This research provides a critical review of the article by Adam Przeworski, entitled "The Games of Transition" (1992). The theoretical background, summary and criticism are offered.
The primary objective of this article is to address the issue of how to fulfill a political transition in a dictatorial nation from dictatorship to democracy, with lessons learned from the experience of South Korea and other countries. Przeworski offers a purely political analysis of regime transition. Economic and sociological factors are not considered major factors in regime change. Instead, political players are vested with nearly autonomous choice in deciding when and how to make the transition from an autocratic government to some other form of government. The element of choice granted to political leadership may shift in the course of the transition to other groups in society, and thus steal the momentum of change away from the leadership. Depending on which groups this shift in political decisionmaking shifts to will determine the final outcome of regime transition. If large elements of society mobilize and demand democracy, a democratic regime could result either peacefully (if the political leadership decides not to resist) or violently through revolution (if the political leadership attempts to repress the social movement). In short, Przeworski's theoretical framework consist of a strictly political dimension in which the state is structured according to the interplay between decisions made by political leadership and social groups.
For Przeworski, the strategic problem of transition is how to get from dictatorship to democracy without either being starved by those who control the productive resources or killed by those who have guns (p. 105). The path to democracy is very difficult and the path has many diversions to other destinations.
Democracy is defined as a political system with three major characteristics. First, there is at l...