This volume has analyzed the roles played by elites in recent transitions to democracy in Latin America and Southern Europe. Its thesis has been that the consolidation of a new democracy requires the establishment of elite consensus and unity, as well as extensive mass participation in the elections and other institutional processes that constitute procedural democracy. The primary focus has been on the elite variable because we regard this as logically and factually prior to the existence of regime stability or instability, to peaceful or disruptive mass mobilization and participation, and thus to the several types of democratic regimes that we have distinguished – consolidated, unconsolidated, stable limited, and pseudo-democracies. Elite consensus requires agreement on the worth of political institutions and on the rules of the political game that is played within and around those institutions. Elite unity involves formal and informal communication networks that encompass all or most elite groups and that enable them to defend and promote their interests through access to central decision-making processes. Historically, most national elites have lacked consensus and unity; the result has been unstable regimes switching between varieties of authoritarian rule and various forms of pseudo- or unconsolidated democracy, with shifts from one to another occurring through irregular power seizures by the groups that make up such disunified elites. For a disunified elite to achieve consensus and unity, there must be a fundamental transformation in elite orientation and structure.