A Duration Analysis of Democratic Transitions and Authoritarian Backslides
نویسندگان
چکیده
Recent theories of political development have emphasized redistributive demands as the main drivers of democratic transitions and consolidation. The authors employ Cox duration models to evaluate a number of economic, institutionalist, and sociological theories of regime transition, using global data from 1970 to 1999. This study suggests that demands for redistribution are insufficient explanators of political transitions. The authors find that transitions to democracy depend primarily on a high level of oppositionist social mobilization and, secondarily, favorable patterns of economic distribution. On the other hand, a high level of socioeconomic development is by far the best guarantor of democratic resiliency, whereas mass political conflict endangers consolidation once democracy has been introduced. The study also reveals that institutionalist factors are less influential than socioeconomic characteristics in explaining regime transitions. This study highlights the contribution of social movement theory to the study of regime transitions.
منابع مشابه
The Role of Resources in Regime Evolution
The evolution of political regimes of resource-rich countries is a highly relevant topic as the debates continue about the likelihood of those countries to democratize. Conventional wisdom dictates that large oil endowment impedes democratic development. However, recent studies found that oil and gas can both contribute to and undermine democracy. At the same time, the subject of how and why a ...
متن کاملIt’s not what you say, it’s how much you say it: Comparing Authoritarian and Democratic Constitutions Using Latent Text Analysis
While constitutions regulate political authority within a state, there is much we do not know about the interaction between political conditions and constitutional texts. Much of the literature relies upon hand-coded databases of constitutional texts. However, this approach raises both methodological and theoretical concerns. Advances in natural language processing, particularly latent text ana...
متن کاملDemocracy, Development, and the International System
Resolving a controversy on the relationship of development to democratization, this article expands the time period under study with panel data running from the early nineteenth century (a time where hardly any country was democratic) to the end of the twentieth century, and shows a positive and significant effect of income on the likelihood of democratic transitions and democratic consolidatio...
متن کاملBut seriously: does oil really hinder democracy
Recent studies have disputed the claim that ‘oil hinders democracy,’ or raised questions about the causal mechanisms behind it. I re-examine the question of petroleum wealth and regime type, using pooled logit regressions, an improved measure of petroleum wealth, and a dataset that covers up to 170 countries from 1960 to 2002. I also explore other types of evidence on oil and authoritarian rule...
متن کاملComparative Study of How the Type of Civil Society May Influence the Type of Transition in Revolutions of Tunisia, Egypt and Libya
General views have usually ignored the relation between the type of civil society and the type of political transitions. To address this shortcoming, the current article has reinvestigated this relation through a comparative study of revolutions in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya. In the framework of this relation, this article has demonstrated that remarkable development of civil society in Tunisia a...
متن کامل