Ronald A. Francisco - The Politics of Regime Transitions

Ronald A. Francisco

First published 2000 by Westview Press

Published 2019 by Routledge
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ISBN 13: 978-0-367-29519-6 (hbk)

For the better part of a decade I have followed the dynamic paths of forty regime transitions. This volume is my evaluation of political and economic reforms that occurred during these transitions. The book is organized along the temporal course of a regime transition. After an historical overview, we consider the collapse of the regime, the early transition, democratization and economic reform. then tries to pull together several themes of the book and to solve persisting puzzles, like the prevalence of semi-presidential government choices in the regime transitions. My objective is to allow the events in the forty sample countries to show how applicable theories relate to regime transitions.

The sample is diverse. I make no claim of expertise for most of the countries that comprise the sample. In the course of my research, however, I have enjoyed the generous help of my colleagues in comparative politics to answer my mundane questions about countries that they know well: Lorraine Bayard de Volo, Paul D'Anieri, Deborah Gerner, Carl Land, Jaroslaw Piekalkiewicz, Gary Reich, and O. Fiona Yap. A sample of forty countries in several regions of the world brings inherent challenges for consistent accuracy. I bear responsibility for errors in the volume.

Vital support of all kinds during this project came from my wife Debby and our son Christopher. I thank both for their willingness to help and to endure the inattention that necessarily accompanies a project of this sort. The book is dedicated to my mother, who with her love and her books enabled me to pursue the path I chose in life and work. I also thank Richard L. Merritt of the University of Illinois for directing my educationin graduate school and beyond.

What processes are unleashed when old regimes give way to new ones? That is what this book seeks to discover. It attempts to render coherent a world that has changed rapidly in recent years. Since these events unfold over time, regime transitions are best studied as a process. The process of regime transitions unfolds from collapse of the old regime through early transition, perhaps democratization, economic reform and finally consolidation. The study focuses on recent transitions in the remarkable era since 1989. Francis Fukuyama (1992) sought to explain the past decade's extraordinary change from the view of political philosophy, Fukuyama contends that we have reached the end of "History" with the global success of liberal democracy. Samuel Huntington (1991) focuses on democratization. He claims that we have entered the "third wave" of democracy. Both Fukuyama and Huntington offer evaluations based upon the dialecticthe historical contest among ideas that leads to eventual progress. Yet not all countries successfully make the leap to democracy. Most remain mired in the transition process, where forces lurk that can move incipient regimes in unexpected directions.

We focus on what happens inside regimes and to a lesser extent on how context affects their transitions. The core of the study comprises the behavior and events of 40 countries selected from different regions that have had regime transitions in the recent past:

Afghanistan, Albania, Argentina, Bulgaria, Belarus, Cambodia, Chile, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Ethiopia, Georgia, German Democratic Republic, Guatemala, Haiti, Hungary, Iran, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, Moldova, Mongolia, Nicaragua, Niger, Nigeria, North Yemen, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Russia, Somalia, South Africa, South Korea, South Yemen, Taiwan, Tajikistan, Ukraine, Uruguay, and Uzbekistan.

The volume explores, in succession, how regimes collapse, how transitions evolve, the challenges of creating democracy, the economic restructuring of transition policies, and the attempts of other countries to affect the direction of the transition. Consolidation, the final phase of transition, concludes the process of regime change.

The underlying perspective I assume in this book is rationality or self-interest (Lichbach and Zuckerman 1997; Przeworski 1992), People choose options to benefit the perception of their own self-interest. This is straightforward under a stable regime: Politicians seek reelection, support the interests of corporations and other groups who donate funds for campaigns, and do not violate the attitudes of their constituents. When a regime collapses, context becomes fluid. Rules and norms fall away, creating the peril of uncertainty. Elites in the old regime seek both to retain their positions and to minimize punishment in the successor regime. New groups form and compete for decision-making power and especially rule-making authority. Workers and managers try to preserve their enterprise and provide for it a relative advantage over other firms or businesses. All of these actions constitute a regime transition.

In order to begin to understand the process of regime transitions, we need to know what has happened in the past when a regime collapses. A good place to start is the history of regime transitions in the last two centuries. This chapter seeks to gain historically based empirical understanding of what happened during these transitions. What we actually know about patterns of political transitions over time and across regions comes almost wholly from case studies. In contrast, the geographic and temporal scope of our introductory historical survey is broad: the world from 1800 to 1986 (and in some cases to 1991). This long time series should reveal the modal events of regime changes in the political development of the world. Simple, descriptive analysis presents the historical context underlying our investigation.

The recent wave of research on political transitions principally addresses the theory and practice of democratization, not how events condition diverse outcomes (e.g., Chilcote et al. 1990, Fishkin 1991, Snyder 1992). Discovering what happened in the wake of historical political failures is feasible thanks to the efforts of Ted Robert Gurr and his associates (Gurr, 1990). Their Polity II dataset classifies the authority patterns in 152 countries from 1800 until 1986 (the Polity III dataset covers the 1990s as well, but we focus here on history). As Ruggie (1993) notes, the year 1989 has become a convenient historical marker as the end of the postwar era. Therefore, in order to capture the post-1986 period as a separate category for comparison, I extend the dataset for countries that have had recent regime transitions. The exercise should reveal to what extent recent regime changes follow stable historical patterns and trends or forge a new set of rules for a new era.