Dictators and Democrats will certainly take its place among the most significant, broad-scale studies of political change in the contemporary world. It has both breadth and depth. It targets understanding patterns that have been posited by major academic studies and impressively creates methodologies to test their validity. That said, there is a reason that many scholars have dodged these sweeping and complex challenges. It is a task of immense proportions. Stephan Haggard and Robert Kaufman manage by meticulously measuring their language and adhering diligently to the social scientist's caution that empirical studies demand. Their analysis on balance reflects the uneven, inconsistent, twisted nature of politics one finds in the diverse political world of the twenty-first century. They do not allow themselves to extend their propositions beyond what is evidenced.
The authors set out to address both the major pre-theories in empirical political science and to build out their thinking with numerous case studies drawn from area studies and regional expertise. The volume will be enthusiastically embraced by scholars already immersed in the literature of global data sets and familiar with the dialogue of controversies related to those methodologies. It takes the empirical data available, massages that data to reposition the conceptual frontier, including modifying models we are currently using. It employs both qualitative and quantitative methodologies. It labors to combine these research techniques and often “pools” the two primary data sets used (CGV and Polity).
To accomplish these objectives that they set, they press their reasoning to the forward boundaries of the scholarly work on systemic change. Both in a substantive and a methodological sense, this positions their volume in the rarified company of the most theoretically-refined academics. It may be that there are fewer than fifty contemporary political scientists who will be able to fathom and build upon their analysis. Valuable to be sure, but for many it will be beyond reach. Graduates and early professionals will certainly try to engage these ideas, but, due to the jargon and the originality, will struggle. They may require a mentor / guide to help them through the thicket. The language is exceptionally intense, dense, and intricate. The detail and complexity yield a slow read requiring one to pour over most of the assertions. It is impossible to slip quickly from one idea to the next because each is significant and packed with implications, especially for those with area studies expertise. This is both a compliment and a caution. The language is meticulously scholarly, referenced and documented elaborately, but can be a bit tangled and is not linear. The volume includes eighty-eight pages of data, twenty-seven pages of references, and hundreds of footnotes. It is carefully-crafted scholarship.
I should concede that I am among those students of comparative politics who have significant reservations about the “Third Wave” premises. Succinctly, one can see the transitions identified in the study as something significantly short of “democracy.” Haggard and Kaufman hint at this, suggesting that the Third Wave genre of studies had an “optimistic face.” They also concede to a very problematic definition of “democracy,” but use the study and its spin-offs as a point of departure and gloss over the conceptual hiccup. Nonetheless, they reference both the measurement and coding challenges. At one point they refer to this as “generosity of coding rules.” This complicates their analysis of “backsliding.”
My own efforts stem from more than forty years of inquiry sharing the same fascination about political transitions from authoritarian modes to less authoritarian systems (quasi-democratic systems) and about patterns that emerge as some systems revert. For the current generation of scholars sharing this interest, this volume will take its place among the three or four studies that define what the scholarly community knows now.
The volume diligently juxtaposes its conceptual and theoretical notions with detail from select regions and specific country experiences. For readers of the Slavic Review, this volume will present two challenges which combined may render it of less value. First, the language may well be quite foreign to the historical / cultural Slavic studies analyst. Second, for those Slavic scholars with social science interests, the sections on the Slavic systems—past and present—will not seem as precise or as complete as “democratization” processes in those countries warrant. Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, and the Baltic states figure prominently in the authors’ postsocialist regional focus. Scholars with other regional expertise may find the accuracy of applying conceptual tests to those regions more comfortable. Any regional or area studies expert will find some basis for challenging some interpretations included in the volume. The transitions from socialist systems to postsocialist systems to European integration are perhaps a very peculiar set of cases. That set of circumstances may account for the awkwardness of the authors’ attempt to apply these cases to their hypotheses. The volume spans seventy-eight cases and highlights a much smaller number of what it calls “reversions” to predemocratic political processes.
In its present form, the analysis may not be particularly useful to policy-makers or non-academic international analysts. Nonetheless, it raises some of the most profound questions in comparative politics: what causes systemic change? Are masses or elites the driving force? Does it make a difference in terms of the longevity of the change? Finally, does inequality or distributive conflict account for triggering change? It inventories the scholarly literature without prejudging its insights. It probes whether shifts in society toward democracy are demand-driven and in particular if they stem from a public response to structural inequality.
Area studies experts will find interesting the effort by the authors to turn at various points in the study, though most clearly in Chapters 4 and 5, to the reasoning and calculations of authoritarian political elites (using coercion and cooptation) as they consider supporting or engineering a transition to a quasi-democratic or more competitive authoritarian system. They seek to understand the logic and behavior of groups mobilized to address inequality in a number of different forms. They attempt to untangle the relationship of inequalities and the consequential “distributive conflict” with only partial success. Chapter 4 takes up the international influences that resonate with political elites. Leverage, “neighborhood effects,” intervention, sanctions, and threats all condition the common consequence: “elite displacement.”
The book turns to the important issue of whether the transitional path (defined by its causal dimensions) enables us to anticipate the longevity of its new form or its impulse to revert. This research is compelled to sharply qualify what it can say to us about these relationships. They share with us that neither the methodology nor the substantive findings are “straightforward.”
Haggard and Kaufman show remarkable insight as they account for the universe of conditions and variables that one encounters in an effort to find patterns of change. They attempt to model the social, economic, and civic organizations that can focus issues and mobilize populations. Their data suggests that 70% of transitions experienced some “pressure from below.” Moreover, in 70% of transitions, authoritarian leaders were able to retain “sufficient authority” to continue to negotiate their positions. On balance, they find inequality to be a variable with very little explanatory power. The data does seem to lead them toward economic variables.
Chapter 6 is an illuminating discussion of what the authors observe and call “weak democracy syndrome.” This posits that many of the twenty-five cases of “reversion” to authoritarian political dynamics can be explained by the rather incomplete transition “to” democracy. This will not come as news to area specialists. The term “backsliding” has an unfortunate normative texture. These paths characterized in the volume as reversals of direction are explained by Praetorianism, weak institutionalization, poor economic performance, and experience with crisis. The authors attempt to differentiate “shallow” reversions from more fundamental ones. In sum, the longevity of fledgling democracies hinged on their performance.
The study, without expressing it explicitly, presumes that all people share “democratic” impulses. Many of the uneven findings could be seen as raising doubt. Haggard and Kaufman end with qualms about the explanatory power of structural factors. They conclude that change-stimulating causes grow out of the political practices of the old regime. When mass mobilization ignites change, one sees mixed levels of political stability. What predicts the durability of democracy? Institutionalization and performance is their answer.
On balance, Dictators and Democrats is valuable by its ability to synthesize what we know and what we want to know. It responsibly places boundary markers on our understanding. It should find its way to every serious comparative politics scholar's shelf alongside Seymour Lipset, Adam Przeworski, Michael Alvarez, Larry Diamond, and others. One gets the sense that if the authors were to precis their research, they might say that they went searching for coherent and significant political patterns (“transition paths”) where they do not seem to exist.
