In the fall of 2003, Stanford professor Larry Diamond received a call from Condoleezza Rice, asking if he would spend several months in Baghdad as an adviser to the American occupation authorities. Diamond had not been a supporter of the war in Iraq, but he felt that the task of building a viable democracy was a worthy goal. But when he went to Iraq, his experiences proved to be more of an education than he bargained for.

Squandered Victory is Diamond's provocative and vivid account of how the American effort to establish democracy in Iraq was hampered not only by insurgents and terrorists but also by a long chain of miscalculations, missed opportunities, and acts of ideological blindness that helped assure that the transition to independence would be neither peaceful nor entirely democratic. And in a new Afterword for the paperback edition, Diamond shows how the ongoing instability in Iraq is a direct result of the shortsighted choices made during the fourteen months of the American occupation and the subsequent Iraqi interim government.

he mid-2005 election of Mahmoud Ahmedinejad as Iran's new president left those committed to democratic change in the country feeling shocked and disappointed. At first glance, his victory seemed to signal not only the consolidation of Iran's ruling Islamist autocracy, but also the rejection in principle of democracy and the revival of the ideas and goals of the revolutionary Islamic Republic. While few had thought that another "reformist" would replace outgoing two-term president Mohammad Khatami, just as few had forecast that a "conservative" with Ahmedinejad's hard-line credentials would win. True, a reassertion of conservative political and economic power had been rolling forward for several years. Its most recent milestone had been the fraudulent February 2004 parliamentary elections, which had turned a one-time pocket of reformism into another tame preserve run by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his agents.1 More of the same might have been anticipated in the case of the post-Khatami presidency, but Ahmedinejad seemed worse than expectednot merely a Khamenei crony, but a true believer in the antidemocratic and antiliberal dictates of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Fortunately, pronouncements of the death of democracy in Iran are premature.

In this Article, we describe an emerging arena of global administration. We claim that this arena, not bounded by a state, raises accountability problems of a kind different from those addressed by conventional administrative law. And we argue that measures designed to address these problems will have potentially large implications for democratic theory and practice. Our argument starts from the premise—stated here without nuance—that something new is happening politically beyond the borders of individual states and irreducible to their voluntary interactions. To distinguish these developments from what is commonly called “international law and politics,” we use the term “global politics.” The emergence of global politics is marked by a proliferation of political settings beyond domestic boundaries. This proliferation expands the range of relevant political actors, while shifting our understanding of political units and of relations among them: the emergence of human rights as limits on Westphalian sovereignty was a first step in this shift, but not the last.

The latest volume in this popular series focuses on the best ways to evaluate and improve the quality of new democratic regimes. The essays in part one elaborate and refine several themes of democratic quality: the rule of law, accountability, freedom, equality, and responsiveness. The second part features six comparative cases, each of which applies these thematic elements to two neighboring countries: Brazil and Chile, South Africa and Ghana, Italy and Spain, Romania and Poland, India and Bangladesh, and Taiwan and Korea.

The paper examines the contributions of scholars of transitions by illuminating, first, key shifts in our theoretical understanding that occurred with the publication of Transitions from Authoritarian Rule. Here it focuses on establishing different insights into the role of elections and, hence, the classification of regimes, as well as structural versus more voluntaristic interpretations of politics and, hence, the role of supposed preconditions. Second, it explores changes in research design that affect how we understand the role of states, nationalities and international factors as well as evaluate the importance of world regions and select units of analysis. Third, it looks at a central methodological challenge posed by the devices politicians choose during different modes of transition, especially the role of political pacts. A brief conclusion follows. This discussion is not intended to be comprehensive. It does not try to cover all of the relevant issues, critiques and literatures that have enriched the field over the last quarter century; nor does it address central questions concerning the definition of democracy, its quality or its testing and measurement that pose serious challenges for the future. Instead, it seeks to assess in broad brushstrokes how the field of democracy studies has changed with the publication of Transitions from Authoritarian Rule.

This Working Paper will be a chapter in an edited volume entitled The Diversity of Democracy: A Tribute to Philippe C. Schmitter, edited by Colin Crouch and Wolfgang Streck, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, US: Edward Elgar (forthcoming 2006).

The book honors the 20th anniversary of the publication of the landmark book, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule by Guillermo O'Donnell and Philippe Schmitter.

The question of "what a democracy is - and is not," to borrow a well-known title, should rather be understood as falling along a continuum. The points of this continuum represent the minimum standards that modern theorists associate with the definition of a democracy, with the advent of new, more complex standards added as we move from one end of the continuum to the other. The minimalist standard, which can be termed Schumpterian/Huntingtonian/Przeworskian, associates democracy with elections, while a more maximal standard, as advanced by post-modern theorists, including feminists and other advocates of minority rights, requires democracy also to encompass political, and ultimately group, equality.

Many scholars claim that democracy tends to improve the material well-being of the poor. I argue that previous tests of this claim were flawed, particularly by sample bias. Once these flaws are addressed, there is no evidence that poor people have benefitted from living under democratic governments. This disturbing result suggests that democracies have not functioned well for their poorest citizens. I speculate about the reasons for this finding, and suggest avenues for further research.

This paper argues that it is difficult to understand the effects of American democracy promotion abroad without examining the bureaucratic context from which the policy emerges at home. Which actors within the U.S. government are involved in promoting political and economic change abroad? What strategies and conceptual models guide them? What tools and resources do they bring to bear? How does the interaction of American bureaucratic politics affect the impact of American democracy promotion? Articulating this mix of goals, strategies, and resources helps explain incoherent patterns of outcomes on the ground.

This paper explore these questions by reference to the U.S. government's most ambitious democracy promotion efforts of the past decade: the effort to rebuild its former Soviet enemies into a democratic allies in the 1990s. Yet the patterns of American bureaucratic politics are not unique to this democracy promotion effort. While American democracy promotion has changed in tone and substance under the watch of George W. Bush, American domestic politics has powerfully shaped American democracy promotion in similar ways in Iraq, Afghanistan, and beyond.

The authors examine the global expansion of higher educational enrollments over the 20th century. Rates of growth accelerated in virtually all countries after 1960. Drawing upon institutional arguments, we discuss the nature of this transformation and the historical trends that brought it about. A changed model of society came into place globally - one in which schooled knowledge and personnel came to be seen as appropriate for a wide variety of social positions, and where many more young people could be viewed as appropriate candidates for higher education. An older vision of education as contributing to a closed society and occupational system - with associated fears of "overeducation" - was replaced by an open-system picture of education as useful "human capital" for unlimited progress. This shift involves several global changes, including:

1. increasing global emphasis on democracy and human rights;
   
2. the advent of modern national development planning; and
   
3. the expansion of science as a broad authority in social life. The authors these arguments and several others using pooled panel regression analyses over the period 1900-2000.
   

They find support for the institutional argument, as well as for several more specific arguments regarding national variation: enrollments are higher in countries better organizationally linked-in to world society, where secondary enrollments are high, where economic development is higher, and where state control over education is low. But global trends dominate the analysis, such that many developing countries now have higher enrollment rates than European countries did only a few decades ago. The article discusses implications of a world in which all countries have large elite sectors schooled in institutions that have a great deal of cultural commonality.