Juan J. Linz’s research while affiliated with Yale University and other places

In this essay, the authors propose a three-part ideal-type typology that distinguishes between “ruling monarchy,” “constitutional monarchy,” and what they call “democratic parliamentary monarchy” (or DPM for short). For us, the defining characteristic of a DPM is that only the freely elected parliament forms and terminates the government. In a constitutional monarchy, by contrast, there is a strong element of dual legitimacy in that parliament and the monarch need each other’s support in order to form or terminate a government. In still greater contrast, in ruling monarchies the monarch can often unilaterally form or terminate the government. Moreover, each of these three types comes with its own set of patterns concerning the rule of law, constitutional constraints on the monarch, the status of parliament, and the relative autonomy of the judiciary.

More than twenty-five years have passed since the publication of Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Prospects for Democracy, the four pioneering volumes edited by Guillermo O’Donnell, Philippe C. Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead that inaugurated third-wave democratization theory. More than fifteen years have passed since the 1996 publication of our own Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe. Looking back, what do we find useable or applicable from works on democratization from this earlier period, and what concepts need to be modified? In particular, what new perspectives are needed in light of the recent upheavals in the Arab world? Here we focus on three topics that have been illuminated by the events of the Arab Spring: 1) the relationship between democracy and religion, especially in the world’s Muslim-majority countries; 2) the character of hybrid regimes that mix authoritarian and democratic elements; and 3) the nature of “sultanism” and its implications for transitions to democracy.

When Jeffrey Isaac approached us to review some recent works in American politics from a comparative perspective, we gladly accepted the task, believing it important to help overcome what some see as the “splendid isolation” of American politics. Indeed, the invitation arrived at a propitious time because, after completing our most recent book, we critically reflected on the fact that we had unfortunately written almost nothing on the oldest, and one of the most diverse, democracies in the world, the United States. We thus agreed to contribute some thoughts on the matter, recognizing the limits of our knowledge of the entire field of American politics, but acknowledging, too, our belief that the current distancing of the study of America from the analysis of other democracies impoverishes modern political science. © 2011, American Political Science Association. All rights reserved.

The global democratic resurgence of the past three-and-a-half decades has been accompanied by a boom in the publication of scholarly work on democracy. Studies of democratic breakdowns, crises, transitions, and consolidation came to dominate the field of comparative politics. During this extraordinary period, no one in the academic book-publishing industry did more to advance, support, understand, and critically evaluate this scholarly outpouring than Henry Tom, who passed away unexpectedly on 10 January 2011 at the age of 64. Ready for a more varied set of challenges, he had retired from book publishing only the previous summer, after receiving numerous effusive expressions of appreciation from friends, colleagues, and authors at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. Fittingly, it was in 1974—the same year that the "third wave" of democratization began—that Henry Tom began his long and fruitful career at Johns Hopkins University Press (JHUP), first as social-sciences editor and then as executive editor. In the subsequent 36 years, he was responsible for the publication of more than a thousand books. Having earned a Ph.D. in early-modern European history from the University of Chicago, Henry established JHUP as a leader in that field, especially in Italian Renaissance studies. A Renaissance man himself with diverse intellectual interests, he acquired manuscripts that ranged widely across all fields of history, as well as sociology, economics, and religious studies. But it was perhaps in political science that he had his greatest impact. Beginning with the publication in 1978 of The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes, the four-volume series edited by Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, Henry published many of the most influential studies of comparative democratic development. He was not afraid to take on big and complex editorial projects or to publish new scholars and unconventional approaches. When the Journal of Democracy began looking for a publisher in 1991, a critical factor drawing us to Johns Hopkins was Henry and the work he had already done to establish JHUP as a leader in the field of democracy studies. Over the subsequent twenty years, we worked closely with Henry to publish twenty-five Journal of Democracy books. In this process, Henry was more than just our editor. We benefited enormously from his knowledge of the field, and his advice helped us to determine which Journal articles to include in our books, and how to shape them both for scholarly readers and for classroom use. The structure and the titles of many of these books were heavily influenced by his suggestions. For the past two decades, the Journal of Democracy editorial board has met every year at the annual convention of the American Political Science Association. And every year during the convention the two of us would meet with Henry to discuss our JHUP book projects for the period ahead. In recent years, we invited Henry to attend our editorial-board meeting as well, and given his deep engagement with scholarship on democracy and his love for the Journal, this was an invitation he was happy to accept. On these occasions he always stimulated our thinking and encouraged and guided our efforts to recruit articles and convene conferences with future edited volumes in mind. The scholarly partnership between JHUP and the Journal of Democracy was in no small measure a personal collaboration between the two of us as editors and Henry Tom. The Journal, its editorial staff (both past and present), and our diverse readers have been graced by his uncommon wisdom, professionalism, and devotion to scholarship on democracy. He will be sorely missed. We mourn the death of Henry Tom, our friend and publisher for 35 years. Henry's creativity and his influence at Johns Hopkins University Press made him, in our minds, one of the cofounders of the democratization field. His work shows how an intelligent publisher can help to shape intellectual life. Henry made possible the publication of ambitious theoretical books, often built upon the basis of pioneering, deeply researched case studies which, in the end, allowed these cases to become part of the comparative-democratization corpus. All of our...

Must every state be a nation and every nation a state? Or should we look instead to the example of countries such as India, where one state holds together a congeries of “national” groups and cultures in a single and wisely conceived federal republic?

The coordinators of this issue propose several articles published by two personalities of the comparative political science, Juan J. Linz and Larry Diamond, friends and colleagues of Seymour Martin Lipset, able to precise the work and personality of the former.