A Comparativist's Perspective

Abstract

One of the uncomfortable facts of life confronting students of comparative politics is that all political systems are, to some extent, unique. Indeed, it seems that the more we know about a particular place, the harder it becomes to compare it to others. Squeezing a given case into a tight theoretical mold offers no easy solutions to this problem, a lesson nicely illustrated by Brazil, whose experience partly inspired the theory of “bureaucratic authoritarianism.” Yet Brazilian authoritarianism never quite matched the expectations that animated this theory, or for that matter, its paradoxical offspring—the theory of “democratic transitions.” As Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe Schmitter once noted: “Brazil is an interesting exception. . . . No serious attempt was made in Brazil to create distinctively authoritarian institutions. Rather, the generals [ruled] . . . by distorting rather than by disbanding the basic institutions of political democracy.” One might quibble with the assertion that Brazil lacked distinctively authoritarian institutions and insist instead that the grafting together of democratic and patrimonialist structures during the 1960s is precisely what created an “exceptional” political beast, one that subsequently resisted a full transition to democracy for nearly 15 years. Yet then we would have to concede that this protracted dynamic was not wholly unique to Brazil, or even to Latin America. Many of my Egyptian colleagues still complain that their country is mired in a marhalla intiqaliyya mustamira—a continuing transitional stage. This ailment Daniel Brumberg, assistant professor of government at Georgetown University, has been a visiting fellow at both the U.S. Institute of Peace and the International Forum for Democratic Studies. He is the author of From Khomeini to Khatami: Charisma, Revolution, and Reform in the Islamic Republic of Iran (2001) and is currently at work on a comparative study of power-sharing and political reform in Indonesia, Algeria, and Kuwait.