Anticipating future political transitions in East Asia, many scholars worry that Chinese democratization and Korean unification will fuel regional instability. To inform this debate, this article examines theories that make competing claims about the stability of these potential transitions: theories within the ‘‘democratization and war’’ school and economic interdependence theory. I compare th...

Consensual and Conflictual Democratization We study the process of endogenous democratization from inefficient oligarchic systems in an economy where heterogeneous individuals can get involved in predation activities. The features of democracies are shown to be crucially related to the conditions under which democratization initially takes place. The political regime and the extent of redistrib...

Using large-scale survey data covering more than 110 countries and exploiting within-country variation across cohorts surveys, we show that individuals with longer exposure to democracy display stronger support for democratic institutions. We bolster these baseline findings using an instrumental-variables strategy regional democratization waves focusing on immigrants' before migration. In all c...

Political regime changes and conflicts over such transitions often occur in clusters and advance like waves. As one country transforms its constitutional framework, discontented actors in other countries take inspiration from this precedent and start to undertake similar efforts. The frontrunner's success encourages them to challenge their own rulers and push for transforming the way in which p...

Many developing countries flocked to free trade since the early 1980s. Concurrent with this rush to adopt an open trade regime, there has been a global movement toward democracy. We argue that these two trends are related by showing how democratization of the political system reduces the ability of governments to use trade barriers as a strategy for building political support. We capture the de...

Addressing the Omics Data Explosion: a Comprehensive Reference Genome Representation and the Democratization of Comparative Genomics and Immunogenomics

This paper examines the European Union’s interaction with civil society organizations in Armenia through the European Neighbourhood Policy as a potential example of normative socialization. Through examining the EU’s interaction with domestic NGOs in Armenia, this paper offers an evaluation of the socialization mechanism coupled with a general critique of the EU’s democratization policy in rela...

This paper, commencing with the revision of classical concepts on democracy, puts forward that democracy is not only the aim but also a kind of means and method, based on which the paper further analyzes the shaping of democracy, and points out that elite democracy is an inevitable trend and that the role and function that elite democracy plays in the process of democratization is the exhibitio...

The paper provides a political economy theory of the Kuznets curve. When development leads to increasing inequality, this can induce political instability and force democratization on political elites. Democratization leads to institutional changes which encourage redistribution and reduce inequality. Nevertheless, development does not necessarily induce a Kuznets curve, and it is shown that de...

Self-determination is the process by which people, who are governed by a foreign power, gain self-government. Often the people first form a sense of community—a sense of a shared identity, destiny, and core values—and then seek to invest those in a state, forming a nation (defined as a community invested in a state). The term self-determination is also used to refer to the normative principle t...