ABSTRACT
Larry Diamond made these observations about Venezuela’s party system in the late 1990s,2 but his observations on party “overinstitutionalization” could as well have been written about Bangladesh in the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century. Other examples are not hard to find: Colombia in the later 1940s, Pakistan in the 1990s.All ended unhappily. Some terminated severely-a Colombian civil war in the 1950s that killed more than 200,000 people; others came to a halt with less turmoil-a populist Venezuelan autocrat stifling civil liberties; a repressive Pakistani general continuing to postpone a promised democratic restoration in the present decade.The Bangladesh experience has yet to play out, with a military-backed emergency rule declared in January 2007, followed by the
restoration of electoral politics in December 2008 being the latest chapters.
