Guillermo O'Donnell


Guillermo Alberto O'Donnell was a prominent Argentine political scientist, who spent most of his career working in Argentina and the United States, and who made lasting contributions to theorizing on authoritarianism and democratization, democracy and the state, and the politics of Latin America. His brother was the politician and writer Pacho O'Donnell.

BiographyFor information about O'Donnell's biography, see the autobiographical references in Guillermo O’Donnell, “Preface,” pp. ix-xxi, in O’Donnell, ''Counterpoints: Selected Essays on Authoritarianism and Democratization'' (Notre Dame, In.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999); the interview with Guillermo O'Donnell, "Democratization, Political Engagement and Agenda Setting Research," in Gerardo L. Munck and Richard Snyder, ''Passion, Craft, and Method in Comparative Politics'' (Johns Hopkins, 2007); and Gerardo L. Munck, “Guillermo O’Donnell,” pp. 878-79, in Jay Kinsbruner (editor in chief), ''Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture'' Vol. 4, 2nd. ed. (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 2008).

O'Donnell was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He studied law at the University of Buenos Aires and became a lawyer in 1958, aged 22. He was involved in student politics, and was Secretary and Acting President of the Buenos Aires University Federation, part of the Argentine University Federation, in 1954–1955. Later he served as national Vice-Minister of Interior, in Argentina, in 1963. But he focused mainly on making a living by working as a lawyer and teaching. During these years he taught in the School of Law at the University of Buenos Aires and at the Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina.

Academic research

O’Donnell was a theorist of authoritarianism and democratization.
O’Donnell’s Modernization and Bureaucratic Authoritarianism offered a pioneering analysis of the breakdown of democracies in South America in the 1960s. He argued that the form of authoritarianism experienced by South America starting in the 1960s was novel because it was based on modern technocrats and a professionalized military organization, instead of populist politicians or traditional military strongmen. To capture this distinctiveness, he coined the term 'bureaucratic authoritarianism'. O’Donnell argued that this new form of authoritarianism emerged as the result of political conflict generated by an import-substitution model of industrialization. He cast his argument as an alternative to the thesis, advanced most notably by Seymour Martin Lipset, that industrialization produced democracy. In South America, O’Donnell argued, industrialization generated not democracy, but bureaucratic authoritarianism. This work, along with a series of subsequent articles, triggered an important debate in comparative politics and Latin American Studies about the political consequences of economic development. The central contributions to this debate were published in a volume edited by David Collier, The New Authoritarianism in Latin America, which assessed and critiqued O’Donnell’s thesis.
The next phase of O’Donnell’s research focused on the demise of authoritarianism and transitions to democracy. His coauthored book with Philippe C. Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies, was one of the most widely read and influential works in comparative politics during the 1980s and 1990s. O’Donnell and Schmitter proposed a strategic choice approach to transitions to democracy that highlighted how they were driven by the decisions of different actors in response to a core set of dilemmas. The analysis centered on the interaction among four actors: the hard-liners and soft-liners who belonged to the incumbent authoritarian regime, and the moderate and radical oppositions against the regime. This book not only became the point of reference for a burgeoning academic literature on democratic transitions, it was also read widely by political activists engaged in actual struggles to achieve democracy.
O'Donnell's research since the early 1990s explored the question of the quality of democracy. His work warns against teleological thinking, that is, the tendency to see countries that democratized in the 1970s and 1980s as following in the tracks, though several steps behind, of the longstanding democratic countries of the West. To highlight the specificity of contemporary Latin American countries and the deficiencies of their democracies, he proposed the concept of delegative democracy, a form of democratic rule that concentrated power in the hands of elected presidents, and the associated concept of horizontal accountability. Later work centered on the problems faced by most Latin American democracies as a result of deficiencies in the rule of law and the social capabilities of citizens. His key works on the quality of democracy have been published in Counterpoints, The Quality of Democracy, Dissonances, and in his final book, Democracy, Agency, and the State, which makes a case for addressing the importance of the state in conceptualizations of democracy.
Summing up his contributions, one observer states that "O’Donnell decisively shaped the intellectual agenda for the study of the rise of military dictatorships in the Southern Cone in the early 1970s; pioneered the analysis of authoritarian breakdowns and democratic transitions throughout the 1980s; and broke new conceptual ground for efforts to understand the problems of life after transition during the 1990s." Another observer put it more briefly: "Guillermo O’Donnell was the argentine Max Weber."

Selected publications

Books
Articles and chapters