Authoritarianism to Democracy

Transitions from Authoritarianism to Democracy create a time frame of uncertainty in Latin America. O’Donnell and Schmitter makes the arguments in the piece on transitions. They are alone in alluding to transitions as ones that move from the certainty of authoritarian regimes to an uncertain “something else” regime. That “something else” could be anything ranging from a political democracy or a more abusive authoritarian regime. The authors discuss themes in this article studying transitions. The first is that the achievement of democracy involves the achievement of a desired goal. The second is that there is almost always an uncertainty of transition and obstacles to successfully transitioning, such as facing ethical dilemmas and hastily making political decisions. The transitions viewed as governments going from certainty of an authoritarian to uncertainty or the “disorder” of a new untested regime. This includes rights that the authoritarian governments strangled like: creativity, hope, self-expression, and freedom. Finally, “normal science methodology” has been used to understand authoritarian, political regimes. This involves economic, social, and cultural categories to identify, analyze, and examine strategies of those defending the current regime and also examining individuals trying to challenge and change the current regime.

In another article Hunter describes how the regimes were handled from a military role, Hunter discusses Latin American nations and the handling of the lessening role the military has. Majority of the nation’s started to deconstruct their military by allowing current as well as former military personnel to be tried for human rights violations during previous governments. Presidents of new founded democracies gave their citizens the ability to come to peace with the charges of violators under the former regimes. For example, once Pinochet was gone, the people of Chile faced hardships because he implemented many laws and rules to keep likeminded politicians in the government once he was gone. The Chilean government had to work to oust of the great presence of military in the government. Lessening the power in the military freed up large amounts of funds due to the fact that the budgets the military had took up a great proportion of the nation’s budgets. countries’ economics in return greatly improved due to the freed up funds once allocated to the military.