Democratization: Understanding the Relationship between Regime Change and the Culture of Politics

Abstract

The comparative literature on regime change offers a range of plausible explanations for the democratic ferment that began spreading across Africa in 1989 (Joseph 1991; Bratton and van de Walle 1992a). Theorists of democratization in general focus on three areas of conceptual concern: structural and contingent factors that precipitate openings in authoritarian rule (Moore 1967; O'Donnell et al. 1986), the relative importance of elite behavior versus mass mobilization strategies of reform (O'Donnell and Schmitter 1986; Karl 1986, 1990; Rueschemeyer et al. 1992), and diffusionist explanations of change (Huntington 1991). Within these broad rubrics, regional variations come into play. While many analysts readily assert that glasnost in the Soviet Union and the collapse of dictatorships in Eastern Europe influenced the rise of pro-democracy movements in Africa, leading theorists of democratic transitions have downplayed the relevance of external factors and the international context to political liberalization in Latin America during the 1980s (O'Donnell and Schmitter 1986; Whitehead 1986; Lowenthal 1991). What this variance suggests is that theories of regime change must be historicized and contextualized in order to incorporate local conditions and circumstances. Historian Achille Mbembe cautions against overemphasizing the specificity of Africa (1990)—but my point is different. Indeed, inasmuch as key theoretical propositions derived from the Latin American, Southern and Eastern European experiences have oriented a great deal of the recent conceptual and empirical work on democratization in Africa, the cultural dynamics of transitions bear closer scrutiny. The argument to be advanced here is that the efficacy of theories of democratic transition for analyzing political processes in any region of the world is hampered by a failure to problematize the relationship between regime change and the culture of politics.