Robert R. Kaufman

• Professor at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

As a wave of backsliding has swept across both new and established democracies, scholars have sought to identify formal and informal institutions that can act as guardrails of democracy. But while informal norms, party structures, and formal institutions such as separation of powers have all been singled out as potential bulwarks against democratic...

Assaults on democracy are increasingly coming from the actions of duly elected governments, rather than coups. Backsliding examines the processes through which elected rulers weaken checks on executive power, curtail political and civil liberties, and undermine the integrity of the electoral system. Drawing on detailed case studies, including the U...

Response to Michael Albertus and Victor Menaldo’s review of Dictators and Democrats: Masses, Elites, and Regime Change - Volume 16 Issue 4 - Stephan Haggard, Robert R. Kaufman

Authoritarianism and the Elite Origins of Democracy. By Michael Albertus and Victor Menaldo. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 312p. $77.01 cloth, $29.99 paper. - Volume 16 Issue 4 - Stephan Haggard, Robert R. Kaufman

We explore what can be learned from authoritarian backsliding in middle income countries about the threats to American democracy posed by the election of Donald Trump. We develop some causal hunches and an empirical baseline by considering the rise of elected autocrats in Venezuela, Turkey, and Hungary. Although American political institutions may...

This chapter examines how international factors may influence elite-led transitions, from direct military pressures and even intervention to the effects of international institutions and diffusion. The discussion is organized around Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way's distinction between leverage and linkage as sources of international influence. In fo...

This chapter examines institutional weaknesses explaining reversion to autocracy, asking in particular whether the specific causal mechanisms that have been identified with the weak democracy syndrome can also be used to explain elite-reaction reversions or populist reversions. It also asks whether praetorianism, weak institutions, and economic cri...

This chapter examines the role of institutions and collective action in distributive conflict transitions by focusing on causal process observation of the distributive conflict and elite-led transition processes. Selecting on the dependent variable, it considers all of the cases in the Polity and CGV datasets with respect to variables of core theor...

This book has examined prevalent structural approaches to democratization, including modernization and distributive conflict theories, by testing them against the experience of the Third Wave. It has shown that the democratic transitions during the period marked a fundamental expansion of opportunities for people around the world to exercise politi...

This book examines regime change during the so-called Third Wave by focusing on transitions to and from democratic rule, taking into account factors such as the nature of authoritarian and democratic institutions, regime performance, and capacities for collective action on the part of civil society. Drawing on seventy-eight discrete democratic tran...

This chapter explores the relationship between inequality, distributive conflict, and regime change during the Third Wave of democratic transitions (1980–2008). It first provides an overview of the theory and existing quantitative findings on the link between inequality and democratic transitions before discussing the results obtained by using an e...

From the 1980s through the first decade of the twenty-first century, the spread of democracy across the developing and postcommunist worlds transformed the global political landscape. What drove these changes and what determined whether the emerging democracies would stabilize or revert to authoritarian rule? This book takes a comprehensive look at...

This chapter examines the effects of political institutions and economic performance by considering two sets of cases that run counter to the expectations of modernization theory: low-income countries that survive and the handful of more developed middle-income countries that revert. It begins with a discussion of factors that enable poor democraci...

The initial optimism that greeted the onset of the "Third Wave" of democratization has cooled with the instability of many new democracies and the proliferation of stable competitive authoritarian regimes. These disappointments have produced a return to structural theories emphasizing the constraints posed by underdevelopment, resource endowments,...

Much of the theoretical work on preferences for redistribution begins with the influential Melzer–Richard model, which makes predictions derived both from position in the income distribution and the overall level of inequality. Our evidence, however, points to limitations on such models of distributive politics. Drawing on World Values Survey evide...

This article extends Lau and Redlawsk's notion of correct voting – whether voters, under conditions of uncertainty, choose the alternative they would have chosen had they been fully informed about the issues and candidates in that election – to sixty-nine elections in thirty-three established and emerging democracies around the world. At the indivi...

Recent work by Carles Boix and Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson has focused on the role of inequality and distributive conflict in transitions to and from democratic rule. We assess these claims through causal process observation, using an original qualitative dataset on democratic transitions and reversions during the “third wave” from 1980 to 20...

We examine the sources of preferences for redistribution in 41 developing countries, with a multi-level model that shows the effect of individual-level and country-level predictors. We test hypotheses derived from Melzer-Richard expectations about the effects of income and sociological expectations about the effect of occupation and urban residence...

An unequal distribution of income and wealth is an inherent feature of all complex societies, and up to a point, a desirable one. A highly skewed distribution, however, raises questions of serious moral and practical concern: To what extent does socioeconomic inequality undermine the principle of political equality on which democratic societies are...

Does democracy lead to more inclusive and equitable social contracts? Our answer is a qualified "yes." Democratization in Latin America and Eastern Europe increased attention to social policy despite wrenching economic crises. Yet welfare legacies of the early and mid-twentieth century affected the new policy course. In Latin America, unequal entit...

Recent books by Carles Boix and by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson provide bold theoretical arguments about how economic inequality can undermine the survival of democracy. Many of their key assumptions, however, are called into question by existing research on "third wave" Latin American democracies. There is little evidence that the poor are...

We assess the factors that affect judgments about the fairness of the distribution of wealth with pooled public opinion data from Latinobarometro surveys conducted in 1997, 2001, and 2002. Hypotheses are tested with a multi-level logit model that allows us to draw on both the individual responses to questions in the surveys, and data about the soci...

Until recently, the study of the welfare state was confined largely to the advanced industrial countries. However, the recent transitions in Eastern Europe substantially widen the canvas on which comparisons might be drawn. In addition, new literature has emerged on the evolution of social policy in the middle-income countries of Latin America and...

This paper analyzes the impact of globalization on social spending in Latin America. It shows that trade integration has a consistently negative effect on social security expenditures, and that this effect is compounded by higher integration into capital markets. The importance of political institutions is also key. Popularly-based governments tend...

This paper examines the determinants of social spending in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and East Asia during the 1980s and 1990s. We hypothesize that pronounced and enduring differences in welfare legacies and fiscal constraints affected the way countries of the three regions responded to more contemporary challenges of economic crisis, integrati...

For the fiscal year ended June 30, 2002, the Association posted a surplus of $173,813 from programmatic and general operating activities. APSA's audited financial statements, which include the figures for programs and operations as well as investments, endowed programs, and grant-funded programs, however, show a net loss of $3.2 million for the fis...

This study examines the effects of globalization, democratization, and partisanship on social spending in fourteen Latin American countries from 1973 to 1997, using a pooled time-series error-correction model. The authors examine three sets of issues. First, following debates in the literature on oecd countries, they want to know whether social spe...

Countries of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe are entering the second decade of political transformation and economic reform. The first decade involved macroeconomic stabilization, privatization, and development of the basic institutional infrastructure of a market economy. The new policy challenges center on the nature of the social cont...

This study examines the effects of globalization, democratization, and partisanship on social spending in 14 Latin American countries from 1973 to 1997, using a pooled time-series error-correction model. Weexamine three sets of issues. First, following debates in the literature on OECD countries, we want to know whether social spending has been enc...

Since the debt crisis of 1982, Mexico has experienced more than a decade of market-oriented economic reform, but research on public opinion toward reform is limited Drawing on general findings fr om opinion research in the United States, this study examines how policy preferences of Mexicans are shapen by social background, judgments about the econ...

Political change in Mexico since the crisis of 1994 has been characterised by the breakdown of centralised hierarchies and the dispersion of power across geographical regions. We examine the changing relations between regional officials of the National Solidarity Programme (PRONASOL) and local PRI politicians in four Mexican states: Puebla, Nayarit...

The historic coincidence of democratization and economic liberalization in dozens of nations has inspired a significant literature on "dual" transitions to democracy and the market economy. This review draws lessons from this literature regarding the conditions for the successful consolidation of political and economic reforms in postauthoritarian...

Dankwart A. Rustow's emphasis on elite bargaining represented an important advance over static, "structural" explanations and anticipated strategic choice models of regime change. However, these models often ignore underlying economic and social conditions that affect the resources of the contending actors and the stakes of the negotiations. Our th...

En este artículo, los autores analizan el papel que juegan las elites gubernamentales y el aparato estatal en la iniciación y consolidación de las reformas de mercado. Se concentran, en primer lugar, en la iniciación de las políticas de reforma y argumentan que debido a los problemas de acción colectiva -los free-riders- que enfrentan los potencial...

As the recent wave of democratization crested in the 1980s, skeptics questioned the capacity of new democratic governments to manage the daunting political challenges of economic reform. It was thought that either reform would undermine democracy by placing undue strains on fragile polities, or democratic politics would undermine the coherence of p...

In a number of middle-income developing countries, the severe inflationary crises of the 1980s coincided with political liberalization and an expansion of the arena of distributive politics. This wave of democratization raises questions that have recurred throughout the post-World War II period. This paper provides a comparative analysis of the pol...

During the debt crisis of the 1980s, new democratic governments in Argentina and Brazil experimented with heterodox approaches to economic stabilization, whereas Mexico's dominant party regime adopted a far more orthodox line of adjustment. None of these approaches had led to a sustained recovery by the end of the decade. Difference in policy choic...

In order to make sense of the endless complexities of social life, social scientists conceptualize the empirical world in terms of interlocking systems and subsystems of roles and behavior, holding some of these spheres constant so that others can be studied and understood. This is a necessary and desirable aspect of social scientific enterprise. I...

Abstract will be provided by author.

Recent work by Carles Boix and Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson has focused on the role of inequality and distributive conflict in transitions to and from democratic rule. We assess these claims through causal process observation, using an original qualitative data set on democratic transitions and reversions during the ―third wave‖ period from 19...

Incl. bibl.