Originally a chapter in the "Handbook of Political Science," this analysis develops the fundamental destinction between totalitarian and authoritarian systems. It emphasizes the personalistic, lawless, non-ideological type of authoritarian rule the author calls the "sultanistic regime.
Empirically thorough and conceptually clear, Crafting State-Nations will have a substantial impact on the study of comparative political institutions and the conception and understanding of nationalism and democracy.
Since their classic volume The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes was published in 1978, Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan have increasingly focused on the questions of how, in the modern world, nondemocratic regimes can be eroded and democratic regimes crafted. In Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation, they break new ground in numerous areas. They reconceptualize the major types of modern nondemocratic regimes and point out for each type the available paths to democratic transition and the tasks of democratic consolidation. They argue that, although "nation-state" and "democracy" often have conflicting logics, multiple and complementary political identities are feasible under a common roof of state-guaranteed rights. They also illustrate how, without an effective state, there can be neither effective citizenship nor successful privatization. Further, they provide criteria and evidence for politicians and scholars alike to distinguish between democratic consolidation and pseudo-democratization, and they present conceptually driven survey data for the fourteen countries studied. Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation contains the first systematic comparative analysis of the process of democratic consolidation in southern Europe and the southern cone of South America, and it is the first book to ground post-Communist Europe within the literature of comparative politics and democratic theory.
Political wisdom holds that the political boundaries of a state necessarily coincide with a nation's perceived cultural boundaries. Today, the sociocultural diversity of many polities renders this understanding obsolete. This volume provides the framework for the state-nation, a new paradigm that addresses the need within democratic nations to accommodate distinct ethnic and cultural groups within a country while maintaining national political coherence. First introduced briefly in 1996 by Alfred Stepan and Juan J. Linz, the state-nation is a country with significant multicultural—even multinational—components that engenders strong identification and loyalty from its citizens. Here, Indian political scholar Yogendra Yadav joins Stepan and Linz to outline and develop the concept further. The core of the book documents how state-nation policies have helped craft multiple but complementary identities in India in contrast to nation-state policies in Sri Lanka, which contributed to polarized and warring identities. The authors support their argument with the results of some of the largest and most original surveys ever designed and employed for comparative political research. They include a chapter discussing why the U.S. constitutional model, often seen as the preferred template for all the world’s federations, would have been particularly inappropriate for crafting democracy in politically robust multinational countries such as India or Spain. To expand the repertoire of how even unitary states can respond to territorially concentrated minorities with some secessionist desires, the authors develop a revised theory of federacy and show how such a formula helped craft the recent peace agreement in Aceh, Indonesia. Empirically thorough and conceptually clear, Crafting State-Nations will have a substantial impact on the study of comparative political institutions and the conception and understanding of nationalism and democracy.
Between States is the first book that assesses systematically the broad implications of interim governments in the establishment of democratic regimes and on the existence of states. Based on historical and contemporary democratisation experiences, the book presents four ideal types of interim government: opposition-led provisional governments, power-sharing interim governments, incumbent-led caretaker governments, and international interim government by the United Nations. The first part explores the theoretical problems of each of these models from a broad comparative perspective. It uses as illustrations historical and contemporary cases that present a wide spectrum of contexts for comparison. The second part provides extensive case studies that are intended to illustrate, appraise, amplify and criticise the analysis in volume one. These include Iran, East Germany, Portugal, Afghanistan, and Yugoslavia.
These essays by the brilliant historian of political science Juan Linz comprise a remarkable intellectual review of the life and work of Robert Michels, his major book Political Parties, and the dimensions of democracy as a functioning system. Linz elucidates the importance of Michels in a way that offers more than a mechanical view of political parties as some sort of precisely ordered system of authority and influence. Instead, Michels offers a view of politics that is bottom up and untidy, what he calls a "reciprocal deference structure." Michels is not simply the father of the iron law of oligarchy, but the idea of politics as a less than orderly network of responsiveness, responsibility, and accountability. Linz demonstrates, with magisterial power, why Michels must be ranked as a foremost thinker in classical political sociology. The remaining three segments of the volume cover areas with which Linz has also long been identified. Each in its own way illumines aspects of Michels as well. "Time and Regime Change" articulates differences between change within a regime and change of a regime--sometimes hard to identify because of the elongated time frames involved. The next essay explains why Spain is neither a traditional society nor a successful modern nation. The reliance upon central authority displaced the hoped for evolution of a society based on representative democratic institutions. The final section. "Freedom and Autonomy of Intellectuals and Artists" is a topic that gripped Michels and Linz alike. Freedom as a goal of the intelligentsia has been frustrated by those who provide ideological justification for repression of ideas and actions in the name of higher values. This segment provides a bridge between Michels and Weber--not to mention both of these major figures with Linz himself. The role of state power in mediating intellectual freedom is the leitmotif that blankets the twentieth century. The work is graced by a full-length bibliography of the writings of Juan J. Linz, prepared by his student and colleague, H. E. Chehabi. Juan Linz is Sterling Professor Emeritus of Political and Social Science at Yale University. He is former Chairman of the Committee on Political Sociology of the International Sociological Association and the International Political Science Association.
This book examines the political evolution of the judiciary – a usually overlooked political actor – and its capacity to contribute to the process of democratic consolidation in Latin America during the 1990s. Calleros analyzes twelve countries in order to assess the independence, impartiality, political strength and efficiency of the judicial branch. The picture that emerges – with the one exception of Costa Rica – is the persistence of weak judicial systems, unable in practice to check other branches of government, including the executive and the military, while not quite effective in fully protecting human rights or in implementing due process of law guarantees. Aggravating issues, such as corruption, heavy case backlogs, overcrowding of prisons, circumvention of laws and personal vulnerability of judges, make the judiciary the least evolved of the three branches of government in the Latin American transitions to democracy.
Originally a chapter in the "Handbook of Political Science," this analysis develops the fundamental destinction between totalitarian and authoritarian systems. It emphasizes the personalistic, lawless, non-ideological type of authoritarian rule the author calls the "sultanistic regime.
Based on more than 500 hours of interviews with key political elites (under both the Franco regime and the current democracy), extensive analyses of public opinion and electoral behavior surveys, and other original research, the book sheds important new light on Spain's democractic regime and its key institutions."--BOOK JACKET.
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