An assessment of five decades of historiography on democratic transitions in Southern Europe, through articles co-authored by specialists on Greece, Portugal and Spain.

This dossier aims to compare and contrast the Southern European democratic transitions of the 1970s. Our starting point is that although the three Transitions were conceptually linked from the beginning as the vanguard of Huntington’s famous “third wave” of democratic transitions, there has been little substantive comparative historical research that considers all three cases together. This special issue takes the Southern European “model” as its point of departure, re-evaluating it in the wake of almost five decades of historiography. In so doing, we also hope to open new lines of comparative analysis for the next generation of transition scholars. To foster a truly comparative approach, the editors pursued a strategy of co-authorship around common themes, hoping this would facilitate deeper conversations across national divides and languages. Thus, the editors identified what we viewed as major areas of historical research on the Transitions and asked our co-authors to collaborate in comparing and contrasting the parameters of each theme across the three cases. The first article explores the institutional aspects of the transitions “from above”, while the second focuses on social movements and the Transitions “from below.” The third article compares approaches to gender and the Transitions, while the fourth considers the transnational and international dimensions. The fifth article tackles the scholarship on historical memory and the Transitions, while the final article analyzes the similarities and differences among them.