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This text is a condensed and lightly edited version of a panel discussion. For further information about the panel and the series of which it was a part, along with brief bios of the panelists, see the box on page 88. Another box, on page 90, contains a list of works mentioned during the discussion. Thanks are owed to Dean W. Jackson and Marlena Papavaritis for producing the initial transcription.
Marc F. Plattner: The concept of transitions has been central to discussions of democratization for more than three decades now. "Transition" has been the primary term used to describe the political changes that typified what Samuel P. Huntington labeled the "third wave" of democratization-the birth of new democracies in well over fifty countries that has made democracy the most common form of regime in the world today. The heyday of transitions was the 1980s and the 1990s. But by the turn of the twenty-first century, the birth of new democracies had slowed down, partly because so many countries had already become democratic. As a result, political scientists turned their attention to issues of democratic consolidation, and then to the quality of democracy.
In a widely discussed and influential essay in the January 2002 issue of the Journal of Democracy, Thomas Carothers called into question the continuing value of what he called "the transition paradigm." For a moment it seemed as if the notion of transition might have become outdated or at least outlived its usefulness. But with the "color revolutions" in the former Soviet Union, and more recently and even more dramatically with the regime changes associated with the "Arab Spring" and the political opening in Burma, the question of democratic transitions has returned to center stage.
The use of the word "transition" to refer to a change in political regime is relatively new. A key role in introducing the term in this sense was played by a much-cited article written in 1970 by political scientist Dankwart Rustow, entitled "Transitions to Democracy: Toward a Dy- namic Model." Writing before the beginning of the third wave, Rustow argues that most political scientists of his day focused on how democracy can be preserved and strengthened where it already exists, mainly in North America and Western Europe....