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What Do We Know About Democratization After Twenty Years?
Abstract
This essay synthesizes the results of the large number of studies of late–20th-century democratization published during the last 20 years. Strong evidence supports the claims that democracy is more likely in more developed coun-tries and that regime transitions of all kinds are more likely during economic downturns. Very few of the other arguments advanced in the transitions litera-ture, however, appear to be generally true. This study proposes a theoretical model, rooted in characteristics of different types of authoritarian regimes, to explain many of the differences in democratization experience across cases in different regions. Evidence drawn from a data set that includes 163 authoritarian regimes offers preliminary support for the model proposed.
... Studies of democratization have also altered significantly as a result of new datasets being completed and shared (Geddes, D 2007;Bunce, 2000). Scholars have written widely on the subject and have offered explanations of transitions to democracy, but some of these explanations are incoherent with others (Geddes, 1999). On the one hand, modernization theorists have proclaimed the importance of socio-economic developmentconsisting of industrialization and high levels of education and urbanization. ...
... It is fair to say that the main problem which analysts face might be that the process of democratization differs greatly from place to place and from case to case. Generalizing these cases or places fails to articulate all the real-world variations (Geddes, 1999). This paper addresses this contestation, arguing that there is no single explanation for the transition to democracy and that it requires more discussions and research findings to determine the conditions for democratization. ...
... Geddes (2007) argues that governments controlled by the military are more fragile and breakable than other varieties of authoritarian regimes because poor economic performance easily destabilizes them. It is a truism that the survival of all forms of governments, which are either democractic or non-democratic, are thetatend by economic crises (Geddes, 1999). Additionally, the military is trained for military purposes, but not for governance (Frank and Ukpere, 2012). ...
Studies of democratization have developed and have become increasingly more sophisticated across thepast 20 years as a result of new datasets being completed and shared. Scholars have written widely on the subject and have offered explanations of transitions to democracy, but some of these explanations are incoherent with others. This paper offers a discussion of a variety of conditions which provide fertile soil for transitions to democracy, ranging from military rule and religion to economic development. Addressing this contestation, the paper argues that there is no single explanation for the transition todemocracy and that it requires very sophisticated thinking to determine the conditions for democracy.
... First, members of the ruling party of an authoritarian regime might not be supportive of the expanding surveillance and punishment from the ideological preference. As elite cohesion theories indicate, authoritarian regimes need to include diverse elite stakeholders in their system to ensure its survival (Bray et al., 2019;Geddes, 1999). In an authoritarian country's developing period, elites included in the ruling party are particularly more likely to be ideologically liberal (Atabaki and Zurcher, 2004;Mauzy and Milne, 2002). ...
... First, it might simply be the tendency for government staff to be more loyal to the state. Second, this can result from the special rent-seeking and patronage that government staff privilege, a common phenomenon in the authoritarian context (Geddes, 1999;Zaloznaya, 2015). An analysis of a municipal SCS metric found government staff has more opportunities to gain credits, such as turning their internal honor and awards into booster points (Liu, 2020). ...
... First, they have the motivation due to the unsatisfaction and practical concerns. Second, they are more resourceful than other unsatisfied groups with less power to mobilize and leverages over the state, which needs cohesion and cooptation of the elites -not only those political elites -to maintain social order and exercise its power (Geddes, 1999;Sinkkonen, 2021). Future scholars should retheorize surveillance systems and pay special attention to the politics of those men-in-the-middle to explore the stratified development, function, and meaning of surveillance. ...
Pervasive surveillance in modern society has raised mounting debates, which are largely concentrated on the ethical dimension and lack sociological examination. Drawing on innovative national survey data, this study analyzes public opinion about social credit systems, an emerging infrastructure that expands the depth and breadth of surveillance in China. I find a general high support for expanding surveillance and punishment yet key variations among different social groups. Counterintuitively, people with higher political capital do not wholly embrace the expanding surveillance and punishment. For example, Chinese Communist Party members are less likely to support state-centered social credit systems compared with the general public. Higher political trust in the regime and socioeconomic status is consistently correlated with higher support, while different media consumption showed limited correlations. This study proposes an alternative theorization of surveillance and enriches our understanding of the heterogeneity and dynamic of the state and public in the authoritarian regime.
... 17 Coups require a sufficient number of officers, core military units, and, possibly, civilian allies to successfully seize control of the state apparatus and maintain internal order. Further, coups entail coordination in planning and implementation to succeed (Geddes, 1999;Singh, 2014). Non-violent protest campaigns require the sustained mobilization of a large number of people and, hence, organizational and coordination resources to overcome (popular) collective action problems (Chenoweth and Stephan, 2011). ...
... We test the BL-FE estimator, in part, to account for (time-invariant) unit heterogeneity. We know that dictatorships differ from each other as much as they differ from democracy (Geddes, 1999). Dictatorships arise from distinct historical political economies and colonial histories (Pepinsky, 2014). ...
Dictators shape regime structures to counter the threats they face. Personaliza-tion entails the progressive accumulation of power in the hands of the dictator to minimize internal threats from organized elites in the military and party. However, elites have incentives to resist the personalization to avoid being marginalized by personalist strongmen. We argue that as personalism increases, rival elites, less able to coordinate coup attempts, turn to strategies that do not require substantial elite coordination: assassinations. At low levels of personalism, elites coordinate insider coups to oust the ruler, reshuffling leadership and still retaining power. At middle levels of personalism, elites organize regime-change coups as reshuffling coups become more difficult. At high levels of personalism, even regime-change coups become difficult to mount, and increasingly marginalized and desperate rivals turn to assassinations. We test these expectations with new data on personalism, assassination and coup attempts, covering all autocracies over the 1946-2010 period.
... In the authoritarian regimes literature, consolidation typically refers to the process by which dictators subvert authoritarian institutions in order to personalize power (Gandhi and Sumner 2020;Svolik 2012). Given the importance of personalism on a wide range of outcomes such as repression (Frantz et al. 2020), conflict (Weeks 2012), and regime failure (Geddes 1999), this is certainly a crucial research area. However, this literature also emphasizes that authoritarian regimes face another consolidation problem. ...
... The consolidation process described above should apply most explicitly to party-based regimes, which are defined as regimes that rule through an organized, civilian authority (Geddes 1999). Military regimes, monarchies, and personalistic regimes are unlikely to go through the same consolidation process. ...
Growing conventional wisdom suggests that authoritarian legislatures prevent oil nationalizations in party-based regimes. However, country scholars and media outlets remain skeptical. We develop a theory aligning with the skeptics. We argue that oil expropriations and legislative closures are endogenous to the process of the consolidation of party-based autocracies. New authoritarian parties close legislatures when they seize power and do not reopen them until they can ensure their dominance of the new legislature, a process abetted by oil expropriations. We test the argument using recently developed cross-case comparative Bayesian qualitative techniques. Evidence shows support for our theory. Our findings suggest that authoritarian legislatures are less constraining in terms of oil nationalizations than new conventional wisdom suggests. Additionally, our evidence points to a different interpretation of the role legislatures play in the evolution of authoritarian regimes.
... In other words, mechanisms are in place, formally and informally, to ensure that the authoritarian leader will safeguard the interests of the elites who bolster the regime or be accountablewithin his or her narrow constituencyto sanctions (North and Weingast 1989). 4 Since authoritarian regimes differ from democracies in the origins of their leaders and ruling coalitions, they differ in how they behave, how (or whether) they resolve this commitment problem, and how stable they are (Geddes 1999;Geddes et al. 2014). For example, studies suggest that single-party regimes and monarchies generally tend to be politically more stable and durable compared to military and personalist regimes, because they better succeed in resolving the commitment dilemma (Brownlee 2009;Geddes 1999). ...
... 4 Since authoritarian regimes differ from democracies in the origins of their leaders and ruling coalitions, they differ in how they behave, how (or whether) they resolve this commitment problem, and how stable they are (Geddes 1999;Geddes et al. 2014). For example, studies suggest that single-party regimes and monarchies generally tend to be politically more stable and durable compared to military and personalist regimes, because they better succeed in resolving the commitment dilemma (Brownlee 2009;Geddes 1999). ...
Since the third wave of democracy, term limits have become a popular fixture of most constitutions intended to constrain the executive. Yet, recent constitutional reforms around the world show that presidents seeking re-election sometimes overturn the entire constitutional order to extend their power. What is the impact of these constitutional manipulations on the longevity of the executive in office? Using survival analysis of all political leaders and national constitutions from 1875 to 2015, this article demonstrates, for the first time, that when ‘authoritarian-aspiring’ presidents remove constitutional term limits, they increase their stay in office by more than 40%. Our findings contrast with a widely held position in the comparative authoritarian literature suggesting that dictators survive longer under institutional constraints. On the contrary, we argue that by removing constitutional barriers, rulers consolidate more power at the expense of their most ambitious allies and can stay in power longer.
... Geddens 1999 yılında tüm otokratik rejimlerin birbirine benzemediğini, bu rejimlerin parti temelli (party-based), kişisel iktidara dayalı (personalist regime) ya da askeri temelli otokrasiler olduğunu ifade etmiştir. (Geddens, 1999) Osei, Akinocho ve Mwombela da söz konusu ayrımdan hareketle rejimin otoriter niteliğindeki değişikliklerin dahi devlet başkanının dönem sınırına saygısı üzerinde etkili olduğunu iddia etmektedir. Yazarlar bu iddialarını devlet başkanının sistem içerisindeki ağırlığı ve başkan ile partisi arasındaki ilişkisi üzerinden ortaya koymaktadır. ...
Aktan, C. C. & Ekinci, A., (2021), Devlet Başkanlığı Makamında Görev Süresi ve
Dönem Sınırını Uzatmaya Yönelik Siyasi Manipülasyonlar, Hukuk ve İktisat Araştırmaları
Dergisi, 13 (1): 151-185., https://doi.org/10.53881/hiad.973184
Bu çalışmada, seçime dayalı demokrasi ve seçime dayalı otokrasi rejimlerinde
devlet başkanlığı makamında görev süresini ve/veya dönem sınırını uzatmaya
yönelik muhtelif siyasi manipülasyonları incelemeyi amaçlıyoruz. Anayasada
düzenlenen görev süresi sınırından kaçınmak isteyen devlet başkanlarının bu
tercihlerini anayasal kuralı değiştirme, yeni bir anayasa hazırla(t)ma, yüksek
yargı kararları ile dönem sınırını esnetme ya da kaldırma gibi kurumsal
yöntemlere başvurarak elde etmeye çalıştıkları görülmektedir.
Anahtar Kelimeler: Görev Süresi Sınırlaması, Görev Değişimi, Rotasyon, Dönemsel Sınır, Görev Süresini Uzatma, Siyasi Manipülasyonlar
... One might argue that government performance is even more important in authoritarian regimes, since these rest on fewer pillars of legitimacy than do democracies, and because the stakes of losing power are higher. For the link between authoritarian breakdown and economic crises, see Geddes (1999) and Haggard (1995). 10 While these strategies can fluctuate to a moderate degree across governments, their core principles are resilient to change. ...
The nation-state is a double sleight of hand, naturalizing both the nation and the state encompassing it. No such naturalization is possible in multinational states. To explain why these countries experience political crises that bring their very existence into question, standard accounts point to conflicts over resources, security, and power. This book turns the spotlight on institutional symbolism.
When minority nations in multinational states press for more self-government, they are not only looking to protect their interests. They are asking to be recognized as political communities in their own right. Yet satisfying their demands for recognition threatens to provoke a reaction from members of majority nations who see such changes as a symbolic repudiation of their own vision of politics. Secessionist crises flare up when majority backlash reverses symbolic concessions to minority nations. Through a synoptic historical sweep of Canada, Spain, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia, The Symbolic State shows us that institutions may be more important for what they mean than for what they do.
A major contribution to the study of comparative nationalism and secession, comparative politics, and social theory, The Symbolic State is particularly timely in an era when the power of symbols - exemplified by Brexit, the Donald Trump presidency, and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement - is reshaping politics.
... I proceed from the assumption that regime elites possess the resources, skills, and networks necessary to formulate policy, mobilize voters in support of the regime, and defend the interests of the ruling party or executive as well as the multitude of actors supporting the ruling coalition (Truex, 2016;Reuter, 2017). Yet, ruling elites are self-interested actors and politically ambitious: they want to advance their careers and expand their power in exchange for providing political services to the ruler (Aldrich & Bianco, 1992;Geddes, 1999;Desposato, 2006). In the given context, this means that regime eliteslike most politicians-share a mix of motivations regarding winning votes, remaining in office, and achieving policy goals (Müller & Strøm, 1999). ...
Defections within the ruling elite often endanger authoritarian rule, emboldening opposition groups and paving the way for regime breakdown. Yet, the consequences of elite defections are better understood than their causes. Why do some authoritarian regimes experience more defections to the opposition than others? This paper develops a theory of the origins of elite defection and tests it using a novel dataset based on the political careers of 15,013 legislative deputies and ministers in 12 electoral autocracies. The theory predicts that regime elites defect when there are greater opportunities to capitalize on the discontent of other regime elites and voters. Regimes with weak party mechanisms that are also supported by many factions experience more defections. Finally, defections increase during economic downturns and when the government’s control of mass media declines, which helps potential defectors coordinate with anti-regime voters.
... This scholarship, which can be summarized by the "authoritarian social contract" thesis (Desai et al. 2009), has generated the expectation that illiberal regimes should be sustained when the economy grows, and lose support when performance deteriorates. According to Geddes (1999), while economic growth enables illiberal incumbents to exchange patronage and public goods for loyalty and support, economic downturns make material resources difficult to mobilize. At the same time, while studies recognize the importance of nationalism and religion for fuelling normative support for authoritarian rule (e.g. ...
Does citizen support for the norms and principles of non-democratic regimes help stabilize authoritarian rule? While a large literature recognizes that authoritarian regimes depend on popular support to lower the costs of staying in power, existing research mainly views mass support for non-democratic regimes as instrumental, fuelled by performance. We know relatively little about the effects of normative support for authoritarian rule. Using novel experimental evidence from well powered online surveys fielded in Turkey and observational data, we find high levels of normative support for the political system. Normative support is significantly more stable to an economic crisis treatment than instrumental support, especially among government voters. We also show that support for authoritarian rule mitigates the electoral consequences of poor economic performance. These findings, which revisit the importance of normative support for regime instability and resilience, have implications for research on mass opinion and defection cascades in electoral autocracies.
... Some scholars focus on opposition strategies (Howard and Roessler 2006;Bunce and Wolchik 2009;Donno 2013) and others emphasize the role of institutions. For example, dominant parties consolidate their rule (Geddes 1999;Brownlee 2009) by facilitating power-sharing among regime elites (Magaloni 2008;Svolik 2012;Geddes et al. 2018). The presence of a multi-party legislature encourages the co-option of the opposition through credible policy concessions (Gandhi 2008;Gandhi and Przeworski 2007). ...
Why are some electoral authoritarian regimes immune to democratization for decades while others not? This article explores the impact of executive selection systems on democratic transitions from electoral authoritarianism. We argue that under electoral authoritarian regimes, Parliament-based systems permit dictators to more effectively deter democratization compared to Presidential systems. This is because Parliament-based systems indirectly allow electoral manipulation to achieve a victory at the ballot box, such as through gerrymandering and malapportionment. Parliament-based systems also make it difficult for opposition parties to coordinate and incentivize autocrats and ruling elites to engage in power-sharing and thus institutionalize ruling parties. We test our hypothesis as well as the underlying mechanisms employing a dataset of 93 electoral authoritarian countries between 1946 and 2012. Cross-national statistical analyses with instrumental variables estimation provide supporting evidence for our theory.
... In spite of the promise of expanded political participation through multiparty democracies that followed the demise of the Soviet Union, centralization of power by the ethnic elite and a rise in economic inequality came to shape the 1990s decade (Pearce, 2000). Further, the neopatrimonial dictatorships engaged in creatively constructing a future that protected and prolonged their existence (Geddes, 1999). Much of the agency was through creating ethnic alliances with little regard to specific economic and political policies, resulting in a patronage politics in which only those in power disproportionately benefitted from government (Shah, 2015). ...
This chapter analyses the spread of neoliberal reforms in higher education, with a primary focus on an empirically specific locale in Zambia, a Sub-Saharan African economy. We argue that neoliberal discourses, introduced into mainstream national policy on higher education in Zambia from the early 1990s have profound effects on the character of higher education in general. The reforms have occasioned significant levels of regulation or control over the actors within higher education by using words that frame and constrain, behaviour leading to the emergence of kinds of individuals who are then rendered governable (Bansel & Davies, 2010). The reforms include cutting public expenditures for social services, which include reducing government support to education and healthcare, as well as a trend toward greater participation by private actors in public life, and in higher education provision and finance (Giroux HA, Harvard Educ Rev 72:425–463, 2002; Harvey 2005; Olssen M, Peters MA, J Educ Policy 20:313–345, 2005; Zajda J, Rust V, Globalisation and comparative education. Springer, Dordrecht, 2021). Ultimately, there has been an institutionalisation of entrepreneurial and managerial modes of organising higher educational institutions, stimulated and advanced by promoting business-like relations between the institutions and industry, commerce, and government.
Keywords
Higher education Neoliberal reforms Strategic management principles Sub-Saharan African economy Zambia
... Theories in the literature that models authoritarian rulers' behaviour agree that mutual gain is possible as a result of exchanges between the authoritarian rulers and citizens, the elite and citizens, and the rulers and a select group of the elite (Gandhi and Przeworski 2006). Co-optation thus becomes a more viable and cost-effective way to consolidate power, legitimate actions, and advance authoritarian reach (Geddes 1999;Boix and Svolik 2013;Pepinsky 2014). Co-optation is the capacity to tie strategically relevant actors (or a group of actors) to the regime elite (Gerschewski 2013, 22). ...
By combining two separate strands of research, the comparative authoritarianism literature and securitisation theory, this article examines the question of why the Kurdish peace process in Turkey failed. By analysing the Turkish government’s treatment of the pro-Kurdish opposition, the article argues for a novel conceptual proposition on a securitisation mechanism of authoritarian resilience in electoral politics. It argues that the incumbents attempted to use the peace process (de-securitisation of the Kurdish issue) not for democratisation but for authoritarianism (by co-opting the pro-Kurdish opposition) and when that failed, they re-securitised the Kurdish issue, repressed the opposition and established an authoritarian regime thanks to justification of securitisation. The article contributes to both securitisation and authoritarian stability theories by showing that for authoritarian stability, depending on its needs and context, a government can successfully securitise, de-securitise and re-securitise the same issue with the use of the same functional actor in each stage.
... Perhaps the most influential authoritarian typology is that offered by Barbara Geddes, which classifies authoritarian systems as monarchical, military, party, personalistic and hybrid regimes (Geddes 1999;Geddes et al. 2012). Each of these regime types carries with it different sets of implicit institutional constraints placed on leaders, both with regard to whom leaders answer to and the degree to which these leaders cede power to elites within institutions that act as credible commitment mechanisms (Gandhi, 2008;Magaloni, 2008). ...
... Comparative research found the one-party system to be more durable than other forms of autocracy, and some international-relations theories attributed this stability to the bipolar system of the Cold War era. 3 Explaining equilibrium, not change, dominated Sovietology. ...
... This approach considers the expected costs of coup execution caused by potential intra-military confrontation and violence (De Bruin, 2019). The underlying argument draws on perspectives that see coups as coordination games in which expectations of others' behavior and the consequences of their joint actions for the military play the critical role (Geddes, 1999;Singh, 2014;Little, 2017). 9 Central to this mechanism are not so much the military's combat capacity or grievances, but the expectations that shape its ability for collective action. ...
Civil-military relations are characterized by a fundamental dilemma. To lower coup risk, leaders frequently empower the military, which satisfies the armed forces with the status quo and enables them to fight against threats challenging the civilian leadership. Simultaneously, a too powerful military itself constitutes a potential threat that is capable of overthrowing the government. Our research adds to this debate by examining the impact of mechanization, that is, the degree to which militaries rely on armored vehicles relative to manpower, on coup risk. We discuss several (opposing) mechanisms before developing the theoretical expectation that higher levels of mechanization should lower the likelihood of a coup due to the increased costs of coup execution. Empirical evidence strongly supports this claim and, thus, contributes to our understanding of the emergence of coups as an essential breakdown of civil-military relations, while adding to the debate surrounding the many trade-offs leaders face when coup-proofing their regimes.
This study suggests that conscription produces an unappreciated side effect in domestic politics as it increases the likelihood of coup d’état in anocratic regimes. Utilizing data from 1950 to 2016, the study measures the impact of conscription on coup risk in anocracies and non-anocracies and provides significant evidence that conscription increases the probability of a coup attempt in anocracies. I do not argue that conscripts stage military coups. Instead, conscription increases coup risk in anocracies because it increases the ties of the armed forces with society and enables the general public or interest groups to organize their collective action within the armed forces. This academic endeavor aims to expand our understanding on the impact of the armed forces on the prospects of military intervention, delineate the socialization aspect of conscription, and to broaden our knowledge on civil–military relations in non-democratic regimes.
English Translation is availabe
هذه الورقة البحثية تسعي لتفسير إخفاق جماعة الإخوان المسلمين في إدارة التغيير السياسي في مصر من خلال التركيز على العوامل الداخلية الموجودة لدى الجماعة والتي أدت إلى حدوث هذا الإخفاق، من خلال استقراء المصادر المختلفة، وبالعودة إلى الأحداث التي مرت بها الجماعة عشية ثورة يناير وما تلاها من أحداث، فإن الورقة تُظهر أن غياب المشروع السياسي واضح المعالم والمتفق عليه كان من الأسباب الرئيسية الداخلية لدى الجماعة التي ساهمت في حدوث هذا الإخفاق في إدارة التغيير السياسي.
Electoral autocracies – regimes that adopt democratic institutions but subvert them to rule as dictatorships – have become the most widespread, resilient and malignant non-democracies today. They have consistently ruled over a third of the countries in the world, including geopolitically significant states like Russia, Turkey, Venezuela, Egypt, Indonesia, Nigeria and Pakistan. Challenging conventional wisdom, Popular Dictators shows that the success of electoral authoritarianism is not due to these regimes' superior capacity to repress, bribe, brainwash and manipulate their societies into submission, but is actually a product of their genuine popular appeal in countries experiencing deep political, economic and security crises. Promising efficient, strong-armed rule tempered by popular accountability, elected strongmen attract mass support in societies traumatized by turmoil, dysfunction and injustice, allowing them to rule through the ballot box. Popular Dictators argues that this crisis legitimation strategy makes electoral authoritarianism the most significant threat to global peace and democracy.
Digital authoritarianism threatens the privacy and rights of Internet users worldwide, yet scholarship on this topic remains limited in analytical power and case selection. In this article, we introduce a comprehensive analytical framework to the field of Internet governance and apply it first, briefly, to the well-known case of China and then, in more depth, to the still-understudied Russian case. We identify the extent and relative centralization of Internet governance as well as proactive versus reactive approaches to governance as notable differences between the cases, highlighting variation among digital authoritarians’ governance strategies. We conclude that Russia’s Internet governance model is less comprehensive and consistent than China’s, but its components may be more easily exported to other political systems. We then consider whether recent changes to Russia’s Internet governance suggest that it could converge with the Chinese model over time.
Electoral autocracies – regimes that adopt democratic institutions but subvert them to rule as dictatorships – have become the most widespread, resilient and malignant non-democracies today. They have consistently ruled over a third of the countries in the world, including geopolitically significant states like Russia, Turkey, Venezuela, Egypt, Indonesia, Nigeria and Pakistan. Challenging conventional wisdom, Popular Dictators shows that the success of electoral authoritarianism is not due to these regimes' superior capacity to repress, bribe, brainwash and manipulate their societies into submission, but is actually a product of their genuine popular appeal in countries experiencing deep political, economic and security crises. Promising efficient, strong-armed rule tempered by popular accountability, elected strongmen attract mass support in societies traumatized by turmoil, dysfunction and injustice, allowing them to rule through the ballot box. Popular Dictators argues that this crisis legitimation strategy makes electoral authoritarianism the most significant threat to global peace and democracy.
Conventional wisdom treats politicization in the international human rights regime as invariant: for any given violation, states condemn adversaries while coddling friends. However, we find that politicization patterns vary markedly across human rights issues. Some norms are more politicized than others, and states are more likely to punish geopolitical partners on certain violations. We offer a novel theory of politicized enforcement wherein states punish human rights violations discriminatively based on their perceived “sensitivity” for the target state. Using data from the UN Universal Periodic Review, an elaborate human rights mechanism, we show that states tend to criticize their adversaries on sensitive issues that undermine the target regime’s power and legitimacy while addressing safer topics with friends. By uncovering a strategic logic of human rights enforcement, this research contributes new theoretical insights on the relationship between norms and power politics in global governance.
This article applies a regime cycle framework to understand patterns of change and continuity in African competitive autocracies. We observe that regime change in African autocracies is rarely the result of actions carried out by rebels, opposition leaders or popular masses substantially altering the structure of power. Instead, they are more frequently carried out by senior regime cadres, resulting in controlled reshuffles of power. We argue that such regime shifts are best explained through a cyclical logic of elite collective action consisting of accommodation and consolidation, and ultimately leading to fragmentation and crisis. These dynamics indicate the stage of leader-elite relationships at a given time, and suggest when regimes may likely expand, contract, purge and fracture. We argue that, by acknowledging in which stage of the cycle a regime and its senior elites are dominant, we can gauge the likelihood as well as the potential success of a regime change. Our framework is finally applied to understand recent regime shifts in competitive autocracies across Africa.
The Arab uprisings have certainly caused a watershed among scholars of civil-military relations. Incumbents that were rendered coup proofed were suddenly falling victim to the mercy of their militaries. Questions like, “Why is coup proofing more successful in some cases more than others?” and “Does coup proofing work?” guided the literature on coup proofing in the last decade even more so in the last four years. Significant research has been undertaken outlining possible reasons for the success/failure of coup proofing. Some authors have even questioned the viability of the coup-proofing process, but yet, no clear reasoning for variations in outcomes of coup-proofing appear to have emerged from the literature to date. Thus, this thesis attempts to take a step back and examine the process through which coup proofing mechanisms are formulated. More particularly, I pose the following questions: Why are there variations in the implementation of some coup proofing mechanisms and what are the conditions contributing to this variation in application? Escaping thus the trap of studying coup proofing as a monolithic process, this thesis studies the variation in the application of economic coup proofing – approach,
technique and implementation – in relation to the organizational features of the military on which the tactics are implemented. To achieve this, the study conducts a qualitative comparison between Jordan, Syria and Egypt. All the regimes in question applied economic coup proofing as a means of buying military loyalty and they also bought them out of day-to-day politics. The Syrian Military, for example, relies on personalized and illicit activity– smuggling and currency dealing – as a means of generating military incentives. This is in comparison to the Egyptian and Jordanian Militaries who profit from controlling large industrial complexes. Questions explaining the reasons behind such variation remain unanswered. While it is theoretically valuable to study economic coup proofing as simply a means of buying off officers that ties the military to the incumbent, it is intuitively compelling to study it as a form of military business. This in turn affects the military’s autonomy vis-à-vis the incumbent but also influences the military’s relation with society at large.
We examine the effect of rainfall on agricultural output and democratization in the world’s most agricultural countries. As in the agricultural economics literature, we find that the relationship between rainfall and agricultural output has an inverted U-shape, as agriculture is harmed by both droughts and very wet conditions. We also find the effect of rainfall on agricultural output to be transitory. The relationship between rainfall and democratization is U-shaped in the short run, and this effect persists in the long run. Hence democratic transitions outlast the (transitory) rainfall shocks that started the democratization process. The U-shaped relationship between rainfall and democratization is consistent with rainfall affecting democratization through its (inverted-U-shaped) effect on agricultural output.
This study discusses the institutional legacy of economic liberalization policies in shaping the contemporary reality of civil-military relations in Arab Spring states, and the future challenges of democratic transformation in these countries. It argues that economic openness through the application of liberalization policies has led to the emergence of a military oligarchy operating under a civilian cover, formally extending the dominance of the Arab armies from the political to the economic sphere. The outcome of this dynamic was the consolidation of the positions and political dominance of the military, which poses great challenges to the future of democratic transition in these countries. The study reviews its hypothesis through the cases of Egypt, Tunisia, Sudan and Algeria, and draws analytical comparisons between them.
In this paper, we estimate the effects of relative international commodity prices on political transitions accounting for time trends (since democracy might evolve in waves) and the fact that different autocratic regime types might respond differently. A standard deviation (2.1 percentage points) decrease in the growth rate of our 3-year moving-average relative price index increases the democratic transition probability by 0.5 percentage points or 13% of the mean probability. The transition probability moves nearly one for one with economic growth. Military autocracies might democratize after positive shocks. The autocratic-transition effects are negative but insignificant.
Most major nonviolent civil resistance campaigns target autocratic regimes. Yet, most dictators are toppled by their close supporters, not civilian protesters. Building on theories of strategic interactions between leaders, security agents, and protesters, we make three core claims: first, protesters are relatively less likely to mount a major nonviolent uprising against dictatorships with personalized security forces; secondly, personalized security forces are more likely to repress realized protest; and, thirdly, security force personalization shapes the prospects for success of mass uprisings in promoting democratic transitions. We leverage new data on security force personalization—a proxy for loyal security agents—and major nonviolent protest campaigns to test these expectations. Our theory explains why many dictatorships rarely face mass protest mobilization and why uprisings that are met with violent force often fail in bringing about new democracies.
Recent studies suggest that political institutions have little impact on the size of consumer fossil fuel subsidies, concluding instead that subsidies reflect country-specific and slowly changing economic factors. Such findings bode poorly for reforming these costly policies. I argue that this conclusion stems from an overly narrow view of the kinds of non-democratic regimes that exist. I introduce a large literature from political science that distinguishes “electoral authoritarian” regimes from other non-democracies and develop a theoretical argument connecting the former's reliance on broad-based public support to higher levels of fossil fuel subsidies. I test the argument using a price-gap measure of domestic consumer gasoline subsides for more than 160 countries for most years between 1990 and 2014. The results demonstrate that the emergence of electoral authoritarianism is associated with larger fuel subsidies, and that an increase in hydrocarbon production revenue has a larger impact on the size of subsidies within electoral authoritarian systems than in other regime types. Reform efforts must acknowledge this political logic while focusing on how to offset subsidies with less environmentally harmful measures.
This paper introduces a new approach to the quantitative study of democratization. Building on the comparative case-study and large-N literature, it outlines an episode approach that identifies the discrete beginning of a period of political liberalization, traces its progression, and classifies episodes as successful versus different types of failing outcomes, thus avoiding potentially fallacious assumptions of unit homogeneity. We provide a description and analysis of all 383 liberalization episodes from 1900 to 2019, offering new insights on democratic “waves”. We also demonstrate the value of this approach by showing that while several established covariates are valuable for predicting the ultimate outcomes, none explain the onset of a period of liberalization.
This article provides empirical evidence to show how the general secretaries of the Chinese Communist Party dominated provincial personnel through their factional ties. Based on panel data from 1993 to 2017, this study finds that the provincial leaders’ personal connections with the incumbent party head significantly increased their promotion chances. The positive effect of the incumbent party heads on promotion did not depend on provincial leaders’ economic performance and seniority. This study further uncovers that working experiences in the prefectural leading positions strongly increased the likelihood of promotion. However, connections with other important top leaders did not have similar effects. These findings challenge the traditional wisdom on the collective leadership and indicate the dominance of the Chinese Communist Party's heads for provincial personnel arrangements.
One of the most interesting aspects to understand future power systems is to assess how they are affected by global trends. The global trends that we aim to scrutinize in this chapter are the five Ds, namely, decentralization, decarbonization, digitalization, deregulation, and democratization, which will roll up the life of every human being in the near future. Interestingly, future power systems will only be considerably affected by these Giga Trends, but also play a key role to further the mentioned Giga Trends. We believe that the 5D Giga Trends will result in some new characteristics for the future power systems in such a way that the existing approaches will not be sufficient to tackle the upcoming issues. As a result, understanding the power system transformation strongly depends on investigating the impacts of the 5D Giga Trends. It is anticipated that a tsunami of disruptions will happen in the future power systems due to these 5D Giga Trends along with the introduction of innovative technologies. This chapter addresses the role of the aforementioned global trends in the future power system, investigates the challenges faced by the existing power systems, and the opportunities due to the emergence of the Giga Trends in power systems are highlighted.
This paper examines the logic of human capital formation in authoritarian regimes based on theories of inequality and regime transition and the prospect of upward mobility model. Our central argument is that by investing in human capital, dictators can boost citizens’ perceived levels of social mobility. Consequently, dictators can preemptively ameliorate the pressure for redistribution from the poor and neutralize threats from the masses. In other words, dictators invest in human capital as a way of increasing citizens’ perceived social mobility and thus sustaining political stability in their authoritarian regimes. Our cross-national analysis covers more than 80 authoritarian regimes from 1970 to 2010 and shows that higher levels of education spending are associated with a lower probability of regime breakdown in autocracies. We further use a causal mediation analysis with the Asian Barometer Survey data and connect our causal link from human capital formation to perceived social mobility and then to authoritarian regime support.
The article provides an overview of current research on elections in authoritarian political regimes. For this purpose, a number of significant papers on this issue have been selected, published in peer-reviewed academic journals with a high impact-factor. The assessment of the significance of the works was made primarily on the basis of their citation indicators according to Scopus and Google Scholar. It is stated that despite the rapid growth in the number of works on authoritarian elections over the past two decades, it is still far from building a comprehensive theory in this area. The review focuses on the question of how elections affect the survival of authoritarian regimes. In this regard, conflicting positions are presented in the literature. On the one hand, elections are seen as instruments for stabilization of authoritarian rule, on the other hand — as sources of instability, and on the third — as levers of democratization.
Dictators shape regime structures to counter the threats they face. Personalization entails the progressive accumulation of power in the hands of the dictator to minimize internal threats from organized elites in the military and party. However, elites have incentives to resist the personalization to avoid being marginalized by personalist strongmen. We argue that as personalism increases, rival elites, less able to coordinate coup attempts, turn to strategies that do not require substantial elite coordination: assassinations. At low levels of personalism, elites coordinate insider coups to oust the ruler, reshuffling leadership and still retaining power. At middle levels of personalism, elites organize regime change coups as reshuffling coups become more difficult. At high levels of personalism, even regime change coups become difficult to mount, and increasingly marginalized and desperate rivals turn to assassinations. We test these expectations with new data on personalism, assassination, and coup attempts, covering all autocracies over the 1946–2010 period.
This study aims to understand a dictator's response to large‐scale anti‐regime protests regarding their safety. While dictators tend to order the repression of such protests, in some cases, they voluntarily cede power without such repression. Earlier studies based on the assumption that leaders always act to maintain power cannot explain this variation. This article presents a novel claim that dictators choose the way in which they lose power. It argues that since dictators who lose power by coups suffer a worse fate than those who lose power following protests, they prefer to relinquish power by the latter if they anticipate that repressing dissent will result in a coup. Thus, dictators prefer a safer way of losing power over maintaining their office at all costs. Data on the post‐tenure fate of dictators from 1946 to 2010 and the case of South Korean anti‐regime protests in 1987 support this theory. Hellmeier, Sebastian. 2016. “The Dictator's Digital Toolkit: Explaining Variation in Internet Filtering in Authoritarian Regimes.” Politics & Policy 44(6): 1158–91. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12189 Hiroi, Taeko, and Sawa Omori. 2013. “Causes and Triggers of Coups d'état: An Event History Analysis.” Politics & Policy 41(1): 39–64. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12001 Hunter, Lance Y., Josh Rutland, and Zachary King. 2020. “Leaving the Barracks: Military Coups in Developing Democracies.” Politics & Policy 48(6): 1062–103. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12383 Este estudio tiene como objetivo comprender la respuesta de un dictador a las protestas contra el régimen a gran escala con respecto a su seguridad. Si bien los dictadores tienden a ordenar la represión de tales protestas, en algunos casos ceden el poder voluntariamente sin tal represión. Estudios anteriores basados en el supuesto de que los líderes siempre actúan para mantener el poder no pueden explicar esta variación. Este artículo presenta una afirmación novedosa de que los dictadores eligen la forma en que pierden el poder. Argumenta que dado que los dictadores que pierden el poder por golpes de estado sufren un destino peor que aquellos que pierden el poder después de las protestas, prefieren que estos últimos renuncien al poder si anticipan que la represión de la disidencia resultará en un golpe. Por lo tanto, los dictadores prefieren una forma más segura de perder el poder que mantener su cargo a toda costa. Los datos sobre el destino posterior al mandato de los dictadores desde 1946 hasta 2010 y el caso de las protestas contra el régimen de Corea del Sur en 1987 respaldan esta teoría. 本研究旨在理解出于安全考虑的独裁者对大规模反政权抗议的响应。尽管独裁者往往对这类抗议采取镇压，但在一些情况下，他们不会施压，而是主动弃权。以往研究基于“领导者总是采取行动保持权力”这一假设，因此无法解释该差异。本文提出一个独特主张，即独裁者会选择以何种方式弃权。本文论证认为，既然那些因军事政变而失权的独裁者的下场不会好过因抗议而弃权的独裁者，他们宁愿因抗议而弃权，如果其预期压迫抗议者将导致政变的话。因此，独裁者情愿以更安全的方式弃权，而不是不计代价地维持政权。关于1946‐2010年独裁者下台后的命运的数据以及1987年韩国反政权抗议案例支持该理论。
Dictators confront a guardianship dilemma: military agents are needed to defeat mass outsider movements, but these agents can overthrow the ruler from within. In existing theories, rulers prioritize coup-proofing measures unless they anticipate strong outsider threats. Then dictators prioritize military competence. I reframe the guardianship dilemma around the central idea that militaries can choose between dual disloyalty options. In addition to staging a coup, militaries can defect by not fending off popular uprisings or rebellions. Dictators fear competent militaries not primarily because of their coup threat but instead because they often survive intact following a regime transition. Low motivation for competent militaries to save the ruler undermines their rationale of guarding against outsider threats, even if they pose a low coup threat. Consequently, rulers prioritize competence under narrow circumstances. Only radically oriented outsider movements that pose an existential threat to all regime elites induce loyalty from a competent military.
Nonviolent campaigns against repressive regimes often turn on the military’s decision to either defend the ruler or make common cause with the ruled. Yet surprisingly little scholarship investigates opposition expectations for the military’s likely response to mass protest. We theorize that some determinants of the military’s willingness to repress are more observable to activists than others. In particular, we identify conscription as a highly salient indicator that soldiers will refuse to fire on protesters and hypothesize that nonviolent campaigns are more likely to materialize against regimes with conscripted armies than those with volunteer forces. We substantiate this theory with two sources of evidence: (1) a survey experiment conducted during the 2019 Algerian Revolution and (2) a cross-national analysis of the positive association between conscription and nonviolent campaign onset from 1945 to 2013.
North Korea is widely seen as having among the most corrupt governments in the world. However, the Kim family regime has not always been so accepting of government wrongdoing. Drawing on archival evidence, this study shows that Kim Il-sung saw corruption as a threat to economic development and launched campaigns to curb it throughout the 1950s. I find that these campaigns were at least somewhat successful, and they contributed to post-Korean War reconstruction and rapid development afterwards. So when and why did the regime shift from combating corruption to embracing it? I argue that changes in the country's economic system following the crisis of the 1990s, especially de facto marketization, made corruption more beneficial to the regime both as a source of revenue and as an escape valve for public discontent. This study's findings contribute to our understanding of the politics of corruption control in authoritarian regimes.
The topic of local public order affairs (with special emphasis on the functioning of units, known as municipal police and their position in the security system of an individual state) is one of the current or emerging issues of security discourse. As with all outputs of scientific research, the question arises as to whether or to what extent this issue is methodically anchored, or how it is covered by secondary studies from renowned sources (including possible theoretical concepts used here). The chapter summarizes this topic and attempts to create a springboard for other researchers who are interested in the issue. Terms such as pluralistic policing, the extended police family or multi-level policing at local level will be mentioned.
Eschewing sweeping generalizations about military autonomy in South America, this study explores critical variations in the degree to which the military is willing and able to defend its perceived prerogatives under democratic rule. There is a ceiling above which the armed forces prefer not to or can not go and below which they desire to extend their influence within the democratic order. The extent varies according to country and issue area. The armed forces have exerted more leverage over democratic governments in Brazil and Chile than in Peru, Uruguay, and Argentina, and levels of military autonomy are higher for internal professional functions than for functions in either the gray zone between professional and political spheres of influence or the political sphere itself.
Human rights issues topped the agenda for many democratic presidents who followed repressive military regimes in Latin America. Traditional approaches assume that the military is powerful enough to suppress human rights initiatives. Transitions approaches closely link success or failure to military power at the time of regime change. Evidence shows not only that there were instances of policy success but also that these are not fully explained by the transitional balance of power. The authors argue that policy outcomes are inextricably tied to levels of institutional concentration and autonomy in the executive branch. Human rights gains occur when policy-making authority is centered in a few hands and where the president can use institutional channels suitably closed to military influence. Low levels of concentration and autonomy result in policy setbacks; mixed levels lead to moderate success. The authors test the model with a comparative case study of governments in Argentina and Chile.
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 theory of democratic transitions focuses on the way economic performance affects constitutional rules, political alignments, and institutions. It can be extended to explain the policy challenges facing new democratic governments and the prospects for consolidation.
The transfer of power through the use of military force is a commonplace event in world affairs. Although no two coups d'etat are alike, they all have a common denominator: poverty. We analyze political and economic data from 121 countries during the period 1950–1982 and find that the probability of a government's being overthrown by a coup is significantly influenced by the level of economic well-being. Thus, even authoritarian governments have powerful incentives to promote economic growth, not out of concern for the welfare of their citizens, but because poor economic performance may lead to their removal by force. When the simultaneity of low income and coups is accounted for, we find that the aftereffects of a coup include a heritage of political instability in the form of an increased likelihood of further coups. Although the effect of income on coups is pronounced, we find little evidence of feedback from coups to income growth.
The authors construct a statistical model with which to test whether the regularity that democracy is more commonly found among wealthy countries stems from a democratizing effect of high income or is due entirely to other factors, such as the historical context, various features of the institutional setting, and simultaneity with the process of leadership change. Even after correcting for these many other influences, the democratizing effect of income remains as a statistically significant factor promoting the emergence of democratic political institutions. The authors go on to find that leaders' risks of losing power rise during their time in office and that these risks are higher in more democratic countries.
The authors confirm the finding by Burkhart and Lewis-Beck that the democracy-promoting effect of income is stronger among the European countries. They suggest that high income has a more powerful democratizing effect among the Southern European countries because it interacts with pressure from major trading partners to democratize. This suggests a revaluation of policies designed to foster the replacement of authoritarian regimes by democratic ones through free trade.
In comparative politics, an established finding--that economic development fosters democratic performance--has recently come under challenge. We counter this challenge with a dynamic pooled time series analysis of a major, but neglected data set from 131 nations. The final generalized least squares-autoregressive moving averages estimates (N = 2,096) appear robust and indicate strong economic development effects, dependent in part on the nation's position in the world system. For the first time, rather hard evidence is offered on the causal relationship between economics and democracy. According to Granger tests, economic development "causes" democracy, but democracy does not "cause" economic development. Overall, the various tests would seem to advance sharply the modeling of democratic performance.
One of the first efforts at international exploration of the comparative sociology of military institutions took place at a Conference on Armed Forces and Society in Western Europe in London, July 1964. The Conference was sponsored jointly by the Committee on Political Sociology of the International Sociological Association and the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society, located at the University of Chicago. It brought together for the first time scholars from the United States and Western Europe and resulted in the publication of a special issue on the subject by the European Journal of Sociology (Archives Européennes de Sociologie, Tome VI, 1965, Numéro 2). Because of rapidly increasing interest and research on the sociological aspects of the professional military and peace-keeping institutions, a special working group was organized on "The Professional Military Man and Militarism" by the International Sociological Association for its Sixth World Congress which was held in Evian, France, in September, 1966. At these sessions over thirty five papers were presented and some seventy participants engaged in the discussions. This was the first time that scholars from Western Europe, Eastern Europe, including the U.S.S.R., the Middle East, the Far East and South America convened to evaluate the current state of the sociology of military institutions, war, revolution and international peace-keeping functions © 1968 in The Netherlands. Mouton & Co. N.V., Publishers. All rights reserved.
A description of the so-called trienio experience and the subsequent transition year of 1957-1958 attempts to clarify the actors involved in regime change, their motivations, their resources, and the actual context of their immediate actions. The analysis examines the elite pacts themselves, and concludes with observations on both the cost and the durability of current democratic arrangements.-from Author
During the last two decades, military rulers have been replaced by democratically elected civilian governments throughout Latin America. Nevertheless, scholars (Mainwaring et al. , 1992:3,8) contend that nearly all contemporary Latin American polities remain unconsolidated democratic regimes principally because civilian control over the armed forces has not yet been established. Although the armed forces have returned to their barracks, they have retained considerable political and institutional autonomy. A number of scholars (Loveman, 1994; Agüero, 1992; and others) emphasize that most Latin American constitutions still recognize the military's right to intervene when the constitutional order is threatened. The armed forces are also generally granted broad jurisdiction over internal security, as well as the freedom to organize their institution without civilian interference. There is a considerable body of opinion which maintains that fears of military intervention continue to constrain the behavior of civilian politicians and social groups (Valenzuela, 1992; O'Donnell and Schmitter, 1986; Rouquié, 1986; and Rial, 1990).
Recent studies of democratization emphasize elite strategic choice but do not easily accommodate collective actors and mass protest. Focusing on unions and labor-affiliated parties, we argue that the labor movement often played a central role. In some cases union-led protest was an important factor in provoking authoritarian extrication. It was also often crucial in moving the transition forward. Finally, labor-based organizations often won a place in the negotiations and expanded the scope of contestation in the new democratic regime.
On three occasions since the mid-1960s, the government of President Soeharto has made major policy decisions that have liberalized Indonesia's economy. These policy decisions are explained as voluntary or autonomous choices reflecting Soeharto's calculations of the political costs and benefits to his continued rule. The choices are set in a context of four conditioning variables: economic crisis, international economic forces, culture, and regime type. This approach is juxtaposed to other popular explanations of Indonesian and Third World policy making, particularly patrimonialism, statism, and culturalism. Patrimonialism is shown in the Indonesian case not to be incompatible with the adoption of neoclassical economic policies. State-centered theories are criticized for too high a level of aggregation and for a lack of empirical fit. The standard cultural approach fails to explain why liberal policies were chosen despite an illiberal culture. A more complex view of culture--conceived as commodious, flexible, living, not a dead weight smothering policy initiative--is offered as an alternative.
Wendy Hunter explores civil-military relations in Brazil following the transition to civilian leadership in 1985. She documents a marked, and surprising, decline in the political power of the armed forces, even as they have remained involved in national policy making. To account for the success of civilian politicians, Hunter invokes rational-choice theory in arguing that politicians will contest even powerful forces in order to gain widespread electoral support. Many observers expected Brazil's fledgling democracy to remain under the firm direction of the military, which had tightly controlled the transition from authoritarian to civilian rule. Hunter carefully refutes this conventional wisdom by demonstrating the ability of even a weak democratic regime to expand its autonomy relative to a once-powerful military, thanks to the electoral incentives that motivate civilian politicians. Based on interviews with key participants and on extensive archival research, Hunter's analysis of developments in Brazil suggests a more optimistic view of the future of civilian democratic rule in Latin America.
Institutional prerogatives secured in the transition from authoritarian rule have not given the military uncontestable political influence in Brazil's new democracy. Rather, electoral competition induces politicians to reduce military interference. Politicians support electorally appealing policies and oppose military efforts to restrict popular mobilization. To control public funds for patronage, they limit military resources. Political support in elections empowers them to act in such areas as labor and budget policy. The decline of military influence justifies a more optimistic assessment of the prospects for overcoming military tutelage in fledgling democracies.
This essay examines the moderation argument: transitions to democracy are threatened if radical forces push their demands too long or too hard. Drawing on evidence from Iberia, South America, and Asia, it illustrates when moderation is required and when it is not. Conditions for democratization hinge less on the absence or existence of radicalism than on pivotal elites' perception of the effects of radicalism. Successful transitions to democracy can be made despite radical activity if elites project that radical forces will not dominate electoral politics.
This article proposes revisions to the theory of political transitions by analyzing patterns of recent popular challenges to neopatrimonial rule in Africa. The approach is explicitly comparative, based on contrasts between Africa and the rest of the world and among regimes within Africa itself. Arguing against the prevalent view that transitions unfold unpredictably according to the contingent interplay of key political actors, the authors contend that the structure of the preexisting regime shapes the dynamics and sometimes even the outcomes of political transitions. They find that in contrast to transitions from corporatist regimes, transitions from neopatrimonial rule are likely to be driven by social protest, marked by struggles over patronage, and backed by emerging middle classes. Following Dahl, the authors compare African regimes on the basis of the degree of formal political participation and competition allowed. They find that regime variants—personal dictatorship, military oligarchy, plebiscitary one-party regime, and competitive one-party regime—are associated with distinctive transition dynamics. Whereas transitions from military oligarchies are typically managed from the top down and are relatively orderly, transitions from plebiscitary systems often occur discordantly through confrontational national conferences. A consolidated democracy is least likely to result from the abrupt collapse of a personal dictatorship and is most likely, though never guaranteed, from a graduated transition from a competitive one-party regime. In general, getting to democracy is problematic from all regimes that lack institutional traditions of political competition.
The past decade marks a watershed in Argentine civil-military relations. The country, an almost classic case of twentieth-century praetorianism, now has an historic opportunity to assert civilian control over the armed forces. This improvement in the prospects for civilian control of the armed forces may not be evident at first since the accession of the current president, Carlos Menem (1989-) was marked by an apparently dramatic retreat in the government's relations with the armed forces. While Menem's predecessor, Raul Alfonsin (1983-1989), pursued a policy which included prosecution of military human rights violators, Menem made an abrupt about-face. He granted a general pardon to those same military officers. However, this trade-off has given the government the freedom to assert a degree of civilian control over the armed forces hitherto lacking in range of important military policies in which the previous government had been largely stalemated by armed forces resistance. The threat of substantial political intervention by the armed forces is now on the wane.
The conditions associated with the existence and stability of democratic society have been a leading concern of political philosophy. In this paper the problem is attacked from a sociological and behavioral standpoint, by presenting a number of hypotheses concerning some social requisites for democracy, and by discussing some of the data available to test these hypotheses. In its concern with conditions—values, social institutions, historical events—external to the political system itself which sustain different general types of political systems, the paper moves outside the generally recognized province of political sociology. This growing field has dealt largely with the internal analysis of organizations with political goals, or with the determinants of action within various political institutions, such as parties, government agencies, or the electoral process. It has in the main left to the political philosopher the larger concern with the relations of the total political system to society as a whole.
The relationship between development timing & political democracy is explored using data from 99 countries at various levels of development but excluding communist countries. No significant relationship is found between the timing of development & the level of political democracy. When more specific characteristics of development timing are explored some significant relationships are found. Support is found for the hypothesis that the greater the extent to which a culture is Protestant-based, the greater the level of political democracy (p less than .05); & the greater the state's control of the economy, the lower the level of democracy (p less than .05). In a panel analysis, changes in political democracy are found to be negatively related to Protestantism. In all of the regressions the level of development has a more significant direct effect than the various timing measures. Modified HA.
This article analyzes the political protests which erupted through sub-Saharan Africa in the eighteen months following the collapse of the Berlin wall in November 1989 and examines subsequent government responses. A sample of thirty regimes is identified, of which about one-half experienced popular unrest and two-thirds undertook peaceful political reform by May 1991. Without rejecting standard structural and diffusionist explanations of protest and reform, the authors favor a contingent approach which emphasizes the resources available to government and opposition political actors as they jockey for power and legitimacy. The article concludes that recent political liberalization measures in African countries, though significant, fall short of a full transition to democracy.
Between 1974 and 1990 more than thirty countries in southern Europe, Latin America, East Asia, and Eastern Europe shifted from authoritarian to democratic systems of government. This global democratic revolution is probably the most important political trend in the late twentieth century. In The Third Wave,Samuel P. Huntington analyzes the causes and nature of these democratic transitions, evaluates the prospects for stability of the new democracies, and explores the possibility of more countries becoming democratic. The recent transitions, he argues, are the third major wave of democratization in the modem world. Each of the two previous waves was followed by a reverse wave in which some countries shifted back to authoritarian government. Using concrete examples, empirical evidence, and insightful analysis, Huntington provides neither a theory nor a history of the third wave, but an explanation of why and how it occurred. Factors responsible for the democratic trend include the legitimacy dilemmas of authoritarian regimes; economic and social development; the changed role of the Catholic Church; the impact of the United States, the European Community, and the Soviet Union; and the "snowballing" phenomenon: change in one country stimulating change in others. Five key elite groups within and outside the nondemocratic regime played roles in shaping the various ways democratization occurred. Compromise was key to all democratizations, and elections and nonviolent tactics also were central. New democracies must deal with the "torturer problem" and the "praetorian problem" and attempt to develop democratic values and processes. Disillusionment with democracy, Huntington argues, is necessary to consolidating democracy. He concludes the book with an analysis of the political, economic, and cultural factors that will decide whether or not the third wave continues. Several "Guidelines for Democratizers" offer specific, practical suggestions for initiating and carrying out reform. Huntington's emphasis on practical application makes this book a valuable tool for anyone engaged in the democratization process. At this volatile time in history, Huntington's assessment of the processes of democratization is indispensable to understanding the future of democracy in the world.
What makes political regimes rise, endure, and fall? The main
question is whether the observed close relation between levels of
economic development and the incidence of democratic regimes is
due to democracies being more likely to emerge or only more likely
to survive in the more developed countries. We answer this
question using data concerning 135 countries that existed at any
time between 1950 and 1990. We find that the level of economic
development does not affect the probability of transitions to
democracy but that affluence does make democratic regimes more
stable. The relation between affluence and democratic stability is
monotonic, and the breakdown of democracies at middle levels of
development is a phenomenon peculiar to the Southern Cone of
Latin America. These patterns also appear to have been true of the
earlier period, but dictatorships are more likely to survive in wealthy
countries that became independent only after 1950. We conclude
that modernization need not generate democracy but democracies
survive in countries that are modern.
The authors analyze the significant political reforms undertaken by 40 sub-Saharan countries. The introduction provides a brief overview of political trends in Africa's period of regime transition in the first half of the 1990s. Chapter 1 surveys the literature on democratization and the different approaches that have been used to explain the success or failure of democratization attempts. Chapter 2 extends and illustrates this theoretical framework by discussing the nature of African political institutions, both formal and informal. Chapter 3 describes in detail the beginning, internal dynamics, and outcomes of recent political transitions across the continent. Chapters 4, 5 and 6 test the authors' politico-institutional approach with the help of a comprehensive base of quantitative data that includes variables on each country's socioeconomic status, legacy of political institutions and transition trajectory. Extensive use is made of case studies. The final chapter examines the prospects for democracy in Africa as of the mid-1990s. It distinguishes between the reversal, survival and consolidation of fragile democratic regimes.
Buffeted by the collapse of trading relations with the former socialist bloc and the continuing US embargo, Cuba has attempted to adjust to external crisis via tighter rationing to curtail demand and traditional planning and sectoral strategies to expand the supply of tradables. This overall program has failed and Cuba has recently begun timid steps toward a more market-oriented approach. We argue that the centerpiece of a new strategy should be a rapid privatization which can be designed to absorb the monetary overhang, widely distribute assets and control, and protect the social safety net that has characterized the Cuban economy.
Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 1987. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 201-218). Photocopy.
Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Political Science, March 1978. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 417-439).
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