Herman Schwartz, professor at the Washington College of Law of the American University in Washington, D.C., has advised numerous postcommunist countries on constitutional and human rights reform. This essay is a condensed version of a chapter in The Self-Restraining State: Power and Accountability in New Democracies, edited by Andreas Schedler, Larry Diamond, and Marc F. Plattner (Lynne Rienner, 1999). Used with permission of the publisher.
"[This] elegantly written and rigorously structured volume … constitutes an important landmark in the comparative study of democratization."—Carlos Santiso, Forum for Development Studies
