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Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation. By Larry Diamond. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. 261p. $55.00.
Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe. By Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. 479p. $55.00 cloth, $18.95 paper.
In recent years, the global advance of polyarchy has fostered the integration of comparative politics by encouraging area specialists to look outside their regions and examine the process of democratization in a truly comparative and crossregional fashion for the first time. More important, the maturation of the literature on the third wave of democratization (which is now older than the undergraduates reading about it) has made possible the emergence of some truly cumulative efforts to make sense of this phenomenon.
The two books under review are easily the best of these new integrative and cumulative efforts. Topically, they are comprehensive introductions to the general phenomenon of democratization, superseding such earlier landmark studies as O'Donnell, Schmitter, and Whitehead's Transitions from Authoritarian Rule (1986) and Huntington's The Third Wave (1991). Geographically, both works cast extraordinarily wide nets, drawing on cases from three or more regions. Temporally, both volumes focus on the third wave (post-1974), although they occasionally draw on the lessons of the earlier waves and reverse waves.
It is not surprising that both books have similar overarching questions and concerns, given that all three authors have worked together closely, and many of the scholars they cite have cooperated on various projects in the past. Without downplaying the many novel and individual contributions made by each book, it is clear-as the authors acknowledge in their respective prefaces-that these volumes can also be viewed as distillations and critiques of the work of the international network of democratization scholars that has taken shape over the past two decades (and whose debates have been featured most prominently in the Journal of Democracy since 1990). Scholarly networking, dialogues, and cumulative refinements of theory are used to spectacular effect in each volume, setting an example for the profession.
Notwithstanding the broad similarities between these two books, there are important differences. These are most visible in the scope and depth of each, in their conceptual emphases, and in the key independent variables upon which they...