By the end of 1970s, transitology, or the study of the transformations following the breakdown of dictatorial regimes, became a sub-discipline of political science. Various theoretical perspectives oriented the analysis toward different factors that could decisively influence political change and transition: the economic and cultural prerequisites, the weight of the recent past, the extrication-path from dictatorship or the international setting. This article examines critically the main currents of transitology in order to re-evaluate their heuristic capacity, their interpretative limits and their methodological difficulties. It stands for rethinking the paradigms of political transition, towards a multidimensional model of analysis of political change, more sensitive to the local specificities and to the dynamic of transformations on the long term
