64 Paradigms and Sand Castles

1997; Casper and Taylor 1996). In short, the theorization of
intra-authoritarian politics makes it possible to subsume the find-
ings of a number of studies with differing regional foci. In regions
where the military led most of the authoritarian regimes that
broke down, the first steps toward democratization could be
traced to splits within the military leadership, but where single
parties or personalist autocrats tended to rule, pressures of vari-
ous kinds external to the ruling party or clique played larger
roles.
The many studies of transitions, most of which draw essential
insights primarily from one part of the world, bear some similar-
ity to the parable about five blind men encountering an elephant.
Each offers a useful and insightful description of the part of the
elephant he touches, but cannot describe the whole. The early
studies could not do so because they were trying to explain a
process that had barely gotten under way, though of course they
had no way of knowing how many countries democratization
would eventually affect. Later studies either have made no at-
tempt to survey all cases or, in their attempt to set their own
region in the broader context, have misinterpreted studies of
some of the most frequently examined cases in particular regions
as being representative of the general experience of that region.
To repeat two of the most basic pieces of advice in this book: lots
of factual information is always good; and it is hard to explain an
outcome that has not yet finished coming out.
Drawing Testable Implications from the Argument
In this section, I detail the derivation of testable implications from
the analytic argument above. As is often the case in comparative
politics, it is not feasible to test in a rigorous way the argument
about cadre interests proposed here. To gather the necessary de-
tailed information about the internal politics of a large number of
authoritarian regimes would require learning many languages and
traveling to many places. Although numerous books and articles
have been written about authoritarian governments in the larger,
more developed, and for other reasons more "interesting" coun-
tries, it is difficult to find even detailed descriptions of events in
smaller, less developed countries such as Burkina Faso, Niger,
and Laos, especially those in which democratization has not taken
place. In situations like this, one must rely on tests of the implica-
tions of the argument, which can sometimes be done with less