1. Bunce, Valerie, “Should Transitologists Be Grounded?”, Slavic Review 54, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 111-27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. Schmitter, Philippe C. with Karl, Terry Lynn, “The Conceptual Travels of Transitologists and Consolidologists: How Far to the East Should They Attempt to Go?” Slavic Review 53, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 173-85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. Bunce, Valerie, “Comparing East and South,” Journal of Democracy 6, No. 3 (Fall 1994): 95.Google Scholar

4. We will refrain from responding to the other misrepresentations of our work in Bunce's reply. Just to keep the record straight, however, we do want to answer her charge that our “arrogance” is apparent from the fact that we felt it “necessary to take on the burden of propagating the comparative message to the unconverted readers of Slavic Review” (116). Philippe Schmitter was approached (unsolicited) by the editor of this review, Elliott Mossman, who asked him if he would be willing to contribute a version of a talk he was invited to give at the 1993 annual convention of the AAASS to the very next issue of Slavic Review. Such was the proximity of the deadline that we were even unable to collaborate fully on the final draft—hence, the “with” rather than “and” connecting its two authors. We did nothing to force ourselves onto these pages and we are responding to that same editor's request to write this reply.

5. See, for example, Karl, Terry Lynn, “In Defense of Area Studies,” Enlace (Stanford University, Fall 1992): 2.Google Scholar

6. This is not a new observation. More than 25 years ago, some scholars of Soviet politics pointed out that the study of the Soviet political system and communist systems in general had proceeded in isolation from developments in social science concepts, theory and methodology precisely because scholars had thought “their” region to be so unique. See, for example, Fleron, Frederic J. Jr., ed., Communist Studies and the Social Sciences: Essays on Methodology and Empirical Theory (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1969).Google Scholar For an overview of the history of the discipline of Soviet studies on this issue, see Breslauer, George, “In Defense of Sovietology,” Post-Soviet Affairs, (1992), 197–238,Google Scholar or Fleron, Frederic J. Jr. and Hoffman, Erik P., Post-Communist Studies and Political Science: Methodology and Empirical Theory in Sovietology (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993).Google Scholar

7. For example, two scholars who otherwise differ quite substantially in their Sovietology agree most emphatically on the intrinsic peculiarity of “its” legacy to eschew comparison: Martin Malia, “Leninist Endgame,” Daedalus (Spring 1992): 57-75 and Jowitt, Ken, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinctions (Berkeley: University of Los Angeles: California Press, 1993), esp. 249-83.Google Scholar

8. Bunce seems to have had access to an unspecified source that proves that “comparative analyses were more common in the eastern European field than, say, Latin American studies” (fn. 15). Frankly, we doubt this and suspect that the opportunities to do research based on empirical field research, either individually or collaboratively, were limited, especially in the Soviet Union. For example, a comparison of the Slavic Review with its equivalent, the Latin American Research Review, would reveal, we suspect, many more articles in the latter that are co-authored by “natives” and “foreigners” (as well as many, many more authored by “natives” trained or resident in the US), and many more articles that deal with more than one polity or society within its respective region. Only since the regime changes in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union has the opportunity to conduct comparative research expanded considerably—and it is this opportunity that should not be missed. The issue we have posed is whether former Sovietologists and young scholars just entering this subfield will be better served by continuing to employ a particularistic, “regionally specific” conceptualization of the problems of democratization or a more generic, “interregional” one.

9. See, for example, Gereffi, Gary and Wyman, Donald L., eds., Manufacturing Miracles: Paths of Industrialization in Latin America and East Asia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fejnzylber, Fernando, Unavoidable Industrial Restructuring in Latin America (Durham:Duke University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; or Haggard, Stephen, Pathways from the Periphery: The Politics of Growth in the Newly Industrializing Countries (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990).Google Scholar In another example, Terry Karl's work demonstrates that the uniqueness of Venezuela's development patterns, which has always been a puzzle for Latin Americanists because it does not follow the same cycles of authoritarian rule and democratization as other countries in the southern cone, becomes more explicable through comparisons with other oil-exporting countries in Asia and Africa rather than through intra-regional comparisons alone (see Terry Lynn Karl, The Paradox of Plenty [Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming]).

10. See Smith, Peter, “The Changing Agenda for Social Science Research on Latin America,” in Smith, Peter H., ed., Latin America in Comparative Perspective: New Approaches to Methods and Analysis (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), 23.Google Scholar

11. Bunce quite mistakenly implies that we (not Meiklejohn Terry) advocated that all ex-Sovietologists should take “refuge in empirie.“

12. In order to illustrate her point about testable hypotheses, Bunce criticizes the works by Linz and by Stepan and Skach on the superiority of parliamentarism over presidentialism (fn. 28). This probabilistic argument, which is not even mentioned in our article in Slavic Review, is quite antithetic to the approach we have adopted and we agree with Bunce's skepticism about applying such seemingly empirical and universalistic findings to specific cases.

13. There is some irony in this label. In 1983 Terry Karl wrote the article “Democracy by Design,” published in Giuseppe DiPalma and Laurence Whitehead, eds., The Central American Impasse (London: Croom Helm Publishers, 1985), in which she criticized US policymakers and international Christian Democrats for imposing an inappropriate model of democratization on El Salvador—a critique she has repeated in several subsequent articles. In the discussion of central America, the phrase “designer democracy” originated with this article.

14. We are grateful to Nora Bensahel for this point.

15. Tilly, Charles, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (New York: Russell Sage, 1984), 145.Google Scholar

16. For the original elaboration of the theorizing about transitions from authoritarian rule, see the four-volume study of Guillermo O'Donnell, Philippe Schmitter and Laurence Whitehead, eds., Transitions from Authoritarian Rule (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). For a more recent “inventory” of what these basic dynamics and patterns might be, see Schmitter, Philippe C., “Transitology: The Science or the Art of Democratization?” in Tulchin, Joseph, ed., The Consolidation of Democracy in Latin America (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1995), 11–44.Google Scholar

17. The words are Tilly's, op. cit., 80.

18. See, for example, Przeworski, Adam and Teune, Henry, The Logic of Comparative Social Inquiry (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1970)Google Scholar; and Ragin, Charles C., The Comparative Method: Moving Beyond Qualitative and Quantitative Strategies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).Google Scholar

19. See, for example, Steven Fish, M., Democracy from Scratch: Opposition and Regime in the New Russian Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; David Ost, “Shaping a New Politics in Poland: Interests and Politics in Post-Communist Eastern Europe,“; Program on Central and Eastern Europe Working Paper Series, no. 8, Minde de Gunzburg Center, Harvard University 1993; and Ekiert, Grzegorz, “Democratization Processes in East Central Europe: A Theoretical Reconsideration,” British Journal of Political Science 21 (July 1991): 285–313.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20. Przeworski, Adam, “The ‘East’ Becomes the ‘South'? The ‘Autumn of the People’ and the Future of Eastern Europe,” P.S. Political Science and Politics 24, no. 1 (March 1991): 21.Google Scholar

21. Despite the fact that the US has not historically seen itself as an empire and has seldom chosen to rule another country directly, its actions in the Caribbean Basin have been those of a superpower. See Fagen, Richard R. and Karl, Terry, “The Logics of Hegemony: The United States as a Superpower in Central America,” in Triska, Jan, ed., Dominant Powers and Subordinate States: The United States in Latin America and the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe (Durham: Duke University Press, 1986), 218-38.Google Scholar

22. As for the assumption that transitologists do not pay attention to history, we can only assume that Bunce has not read what we and our collaborators have written about specific cases.

23. “Modes of Transition in Latin America, Southern and Eastern Europe,” International Social Science Journal, no. 128 (May 1991): 269-84. Bunce claims on unspecified grounds that we have miscoded Bulgaria (fn. 9). Fine, since we did indicate in the above article that all our codings of the eastern cases were tentative and subject to improvement by country specialists. The only reason that we are puzzled is because Schmitter gave a series of lectures in Sofia last year and all his respondents were fully agreed that the transition there unequivocally fit into the “imposed” category.

24. Guillermo O'Donnell and Philippe Schmitter, op. cit.

25. See Karl, Terry Lynn, “Dilemmas of Democratization in Latin America,” Comparative Politics 23, no. 1 (October 1990): 1–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

26. It is impossible to resist a comment on Bunce's assertion that in eastern Europe there has been no demobilization during the transition (126). If there is one theme that has repeatedly been mentioned to Schmitter during his trips to eastern Europe it is precisely this—not just the demobilization of various mass publics (women in particular) but, even more, of intellectuals! Whether this has been a good or a bad thing as far as the overall democratization process is concerned is another matter, although pace Bunce we have never argued that this contributes positively. We have simply pointed to the almost universal fact of demobilization and the ways in which this affects the choice of institutions, the outcome of elections and the advent of widespread desencanto with democracy. For a discussion of this point in Hungary, see Bruszt, Laszlo and Stark, David, “Remaking the Political Field in Hungary,” Journal of International Affairs 45, no. 1 (Summer 1991): 201-45.Google Scholar

27. Consider this conclusion from a recent article (admittedly, not written by eastern European-Russian area specialists): “Despite mass political action at the moment these regimes crumbled, the revolutions (sic) in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union were largely characterized by ‘revolutions from above.’ They were facilitated by festering splits within the political elite, its ultimate decision to relinquish power, and, with the exception of Poland, the emergence of only a small counterelite” (Beverly Crawford and Arend Lijphart, “Old Legacies, New Institutions, Hegemonic Norms, and International Pressures: Explaining Political and Economic Changes in Post-Communist Eastern Europe,” forthcoming in Comparative Political Studies).

28. Bunce does cite Schmitter's “Dangers and Dilemmas of Democracy,” Journal of Democracy 5, no. 2 (April 1994): 57-75, where it is specifically observed that very few neo-democracies have reverted to autocracy and that the real issue is not the survival but the consolidation of democracy.

29. Or, if we may be permitted to cite and then paraphrase an ex-Sovietologist not known for his social scientific sympathies, Martin Malia (from his “Leninist Endgame,” Daedalus [Spring 1992]), the question is whether it will be more productive to presume that: “Postcommunism will yield a very mixed result because its basic problems are created by the previous structures of the communist order. Postcommunism will be unique in human history, because communism itself was unique… . To grasp the nature of the present transition, therefore, we (should) first look at what it is negating, and then examine, step by step, the consequences this negation has produced so far” (58-9). Or should one begin with the assumption that: Postcommunism will yield a very mixed result because its basic problems overlap with those of other polities in transition and are created by generic changes in the structures of social, economic, cultural and political domination. This mix of outcomes will not be unique, because the process of transition imposes similar constraints and choices upon those who engage in it. To grasp the nature of the present transition, therefore, we should first look at what it is attempting to create and then examine, step by step, the consequences (intended and unintended) that this effort has produced so far.