exactly these powers should be separated
and divided.I5 O n the other hand, there is no logical reason why
judicial review and rigid constitutions cannot be combined with
parliamentary government or, for that matter, with unitary and
centralized systems. In practice, as von Beyme points out, today
more parliamentary systems than presidential ones have
established a variation on the theme of constitutional
jurisdiction. l6 Very clearly, the combination of parliamentary
government, strong constitutional protection, and, for the larger
countries, federalism and decentralization is both possible and
advisable.

CONCLUSION

I believe that these six lessons are both valid and valuable in spite
of the obviously many and considerable differences among the
Southern European countries, among the Latin American
countries, and also between Southern Europe and Latin America.
I have already repeatedly referred to the first two sets of
Cited in von Beyme, America as a Model, op. cit., p. 85.
See K. C . Wheare, Federal Government, 4th ed., New York, Oxford University Press,
1984, pp. 53 - 74.
l 6 Von Beyme, America m a Model, op. cit., p. 85.
I

l5

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GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION

differences, those within Southern Europe and within Latin

America. However, the most important reason for doubting the
relevance of the Southern European examples for Latin America
would be the difference between the two regions. It is precisely
this difference that several scholars have recently emphasized. For
instance, Guillermo ODonnell writes that the prospects for
political democracy in Latin America are not very favorable,
certainly less so than in Southern Europe. ODonnells coauthor of the authoritative four-volume work Transitions from
Authoritarian Rule, Philippe C . Schmitter, is equally pessimistic. In
my opinion, both this forecast and the grounds for it are
exaggerated.
One of the reasons for their pessimism, with which I find
myself largely in agreement, concerns the considerable socioeconomic differences between the two regions. What is important
here is not the overall level of economic development. Italy and
Spain may be economically more developed than any of the Latin
American countries, but Portugal and Greece are clearly not. The
crucial difference is that socio-economic inequality is substantially
greater in Latin America than in Southern Europe. ODonnell
speaks of acute, pervasive, and blatant inequalities in the latter
region. l8 But ODonnells diagnosis should yield two
conclusions, instead of one: this major cleavage makes viable
democracy less likely, but the likelihood can be improved by
using the appropriate consensual instruments.
Another reason why ODonnell and Schmitter are pessimistic
is that the Latin American countries do not share the Southern
European advantage of the relatively modest, not to say minor,
role played by the armed forces in the defunct regime. But
Greece is at least a partial exception to this pattern and, as
Schmitter himself points out, there is the countervailing
disadvantage
that
the
Southern European
countries
have . . .experienced bureaucratic-authoritarian rule more
continuously and for a longer period of time. Another difference
is that the international context has been more favourable to
Southern Europe than to Latin America. For one thing, the
United States, whose policies toward democratization in Latin
America have been ambiguous and variant from one case to
another, has consistently supported it in Southern Europe. But
Schmitter himself concludes that such external forces have been of
l7

Guillermo ODonnell, Introduction to the Latin American Cases, op. cit., p. 14.
ibid., p. 11.

SIX LESSONS FOR LATIN AMERICA

83

minor importance and that the transitions from authoritarian rule

and the prospects for democracy must be largely explained in
terms of national forces and calculations. l9
Schmitter also emphasizes the differential role of dominant
models: The Southern European countries may have also
benefited from their distance from the American system of
government. Western Europe may seem to be monolithically
democratic in the contemporary period, but beneath that overall
similarity lie many differences in institutional configuration [such
as] pure parliamentarism, semipresidentialism, and consociationalism, coupled with a wide range of party systems, electoral
arrangements, and territorial distributions of authority. The
Latin American political engineers, by contrast, may be
compelled to choose from a more restricted menu. The hegemony
of the United States as a model of political democracy, not to
mention the legacy of their own nineteenth-century constitutions,
makes it less likely that they will deviate from the presidentialist,
bicameral, formal checks-and-balances, first-past-the-post
ideal with its implied two-party system. After all that I have
said myself about the importance of normative models of
democracy, I have to endorse much of what Schmitter is arguing,
but I would add three qualifications. First, as I have emphasized
several times, parts of the US model are positive and valuable for
Latin America. Secondly, Schmitters statement that the Latin
Americans may be compelled to choose from the US model and
their own political traditions is too strong and too deterministic;
in fact, there has been considerable interest in studying the
European, and especially Southern European, examples. My
third, relatively minor, point concerns the choice of electoral
systems. Here the variation in Europe is much more limited PR is the nearly universal norm - and the Latin American
experience is much more varied - including a strong PR
tradition - than Schmitter claims.
Finally, in spite of all his pessimism, ODonnell argues that the
chances for democracy in Latin America may not be so small after
all because of the widespread revulsion against the excesses of
recent authoritarian regimes. As a result, never has the
Philippe C. Schmitter,An Introduction to Southern European Transitions from
Authoritarian Rule: Italy, Greece, Portugal, Spain, and Turkey, in ODonnell,
Schmitter, and Whitehead (eds), Transitions frum Authoritarian Rule, op. cit., vol. 1 ,
pp. 4 - 5.
ibid., p. 9.

84

GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION

ideological prestige of political democracy been higher in Latin

America than now - offering an unprecedented opportunity for
the establishment and consolidation of democracy. This is the
terrain , he continues, where that unpredictable combination of
virtzi on the part of leaders, and fortuna in the combination of
circumstances, may make the crucial difference. The message
of this article has been that the political engineers virtzi should
include not only a strong commitment to democracy but also the
willingness and ability to be creative, to be not over constrained
by existing political traditions, to examine all of the available
options, and to learn from the positive and negative examples of
other democracies.

ODonnell, Introduction to the Latin American Cases, op. cit., p. 11