Taking uncertainty seriously: The blurred boundaries of democratic transition and consolidation

The temporal boundaries of democratization are often fuzzy and controversial. Yet students of regime change have paid little systematic attention to issues of temporal delimitation, despite their profound methodological as well as political implications. Scholars routinely define, but almost never study, processes of democratic transition and consolidation in terms of institutional uncertainty. This article, by contrast, proposes to take uncertainty seriously. Concerned with the operational implications of uncertainty, it critically revises the 'inner boundary' of democratization (the threshold between transition and consolidation) as well as its 'outer boundaries' (the onset of transition and the closure of consolidation). It concludes that the latter are structurally indeterminate unless incisive 'focal events' make actor expectations converge at either high or low levels of institutional uncertainty.