The Breakdown of Authoritarian Regimes

Abstract

5Y rEARS of scholarly concern with the conditions of democracy have been followed rather belatedly by recent attention on the part of students of comparative politics to the clearly related, though hardly identical, question of the breakdown of democratic regimes. Similarly, most students of military governments, and of authoritarian regimes generally, have been far more interested in the reasons for military intervention in politics than in the causes or process of the demise of authoritarianism. Only lately has this begun to change. In recent years, for example, there have been a spate of scholarly analyses of Latin America's latest version of authoritarianism, the bureaucratic-authoritarian (B-A) regime.2 In the earlier writings concerning such regimes it was often at least implicitly treated as the new paradigm of Latin America's political future, following upon those earlier, failed paradigms of democracy and socialist revolution. That is, B-A regimes were presumed to be both the wave of the future and a semi-permanent condition, related as they were to Latin America's situation of international dependency and the supposed end of the import-substitution phase of economic development. More recent scholarship, however, has begun to question or qualify some of those formulations and to address such questions as the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of such regimes, as well as the causes and conditions of their possible demise.3 Nonetheless, there still has been remarkably little comparative attention paid to how and why authoritarian governments break down4 (apart, that is, from studies of certain particular cases). Can some general patterns be dis-