De la dictadura a la democracia: las transiciones institucionales. ¿Transiciones desde arriba?

Institutional building constitutes a distinct parameter of the democratic transition process. The comparative perspective of this article enables us to examine the question if the Spanish, Greek and Portuguese transitions converge or differ, in terms of ruptures and continuities, at the level of institutional reforms. Our fundamental research questions is as follows: Is there a Portuguese/Greek/Spanish exception or, on the contrary, a “south European path” in what concerns the institutions of democratic transition and consolidation? As a working hypothesis, this article builds on the idea that with regard to institutional change and structure, the three countries present different transitional experiences although the different paths followed end up converging in a certain institutional, political and “cultural”/civic modernisation–at which point we may wonder if the integration into the European Economic Community and “Europeanisation” have been perceived in all three cases as the capstone of the transitional institutional reforms and as a critical lever for their consolidation.