Columns:: Worth repeating

since 12/15/98

Columns::April 28, 2003

Worth repeating

Russell Hardin of New York University delivered this year’s Parthemos Lecture for the political science department April 17. He discussed the theoretical understanding of the new democratic regimes in Eastern Europe. An excerpt:
“Now, could the East Europeans have made an easy transition to democracy? The belief at the time was . . . that it would be a real mess to go from these autocratic regimes to relatively democratic regimes. It was probably very nearly the universal belief that South Africa would have to go through bloodshed to change from the kind of racist autocratic regime it had . . . to a really open and fully democratic kind of society. And that seems not to have happened in either place. There was a little bit of bloodshed in Romania, but for the most part in the eastern transition there has not been bloodshed. There has been far more in the nations that haven’t made the transition to democracy.
“So it looks like, on the account of the best general theory of how democracy can be made to work, that these places will have a really hard time and the remarkable thing is that they’ve had a really easy time. The traditional criterion for whether you have a democracy is that if you lose an election you walk away and the other side comes in, so the winner of the vote winds up holding the office. And all of the East European nations have succeeded at least twice in that; they have had elections and almost every incumbent party has lost in Eastern Europe and been replaced by, in some sense, the other side. Although ironically, when the other side comes in, they have the same policies.
“So it looks like they have made the transition that is relatively stable, just as Portugal and Spain and some of the Latin American nations have done.”

--Beth Roberts

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